Wasps living around a Cold War-era nuclear facility in South Carolina have built at least four radioactive nests, raising questions about their source of hazardous material and the extent of environmental contamination, according to a report by The New York Times.

Last week, news broke that officials at the site—Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina—had found one radioactive nest on July 3. The discovery was documented in a July 22 report by the US Department of Energy, which owns the site.

The report said that the nest was on a post near a tank used to store nuclear waste and that it "was probing 100,000 dpm/100 cm2 beta/gamma." This contamination level "is greater than 10 times the total contamination values" listed in federal regulations for areas that require contamination posting and monitoring, the report said. Still, it concluded that the radioactivity of the nest was considered to be from "onsite legacy radioactive contamination not related to a loss of contamination control."

But the Times uncovered that three additional radioactive nests had been found since the July 3 discovery.

"The U.S. Department of Energy is managing the discovery of four wasp nests with very low levels of radioactive contamination," Edwin Deshong, the manager of the DOE's Savannah River Operations Office, said in an emailed statement to the Times. "The nests do not pose a health risk to SRS workers, the community, or the environment."

The SRS is a 310-square-mile facility built in the 1950s to produce material for nuclear weapons, including plutonium and tritium, a component of hydrogen bombs, the Times noted. Activity at the SRS, which is located near the border with Georgia, declined at the end of the Cold War. The DOE began cleaning up the site in 1996—a slow process that is currently estimated to be completed by 2065.

According to the DOE, the site produced 165 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, which has been evaporated to 34 million gallons. The site has 51 waste tanks, eight of which have been operationally closed, with the remaining 43 in various states of the closure process.

Outside experts have been quick to point out critical information missing from the DOE's nest report, including the absolute level of radioactivity found in the nest, the specific isotopes that were found, and the type of wasps that built the nest. Some wasps build their nests from mud, while others might use chewed-up pulp from wood.

Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina who studies organisms and ecosystems in radioactive regions, told the Times that the DOE's explanation that the wasps gathered legacy contamination for their homes is not unreasonable. "There's some legacy radioactive contamination sitting around in the mud in the bottom of the lakes, or, you know, here and there," he said.

"The main concern relates to whether or not there are large areas of significant contamination that have escaped surveillance in the past," Mousseau said. "Alternatively, this could indicate that there is some new or old radioactive contamination that is coming to the surface that was unexpected."

The DOE report of the first wasp nest said that the nest was sprayed to kill wasps, then bagged as radioactive waste. The ground and area around where the nest had been did not have any further contamination.

In a statement to the Aiken Standard, officials working at the DOE site noted that the wasps themselves pose little risk to the community—they likely have lower contamination on them and generally don't stray more than a few hundred yards from their nests.

However, the Times pointed out a report from 2017, when officials at SRS found radioactive bird droppings on the roof of a building at the site. Birds can carry radioactive material long distances, Mousseau said.

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Posted Tuesday 5 August 2025 at 3:43 am AEST (my time).

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical way of thinking into the world of physics. At the time, physicists were still plagued by debates about basic definitions—what is heat? how are molecules structured?—and Hilbert hoped that the formal logic of mathematics could provide guidance.

On the morning of August 8, 1900, he delivered a list of 23 key math problems to the International Congress of Mathematicians. Number six: Produce airtight proofs of the laws of physics.

The scope of Hilbert’s sixth problem was enormous. He asked “to treat in the same manner [as geometry], by means of axioms, those physical sciences in which mathematics plays an important part.”

His challenge to axiomatize physics was “really a program,” said Dave Levermore, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. “The way the sixth problem is actually stated, it’s never going to be solved.”

But Hilbert provided a starting point. To study different properties of a gas—say, the speed of its molecules, or its average temperature—physicists use different equations. In particular, they use one set of equations to describe how individual molecules in a gas move, and another to describe the behavior of the gas as a whole. Was it possible, Hilbert wondered, to show that one set of equations implied the other—that these equations were, as physicists had assumed but hadn’t rigorously proved, simply different ways of modeling the same reality?

For 125 years, even axiomatizing this small corner of physics seemed impossible. Mathematicians made partial progress, coming up with proofs that only worked when they considered the behavior of gases on extremely short timescales or in other contrived situations. But these fell short of the kind of result that Hilbert had imagined.

Now, three mathematicians have finally provided such a result. Their work not only represents a major advance in Hilbert’s program, but also taps into questions about the irreversible nature of time.

“It’s a beautiful work,” said Gregory Falkovich, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. “A tour de force.”

Under the Mesoscope

Consider a gas whose particles are very spread out. There are many ways a physicist might model it.

At a microscopic level, the gas is composed of individual molecules that act like billiard balls, moving through space according to Isaac Newton’s 350-year-old laws of motion. This model of the gas’s behavior is called the hard-sphere particle system.

Now zoom out a bit. At this new “mesoscopic” scale, your field of vision encompasses too many molecules to individually track. Instead, you’ll model the gas using an equation that the physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann developed in the late 19th century. Called the Boltzmann equation, it describes the likely behavior of the gas’s molecules, telling you how many particles you can expect to find at different locations moving at different speeds. This model of the gas lets physicists study how air moves at small scales—for instance, how it might flow around a space shuttle.

Zoom out again, and you can no longer tell that the gas is made up of individual particles. It acts like one continuous substance. To model this macroscopic behavior—how dense the gas is and how fast it’s moving at any point in space—you’ll need yet another set of equations, called the Navier-Stokes equations.

Physicists view these three different models of the gas’s behavior as compatible; they’re simply different lenses for understanding the same thing. But mathematicians hoping to contribute to Hilbert’s sixth problem wanted to prove that rigorously. They needed to show that Newton’s model of individual particles gives rise to Boltzmann’s statistical description, and that Boltzmann’s equation in turn gives rise to the Navier-Stokes equations.

Mathematicians have had some success with the second step, proving that it’s possible to derive a macroscopic model of a gas from a mesoscopic one in various settings. But they couldn’t resolve the first step, leaving the chain of logic incomplete.

Now that’s changed. In a series of papers, the mathematicians Yu Deng, Zaher Hani, and Xiao Ma proved the harder microscopic-to-mesoscopic step for a gas in one of these settings, completing the chain for the first time. The result and the techniques that made it possible are “paradigm-shifting,” said Yan Guo of Brown University.

Declaration of Independence

Boltzmann could already show that Newton’s laws of motion give rise to his mesoscopic equation, so long as one crucial assumption holds true: that the particles in the gas move more or less independently of each other. That is, it must be very rare for a particular pair of molecules to collide with each other multiple times.

But Boltzmann could not definitively demonstrate that this assumption was true. “What he could not do, of course, is prove theorems about this,” said Sergio Simonella of Sapienza University in Rome. “There was no structure, there were no tools at the time.”

After all, there are infinitely many ways a collection of particles might collide and recollide. “You just get this huge explosion of possible directions that they can go,” Levermore said—making it a “nightmare” to actually prove that scenarios involving many recollisions are as rare as Boltzmann needed them to be.

In 1975, a mathematician named Oscar Lanford managed to prove this, but only for extremely short time periods. (The exact amount of time depends on the initial state of the gas, but it’s less than the blink of an eye, according to Simonella.) Then the proof broke down; before most of the particles got the chance to collide even once, Lanford could no longer guarantee that recollisions would remain a rare occurrence.

In the decades since, many mathematicians tried to extend his result, to no avail.

Then, in November 2023, Deng, now at the University of Chicago, and Hani, of the University of Michigan, posted a preprint that teased the desired proof. A forthcoming paper, they wrote, would build off their latest result to investigate “the long-time extension of Lanford’s theorem.”

Other mathematicians didn’t know what to make of the announcement. “I didn’t think it was possible,” said Pierre Germain of Imperial College London. Deng and Hani didn’t even usually work with particle systems; until that point, they’d mainly been studying systems made up of waves (like rays of light).

So mathematicians eagerly awaited the promised proof.

When Particles Collide

Deng and Hani’s 2023 result involved an analysis of the transition from the microscopic scale to the mesoscopic scale in the context of waves. About a year before the mathematicians posted their paper online, Deng was at a conference, where he met with a graduate student at Princeton University named Xiao Ma. They ended up discussing Deng and Hani’s work, and how they might adapt the methods to particles. Doing so would allow them to extend Lanford’s result—to show that particle recollisions are rare even on longer timescales.

It was an idea that Deng and Hani had already been considering. Impressed by Ma’s insights on the topic, Deng invited him to help them turn their intuition into a proof.

The trio hoped to focus on a much-studied scenario where mathematicians had already proved the second, meso-to-macro step in Hilbert’s sixth problem. In this scenario, a dilute gas of spherical particles is trapped in a box. If a particle hits one of the box’s walls, it reappears on the opposite wall.

But to prove the harder micro-to-meso step for this setting—thereby resolving Hilbert’s sixth problem—Deng, Hani, and Ma had to port their wave-based techniques over to particles. So they started in a setting where that task would be a little bit easier. They worked with a gas whose particles are distributed randomly in an infinite amount of space; unlike the particles in the boxed gas, which keep bouncing off each other forever, these particles eventually disperse and stop colliding. “In the whole-space case, there is a shortcut,” Deng said.

The three mathematicians first needed to tabulate the different patterns of collisions that might occur in their gas, and how likely each of those patterns was. They could easily rule out scenarios with particularly high rates of recollisions. This left them with a finite, though still massive, number of patterns to analyze—each involving a certain subset of particles colliding, in a certain order. Once they knew exactly what each pattern entailed, they could use that information to estimate its likelihood of occurring.

But that often felt like an impossible task, because many of the patterns involved huge numbers of particles and intricate, indirect interactions between them. “The structure of these sets [of colliding particles] gets exceedingly complicated,” Deng said. In principle, the mathematicians would need to keep track of every one of these particles simultaneously to compute the probability estimates they needed.

That’s where Deng and Hani’s previous work on waves gave them an important insight. In that result, they’d figured out ways to break up complicated patterns of interacting waves into simpler ones. They’d carefully crafted their technique so that, by working with only a few waves at a time, they could still get a good estimate for the likelihood of the more complicated complete wave pattern.

They hoped the same idea would work in the particle setting.

But after a collision, particles behave very differently from waves. For instance, particles, unlike waves, bounce off each other, greatly affecting the resulting pattern of collisions and its probability of happening. Deng, Hani and Ma needed to rework the details of their strategy from the beginning.

First, they tackled the simplest cases, in which each particle collides just a few times over a very short time span, with no recollisions. They then gradually moved on to harder and harder cases—longer amounts of time, with more collisions and recollisions.

It was as much an art as a science. “The intuition was developed gradually, starting with some unsuccessful attempts,” Deng said. They had to get a sense for how to slice up large, complicated patterns of particle collisions in a way that would simplify their calculations while keeping their estimates highly accurate.

“This is a process that takes months,” Hani said. “We would be stuck constantly.” Nearly every day, they jumped on a Zoom meeting to talk things through. “Much to the dismay of my wife, some of them happened very late at night, or very early in the morning,” Hani said. “I would put my daughter to sleep, and then we would have two or three hours of Zoom meetings.”

Finally, by the spring of 2024, the trio was sure they had covered everything. Their proof, which they posted online that summer, confirmed that recollisions had to be very, very uncommon. They’d shown, as they’d hoped to, that in their infinite-space setting, Boltzmann’s description of the gas could be derived from Newton’s. The microscopic and mesoscopic scales fell under a single rigorous mathematical framework.

“I think it’s outstanding work,” said Alexandru Ionescu, a mathematician at Princeton who was also Deng’s and Ma’s doctoral adviser. “These are some of the most significant advances in many, many years.”

They were now ready to return to the gas-in-a-box setting, where they could finally solve Hilbert’s sixth problem.

The Completed Chain

It didn’t take long for them to extend their result from the infinite-space setting to the boxed one. “Eighty percent of the proof is still the same in the whole-space case,” Deng said.

In March, they posted a new paper that combined their proof with the earlier results connecting the Boltzmann equation to the Navier-Stokes equations. The logical chain was complete: They’d shown that, for a realistic model of a gas, a microscopic description of individual particles does indeed ultimately give rise to a macroscopic description of the gas’s large-scale behavior.

The work didn’t just mark the resolution of a major case of Hilbert’s sixth problem. It also provided a rigorous mathematical resolution of an old paradox.

At the microscopic scale, where particles act like billiard balls, time is reversible. Newton’s equations predict both where a particle comes from and where it’s going. The future is not fundamentally different from the past.

But at the mesoscopic and macroscopic levels, there is no going back in time. “We know very well that, going forward in time, one ages but does not rejuvenate; heat does not spontaneously pass from a cold body to a warm body; a drop of ink in a glass of water spreads, darkening the liquid, but does not spontaneously return to the small, round shape it originally had,” Simonella wrote. Neither the Boltzmann equation nor the Navier-Stokes equations are time-reversible; if you try to run time backward, the results will be nonsensical.

To Boltzmann’s contemporaries, this was perplexing. How could a time-irreversible equation be derived from a time-reversible system?

But Boltzmann argued that there was no paradox: Even if each particle can be modeled in a time-reversible way, almost every collision pattern ends up with a gas dispersing. The chance of, say, a gas suddenly contracting is essentially zero.

Lanford had confirmed this intuition mathematically for his very short time frame. Now Deng, Hani, and Ma’s result confirms it for more realistic situations.

Going forward, mathematicians—who are still poring over the details of the new proof—want to test whether similar techniques might be useful in other, even more realistic contexts. These might include gases made up of particles of different shapes, or particles that interact in more complicated ways.

Meanwhile, Falkovich said, these sorts of rigorous proofs can help physicists understand why a gas behaves a certain way at various scales, and why different models might be more or less effective in different scenarios. “What mathematicians do to physicists,” he said, “is they wake us up.”

Editor’s Note: Deng and Hani’s work on the system of waves was funded in part by the Simons Foundation, which also funds the editorially independent Quanta magazine.

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 4 August 2025 at 3:58 am AEST (my time).

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The Standard Model is the best framework scientists have for understanding particles and forces, but it doesn’t cover everything like dark matter, which makes up most of the universe’s mass. Some theories suggest there could be a fifth fundamental force, possibly carried by a new particle, that interacts between electrons and neutrons. To test this idea, the researchers looked at tiny differences in atomic transitions called isotope shifts, in calcium ions.

They focused on two specific transitions: ³P₀ → ³P₁ in Ca¹⁴⁺ and ²S₁/₂ → ²D₅/₂ in Ca⁺. These were measured across five stable calcium isotopes (Ca⁴⁰, Ca⁴², Ca⁴⁴, Ca⁴⁶, and Ca⁴⁸), which all have 20 protons but different numbers of neutrons. Measuring these shifts with sub-Hertz precision is no small feat. “We trapped two isotopes at the same time in the ion trap and measured them together,” said doctoral student Luca Huber. This clever setup helped cancel out noise and allowed them to measure frequency differences down to 100 millihertz.

Meanwhile, other teams helped out by measuring transitions in highly charged calcium ions and calculating nuclear mass ratios with incredibly tiny uncertainties—less than 4 × 10⁻¹¹. When all this data was combined, the researchers created what’s called a King plot (KP). Normally, if everything follows known physics, the data points in a King plot should line up neatly. But in this case, they didn’t.

“The key thing about these King plots: if all the points lie on a straight line, the measured values can be explained by known nuclear physics effects,” said Diana Prado Lopes Aude Craik, a physics professor at ETH Zurich. But the data showed a clear curve, a nonlinearity, with a significance of about 10³ σ, which is way beyond what could be chalked up to random chance.

So what’s causing this bend in the plot? The team ran detailed calculations and found that the biggest known effect from the Standard Model, the second-order mass shift, wasn’t enough to explain it. The only remaining known factor that might be strong enough is something called nuclear polarization. That’s when the nucleus of an atom gets slightly distorted by the surrounding electrons. It’s not well understood, but it could be the missing piece.

Even though the results don’t confirm new physics, they do help tighten the limits on what’s possible. The team used their data to improve constraints on a hypothetical Yukawa interaction, a type of force that could be carried by a new boson. Their measurements narrowed down the possibilities for boson masses between 10 eV/c² and 10⁷ eV/c².

The researchers aren’t stopping here. They’re already working on measuring a third transition in calcium with even higher precision. “We hope that this will help us overcome the theoretical challenges and make further progress in the search for this new force,” said Aude Craik.

This is a great example of how cutting-edge measurement techniques like ultra-precise ion trapping and frequency analysis can push the limits of what we know about the universe. Even if you’re not deep into particle physics, it’s exciting to see how atomic-level experiments can help test big ideas like new forces and particles.

Source: ETH Zurich, American Physical Society

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

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Posted Sunday 3 August 2025 at 6:38 pm AEST (my time).

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Graphene is just one atom thick and has a structure that makes it very stiff. While this stiffness is useful in many ways, it limits how much the material can bend or stretch. Since its discovery in 2004, scientists have tried to change its stiffness by removing atoms, but results have been inconsistent. Some studies showed a small drop in stiffness, while others saw it increase.

To clear up the confusion, the Vienna team ran a series of experiments in a special setup that keeps graphene completely clean and free from air or dust. “This unique system we have developed in the University of Vienna allows us to examine 2D materials without interference,” said Jani Kotakoski, who led the research. Wael Joudi, the first author of the study, added, “For the first time this kind of experiment has been carried out with the graphene fully isolated from ambient air and the foreign particles it contains. Without this separation, these particles would quickly settle on the surface affecting the experiment procedure and measurements.”

The team introduced defects into the graphene using low-energy argon (Ar) ions (less than 200 eV), which knocked out atoms in a controlled way. These missing atoms are called vacancies. They then used advanced microscopes and image analysis to study the atomic structure, and measured how the material responded to pressure using atomic force microscopy (AFM) nanoindentation.

Before the defects were added, the graphene had a two-dimensional elastic modulus (E^2D) of 286 N/m. After the vacancies were introduced, this dropped to 158 N/m. That’s a really big change—more than most theories had predicted—and it helps explain why earlier experiments gave mixed results. Simulations showed that the softening happens mostly because of ripples caused by strain around spots where two or more atoms are missing. Single missing atoms didn’t have much effect.

“You can imagine it like an accordion. When pulled apart, the waved material now gets flattened, which requires much less force than stretching the flat material and therefore it becomes more stretchable,” said Joudi. Simulations by Rika Saskia Windisch and Florian Libisch backed up this idea, showing both the ripple formation and the increased stretchability.

The researchers also found that if the graphene surface isn’t cleaned before adding defects, the opposite happens as it becomes stiffer. This is because dirt or particles on the surface block the ripple effect. “This shows the importance of the measurement environment when dealing with 2D materials. The results open up a way to regulate the stiffness of graphene and thus pave the way for potential applications,” Joudi concluded.

Source: Vienna University of Technology, American Physical Society | Image via Depositphotos

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

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Posted Sunday 3 August 2025 at 11:47 am AEST (my time).

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A heavy bomber drone lifting an e-bike into the air.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has placed unbelievable pressure on drone developers on both sides of the war, who have responded with astounding innovations that include:

• fiber-optic drones (to prevent radio jamming)
• kamikaze sea drones, eventually equipped with anti-air missiles
• drones that fire shotguns
• bomber drones that drop mines and grenades
• drones that release flaming thermite into trenches
• long-range, aircraft-style drones that can substitute for small cruise missiles
• interceptor drones that hunt down other drones
• first-person view (FPV) drones so maneuverable they can be piloted right through a broken window pane to hit indoor targets
• ground drones for both combat and transport

Many drone developers are now chasing the next big thing—AI built right into the drone, allowing it to make autonomous targeting decisions if its communication links are cut.

But sometimes you don't need high-tech software, agility, or stealth. Sometimes, you just need a really, really big drone that can carry an entire e-bike and deliver it to a soldier stranded several kilometers away.

Ukraine's 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade of the National Guard, dubbed "Rubizh," has just shared video of a large quadcopter drone that it used to conduct just such a mission. (And, because this is modern warfare, you can watch a 16-minute video about the operation on the brigade's YouTube channel.)

Details from a frontline war zone are almost impossible to verify, but the brigade has shared plenty of footage, including shots of the drone lifting the bike and a soldier riding it back to safety along a treeline. (Both sides are now making widespread use of e-bikes and motorcycles for quick infantry assaults after three years of drone warfare have wiped out many of the traditional armored vehicles.)

In their telling, a soldier with the callsign "Tankist" was holding a frontline position that came under attack, and a number of his comrades were killed. Tankist found himself cut off from safety and had to hold the position alone for several days.

To retrieve him, brigade staff devised a plan to deliver an e-bike via heavy bomber drone. The first drone was shot down, while the second failed under the weight. But the third attempt was successful, and Tankist was finally able to zip back toward Ukrainian lines. (He apparently hit a landmine on the way and survived that, too, finishing the trip on a second delivered e-bike.)

Amazon, of course, has had "drone delivery" in view for years and is currently testing delivery drones at locations around the US, including Pontiac, Michigan; Phoenix, Arizona; and Waco, Texas.

But these drones will only deliver packages weighing under 5 lbs—an e-bike weighs considerably more.

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Posted Saturday 2 August 2025 at 12:32 pm AEST (my time).

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Tesla was found partially liable in a wrongful death lawsuit in a federal court in Miami today. It's the first time that a jury has found against the car company in a wrongful death case involving its Autopilot driver assistance system—previous cases have been dismissed or settled.

In 2019, George McGee was operating his Tesla Model S using Autopilot when he ran past a stop sign and through an intersection at 62 mph then struck a pair of people stargazing by the side of the road. Naibel Benavides was killed and her partner Dillon Angulo was left with a severe head injury.

While Tesla said that McGee was solely responsible, as the driver of the car, McGee told the court that he thought Autopilot "would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake," a perception that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk has done much to foster with highly misleading statistics that paint an impression of a brand that is much safer than in reality.

The jury heard from expert witnesses about Tesla's approach to human-machine interfaces and driver monitoring, as well as its use of statistics, then considered their verdict on Thursday afternoon and Friday before deciding that, while McGee was two-thirds responsible for the crash, Tesla also bore a third of the responsibility for selling a vehicle "with a defect that was a legal cause of damage" to Benavides' relatives and Angulo. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $129 million in compensatory damages, and a further $200 million in punitive damages.

"Tesla designed autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans," said Brett Schreiber, lead attorney for the plaintiffs. "Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm's way. Today's verdict represents justice for Naibel's tragic death and Dillon's lifelong injuries, holding Tesla and Musk accountable for propping up the company’s trillion-dollar valuation with self-driving hype at the expense of human lives," Schreiber said.

A representative for Tesla sent Ars the following statement: "Today's verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla's and the entire industry's efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial. Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator—which overrode Autopilot—as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash. This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver—from day one—admitted and accepted responsibility."

This article was updated 8/1/2026 at 3:10 pm with a response from Tesla.

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Posted Saturday 2 August 2025 at 12:29 pm AEST (my time).

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. July's list includes the discovery of the tomb of the first Maya king of Caracol in Belize, the fluid dynamics of tacking a sailboat, how to determine how fast blood was traveling when it stained cotton fabric, and how the structure of elephant ears could lead to more efficient indoor temperature control in future building designs, among other fun stories.

Tomb of first king of Caracol found

Archaeologists Arlen and Diane Chase are the foremost experts on the ancient Maya city of Caracol in Belize and are helping to pioneer the use of airborne LiDAR to locate hidden structures in dense jungle, including a web of interconnected roadways and a cremation site in the center of the city's Northeast Acropolis plaza. They have been painstakingly excavating the site since the mid-1980s. Their latest discovery is the tomb of Te K'ab Chaak, Caracol's first ruler, who took the throne in 331 CE and founded a dynasty that lasted more than 460 years.

This is the first royal tomb the husband-and-wife team has found in their 40+ years of excavating the Caracol site. Te K'ab Chaak's tomb (containing his skeleton) was found at the base of a royal family shrine, along with pottery vessels, carved bone artifacts, jadeite jewelry, and a mosaic jadeite death mask. The Chases estimate that the ruler likely stood about 5'7" tall and was probably quite old when he died, given his lack of teeth. The Chases are in the process of reconstructing the death mask and conducting DNA and stable isotope analysis of the skeleton.

How blood splatters on clothing

Analyzing blood splatter patterns is a key focus in forensic science, and physicists have been offering their expertise for several years now, including in two 2019 studies on splatter patterns from gunshot wounds. The latest insights gleaned from physics concern the distinct ways in which blood stains cotton fabrics, according to a paper published in Forensic Science International.

Blood is a surprisingly complicated fluid, in part because the red blood cells in human blood can form long chains, giving it the consistency of sludge. And blood starts to coagulate immediately once it leaves the body. Blood is also viscoelastic: not only does it deform slowly when exposed to an external force, but once that force has been removed, it will return to its original configuration. Add in coagulation and the type of surface on which it lands, and correctly interpreting the resulting spatter patterns becomes incredibly difficult.

The co-authors of the July study splashed five different fabric surfaces with pig's blood at varying velocities, capturing the action with high-speed cameras. They found that when a blood stain has "fingers" spreading out from the center, the more fingers there are, the faster the blood was traveling when it struck the fabric. And the faster the blood was moving, the more "satellite droplets" there will be—tiny stains surrounding the central stain. Finally, it's much easier to estimate the velocity of blood splatter on plain-woven cotton than on other fabrics like twill. The researchers plan to extend future work to include a wider variety of fabrics, weaves, and yarns.

DOI: Forensic Science International, 2025. 10.1016/j.forsciint.2025.112543  (About DOIs).

Offshore asset practices of the uber-rich

Percentage of blacklisted jurisdiction use.

Herbert Chang

 

Propensity of identity concealment.

Herbert Chang

 

The uber-rich aren't like the rest of us in so many ways, including their canny exploitation of highly secretive offshore financial systems to conceal their assets and/or identities. Researchers at Dartmouth have used machine learning to analyze two public databases and identified distinct patterns in the strategies oligarchs and billionaires in 65 different countries employ when squirreling away offshore assets, according to a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

One database tracks offshore finance, while the other rates different countries on their "rule of law." This enabled the team to study key metrics like how much of their assets elites move offshore, how much they diversify, and how much they make use of "blacklisted" offshore centers that are not part of the mainstream financial system. The researchers found three distinct patterns, all tied to where an oligarch comes from.

Billionaires from authoritarian countries are more likely to diversify their hidden assets across many different centers—a "confetti strategy"—perhaps because these are countries likely to exact political retribution. Others, from countries with effective government regulations—or where there is a pronounced lack of civil rights—are more likely to employ a "concealment strategy" that includes more blacklisted jurisdictions, relying more on bearer shares that protect their anonymity. Those elites most concerned about corruption and/or having their assets seized typically employ a hybrid strategy.

The work builds on an earlier 2023 study concluding that issuing sanctions on individual oligarchs in Russia, China, the US, and Hong Kong is less effective than targeting the small, secretive network of financial experts who manage that wealth on behalf of the oligarchs. That's because sanctioning just one wealth manager effectively takes out several oligarchs at once, per the authors.

DOI: PLoS ONE, 2025. 10.1371/journal.pone.0326228  (About DOIs).

Medieval remedies similar to TikTok trends

The Middle Ages are stereotypically described as the "Dark Ages," with a culture driven by superstition—including its medical practices. But a perusal of the hundreds of medical manuscripts collected in the online Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine (CEMLM) reveals that in many respects, medical practices were much more sophisticated; some of the remedies are not much different from alternative medicine remedies touted by TikTok influencers today. That certainly doesn't make them medically sound, but it does suggest we should perhaps not be too hasty in who we choose to call backward and superstitious.

Per Binghamton University historian Meg Leja, medievalists were not "anti-science." In fact, they were often quite keen on learning from the natural world. And their health practices, however dubious they might appear to us—lizard shampoo, anyone?—were largely based on the best knowledge available at the time. There are detox cleanses and topical ointments, such as crushing the stone of a peach, mixing it with rose oil, and smearing it on one's forehead to relieve migraine pain. (Rose oil may actually be an effective migraine pain reliever.) The collection is well worth perusing; pair it with the Wellcome-funded Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries to learn even more about medieval medical recipes.

Physics of tacking a sailboat

Possibly the most challenging basic move for beginner sailors is learning how to tack to sail upwind. Done correctly, the sail will flip around into a mirror image of its previous shape. And in competitive sailboat racing, a bad tack can lose the race. So physicists at the University of Michigan decided to investigate the complex fluid dynamics at play to shed more light on the tricky maneuver, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

After modeling the maneuver and conducting numerical simulations, the physicists concluded that there are three primary factors that determine a successful tack: the stiffness of the sail, its tension before the wind hits, and the final sail angle in relation to the direction of the wind. Ideally, one wants a less flexible, less curved sail with high tension prior to hitting the wind and to end up with a 20-degree final sail angle. Other findings: It's harder to flip a slack sail when tacking, and how fast one manages to flip the sail depends on the sail's mass and the speed and acceleration of the turn.

DOI: Physical Review Fluids, 2025. 10.1103/37xg-vcff  (About DOIs).

Elephant ears inspire building design

Maintaining a comfortable indoor temperature constitutes the largest fraction of energy usage for most buildings, with the surfaces of walls, windows, and ceilings contributing to roughly 63 percent of energy loss. Engineers at Drexel University have figured out how to make surfaces that help rather than hamper efforts to maintain indoor temperatures: using so-called phase-change materials that can absorb and release thermal energy as needed as they shift between liquid and solid states. They described the breakthrough in a paper published in the Journal of Building Engineering.

The Drexel group previously developed a self-warming concrete using a paraffin-based material, similar to the stuff used to make candles. The trick this time around, they found, was to create the equivalent of a vascular network within cement-based building materials. They used a printed polymer matrix to create a grid of channels in the surface of concrete and filled those channels with the same paraffin-based material. When temperatures drop, the material turns into a solid and releases heat energy; as temperatures rise, it shifts its phase to a liquid and absorbs heat energy.

The group tested several different configurations and found that the most effective combination of strength and thermal regulation was realized with a diamond-shaped grid, which boasted the most vasculature surface area. This configuration successfully slowed the cooling and heating of its surface to between 1 and 1.2 degrees Celsius per hour, while holding up against stretching and compression tests. The structure is similar to that of jackrabbit and elephant ears, which have extensive vascular networks to help regulate body temperature.

DOI: Journal of Building Engineering, 2025. 10.1016/j.jobe.2025.112878  (About DOIs).

ID-ing a century-old museum specimen

Natural history museums have lots of old specimens in storage, and revisiting those specimens can sometimes lead to new discoveries. That's what happened to University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Richard J. Knecht as he was poring over a collection at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology while a grad student there. One of the fossils, originally discovered in 1865, was labeled a millipede. But Knecht immediately recognized it as a type of lobopod, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Biology. It's the earliest lobopod yet found, and this particular species also marks an evolutionary leap since it's the first known lobopod to be non-marine.

Lobopods are the evolutionary ancestors to arthropods (insects, spiders, and crustaceans), and their fossils are common along Paleozoic sea beds. Apart from tardigrades and velvet worms, however, they were thought to be confined to oceans. But Palaeocampa anthrax has legs on every trunk, as well as almost 1,000 bristly spines covering its body with orange halos at their tips. Infrared spectroscopy revealed traces of fossilized molecules—likely a chemical that emanated from the spinal tips. Since any chemical defense would just disperse in water, limiting its effectiveness, Knecht concluded that Palaeocampa anthrax was most likely amphibious rather than being solely aquatic.

DOI: Communications Biology, 2025. 10.1038/s42003-025-08483-0  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 2 August 2025 at 4:02 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of July): 3,458

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

As the story goes, the rock band AC/DC took its name from a label on an old sewing machine in the Young brothers’ home. It must have meant that the machine could run on either alternating-current or direct-current electricity. Today, all the newfangled electronic devices in our homes run only on DC power—even lighting fixtures, now that LEDs have replaced incandescent bulbs.

But wait. The electricity that comes out of your wall socket is alternating current. That means each device needs to convert AC power to DC, as well as reducing the voltage to the much lower levels used in digital circuits. So you might well ask: Wouldn’t it make more sense to have DC outlets in your home?

That’s a great question, and it’s actually one that sparked a big debate back in the early days of electrification. Thomas Edison favored DC circuits, but Nikola Tesla thought AC circuits were the way to go. Clearly Tesla won that argument. Let’s see why!

What Is Electricity?

Electricity is a flow of electrons through a conducting material like a metal wire. You can kind of think of the electrical grid as a system of rivers and streams with current flowing through them. In a river, a difference in elevation causes water to move downhill; in a power line, the force driving the current is voltage—a difference in potential energy between two points in a circuit.

That analogy works for direct current, anyway. But in most grids, electrical power is transmitted with alternating voltage. That means the negative and positive poles flip back and forth, causing the electrons to endlessly lurch forward and backward instead of traveling in a continuous stream.

As you can imagine, that makes alternating current more complicated to deal with. So Edison had a point: Direct current is much simpler. In fact, anyone can make a DC circuit. All you need is a battery and a wire to connect the positive and negative electrodes. You can even make your own battery. Just get two different metals, like zinc and copper, and stick them in opposite ends of a potato. The acid in the potato juice reacts differently with the two metals, creating a tiny amount of voltage—enough to light up a small LED. DC is easy.

Direct-Current Toaster

For example, suppose you wanted to create a DC toaster. A toaster is basically a box with a wire inside that gets hot when current runs through it. And let’s say this toaster requires 1,000 watts of power. Oh, power? That's the time (t) rate of energy (E). So if you put 1 joule of energy into a wire in 1 second, that would be 1 watt of power (P) :

For electrical power in particular, we can calculate that as the product of the electric current (I) and the voltage (V) :

With that, we can draw a simple toaster circuit diagram:

The nichrome wire inside the toaster is not a good conductor. It impedes the flow of current, causing the wire to heat up. So it’s basically a device for converting electrical energy into thermal energy. In the diagram above, R stands for the amount of resistance, which is measured in ohms.

So let's say our DC power supply runs at 10 volts. We can use this to find the level of resistance needed to get our toast nice and toasty. There is a relationship between the current (I) and voltage (V) for a resistor called Ohm's law, and that gives us the following expression for power:

With 10 volts, we need a resistance of 0.1 ohms (which is tiny) to get a power of 1,000 watts. But wait—it’s not just the heating element inside that creates resistance in the circuit. The power cord that you plug into the wall also has resistance. The copper wire inside the cord is a good conductor, but the length of the cord itself increases the resistance.

To make things easy, imagine that the power cord also has a 0.1-ohm resistance, so the total resistance in the circuit is 0.2 ohms. That means we’d get a lower electrical current, and the power to the toaster would be just 250 watts. That's going to be some un-toasty toast.

To fix this, we have to increase the voltage of the power source. Let's ramp that up to 100 volts. In that case our toaster could be 10 ohms, so the 0.1-ohm power cord won't matter much. Well, it's not a problem for a 3-foot power cord in your home. But what about the transmission lines from the power station to your town? These can be over 100 kilometers long.

With much longer wires you get much more resistance, which means those wires will get hot and waste energy. Again, the solution is to use a higher-voltage source. Remember P = IV ? That says you can deliver the same power by having a stupid-high voltage with stupid-low current.

Yes, you solve one problem and it just makes another problem. Suppose the wall outlet is 10,000-volt DC. Oh, but you want to charge your phone, and it needs 5-volt DC. How do you do that? OK, there is a way to make it work. You could put a large resistor in series with your phone and it would convert electrical energy to heat. But again, that’s just throwing away energy.

Alternating-Current Toaster

So what happens if we switch to alternating current? Remember, AC circuits are created by flipping the positive and negative poles back and forth, so the voltage alternates between a positive value and a negative value (meaning the direction of electron flow changes). Here is a plot of voltage as a function of time for the two types of current.

The DC source has a constant voltage, so that’s the flat blue line above. The AC source (red) has a voltage that oscillates between +10 and –10 volts, and there are times when the voltage is actually zero. In this made-up example, you can see that the voltage switches eight times in half a second. Real household AC varies, but in the US it averages around 120 volts (plus and minus) with a frequency of 60 hertz.

If we take our toaster and plug it into a 60-Hz AC outlet, it’ll run just fine. Since it works by just making a wire hot, it doesn't matter if it has DC or AC current—either way it gets hot. Same for incandescent light bulbs. In fact, they’re really not very different from toasters; it’s just that the thin tungsten wire in a bulb gets so hot (up to 4,500 degrees F) that it glows and produces light.

AC Power Is More Efficient

With AC, we still have the same problem with long power lines. You need to have high voltage and low current so you don't lose too much energy from hot wires. But AC has a nice advantage: It's easy to take that high voltage and change it to a low voltage. This is possible because of the oscillating nature of the current and Faraday’s law of induction.

Faraday's law says that if you change the strength of a magnetic field inside a loop of wire, you will produce an electric current. In the clip below, you can see that when I stick a strong magnet into a coil of wire or pull it out, the current level (measured in amps) jumps up.

You can also do this without a magnet if you use two coils of wire. In the video below, I’m connecting and disconnecting a little coin battery to a primary coil. (You can’t see the coils, but they’re inside the small gray box in the foreground.)

The secondary coil isn’t connected to any power source. But the changing current in the primary coil makes a changing magnetic field, and that induces a current in the secondary coil. Even with this tiny battery you can see that I get a big induced current. Check it out:

But that’s not all! We can change the voltage induced in the second coil by changing the ratio of the number of loops in each coil. If the induced coil has 100 loops and the primary coil has 1,000 loops, the induced voltage will be 100/1,000 or 0.1 times the input. If you reverse that, you can get an output voltage that is 10 times the input.

We call this a transformer (because it transforms the voltage). They are kind of a big deal. Here's what a small one looks like inside:

This is one of those “power bricks” that all your gadgets use to plug into a wall socket. The two coils are side by side, and you can see that the one on the right has more “turns” than the one on the left. So, if you have a 120-volt AC input, the output will be lower (in this case it's 12 volts). There's some other stuff in there that takes that lower-voltage AC and turns it into a DC output; that's called a voltage rectifier.

Just to be clear, you can't use an AC transformer with a DC circuit. I mean it's technically possible to take a DC input, convert it to AC, and then transform it—but why do the extra stuff when you can just deliver AC power to houses? That's exactly what we do. When you see those giant high-voltage transmission lines, they are super-high-voltage AC circuits.

So here's how it works. You have some power station that runs on fossil fuels or hydroelectric or whatever. You need to make this an AC output and then ramp up the voltage to something crazy like 100,000 volts. This means you can send it on the long power lines at very low current so there isn't much power loss.

When a power line gets to a town, it goes into a substation. This is basically just another giant transformer that reduces the AC voltage to something more manageable, like 10,000 volts. Finally, the current goes through one more transformer to get it to the 240-volt AC that enters your house. Big appliances like clothes dryers use the whole 240 V, and for your electrical outlets that gets cut in half to give you 120 V.

But none of this would be possible with DC power. It just wouldn't be practical. AC rules!

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Posted Saturday 2 August 2025 at 3:58 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of July): 3,458

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force's Space Mission Delta 2.

If it seems like there's a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force's Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

Dozens of satellites are being launched each week, primarily by SpaceX to continue deploying the Starlink broadband network. The US military has advance notice of these launches—most of them originate from Space Force property—and knows exactly where they're going and what they're doing.

That's usually not the case when China or Russia (and occasionally Iran or North Korea) launches something into orbit. With rare exceptions, like human spaceflight missions, Chinese and Russian officials don't publish any specifics about what their rockets are carrying or what altitude they're going to.

That creates a problem for military operators tasked with monitoring traffic in orbit and breeds anxiety among US forces responsible for making sure potential adversaries don't gain an edge in space. Will this launch deploy something that can destroy or disable a US satellite? Will this new satellite have a new capability to surveil allied forces on the ground or at sea?

Of course, this is precisely the point of keeping launch details under wraps. The US government doesn't publish orbital data on its most sensitive satellites, such as spy craft collecting intelligence on foreign governments.

But you can't hide in low-Earth orbit, a region extending hundreds of miles into space. Col. Raj Agrawal, who commanded Mission Delta 2 until earlier this month, knows this all too well. Agrawal handed over command to Col. Barry Croker as planned after a two-year tour of duty at Mission Delta 2.

Some space enthusiasts have made a hobby of tracking US and foreign military satellites as they fly overhead, stringing together a series of observations over time to create fairly precise estimates of an object's altitude and inclination.

Commercial companies are also getting in on the game of space domain awareness. But most are based in the United States or allied nations and have close partnerships with the US government. Therefore, they only release information on satellites owned by China and Russia. This is how Ars learned of interesting maneuvers underway with a Chinese refueling satellite and suspected Russian satellite killers.

Theoretically, there's nothing to stop a Chinese company, for example, from taking a similar tack on revealing classified maneuvers conducted by US military satellites.

The Space Force has an array of sensors scattered around the world to detect and track satellites and space debris. The 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons, which were both under Agrawal's command at Mission Delta 2, are the units responsible for this work.

Preparing for the worst

One of the most dynamic times in the life of a Space Force satellite tracker is when China or Russia launches something new, according to Agrawal. His command pulls together open source information, such as airspace and maritime warning notices, to know when a launch might be scheduled.

This is not unlike how outside observers, like hobbyist trackers and space reporters, get a heads-up that something is about to happen. These notices tell you when a launch might occur, where it will take off from, and which direction it will go. What's different for the Space Force is access to top-secret intelligence that might clue military officials in on what the rocket is actually carrying. China, in particular, often declares that its satellites are experimental, when Western analysts believe they are designed to support military activities.

That's when US forces swing into action. Sometimes, military forces go on alert. Commanders develop plans to detect, track, and target the objects associated with a new launch, just in case they are "hostile," Agrawal said.

We asked Agrawal to take us through the process his team uses to prepare for and respond to one of these unannounced, or "non-cooperative," launches. This portion of our interview is published below, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: Let's say there's a Russian or Chinese launch. How do you find out there's a launch coming? Do you watch for NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen), like I do, and try to go from there?

Agrawal: I think the conversation starts the same way that it probably starts with you and any other technology-interested American. We begin with what's available. We certainly have insight through intelligence means to be able to get ahead of some of that, but we're using a lot of the same sources to refine our understanding of what may happen, and then we have access to other intel.

The good thing is that the Space Force is a part of the Intelligence Community. We're plugged into an entire Intelligence Community focused on anything that might be of national security interest. So we’re able to get ahead. Maybe we can narrow down NOTAMs; maybe we can anticipate behavior. Maybe we have other activities going on in other domains or on the Internet, the cyber domain, and so on, that begin to tip off activity.

Certainly, we’ve begun to understand patterns of behavior. But no matter what, it's not the same level of understanding as those who just cooperate and work together as allies and friends. And if there's a launch that does occur, we're not communicating with that launch control center. We're certainly not communicating with the folks that are determining whether or not the launch will be safe, if it’ll be nominal, how many payloads are going to deploy, where they're going to deploy to.

I certainly understand why a nation might feel that they want to protect that. But when you're fielding into LEO [low-Earth orbit] in particular, you're not really going to hide there. You're really just creating uncertainty, and now we're having to deal with that uncertainty. We eventually know where everything is, but in that meantime, you're creating a lot of risk for all the other nations and organizations that have fielded capability in LEO as well.

Find, fix, track, target

Ars: Can you take me through what it’s like for you and your team during one of these launches? When one comes to your attention, through a NOTAM or something else, how do you prepare for it? What are you looking for as you get ready for it? How often are you surprised by something with one of these launches?

Agrawal: Those are good questions. Some of it, I'll be more philosophical on, and others I can be specific on. But on a routine basis, our formation is briefed on all of the launches we're aware of, to varying degrees, with the varying levels of confidence, and at what classifications have we derived that information.

In fact, we also have a weekly briefing where we go into depth on how we have planned against some of what we believe to be potentially higher threats. How many organizations are involved in that mission plan? Those mission plans are done at a very tactical level by captains and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] that are part of the combat squadrons that are most often presented to US Space Command...

That integrated mission planning involves not just Mission Delta 2 forces but also presented forces by our intelligence delta [Space Force units are called deltas], by our missile warning and missile tracking delta, by our SATCOM [satellite communications] delta, and so on—from what we think is on the launch pad, what we think might be deployed, what those capabilities are. But also what might be held at risk as a result of those deployments, not just in terms of maneuver but also what might these even experimental—advertised "experimental"—capabilities be capable of, and what harm might be caused, and how do we mission-plan against those potential unprofessional or hostile behaviors?

As you can imagine, that's a very sophisticated mission plan for some of these launches based on what we know about them. Certainly, I can't, in this environment, confirm or deny any of the specific launches… because I get access to more fidelity and more confidence on those launches, the timing and what's on them, but the precursor for the vast majority of all these launches is that mission plan.

That happens at a very tactical level. That is now posturing the force. And it's a joint force. It's not just us, Space Force forces, but it's other services' capabilities as well that are posturing to respond to that. And the truth is that we even have partners, other nations, other agencies, intel agencies, that have capability that have now postured against some of these launches to now be committed to understanding, did we anticipate this properly? Did we not?

And then, what are our branch plans in case it behaves in a way that we didn't anticipate? How do we react to it? What do we need to task, posture, notify, and so on to then get observations, find, fix, track, target? So we're fulfilling the preponderance of what we call the kill chain, for what we consider to be a non-cooperative launch, with a hope that it behaves peacefully but anticipating that it'll behave in a way that’s unprofessional or hostile... We have multiple chat rooms at multiple classifications that are communicating in terms of "All right, is it launching the way we expected it to, or did it deviate? If it deviated, whose forces are now at risk as a result of that?"

Now, we even have down to the fidelity of what forces on the ground or on the ocean may not have capability... because of maneuvers or protective measures that the US Space Force has to take in order to deviate from its mission because of that behavior. The conversation, the way it was five years ago and the way it is today, is very, very different in terms of just a launch because now that launch, in many cases, is presenting a risk to the joint force.

We're acting like a joint force. So that Marine, that sailor, that special operator on the ground who was expecting that capability now is notified in advance of losing that capability, and we have measures in place to mitigate those outages. And if not, then we let them know that "Hey, you're not going to have the space capability for some period of time. We'll let you know when we're back. You have to go back to legacy operations for some period of time until we're back into nominal configuration."

I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind in the way that we now do even just launch processing. It's very different than what we used to do.

Ars: So you’re communicating as a team in advance of a launch and communicating down to the tactical level, saying that this launch is happening, this is what it may be doing, so watch out?

Agrawal: Yeah. It’s not as simple as a ballistic missile warning attack, where it's duck and cover. Now, it’s "Hey, we've anticipated the things that could occur that could affect your ability to do your mission as a result of this particular launch with its expected payload, and what we believe it may do." So it's not just a general warning. It’s a very scoped warning.

As that launch continues, we're able to then communicate more specifically on which forces may lose what, at what time, and for how long. And it’s getting better and better as the rest of the US Space Force, as they present capability trained to that level of understanding as well... We train this together. We operate together and we communicate together so that the tactical user—sometimes it's us at US Space Force, but many times it's somebody on the surface of the Earth that has to understand how their environment, their capability, has changed as a result of what's happening in, to, and from space.

Ars: The types of launches where you don’t know exactly what’s coming are getting more common now. Is it normal for you to be on this alert posture for all of the launches out of China or Russia?

Agrawal: Yeah. You see it now. The launch manifest is just ridiculous, never mind the ones we know about. The ones that we have to reach out into the intelligence world and learn about, that's getting ridiculous, too. We don't have to have this whole machine postured this way for cooperative launches. So the amount of energy we're expending for a non-cooperative launch is immense. We can do it. We can keep doing it, but you're just putting us on alert... and you're putting us in a position where we're getting ready for bad behavior with the entire general force, as opposed to a cooperative launch, where we can anticipate. If there's an anomaly, we can anticipate those and work through them. But we're working through it with friends, and we’re communicating.

We're not having to put tactical warfighters on alert every time ... but for those payloads that we have more concern about. But still, it's a very different approach, and that's why we are actively working with as many nations as possible in Mission Delta 2 to get folks to sign on with Space Command’s space situational awareness sharing agreements, to go at space operations as friends, as allies, as partners, working together. So that way, we're not posturing for something higher-end as a result of the launch, but we're doing this together. So, with every nation we can, we're getting out there—South America, Africa, every nation that will meet with us, we want to meet with them and help them get on the path with US Space Command to share data, to work as friends, and use space responsibly.”

Ars: How long does it take you to sort out and get a track on all of the objects for an uncooperative launch?

Agrawal: That question is a tough one to answer. We can move very, very quickly, but there are times when we have made a determination of what we think something is, what it is and where it's going, and intent; there might be some lag to get it into a public catalog due to a number of factors, to include decisions being made by combatant commanders, because, again, our primary objective is not the public-facing catalog. The primary objective is, do we have a risk or not?

If we have a risk, let's understand, let's figure out to what degree do we think we have to manage this within the Department of Defense. And to what degree do we believe, "Oh, no, this can go in the public catalog. This is a predictable elset (element set)"? What we focus on with (the public catalog) are things that help with predictability, with spaceflight safety, with security, spaceflight security. So you sometimes might see a lag there, but that's because we're wrestling with the security aspect of the degree to which we need to manage this internally before we believe it's predictable. But once we believe it's predictable, we put it in the catalog, and we put it on space-track.org. There's some nuance in there that isn't relative to technology or process but more on national security.

On the flip side, what used to take hours and days is now getting down to seconds and minutes. We've overhauled—not 100 percent, but to a large degree—and got high-speed satellite communications from sensors to the centers of SDA (Space Domain Awareness) processing. We're getting higher-end processing. We're now duplicating the ability to process, duplicating that capability across multiple units. So what used to just be human labor intensive, and also kind of dial-up speed of transmission, we've now gone to high-speed transport. You're seeing a lot of innovation occur, and a lot of data fusion occur, that's getting us to seconds and minutes.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Posted Saturday 2 August 2025 at 3:54 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of July): 3,458

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Tragically, this crash dates back to 2019 in Key Largo, Florida, when George McGee was driving his Tesla Model S with the Enhanced Autopilot system engaged. Enhanced Autopilot is a paid option on Tesla cars that brings advanced features like auto steering, Navigate on Autopilot, and Summon.

McGee says he dropped his phone while driving and scrambled to pick it up, believing that the Enhanced Autopilot would automatically brake if an obstacle appeared. However, he sped through an intersection at over 60 mph and crashed into a parked car and its nearby owners.

In this crash, 22-year-old Naibel Benavides died at the scene from severe injuries. Her body was discovered approximately 75 feet from the impact point, highlighting the collision's force. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but sustained serious injuries, including broken bones and a traumatic brain injury.

Angulo is pursuing compensation for his medical costs and emotional distress, while Benavides' family is filing a wrongful death lawsuit seeking damages for pain, suffering, and punitive penalties.

McGee was charged in October 2019 with careless driving, but Benavides' family could settle with him in the same year.

Lawyers argue that Tesla's Autopilot system had dangerous defects and both the EV maker and CEO Elon Musk have made false statements to customers, shareholders, and the public. Tesla attorneys said the EV maker informs customers about how to use the Autopilot and other features, and George McGee's driving was to blame for the collision.

Judge Beth Bloom in the Miami court allowed the case to move ahead to trial. She wrote in an order that "A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit."

The accuracy of Tesla's Autopilot system has sparked numerous concerns and questions to date. Consequently, Texas residents have protested against the launch of Tesla's robotaxi service over safety issues.

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Posted Saturday 2 August 2025 at 3:53 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of July): 3,458

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Welcome to Edition 8.05 of the Rocket Report! One of the most eye-raising things I saw this week was an online update from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center touting its work on cryogenic propellant management in orbit. Why? Because until recently, this was a forbidden research topic at the space agency, as propellant depots would obviate the need for a large rocket like the Space Launch System. But now that Richard Shelby is retired...

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

Australian launch goes sideways. Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country's first homegrown launch vehicle, Ars reports. The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris rocket ignited its four main engines and took off from its launch pad in northeastern Australia, but the rocket quickly lost power from two of its engines and stalled just above the launch pad before coming down in a nearby field. The crash sent a plume of smoke thousands of feet over the launch site, which sits on a remote stretch of coastline on Australia's northeastern frontier.

Setting expectations ... Gilmour Space, the private company that developed the rocket, said in a statement that there were no injuries and "no adverse environmental impacts" in the aftermath of the accident. The launch pad also appeared to escape any significant damage. The company's cofounder and CEO, Adam Gilmour, spoke with Ars a few hours after the launch. Gilmour said he wasn't surprised by the outcome of the Eris rocket's inaugural test flight, which lasted just 14 seconds. "I didn't expect that we would get to orbit," he said. "Never did. I thought best case was maybe 40 seconds of flight time, but I'll take 14 as a win." (submitted by zapman987 and Tfargo04)

Firefly seeks to go public. Firefly Aerospace seeks to raise more than $600 million through a public stock offering, an arrangement that would boost the company's market valuation to nearly $5.5 billion, according to a document filed with the SEC on Monday, Ars reports. The launch of Firefly's Initial Public Offering (IPO) comes as the company works to build on a historic success in March, when Firefly's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the surface of the Moon. Firefly plans to sell 16.2 million shares of common stock at a price of between $35 and $39 per share. Under those terms, Firefly could raise up to $631.8 million on the public market.

A lot of financial needs ... In a statement, Firefly said it will use the funds to pay off a "substantial" amount of debt and support dividend payments and "for general corporate purposes." Firefly's general corporate purposes include a spectrum of activities, and some are going better than others. Firefly is deep into the capital-intensive development of a new medium-class rocket named Eclipse in partnership with Northrop Grumman, which made a $50 million strategic investment into Firefly in May. And Firefly is developing a spacecraft line called Elytra, a platform that can host military sensors and other payloads and maneuver them into different orbits.

Air Force tests new ICBM. It's been half a decade since the Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a sole-source contract to develop a next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile, known as the LGM-35 Sentinel. The missiles will carry thermonuclear warheads and are intended to replace all 450 Minuteman III missiles starting in 2029. This week, the Air Force announced that testing of the rocket's second stage motor in a vacuum chamber to simulate high-altitude conditions is going well. "This test reflects our disciplined digital engineering approach and the continued momentum behind the Sentinel program," said Brig. Gen. William S. Rogers of the Air Force.

Real-world tests to validate models ... The stage-two motor is one of three booster segments that make up the three-stage Sentinel missile. According to the Air Force, this test is part of a series intended to qualify the stage-two design and validate predictive performance models developed in a digital engineering environment. The data gathered from the test will be used to refine design elements and reduce technical risk as the program moves toward production. The milestone follows the stage-one rocket motor test conducted in March at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Promontory, Utah.

Starship debris clouds future of SpaceX Bahamas landings. In a new report, Reuters provides additional details about the deal between SpaceX and the Bahamas to land Falcon 9 first stages there and why it still may go sideways. The Bahamas rocket-landing deal, which unlocked a more efficient path to space for SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9, was signed in February last year by Deputy Prime Minister Chester Cooper. Sources told the publication that the quick approval created tension within the Bahamian government, with some officials expressing misgivings about a lack of transparency in the negotiations.

Landing agreement on hold ... SpaceX's deal with the Bahamas, the government said, included a $1 million donation to the University of Bahamas, where the company pledged to conduct quarterly seminars on space and engineering topics. The company must also pay a $100,000 fee per landing. In April, the landing agreement was put on hold after the explosion of SpaceX's Starship rocket, whose mid-flight failure sent hundreds of pieces of debris washing ashore on Bahamian islands. Local activists have increased criticism of the Falcon 9 landing agreement since then, which remains under review. (submitted by Tom Nelson)

A single cloud delays Crew 11 launch. The SpaceX Crew-11 mission was a little more than a minute away from the planned launch Thursday onboard the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft when cumulus clouds popped up in just the right spot to trigger a scrub, Spaceflight Now reports. The four astronauts, led by NASA's Zena Cardman, are bound for the International Space Station when they leave Earth.

Forecasters for the win? ... On Wednesday, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather at launch. Meteorologists said there was a low probability for interference from cumulus clouds, but that proved to be enough to stymie a launch attempt. As a meteorologist, I feel like I should apologize for my colleagues. Another attempt is likely Friday, although weather conditions will deteriorate somewhat.

Mysterious rocket engine undergoes testing. The Exploration Company has successfully completed a six-week test campaign of the oxygen-rich preburner for its Typhoon rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. With co-financing from the French space agency CNES, The Exploration Company began work on its Typhoon rocket engine in January 2024. The reusable engine uses a full-flow staged combustion cycle and is designed to produce 250 metric tons of thrust, which is comparable to a SpaceX Raptor. On Thursday, the company announced that it had completed a series of 16 hot-fire tests of the oxygen-rich preburner for the Typhoon engine.

What is the engine for? ... At this point, the Typhoon engine does not have a confirmed application, as it is far too powerful for any of the company’s current in-space logistics projects. According to information provided to European Spaceflight by the company, The Exploration Company partnered with an industrial prime contractor to submit a proposal for the European Space Agency’s European Launcher Challenge. While unconfirmed, the company’s contribution to the bid likely included the Typhoon engine.

India's GSLV delivers for NASA. A $1.5 billion synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite, a joint project between NASA and the Indian space agency ISRO, successfully launched into orbit on Wednesday aboard that nation's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, Ars reports. The mission, named NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), was subsequently deployed into its intended orbit 464 miles (747 km) above the Earth's surface. From this Sun-synchronous orbit, it will collect data about the planet's land and ice surfaces two times every 12 days.

A growing collaboration ... After Wednesday's launch, the spacecraft will undergo a three-month commissioning phase. The NISAR mission is notable both for its price tag—Earth observation missions typically cost less because they do not need to be hardened for long-duration flight in deep space—as well as the partnership with India. In terms of complexity and cost, this is the largest collaboration between NASA and ISRO to date and could set a template for further cooperation in space as part of the Artemis program or other initiatives.

You can now see a Merlin engine at the Smithsonian. The National Air and Space Museum welcomed the public into five more of its renovated galleries on Monday, including two showcasing spaceflight artifacts, Ars reports. The new exhibitions shine a modern light on returning displays and restore the museum's almost 50-year-old legacy of adding objects that made history but have yet to become historical.

The mighty Merlin ... Among the artifacts debuting in "Futures in Space" are a Merlin engine and grid fin that flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Sian Proctor's pressure suit that she wore on the private Inspiration4 mission in 2021, and a mockup of a New Shepard crew module that Blue Origin has pledged to replace with its first flown capsule when it is retired from flying. It's great to see elements of the Falcon 9 rocket in the museum. Although the booster is still active, it is by far the most-flown US rocket in history, and the Merlin engine is the most reliable rocket engine over that timeframe.

Reason Foundation calls for termination of SLS. A libertarian think tank, the Reason Foundation, has published a new report that is deeply critical of NASA's Artemis program and its use of the Space Launch System Rocket and Orion spacecraft. "NASA needs to bite the bullet and end its use of obsolete, non-reusable launch vehicles and sole-source, cost-plus contracts," the report states. "It should shift to state-of-the-art reusable spacecraft and public-private partnerships like those now transporting cargo and people between Earth and the International Space Station."

How to get to the Moon ... The report estimates that canceling the SLS rocket, its ground systems, Orion, and the Lunar Gateway would save NASA $5.25 billion a year. The authors posit several different architectures for a lunar lander that would be ready sooner and be compatible with existing rockets. This includes a novel plan to use Crew Dragon, with legs, as a lander. It is not clear how much impact the report will have, as Congress seems to want to fly the SLS indefinitely, and the Trump administration seeks to cancel the rocket after two more flights.

NASA is finally interested in propellant depots. This week NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center posted an update noting its recent work on developing and testing technology to manage cryogenic propellants in space. Teams at the field center in Huntsville, Alabama tested an innovative approach to achieve zero boiloff storage of liquid hydrogen using two stages of active cooling, which could prevent the loss of valuable propellant. "Technologies for reducing propellant loss must be implemented for successful long-duration missions to deep space like the Moon and Mars," said Kathy Henkel, acting manager of NASA’s Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio Project, based at NASA Marshall.

If only this had been done earlier ... This is great, obviously, as long-term storage of liquid propellants such as oxygen, hydrogen, and methane are critical to the strategies of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies working to develop reusable and more cost-effective space transportation vehicles. However, it is somewhat ironic to see NASA and Marshall promoting this work after it was suppressed for a decade by US Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican. As Ars has previously reported, in order to protect the Space Launch System rocket, Shelby directed NASA to end its work on storage and transfer of cryogenic propellants, going so far as to say he would fire anyone who used the word 'depot.' Well, we will say it: Depot.

Next three launches

August 1: Falcon 9 | Crew-11 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 15:43 UTC

August 2: Electron | JAKE 4 suborbital flight | Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia | 01:45 UTC

August 4: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-30 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 04:11 UTC

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Posted Saturday 2 August 2025 at 3:52 am AEST (my time).

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LONDON, ENGLAND—Formula E’s 11th season came to a close in its now-traditional London home this past weekend. In its first two seasons, it tried to make a go of racing in Battersea Park, a race that local residents rejected as too disruptive. After a five-year gap, the sport found a more receptive home at Excel London in the city’s Docklands, racing around and then through the cavernous exhibition center—something that’s only really possible with electric racing cars (or very fume-tolerant authorities).

As a location for an ePrix, Excel London is nigh-perfect. It’s fed by a pair of light rail stations just minutes from the center of town and comes preinstalled with concessions and restrooms and much of the other infrastructure that normally has to be brought in for a temporary circuit, with hotels literally walking distance. But like with most Formula E races, the few thousand fans in attendance, while not exactly an afterthought, aren’t really why the series shows up—this is a sport for an audience watching behind a screen.

It’s going to be the speed of the cars, rather than the size of the crowds, that causes Formula E to outgrow the 20-turn, 1.3-mile (2.09 km) circuit. Next year will be the final visit, before a possible Silverstone ePrix in 2027, once Gen 4 gets going.

No, they don’t swap cars anymore

If you’ve been following the sport since its inception, you’ll no doubt remember the initial Gen 1 car. Back in 2014, batteries cost more and stored less energy per unit of volume and mass, and the only way to get to the end of a 45-minute race was for each driver to have two identical cars, swapping at a mid-race pitstop.

Different drivers hop in and out of the same car in endurance racing, and in the old days a driver might have sometimes been replaced mid-race by a teammate if that looked like securing a better outcome. (As an aside, can you imagine the social media generation reacting to something like that? I’m not sure I even want to.) But drivers needing more than one car to finish a sprint race captured the public attention, and not in a good way.

Tell someone that you’re going to an ePrix and “is that the series where they change cars?” is more than likely the reply, even though car swaps went away with the arrival of the Gen 2 car in season 5.

The current race car is known as the Gen 3 Evo, and it’s a far cry from the slightly underwhelming early days. Zero to 60 mph happens in less than two seconds, faster even than an F1. There’s part-time all-wheel drive with up to 470 hp (350 kW), and even before the introduction of the Evo package, the Gen 3 cars were hitting more than 170 mph (274 km/h) going into turn 1 at Portland.

But it’s all going to change again in just two years. When Season 13 starts in late 2026, Formula E enters its Gen 4 era. And it’s a huge technical upgrade. All-wheel drive becomes permanent, and the cars will have 804 hp (600 kW) to play with. But they’re growing in size, getting longer (by 20.4 inches/520 mm), wider (by 3.6 inches/97 mm), and with a 14.7-inch (375 mm) longer wheelbase, and a curb weight of just over a ton (1,016 kg). And Hankook tires will be swapped for Bridgestones, which are getting wider and softer.

"I think when we set up the objective of the Gen 4 car, thanks to technology improvement of electrical—mainly the cells, to be honest—definitely our focus was to show car performance," said Vincent Gaillardot, FIA technical director for Formula E.

In addition to being bigger and heavier, teams are also going to have high- and low-downforce configurations. Racing drivers will always want more grip, but the addition of aerodynamics to push cars down onto the track surface can fundamentally change the racing, and not always in a way that makes for an entertaining spectacle for the audience. That said, Formula E isn’t adding downforce to Gen 4 just because.

Change is never easy

"This was a hot topic. No mitigation: car performance, car performance, car performance. So this is why I went to 600 kilowatt. This is why the high grip tire, downforce and so on, because before, it was not possible. So we had to compromise other things to make the show and compromise performance. This time, no compromise at all," Gaillardot told Ars. Instead, Gen 4 will be a race car that doesn't have to apologize for not having an internal combustion engine.

"It's a must at the moment already, because we will get so powerful and quick," said Florian Modlinger, director of Porsche's factory Formula E program, which sealed both the team's and manufacturer's titles in London. "For the braking maneuvers, for the cornering speeds, some downforce is needed, and for me, it will be the biggest step in all the generations for car performance. How will this affect the racing? We are still investigating, because all our simulations are ongoing," he told me.

But aero is not about to become a new core competency for Formula E teams. The bodywork will be standard across all the teams, and a cost cap prevents anyone from trying to spend their way out of a problem.

"I have to always look back a bit to the last season, because in season 10, and in the last year, there was already the testing of Gen 3 Evo ongoing. We were in the championship fight in season 10, and we were already looking on the concepts of Gen 4. And under the cost cap, you need to allocate the resources to three parallel projects, you know: championship fight, Gen 3 Evo testing, and Gen 4 concepts," Modlinger said. Porsche took home the driver's championship last year to go with this year's pair of titles, so evidently the resource allocation worked quite well.

It sounds like we might see more room for technical development in the coming years. So far, the series has only allowed manufacturers freedom to develop things like motors, power electronics, transmissions, and software. Batteries, in particular, have been locked down to a single supplier to keep costs sane.

"We hope that, with Gen 4 being a game changer, that the return of investment of the series will improve. And for sure, as the FIA, and with the promoter and manufacturers, if really we have a good return on investment, we will open the perimeter to manufacture development of technology. This is really a balance we have to work with every single time," Gaillardot said.

"The clear standpoint is the series itself needs to be sustainable; sustainable for manufacturers and teams, and we need always to respect the cost cap, and we need to monitor how the series is growing. This means also the revenues are growing and the chances to increase them, then we can also think about [spending] more money," Modlinger said.

Spending controls and a rigid technical rulebook, rather than balance of performance, then, will be the plan.

"When you think what you could open additionally, you need to say that our powertrains are so efficient already—when you think about from the battery to the rear wheel, more than 97.5 percent. It's an impressive number. And there you maybe can think in the future if you should open up other things like battery infrastructure, battery cooling, battery thermal management, whatever little things where you can make a difference and which is relevant for the technology and for the road cars," Modlinger said.

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Posted Friday 1 August 2025 at 11:34 am AEST (my time).

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Tesla’s newly-launched ride-hailing service in San Francisco isn’t quite ready for the “robotaxi” designation. After launching its robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas, with a “safety monitor” in the passenger seat last month, a video of Tesla’s service in San Francisco shows a vehicle arriving with a human at the wheel, as reported earlier by Business Insider.

California requires companies to obtain three permits to operate a commercial robotaxi service. So far, the state has granted Tesla just one of the permits, allowing it to run a ride-hailing service with humans in the driver’s seat. The Alphabet-owned Waymo is currently the only company with the permits to offer commercial driverless rides in San Francisco.

Even though the service in Texas and California hasn’t yet achieved Musk’s promise of operating with “no one in the car,” Musk told Tesla investors last week that he plans to expand robotaxi service to Florida, Nevada, and Arizona.

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Posted Friday 1 August 2025 at 4:09 am AEST (my time).

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The spread of measles is showing no signs of slowing down in Mexico. Between July 21 and 25, the country’s number of confirmed infections in 2025 rose from 3,553 to 3,730, an increase of 197 in only four days, according to the Ministry of Health. Experts and health officials in Mexico have warned that the virus’s speed of transmission appears to be increasing.

So far, the outbreak has claimed the lives of 12 people: 11 in the state of Chihuahua—which borders Texas to the north, the epicenter of the US’s measles outbreak—with one more death in the neighboring state of Sonora to the west. Mexican health authorities have called on all health care providers to reinforce surveillance and prevention measures to contain the spread of the virus.

Children between zero and four years of age continue to be the population most affected, with 838 infections—an incidence of 8.05 cases per 100,000 children. People aged between 25 and 29 also account for a large number of infections—512 cases—while there have been 419 cases among those between 30 and 34 years old.

The latest bulletin issued by Mexico’s National Epidemiological Surveillance System, SINAVE, points out that infections have been concentrated in Chihuahua. The border state has reported 3,490 cases, which represents 93 percent of the total for the country. So far, a total of 7,086 probable cases have been counted, in 82 municipalities across 20 states of the country.

In view of the seriousness of the outbreak, the government of Chihuahua has activated what it is calling the “Juarez Shield Strategy.” The initiative includes a massive free vaccination campaign for those between six months and 49 years of age. Over the last week, state health authorities have vaccinated around 42,000 people against measles.

The Ministry of Health has also launched its “Rapid Response Plan for the Interruption of the Measles Outbreak,” a multi-part initiative that aims, among other things, to strengthen epidemiological surveillance and laboratory diagnosis to speed up the identification and containment of cases. The plan also proposes establishing controls in clinics and out in the community to break the chain of transmission, which includes isolating probable and confirmed cases in health care settings.

Measles Resurgence Is a Global Problem

Measles is one of the world’s most contagious viral diseases. It spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids or by airborne transmission. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the virus can remain active in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours. An infected person can infect up to nine out of 10 unvaccinated close contacts, according to the US Centers for Disease Control.

Anyone unvaccinated can contract the disease, although it is most common in children. Initial symptoms include high fever, cough, runny nose, and a rash that spreads over the body. The incubation period is 10 to 14 days, and the illness lasts between four and seven days.

Complications of measles affect a small minority of patients, but they can be deadly, and are the main cause of mortality following an infection. They can include blindness, encephalitis, severe diarrhea, dehydration, ear infections, and pneumonia. Complications are especially dangerous for children under five, adults over 30, and patients with malnutrition or weakened immune systems. In addition, according to the WHO, the virus weakens the immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to other infections.

There is no specific treatment for measles, so mass vaccination is the best prevention strategy. But following successful elimination strategies in many parts of the world, including the US, the virus has resurfaced in some of these places in recent years due to declining vaccination rates. In 2023, the WHO recorded 10.3 million cases globally, representing a year-on-year increase of 20 percent. Until recently, most infections were concentrated in Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Western Pacific. However, the disease has begun to gain ground in the Americas, with outbreaks raising alarm bells in the United States, Canada, and Argentina.

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

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Posted Friday 1 August 2025 at 4:07 am AEST (my time).

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Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) in butterfly wings, for example, are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

In the case of peacock feathers, it's the regular, periodic nanostructures of the barbules—fiber-like components composed of ordered melanin rods coated in keratin—that produce the iridescent colors. Different colors correspond to different spacing of the barbules.

Both are naturally occurring examples of what physicists call photonic crystals. Also known as photonic bandgap materials, photonic crystals are "tunable," which means they are precisely ordered in such a way as to block certain wavelengths of light while letting others through. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength. (In fact, the rainbow weevil can control both the size of its scales and how much chitin is used to fine-tune those colors as needed.)

Even better (from an applications standpoint), the perception of color doesn't depend on the viewing angle. And the scales are not just for aesthetics; they help shield the insect from the elements. There are several types of manmade photonic crystals, but gaining a better and more detailed understanding of how these structures grow in nature could help scientists design new materials with similar qualities, such as iridescent windows, self-cleaning surfaces for cars and buildings, or even waterproof textiles. Paper currency could incorporate encrypted iridescent patterns to foil counterfeiters.

There have been prior examples of random laser emissions in everything from stained bovine bones and blue coral skeletons to insect wings, parrot feathers, and human tissue, as well as salmon iridiphores. The authors of this most recent study were interested in whether they could produce similar laser emissions using peacock feathers and hopefully identify the specific mechanism.

It wasn't difficult to get the peacock feathers, given how popular they are for decorative and arts and crafts purposes, but the authors did make sure none of the feathers used in their experiments contained impurities (like dyes). They cut away any excess lengths of barbs and mounted the feathers on an absorptive substrate. They then infused the feathers with common dyes by pipetting the dye solution directly onto them and letting them dry. The feathers were stained multiple times in some cases. Then they pumped the samples with pulses of light and measured any resulting emissions.

The team observed laser emissions in two distinct wavelengths for all color regions of the feathers' eyespots, with the green color regions emitting the most intense laser light. However, they did not observe any laser emission from feathers that were only stained once, just in sample feathers that underwent multiple wetting and complete drying cycles. This is likely due to the better diffusion of both dye and solvent into the barbules, as well as a possible loosening of the fibrils in the keratin sheath.

The authors were unable to identify the precise microstructures responsible for the lasing; it does not appear to be due to the keratin-coated melatonin rods. Co-author Nathan Dawson of Florida Polytechnic University suggested to Science that protein granules or similar small structures inside the feathers might function as a laser cavity. He and his colleague think that one day, their work could lead to the development of biocompatible lasers that could safely be embedded in the human body for sensing, imaging, and therapeutic purposes.

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2025. 10.1038/s41598-025-04039-8  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 31 July 2025 at 12:18 pm AEST (my time).

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Builders in ancient Rome used a special kind of ancient concrete to construct their aqueducts, bridges, and buildings. But is Roman concrete more sustainable than the Portland cement used in today's concrete? The answer is more nuanced than one might think, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. Roman concrete produces as much CO₂ as modern methods, but fewer air pollutants.

As we've reported previously, like today's Portland cement (a basic ingredient of modern concrete), ancient Roman concrete was basically a mix of a semi-liquid mortar and aggregate. Portland cement is typically made by heating limestone and clay (as well as sandstone, ash, chalk, and iron) in a kiln. The resulting clinker is then ground into a fine powder, with just a touch of added gypsum—the better to achieve a smooth, flat surface. But the aggregate used to make Roman concrete was made up of fist-sized pieces of stone or bricks.

Scientists have long been fascinated by the remarkable longevity of Roman concrete; it's a very active field of study. For instance, in 2017, scientists analyzed the concrete from the ruins of sea walls along Italy's Mediterranean coast, which have stood for two millennia despite the harsh marine environment. That analysis revealed that the recipe involved a combination of rare crystals and a porous mineral. So exposure to seawater generated chemical reactions inside the concrete, causing aluminum tobermorite crystals to form out of phillipsite, a common mineral found in volcanic ash. The crystals bound to the rocks, preventing the formation and propagation of cracks that would have otherwise weakened the structures.

In 2021, archaeologists analyzed samples of the ancient concrete used to build a 2,000-year-old mausoleum along the Appian Way in Rome, widely considered one of the best-preserved monuments on the famous road. They discovered that the tomb's mortar was similar to the walls of the Markets of Trajan: volcanic tephra from the Pozzolane Rosse pyroclastic flow, binding together large chunks of brick and lava aggregate. However, the tephra used in the tomb's mortar contained much more potassium-rich leucite. The potassium in the mortar dissolved in turn and effectively reconfigured the binding phase.

And in 2023, archaeologists analyzed samples taken from the concrete walls of the Privernum archaeological site near Rome and found that the Romans employed "hot mixing" with quicklime, among other strategies, to give the material self-healing functionality. When cracks begin to form in the concrete, they are more likely to move through the lime clasts. The clasts can then react with water, producing a solution saturated with calcium. That solution can either recrystallize as calcium carbonate to fill the cracks or react with the pozzolanic components to strengthen the composite material.

Testing ancient recipes

Yet the environmental impact of Roman concrete, compared to its modern counterpart, has not been rigorously assessed—until now. “Studying Roman concrete can teach us how to use materials in a way that can maximize the longevity of our structures, because sustainability goes hand-by-hand with durability,” said co-author Daniela Martinez, an engineer at Universidad del Norte in Colombia. “We were interested in how we can draw lessons from their methods to inform some of the climate-mitigation challenges that we currently face in our built environment.”

Martinez et al. tested three different Roman concrete recipes with varying slaked lime-to-pozzolan ratios (1:2, 1:3, and 1:4), and assessed greenhouse gas and air emissions for each production stage based on known Roman construction practices. Specifically, the Romans used oak and fir wood as fuel for their lime kilns. (Processes like loading, transportation, and mixing were done by human and animal labor and thus fell outside the scope of the analysis.) The team also assessed greenhouse gas and air emissions for modern concrete production, taking into account variability in equipment efficiency and energy sources for the kiln, among other factors.

The results surprised the scientists. Per volume of concrete, the production process for Roman concrete ended up emitting as much and in some cases more CO₂ than modern formulations. On the other hand, Roman concrete emits much lower volumes of such air pollutants as nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide—between 11 percent and 98 percent less, depending on whether the energy source was fossil fuels, biomass, or renewable energy (which had the biggest reductions).

Roman concrete is also more durable and hence would require less maintenance and replacement over time, which might further offset any negative environmental impacts. However, the authors caution that it's a difficult comparison, given that ancient Roman structures didn't use steel bars for reinforcement, unlike modern concrete construction methods. It's the  corrosion of those steel reinforcements that primarily causes deterioration of modern concrete.

“Contrary to our initial expectations, adopting Roman formulations with current technology may not yield substantial reductions in emissions or energy demand,” said Martinez. “Using biomass and other alternative fuels to fire kilns may prove more effective in decarbonizing modern cement production than implementing Roman concrete formulations.” However, "there's a lot of lessons we can draw from the Romans. If we can incorporate their strategies with our modern innovative ideas, we can create a more sustainable built environment."

DOI: iScience, 2025. 10.1016/j.isci.2025.113052  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 31 July 2025 at 12:17 pm AEST (my time).

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After more than a decade of development, NASA's science leadership traveled to India this week for the launch of the world's most expensive Earth-observation satellite.

The $1.5 billion synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite, a joint project between NASA and the Indian space agency ISRO, successfully launched into orbit on Wednesday aboard that nation's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, a medium-lift rocket.

The mission, named NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), was subsequently deployed into its intended orbit 464 miles (747 km) above the Earth's surface. From this Sun-synchronous orbit, it will collect data about the planet's land and ice surfaces two times every 12 days, including the infrequently visited polar regions in the Southern Hemisphere.

Two for one

The satellite combines two main instruments that, unlike optical telescopes, can gather data through clouds and at night. NASA provided the L-band synthetic aperture radar, which is efficient at measuring soil moisture, forests, and the movement of land and ice on the surface of the planet. India contributed an S-band radar that is useful for measuring agricultural changes, as well as grasslands and human-built structures.

NASA and other spaceflight organizations have been developing and flying synthetic aperture radar for decades, but the NISAR spacecraft is one of the first missions to combine two different bands onto a single vehicle. This should provide a more comprehensive view of how the planet's surface is changing on a real-time basis.

After Wednesday's launch, the spacecraft will undergo a three-month commissioning phase. During this time NISAR will deploy a very large antenna reflector that is 39 feet (12 meters) in diameter. This reflector will send and receive microwaves from the two radars and use differences to measure the surface below.

Notable for cost and collaboration

The NISAR mission is notable both for its price tag—Earth observation missions typically cost less because they do not need to be hardened for long-duration flight in deep space—as well as the partnership with India. In terms of complexity and cost, this is the largest collaboration between NASA and ISRO to date and could set a template for further cooperation in space as part of the Artemis program or other initiatives.

"The powerful capability of this radar mission will help us study Earth’s dynamic land and ice surfaces in greater detail than ever before," said V. Narayanan, chair of the Indian space agency, in a statement after the launch. "With this successful launch, we are at the threshold of fulfilling the immense scientific potential NASA and ISRO envisioned for the NISAR mission more than 10 years ago."

As Narayanan noted, the development of the NISAR mission has spanned more than a decade. The US and Indian space agencies signed the partnership agreement on September 30, 2014, to design and build the spacecraft. At the time, launch was targeted for 2024, so missing that deadline by less than a year is quite respectable.

Who deserves credit?

After the launch, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy, on social media site X, celebrated the successful deployment of the spacecraft. However, Duffy did not quite have his history correct in attributing the mission's success to President Donald Trump.

Social media post by Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.

Credit: X

"The mission is a joint U.S.-India effort, negotiated by President TRUMP," Duffy wrote. "Thanks to his LEADERSHIP & our friends at @ISRO, @NASA is Making Space Great Again!"

Trump did not begin his first term as US President until nearly two and a half years after the partnership between NASA and ISRO was negotiated.

Nevertheless it is likely welcome to NASA's Earth Science program that a Trump appointee acknowledged that a mission designed to study Earth's surface, including the influence of climate change, is of value to the space agency.

Given the Trump administration's proposed cuts to NASA's science programs, it is not clear whether a mission like NISAR could get funded today.

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Posted Thursday 31 July 2025 at 12:16 pm AEST (my time).

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Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country's first homegrown launch vehicle.

The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris rocket ignited its four main engines and took off from its launch pad in northeastern Australia at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC) Tuesday. Liftoff occurred at 8:35 am local time Wednesday at Bowen Orbital Spaceport, the Eris rocket's launch site in the Australian state of Queensland.

But the rocket quickly lost power from two of its engines and stalled just above the launch pad before coming down in a nearby field. The crash sent a plume of smoke thousands of feet over the launch site, which sits on a remote stretch of coastline on Australia's northeastern frontier.

Gilmour Space, the private company that developed the rocket, said in a statement that there were no injuries and "no adverse environmental impacts" in the aftermath of the accident. The launch pad also appeared to escape any significant damage.

The company's cofounder and CEO, Adam Gilmour, spoke with Ars a few hours after the launch. Gilmour said he wasn't surprised by the outcome of the Eris rocket's inaugural test flight, which lasted just 14 seconds.

"I didn't expect that we would get to orbit," he said. "Never did. I thought best case was maybe 40 seconds of flight time, but I'll take 14 as a win."

The company shared a video of the flight on X.

The Eris launcher consists of three stages, with four of Gilmour's Sirius engines on the booster, a single Sirius engine on the second stage, and an engine named Phoenix on the third stage. The Sirius engines use hybrid propulsion, with a solid fuel and hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer, while Phoenix burns a mixture of kerosene and cryogenic liquid oxygen. The Eris rocket is designed to place payloads of up to 670 pounds (305 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit, according to Gilmour's website.

In a statement, Gilmour Space called the first Eris test flight "a major milestone toward offering low-cost, responsive launch services for small satellites globally."

"Congratulations to the Gilmour team on today's achievement," said Enrico Palermo, head of the Australian Space Agency. "It is rare for first launches to reach orbit. That is part of the innovation cycle and why you test. We look forward to the next phases of the test program."

Diagnosing failure

Gilmour's engineers determined that propulsion failures were the likely cause of the accident.

"All the data we have now is just from what we've seen on videos, and it looks like an engine failed within the first few seconds of the flight," Gilmour said in an interview with Ars. "Then the rocket has enough power to go up with three engines, and the control system was doing a marvelous job of keeping it vertical. But I think as we kind of cleared the tower, a second engine looked like it's failed, and that's when we couldn't keep going, and we came back down again."

Hybrid engines are an unconventional choice for an orbital-class rocket. They typically don't produce as much thrust as conventional solid- or liquid-fueled rockets. But they're less complex than liquid engines, and unlike a solid rocket motor, hybrid engines can be throttled or turned off if there is a problem.

Gilmour's team of more than 200 employees designed and developed the bulk of the Eris rocket, including the engines, structures, avionics, software, and the spaceport itself. Most of the company's engineers are new to the space industry, but Gilmour's staff includes a handful of veterans from other rocket companies, including Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, Virgin Orbit, and Avio.

"Most of what we do, we develop ourselves the hard way, with pure R&D, with failure," Gilmour said.

The long wait for regulatory approval from the Australian government may have been a contributing factor in the outcome of the test flight, according to Gilmour. The company rolled the Eris rocket to the launch pad for prelaunch testing in April 2024, but it took more than a year to secure the go-ahead from Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the Australian Space Agency to launch.

"We had to wait 18 months to get the regulatory approval to launch with the rocket finished," Gilmour said. When it wasn't on the launch pad for testing, the rocket was stored horizontally inside a hangar about a mile from the beach, at risk to corrosive damage from salt air.

"I was just getting more and more concerned that the rocket was getting old," Gilmour said. "We had to replace a lot of things on it during testing, and we were just getting very nervous that the longer we waited, the worse that would get. So for that old vehicle to get off the pad, to clear the tower, to clear the launch pad before it went out, I'm really happy with that."

Heading up from Down Under

The last attempt to launch a satellite from Australian soil was in 1971, when the British Black Arrow rocket lifted off from a military range in South Australia and placed a UK-built satellite into orbit. Gilmour is leading the charge to bring orbital launches back to Australia, this time with a domestic rocket.

Adam Gilmour founded his space company with his brother James in 2012 after a career in banking. Gilmour raised approximately $90 million, primarily from venture capital firms, to get the first Eris rocket to the launch pad. Just last week, the Australian government announced a funding commitment of 5 million Australian dollars ($3.2 million) for Gilmour to support the development of a liquid-fueled engine for the Eris rocket's second stage.

This is a modest investment for Gilmour's capital-intensive effort to field an orbital-class launcher.

"There's a new minister that's in charge of space, among other things, and he's already texted me today and said congratulations," Gilmour said. "So it looks like we're turning a new leaf, and things are looking good again, and I'm feeling pretty positive about what we can do with the Australian government."

The second Eris rocket is in production at the company's headquarters in Gold Coast, Queensland. Gilmour said the structure of the next rocket is complete, but engineers waited to build the engines until they saw how the first rocket performed.

"I'm glad [we did that] because they failed," Gilmour said. "So, I'm going to be doing a few more engine tests before I chuck more into the rocket. I'm estimating that will take about another six months to finish the build, and then we've got to test it for another month or so. So I'm looking for a January, February launch for the second one."

But first, Gilmour must find out what went wrong with the first rocket. The test flight was the first time Gilmour fired a cluster of four of its Sirius hybrid engines together, although engineers performed numerous single-engine test-firings. Hybrid engines, unlike liquid-fueled engines, can only be fired once, so building a dedicated booster was an expense the company chose to avoid.

"Why did the engines fail? We have to figure that out. We don't know," Gilmour said. "It's a little bit unusual they failed so early. But again, those engines have been on that rocket for more than 18 months, and you can't test them. So I wouldn't be surprised if we just find out that wear and tear from age has been a contributing factor—a lot of the rubber seals and all the rest of the ablative materials."

"We never designed it to be dormant for 18 months," he said. "So I think one of the lessons learned is we're not going to build a rocket and then wait 18 months again to have another launch license."

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Posted Thursday 31 July 2025 at 12:14 pm AEST (my time).

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For decades, sleep disturbance was a punch line: the cartoon dad snoring, the disgruntled partner burying their head under a pillow. But science is beginning to paint a less jovial picture. Sleep apnea—a relatively common disorder where breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep—is now being taken seriously as a potential biomarker for a host of major health conditions, from cardiovascular disease to Alzheimer’s, even anxiety and depression.

“Sleep is just as important for health as diet and exercise,” says Marishka Brown, director of the US National Center on Sleep Disorders Research. “Poor sleep affects both your mental and physical health; it contributes to cardiovascular disease, increases all-cause mortality, and raises risk factors like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. And these impacts are independent—they’re not just knock-on effects from something else. Sleep is foundational.”

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is one of the most common types of apnea, affecting an estimated 1 billion people worldwide. It occurs when the upper airway repeatedly collapses during sleep, interfering with breathing and lowering oxygen levels. The brain responds by jolting the sleeper awake—sometimes hundreds of times a night—before letting them drift off again, often unaware.

Sufferers may feel exhausted during the day and can experience memory problems. But more than this, the latest research suggests that sleep apnea may play an early and direct role in serious long-term illnesses, especially those affecting the brain.

“Traditionally, sleep apnea was thought of as a disorder that increases with age—especially in men—and leads to heart problems, maybe stroke,” says Bryce Mander, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC Irvine. “But over the last decade, it’s become clearer that it’s also a risk factor for neurological illnesses like Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.”

Each pause of breath triggered by apnea causes a drop in oxygen levels and a surge in adrenaline for the sleeper. “Over time, that raises the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke,” says Atul Malhotra, a sleep medicine specialist and professor at UC San Diego. “There’s strong evidence now that sleep apnea is not just a marker of being unfit. Lean people get sleep apnea too,” he adds.

Hypoxemia—when oxygen levels in the blood are lower than normal—increases inflammation and oxidative stress on cells, explains Mander. “It’s associated with vascular pathology in the brain. So, your blood vessels become damaged, and that can damage the surrounding brain tissue,” he says.

This damage can accelerate the trajectory of a disease like Alzheimer’s or make the brain more vulnerable to it—and researchers now know the effects may appear years before outward symptoms.

A 2015 New York University study found that people with sleep-disordered breathing developed mild cognitive impairment, including Alzheimer’s, up to 10 years earlier than those without. However, those who received treatment for their sleep apnea had the same onset age as those without sleep-disordered breathing.

“Duration of untreated illness is one of the biggest predictors of long-term damage,” says Mander. “The longer you have OSA, the more havoc it can wreak on the body and the brain.”

Notably, the research showed that apnea can manifest differently in REM sleep: “A lot of the memory consolidation and emotional regulation … happens during REM,” Mander explains. “If you’re waking up during REM because of a breathing event, you're fragmenting that process. And if that’s happening night after night for years, it adds up.”

Early diagnosis, therefore, is critical—but it’s currently falling short. Diagnosis frequently relies on a partner noticing loud snoring, an unreliable signal at best.

“The reality is, women—and especially pregnant women—have been overlooked when it comes to sleep disorders,” says Brown. “Right now, our diagnostic standards for sleep apnea are based on a very narrow demographic—typically middle-aged men. But we know that women present differently.”

“What’s classified as ‘mild’ apnea in a man could be moderate or even severe in a woman, particularly during pregnancy,” she adds. “We’ve supported research in pregnant women that found even mild sleep-disordered breathing was an independent risk factor for maternal hypertension, preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes.”

Wearable tech companies are racing to fill the diagnostic gap. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch recently became the first wearable to receive De Novo authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration for detecting signs of OSA. But experts remain cautious. “Wearables and home sleep tests are improving, but they’re not yet a replacement for a full clinical diagnosis,” says Malhotra. “They can give a false sense of security—people see a score and think they’re fine when they’re not.”

Mander is also skeptical: “They’re not accurate enough to replace proper diagnosis,” he says. “They might be better than nothing—as long as you treat them as one piece of information, not the full picture.” While smartwatches and rings can track metrics like heart rate variability, they’re still not reliable at detecting breathing patterns, he adds.

The gold standard in diagnosis is polysomnography, a clinical sleep study that monitors brain waves, oxygen, heart rate, and muscle activity. But this is expensive and time-consuming, and doesn't scale well.

New home-based devices are now offering better options. Mander highlights WatchPAT, which uses finger, wrist, and chest sensors to detect apnea events by analyzing changes in blood vessels. There’s also ARES, a wearable headband monitor that measures airflow, oxygen levels, and sleep position, and NightOwl, a fingertip device that received FDA approval in recent years.

“It's a big step forward, especially for reaching underserved populations who might not be able to access a sleep lab,” Mander says. Still, there are limitations. “Right now, the home test doesn’t know if you’re awake or asleep, much less the sleep stage. It would probably miss people with REM-dominant OSA,” he says. “If we have devices that can detect when these events are happening—in REM versus non-REM—that could help us pick up people earlier and reduce their risk.”

Once diagnosed, CPAP—continuous positive airway pressure—remains the gold standard for treatment, despite being uncomfortable or claustrophobic for some users. It uses a small machine to deliver a steady stream of air through a mask, keeping the airway open during sleep. “CPAP improves symptoms, blood pressure, and we now have emerging evidence that it may reduce cardiovascular risk,” says Malhotra.

For those who can’t tolerate CPAP, new tools such as nasal inserts are emerging on the market. Some interventions are more unconventional—and yet surprisingly effective. “There’s an Australian study that showed learning the didgeridoo helped strengthen throat muscles and reduce OSA severity,” says Mander. “It’s a fun example, but it works.”

Ultimately, the most critical step is awareness. “We used to think snoring was just annoying or funny,” Malhotra says. “Now we understand that it can be a sign of a serious medical condition. If you snore heavily or feel constantly tired, don’t just brush it off—go see your doctor.”

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Posted Thursday 31 July 2025 at 2:55 am AEST (my time).

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Tesla has a new battery cell supplier. Although the automaker is vertically integrated to a degree not seen in the automotive industry for decades, when it comes to battery cells it’s mostly dependent upon suppliers. Panasonic cells can be found in many Teslas, with the cheaper, sturdier lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells being supplied by CATL. Now Tesla has a new source of LFP cells thanks to a deal just signed with LG Energy Solutions.

According to The Korea Economic Daily, the contract between Tesla and LGES is worth $4.3 billion. LGES will begin supplying Tesla with cells next August through until at least the end of July 2030, with provisions to extend the contract if necessary.

The LFP cells probably aren’t destined for life on the road, however. Instead, they’ll likely be used in Tesla’s energy storage products, which both Tesla and LGES hope will soak up demand now that EV sales prospects look so weak in North America.

The deal also reduces Tesla’s reliance on Chinese suppliers. LGES will produce the LFP cells at its factory in Michigan, says Reuters, and so they will not be subject to the Trump trade war tariffs, unlike Chinese-made cells from CATL.

Although Tesla CEO Elon Musk has boasted about the size of the energy storage market, its contribution to Tesla’s financials remains meagre, and actually shrank during the last quarter.

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Posted Thursday 31 July 2025 at 2:54 am AEST (my time).

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The magnitude 8.7 quake strikes 136km east of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in Russia’s far east, according to US Geological Survey.

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Posted Wednesday 30 July 2025 at 12:25 pm AEST (my time).

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On Monday, Mayor Patrick Collins of Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced plans for an AI data center that would consume more electricity than all homes in the state combined, according to the Associated Press. The facility, a joint venture between energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would start at 1.8 gigawatts and scale up to 10 gigawatts of power use.

The project's energy demands are difficult to overstate for Wyoming, the least populous US state. The initial 1.8-gigawatt phase, consuming 15.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, is more than five times the electricity used by every household in the state combined. That figure represents 91 percent of the 17.3 TWh currently consumed by all of Wyoming's residential, commercial, and industrial sectors combined. At its full 10-gigawatt capacity, the proposed data center would consume 87.6 TWh of electricity annually—double the 43.2 TWh the entire state currently generates.

Because drawing this much power from the public grid is untenable, the project will rely on its own dedicated gas generation and renewable energy sources, according to Collins and company officials. However, this massive local demand for electricity—even if self-generated—represents a fundamental shift for a state that currently sends nearly 60 percent of its generated power to other states.

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon praised the project's potential benefits for the state's natural gas industry in a company statement. "This is exciting news for Wyoming and for Wyoming natural gas producers," Gordon said.

The proposed site for the new datacenter sits several miles south of Cheyenne near the Colorado border off US Route 85. While state and local regulators still need to approve the project, Collins expressed optimism about a quick start. "I believe their plans are to go sooner rather than later," he said.

Wyoming’s data center boom

Cheyenne is no stranger to data centers, having attracted facilities from Microsoft and Meta since 2012 due to its cool climate and energy access. However, the new project pushes the state into uncharted territory. While Wyoming is the nation's third-biggest net energy supplier, producing 12 times more total energy than it consumes (dominated by fossil fuels), its electricity supply is finite.

While Tallgrass and Crusoe have announced the partnership, they haven't revealed who will ultimately use all this computing power—leading to speculation about potential tenants.

A potential connection to OpenAI's Stargate AI infrastructure project, announced in January, remains a subject of speculation. When asked by the Associated Press if the Cheyenne project was part of this effort, Crusoe spokesperson Andrew Schmitt was noncommittal. "We are not at a stage that we are ready to announce our tenant there," Schmitt said. "I can't confirm or deny that is going to be one of the Stargate."

OpenAI recently activated the first phase of a Crusoe-built data center complex in Abilene, Texas, in partnership with Oracle. Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, told the Associated Press last week that the Texas facility generates "roughly and depending how you count, about a gigawatt of energy" and represents "the largest data center—we think of it as a campus—in the world."

OpenAI has committed to developing an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity through an agreement with Oracle. "We're now in a position where we have, in a really concrete way, identified over five gigawatts of energy that we're going to be able to build around," Lehane told the AP. The company has not disclosed locations for these expansions, and Wyoming was not among the 16 states where OpenAI said it was searching for data center sites earlier this year.

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Posted Wednesday 30 July 2025 at 12:03 pm AEST (my time).

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Firefly Aerospace seeks to raise more than $600 million through a public stock offering, an arrangement that would boost the company's market valuation to nearly $5.5 billion, according to a document filed with the SEC on Monday.

The launch of Firefly's Initial Public Offering (IPO) comes as the company works to build on a historic success in March, when Firefly's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the surface of the Moon. Firefly plans to sell 16.2 million shares of common stock, at a price of between $35 and $39 per share. Under those terms, Firefly could raise up to $631.8 million on the public market.

Firefly has applied to list its common stock on the NASDAQ Global Market under the ticker symbol "FLY."

In a statement, Firefly said it will use the funds to pay off a "substantial" amount of debt, support dividend payments, and "for general corporate purposes." Firefly's general corporate purposes include a spectrum of activities, and some are going better than others.

A mixed record

Blue Ghost became the first privately owned spacecraft to pull off a fully successful landing on another world, fulfilling a $101.5 million contract from NASA to deliver a suite of scientific and tech demo experiments to the Moon. Firefly has received orders from NASA for two more lunar missions using the Blue Ghost platform, and the company is positioned to win more after completing its first Moon landing earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Firefly has struggled to build a reliable track record for its small Alpha launch vehicle, a rocket capable of placing more than a metric ton of payload into low-Earth orbit. In six launches since 2021, the Alpha rocket has logged two successful flights, two partial failures that ended up in the wrong orbit and two missions that failed to reach orbit at all.

Most recently, the sixth flight of the Alpha rocket in April suffered a failure a few minutes after liftoff, when a mishap during stage separation damaged the rocket's second stage. Firefly has not announced a schedule for the next Alpha launch or the results of the investigation into the April failure.

Firefly is deep into the capital-intensive development of a new medium-class rocket named Eclipse in partnership with Northrop Grumman, which made a $50 million strategic investment into Firefly in May. And Firefly is developing a spacecraft line called Elytra, a platform that can host military sensors and other payloads and maneuver them into different orbits.

IPOs again in vogue

Firefly's filing to go public harkens back to a few years ago, when numerous space companies flooded the public market, mainly through mergers with SPACs—Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. But the SPAC boom turned to bust. Many of those companies have lost value since going public, and a few have gone out of business.

One exception is Rocket Lab, which has a market valuation today of nearly $23 billion. Rocket Lab, like Firefly, has diversified its product offerings after an initial focus on launch services. Through internal investment and acquisitions, Rocket Lab now builds satellites, spacecraft components, and military-grade sensors and is developing a medium-lift rocket with comparable performance to Firefly's Eclipse.

An IPO on the upper end of Firefly's projection would net the company a market valuation of close to $5.5 billion. The stock offering amounts to about a 12 percent stake in Firefly ownership. Firefly's current primary shareholder, AE Industrial Partners, would retain about 42 percent ownership in the company and more than 50 percent of voting power after the IPO.

The financial services firm Charles Schwab reported last month that IPOs are on the comeback across multiple sectors of the market. "After a long dry spell, there are signs of life in the initial public offerings space," Charles Schwab said in June. "An increase in offerings can sometimes suggest an improvement in overall market sentiment."

Firefly is eschewing a SPAC merger in favor of a traditional IPO. Another space company, Voyager Technologies, closed an Initial Public Offering on June 11, raising nearly $383 million with a valuation peaking at $3.8 billion despite reporting a loss of $66 million in 2024. Voyager's stock price has been in a precipitous decline since then.

Financial information disclosed by Firefly in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals the company registered $60.8 million in revenue in 2024, a 10 percent increase from the prior year. But Firefly's net loss widened from $135 million to $231 million, largely due to higher spending on research and development for the Eclipse rocket and Elytra spacecraft.

Rocket Lab, too, reported a net loss of $190 million in 2024 and another $60.6 million in the first quarter of this year. Despite this, Rocket Lab's stock price has soared for most of 2025, further confirming that near-term profits aren't everything for investors.

Chad Anderson, the founder and managing partner of Space Capital, offered a "gut check" to investors listening to his quarterly podcast last week.

"90 percent of IPOs that double on day one deliver negative returns over three years," Anderson said. "And a few breakout companies become long-term winners… Rocket Lab being chief among them. But many fall short of expectations, even with some collapsing into bankruptcy, again, as we've seen over the last few years.

"There's a lot of excitement about the space economy, and rightly so," Anderson said. "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for investors, but unfortunately, I think this is going to be another example of why specialist expertise is required and the ability to read financial statements and understand the underlying business fundamentals, because that’s what's really going to take companies through in the long term."

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Posted Tuesday 29 July 2025 at 5:18 pm AEST (my time).

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The X-37B, the US Space Force's secretive space plane, will soon take flight again.

On Monday, the Space Force announced that it will fly the small, Space Shuttle-shaped vehicle on the program's eighth mission next month. The launch of the vehicle, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to occur no earlier than August 21 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

There are two active X-37Bs in the Space Force fleet, both built by Boeing. The first made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the two uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights. The first made its longest and latest flight from 2020 to 2022 over a span of 908 days. The second flew more recently, landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.

It's likely that the first of these two vehicles, both of which are about 29 feet (9 meters) long and roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA's Space Shuttle orbiters, will launch next month.

Some details about the upcoming flight

Over the past decade and a half, the Space Force has largely remained silent about the purpose of this space plane, flying classified payloads and providing only limited information about the purpose of each flight.

However, for this flight, OTV-8, the military has provided a bit more detail about its intentions. The vehicle will fly with a service module that will expand its capacity for experiments, allowing the space plane to host payload for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit.

The mission's goals include tests of "high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies."

"OTV-8's laser communications demonstration will mark an important step in the US Space Force's ability to leverage commercial space networks as part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant space architectures," said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman in a statement. "In so doing, it will strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability, and data transport speeds of our satellite communications architectures."

Navigating in a world without GPS

The space plane will also advance the development of a new navigation technology based on electromagnetic wave interference. The Space Force news release characterizes this as the "highest-performing quantum inertial sensor ever tested in space."

Boeing has previously tested a quantum inertial measurement unit, which detects rotation and acceleration using atom interferometry, on conventional aircraft. Now, an advanced version of the technology is being taken to space to demonstrate its viability. The goal of the in-space test is to demonstrate precise positioning, navigation, and timing in an environment where GPS services are not available.

"Bottom line: testing this tech will be helpful for navigation in contested environments where GPS may be degraded or denied," Saltzman said in a social media post Monday, describing the flight.

Quantum inertial sensors could also be used near the Moon, where there is no comparable GPS capability, or for exploration further into the Solar System.

Notably, the small X-37B is back to launching on a medium-lift rocket with this new mission. During its most recent flight that ended in March, the space plane launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. This allowed the X-37B to fly beyond low-Earth orbit and reach an elliptical high-Earth orbit.

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Posted Tuesday 29 July 2025 at 9:06 am AEST (my time).

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Formula 1 made its annual stop at Spa-Francorchamps, the historic track that winds its way through the hills and trees of the Ardennes. I’ll admit, I’d been waiting for this one; in fact, I’ve become somewhat of a Spa bore, having fallen in love with the place all over again a few weeks ago while attending the Crowdstrike 24-hour GT3 race.

The 4.3 mile (6.9 km) track delivers, whether that’s as a challenge to the drivers—corners like Eau Rouge, Raidillon, Pouhon, and Blanchiment are the equal of any. There’s elevation change, something that neither Monza nor Silverstone nor Montreal can offer. It has history, dating back well before the start of the Formula 1 world championship in 1949, albeit in a much longer, much scarier version that was truncated by more than half in 1979. The views are spectacular from almost anywhere you choose to watch from, and despite the track’s size, its a pleasant and easy walk through the forest paths (just as long as you can stop imagining that one scene from Band of Brothers).

The food and drink in the region are worth a visit by themselves, and architecture fans will enjoy the Belgians' chaotic attitude toward planning permission and house renovations, which appears to boil down to “do whatever you like as long as it looks good and won’t fall down.” Pretty good driving roads in the area, too, although they get even better toward the Nürburgring, just over an hour away in Germany.

The other thing Spa has plenty of is weather. (Well, almost always; while it rained during practice for the 24 hour race last month, the race itself was completely dry. As was the Nürburgring 24 the weekend before. And the 24 Hours of Le Mans the week before that. Which scares me.) But there was weather aplenty for the 2025 Belgian Grand Prix.

Sprint weekend

This year Spa held a sprint weekend, significantly shortening the practice time available to teams, most of whom brought technical upgrades to the race. Sprint qualifying was determined by track evolution, with the surface getting grippier as more and more cars attempted to set fast times. Sauber rookie Gabriel Bortoleto in particular garnered some well-deserved attention for getting into SQ3, up among the very fastest cars, as did the Haas of Oliver Bearman (and his anything-but-a-rookie teammate Nico Hulkenberg).

McLaren’s Oscar Pastri secured the pole for the sprint race, lining up next to the Red Bull of Max Verstappen, a team now under the direction of Laurent Miekes after Red Bull’s corporate owners gave founding team principal Christian Horner his marching orders two weeks ago. As I wrote some months ago, for the past few years Red Bull’s design team has built cars that, while theoretically fast, are so difficult to drive at the limit that only Verstappen can exploit them properly. A single driver in the fastest car can win the driver’s championship, but if you want the team’s title—and that’s the one the bonuses are tied to, usually—then you better have both cars scoring good points. Just ask McLaren.

And Red Bull can no longer claim to have built the fastest car, even in Verstappen’s hands.

That said, starting in second place at Spa is not so bad. After the slow hairpin of La Source—which McLaren has finally built a car able to cope with—there’s a long run to Les Coombes, with the challenge of Eau Rouge and Raidillon on the way. Verstappen got a good tow from the slipstream behind Piastri’s car along the Kemmel straight toward Les Coombes (isn’t it better when all the parts of the track have actual names and not just turn 1, turn 2, etc?) and got past, staying there in first place until the end, 15 laps later. Behind him, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc did something similar to Piastri’s McLaren teammate, Lando Norris.

Although the Mclaren is a faster car than either the Red Bull or Ferrari, at Spa its speed came in the corners, and the orange cars were unable to close on or pass their rivals on the straights.

Teams and drivers faced a dilemma for Sunday’s race. They could either set their cars up for dry running, with less downforce and more top speed, or give them a higher downforce setup to capitalize on the rain. The thing is, they have to make that decision before qualifying on Saturday, then stick with it. Changes are allowed to setup, but only if you opt to start from the pitlane.

The McLarens took first and second in qualifying, with an amazing lap by Charles Leclerc that pipped Verstappen to third place by 3 milliseconds. Alex Albon got his Williams into a fine fifth place, and Red Bull’s other driver, Yuki Tsunoda—who has a much better relationship with Miekes than he ever did with Horner—made it into seventh just 0.3 seconds behind his otherworldly teammate. Bortotelo repeated his feat, snatching 10th in qualifying.

Not everyone had a good quali, particularly not Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton, who was eliminated among the first drivers for the second time in two days, something the seven-time World Champion described as unacceptable. Mercedes’ young phenom, Kimi Antonelli, who replaced Hamilton, was also eliminated among the first batch, part of a miserable weekend for the Italian who just graduated from high school.

Race day

Sunday morning was greeted with plenty of rain, affecting the support races and then delaying the start of the Grand Prix. Formula 1 has both intermediate and wet grooved tires, which pump gallons of water into the air from the track at speed, creating huge clouds of visibility-obscuring spray that, at a place like Spa, just hang between the trees. It’s this lack of visibility, rather than the wet track itself, that makes F1 so cautious, and so the formation lap was held behind the safety car, at which point the race officials decided to red flag things and wait for some more rain to come through and then leave.

The race eventually began 90 minutes late and circulated behind the safety car for far longer than was necessary, given the emergence of a dry line before too long. The red flag gave plenty of drivers and teams the opportunity to tweak their setups for the rain—something that turned out to be the wrong move given the FIA’s reticence to throw the green flag.

Piastri, in second place behind Norris, did to his teammate what Verstappen had done to him the day before and snatched the lead well before Les Coombes, staying just far enough ahead of his closest rival for the championship throughout the race. A small mistake by Norris and a slightly slower pitstop from his team meant he never got close enough to challenge Piastri for the lead. Behind them, Verstappen was similarly unable to make his way past Leclerc.

Star of the race for me, and the viewers who voted him driver of the day, was Hamilton. Starting from the very back of the queue in the pitlane, Hamilton’s Ferrari was set up for wet weather, and yet again we saw the skills that have won him more F1 races than any other driver in history. Have you ever seen someone overtake at Stavelot? I might have, but only in Gran Turismo 7.

A key to Hamilton’s success was pitting for slick tires at the right time—lap 11, just ahead of almost everyone else—and the British driver finished in seventh place at the end, behind the low-downforce Williams of Albon.

The 2025 race will not rank high in the pantheon of Belgian Grands Prix in terms of a thrilling race, but if you’re a motorsport fan, you owe it to yourself to make it out there sometime. Did I mention the World Endurance Championship has a six-hour race there in May? The tickets are far cheaper than F1, and you get a lot more access, too.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Posted Tuesday 29 July 2025 at 9:05 am AEST (my time).

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