A team of astronomers from the University of Montreal has discovered a new potentially habitable exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf star L 98-59, 35 light-years from Earth. This discovery means there are now five confirmed planets in this solar system’s “temperate” or “habitable” zone, the region in a solar system where liquid water could exist on planets’ surfaces.

The newly discovered planet, called “L 98-59 f,” managed to evade previous observations because it doesn’t pass between Earth and its star when orbiting, known as “transiting.” Planets that transit their host stars are easier to spot, because the mini-eclipses they create when passing across the face of their star can be seen by telescopes.

The research announcing the planet’s discovery—which is awaiting publication in The Astronomical Journal—located the planet through subtle variations in its host star’s motion. Planets orbiting stars exert a gravitational pull on their host as they orbit, slightly moving their star’s position. These movements can reveal the presence of planets even when they cannot be seen.

The revealing movements of L 98-59 were picked up by two instruments specifically designed for planet hunting: the high-precision HARPS spectrograph, installed on the European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope, and the ESPRESSO rocky exoplanet spectrograph, which is part of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

L 98-59 f stands out from the other planets in its solar system because it receives a similar amount of solar energy to Earth. According to the Montreal researchers, if it has a suitable atmosphere, it could be a temperate planet capable of retaining liquid water on its surface.

As well as allowing for the presence of liquid water, the habitable zone of a solar system is the region where, potentially, planetary conditions could allow for the development of life. Each star has its own habitable zone, determined by its type and the amount of energy it emits.

The L 98-59 star system is gradually gaining attention among astronomy enthusiasts. Each confirmed exoplanet is as intriguing as the rest, and all are in the habitable band. The planet closest to the star is half the mass of Venus but 85 percent the size of Earth. The second is almost 2.5 times more massive than our planet. The third may be 30 percent oceanic. Little is known about the fourth, except that it is also a “super-Earth”—a term used to describe planets larger than our own but smaller than the ice giants of our solar system.

For now, there isn’t an image of L 98-59 f. The next step will be to employ the advanced technology of the James Webb Space Telescope to try to capture a direct image of it.

“These results confirm L 98-59 as one of the most compelling nearby systems for exploring the diversity of rocky planets, and, eventually, searching for signs of life,” says a statement issued by the University of Montreal.

There is only one other known stellar system similar in complexity and number of exoplanets: TRAPPIST-1, which is 39 light-years from Earth. It is an ultracool dwarf star with at least seven rocky exoplanets, three of which are in the habitable region.

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

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Posted Tuesday 29 July 2025 at 9:04 am AEST (my time).

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For two years, Col. Raj Agrawal commanded the US military unit responsible for tracking nearly 50,000 human-made objects whipping through space. In this role, he was keeper of the orbital catalog and led teams tasked with discerning whether other countries' satellites, mainly China and Russia, are peaceful or present a military threat to US forces.

This job is becoming more important as the Space Force prepares for the possibility of orbital warfare.

Ars visited with Agrawal in the final weeks of his two-year tour of duty as commander of Mission Delta 2, a military unit at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Mission Delta 2 collects and fuses data from a network of sensors "to identify, characterize, and exploit opportunities and mitigate vulnerabilities" in orbit, according to a Space Force fact sheet.

This involves operating radars and telescopes, analyzing intelligence information, and "mapping the geocentric space terrain" to "deliver a combat-ready common operational picture" to military commanders. Agrawal's job has long existed in one form or another, but the job description is different today. Instead of just keeping up with where things are in space—a job challenging enough—military officials now wrestle with distinguishing which objects might have a nefarious purpose.

From teacher to commander

Agrawal's time at Mission Delta 2 ended on July 3. His next assignment will be as Space Force chair at the National Defense University. This marks a return to education for Agrawal, who served as a Texas schoolteacher for eight years before receiving his commission as an Air Force officer in 2001.

"Teaching is, I think, at the heart of everything I do," Agrawal said. 

He taught music and math at Trimble Technical High School, an inner city vocational school in Fort Worth. "Most of my students were in broken homes and unfortunate circumstances," Agrawal said. "I went to church with those kids and those families, and a lot of times, I was the one bringing them home and taking them to school. What was [satisfying] about that was a lot of those students ended up living very fulfilling lives."

Agrawal felt a calling for higher service and signed up to join the Air Force. Given his background in music, he initially auditioned for and was accepted into the Air Force Band. But someone urged him to apply for Officer Candidate School, and Agrawal got in. "I ended up on a very different path."

Agrawal was initially accepted into the ICBM career field, but that changed after the September 11 attacks. "That was a time with anyone with a name like mine had a hard time," he said. "It took a little bit of time to get my security clearance."

Instead, the Air Force assigned him to work in space operations. Agrawal quickly became an instructor in space situational awareness, did a tour at the National Reconnaissance Office, then found himself working at the Pentagon in 2019 as the Defense Department prepared to set up the Space Force as a new military service. Agrawal was tasked with leading a team of 100 people to draft the first Space Force budget.

Then, he received the call to report to Peterson Space Force Base to take command of what is now Mission Delta 2, the inheritor of decades of Air Force experience cataloging everything in orbit down to the size of a softball. The catalog was stable and predictable, lingering below 10,000 trackable objects until 2007. That's when China tested an anti-satellite missile, shattering an old Chinese spacecraft into more than 3,500 pieces large enough to be routinely detected by the US military's Space Surveillance Network.

Two years later, an Iridium communications satellite collided with a defunct Russian spacecraft, adding thousands more debris fragments to low-Earth orbit. A rapid uptick in the pace of launches since then has added to the problem, further congesting busy orbital traffic lanes a hundred miles above the Earth. Today, the orbital catalog numbers roughly 48,000 objects.

"This compiled data, known as the space catalog, is distributed across the military, intelligence community, commercial space entities, and to the public, free of charge," officials wrote in a fact sheet describing Mission Delta 2's role at Space Operations Command. Deltas are Space Force military units roughly equivalent to a wing or group command in the Air Force.

The room where it happens

The good news is that the US military is getting better at tracking things in space. A network of modern radars and telescopes on the ground and in space can now spot objects as small as a golf ball. Space is big, but these objects routinely pass close to one another. At speeds of nearly 5 miles per second, an impact will be catastrophic.

But there's a new problem. Today, the US military must not only screen for accidental collisions but also guard against an attack on US satellites in orbit. Space is militarized, a fact illustrated by growing fleets of satellites—primarily American, Chinese, and Russian—capable of approaching another country's assets in orbit, and in some cases, disable or destroy them. This has raised fears at the Pentagon that an adversary could take out US satellites critical for missile warning, navigation, and communications, with severe consequences impacting military operations and daily civilian life.

This new reality compelled the creation of the Space Force in 2019, beginning a yearslong process of migrating existing Air Force units into the new service. Now, the Pentagon is posturing for orbital warfare by investing in new technologies and reorganizing the military's command structure.

Today, the Space Force is responsible for predicting when objects in orbit will come close to one another. This is called a conjunction in the parlance of orbital mechanics. The US military routinely issues conjunction warnings to commercial and foreign satellite operators to give them an opportunity to move their satellites out of harm's way. These notices also go to NASA if there's a chance of a close call with the International Space Station (ISS).

The first Trump administration approved a new policy to transfer responsibility for these collision warnings to the Department of Commerce, allowing the military to focus on national security objectives.

But the White House's budget request for next year would cancel the Commerce Department's initiative to take over collision warnings. Our discussion with Agrawal occurred before the details of the White House budget were made public last month, and his comments reflect official Space Force policy at the time of the interview. "In uniform, we align to policy," Agrawal wrote on his LinkedIn account. "We inform policy decisions, but once they’re made, we align our support accordingly."

Since our interview, analysts have also noticed an uptick in interesting Russian activity in space and tracked a suspected Chinese satellite refueling mission in geosynchronous orbit.

Let's rewind the tape to 2007, the time of China's game-changing anti-satellite test. Gen. Chance Saltzman, today the Space Force's Chief of Space Operations, was a lieutenant colonel in command of the Air Force's 614th Space Operations Squadron at the time. He was on duty when Air Force operators first realized China had tested an anti-satellite missile. Saltzman has called the moment a "pivot point" in space operations. "For those of us that are neck-deep in the business, we did have to think differently from that day on," Saltzman said in 2023.

Agrawal was in the room, too. "I was on the crew that needed to count the pieces," he told Ars. "I didn’t know the significance of what was happening until after many years, but the Chinese had clearly changed the nature of the space environment."

The 2007 anti-satellite test also clearly changed the trajectory of Agrawal's career. We present part of our discussion with Agrawal below, and we'll share the rest of the conversation tomorrow. The text has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: The Space Force's role in monitoring activities in space has changed a lot in the last few years. Can you tell me about these changes, and what's the difference between what you used to call Space Situational Awareness, and what is now called Space Domain Awareness?

Agrawal: We just finished our fifth year as a Space Force, so as a result of standing up a military service focused on space, we shifted our activities to focus on what the joint force requires for combat space power. We've been doing space operations for going on seven decades. I think a lot of folks think that it was a rebranding, as opposed to a different focus for space operations, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Compared to Space Domain Awareness (SDA), Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is kind of the knowledge we produce with all these sensors, and anybody can do space situational awareness. You have academia doing that. You've got commercial, international partners, and so on. But Space Domain Awareness, Gen. [John "Jay"] Raymond coined the term a couple years before we stood up the Space Force, and he was trying to get after, how do we create a domain focused on operational outcomes? That's all we could say at the time. We couldn't say war-fighting domain at the time because of the way of our policy, but our policy shifted to being able to talk about space as a place where, not that we want to wage war, but that we can achieve objectives, and do that with military objectives in mind.

We used to talk about detect, characterize, attribute, predict. And then Gen. [Chance] Saltzman added target onto the construct for Space Domain Awareness, so that we're very much in the conversation of what it means to do a space-enabled attack and being able to achieve objectives in, from, and to space, and using Space Domain Awareness as a vehicle to do those things. So, with Mission Delta 2, what he did is he took the sustainment part of acquisition, software development, cyber defense, intelligence related to Space Domain Awareness, and then all the things that we were doing in Space Domain Awareness already, put all that together under one command ... and called us Mission Delta 2. So, the 18th Space Defense Squadron ... that used to kind of be the center of the world for Space Domain Awareness, maybe the only unit that you could say was really doing SDA, where everyone else was kind of doing SSA. When I came into command a couple years ago, and we face now a real threat to having space superiority in the space domain, I disaggregated what we were doing just in the 18th and spread out through a couple of other units ... So, that way everyone's got kind of majors and minors, but we can quickly move a mission in case we get tested in terms of cyber defense or other kinds of vulnerabilities.

We can't see the space domain, so it's not like the air domain and sea domain and land domain, where you can kind of see where everything is, and you might have radars, but ultimately it's a human that's verifying whether or not a target or a threat is where it is. For the space domain, we’re doing all that through radars, telescopes, and computers, so the reality we create for everyone is essentially their reality. So, if there's a gap, if there's a delay, if there are some signs that we can't see, that reality is what is created by us, and that is effectively the reality for everyone else, even if there is some other version of reality in space. So, we're getting better and better at fielding capability to see the complexity, the number of objects, and then translating that into what's useful for us—because we don't need to see everything all the time—but what's useful for us for military operations to achieve military objectives, and so we've shifted our focus just to that.

We're trying to get to where commercial spaceflight safety is managed by the Office of Space Commerce, so they're training side by side with us to kind of offload that mission and take that on. We're doing up to a million notifications a day for conjunction assessments, sometimes as low as 600,000. But last year, we did 263 million conjunction notifications. So, we want to get to where the authorities are rightly lined, where civil or commercial notifications are done by an organization that's not focused on joint war-fighting, and we focus on the things that we want to focus on.

Ars: Thank you for that overview. It helps me see the canvas for everything else we're going to talk about. So, today, you’re not only tracking new satellites coming over the horizon from a recent launch or watching out for possible collisions, you’re now trying to see where things are going in space and maybe even try to determine intent, right?

Agrawal: Yeah, so the integrated mission delta has helped us have intel analysts and professionals as part of our formation. Their mission is SDA as much as ours is, but they're using an intel lens. They're looking at predictive intelligence, right? I don't want to give away tradecraft, but what they're focused on is not necessarily where a thing is. It used to be that all we cared about was position and vector, right? As long as you knew an object’s position and the direction they were going, you knew their orbit. You had predictive understanding of what their element set would be, and you only had to do sampling to get a sense of ... Is it kind of where we thought it was going to be? ... If it was far enough off of its element set, then we would put more energy, more sampling of that particular object, and then effectively re-catalog it.

Now, it's a different model. We're looking at state vectors, and we're looking at anticipatory modeling, where we have some 2,000 or 2,200 objects that I call the "red order of battle"—that are high-interest objects that we anticipate will do things that are not predicted, that are not element set in nature, but that will follow some type of national interest. So, our intel apparatus gets after what things could potentially be a risk, and what things to continue to understand better, and what things we have to be ready to hold at risk. All of that's happening through all the organizations, certainly within this delta, but in partnership and in support of other capabilities and deltas that are getting after their parts of space superiority.

Hostile or friendly?

Ars: Can you give some examples of these red order of battle objects?

Agrawal: I think you know about Shijian-20 (a "tech demo" satellite that has evaded inspection by US satellites) and Shijian-24C (which the Space Force says demonstrated "dogfighting" in space), things that are advertised as scientific in nature, but clearly demonstrate capability that is not friendly, and certainly are behaving in ways that are unprofessional. In any other domain, we would consider them hostile, but in space, we try to be a lot more nuanced in terms of how we characterize behavior, but still, when something's behaving in a way that isn't pre-planned, isn't pre-coordinated, and potentially causes hazard, harm, or contest with friendly forces, we now get in a situation where we have to talk about is that behavior hostile or not? Is that escalatory or not? Space Command is charged with those authorities, so they work through the legal apparatus in terms of what the definition of a hostile act is and when something behaves in a way that we consider to be of national security interest.

We present all the capability to be able to do all that, and we have to be as cognizant on the service side as the combatant commanders are, so that our intel analysts are informing the forces and the training resources to be able to anticipate the behavior. We're not simply recognizing it when it happens, but studying nations in the way they behave in all the other domains, in the way that they set policy, in the way that they challenge norms in other international arenas like the UN and various treaties, and so on. The biggest predictor, for us, of hazardous behaviors is when nations don't coordinate with the international community on activities that are going to occur—launches, maneuvers, and fielding of large constellations, megaconstellations.

As you know, we work very closely with Starlink, and they're very, very responsible. They coordinate and flight plan. They use the kind of things that other constellations are starting to use ... changes in those elsets (element sets), for lack of a better term, state vectors, we're on top of that. We're pre-coordinating that. We’re doing that weeks or months in advance. We're doing that in real-time in cooperation with these organizations to make sure that space remains safe, secure, accessible, profitable even, for industry. When you have nations, where they're launching over their population, where they're creating uncertainty for the rest of the world, there's nothing else we can do with it other than treat that as potentially hostile behavior. So, it does take a lot more of our resources, a lot more of our interest, and it puts [us] in a situation where we're posturing the whole joint force to have to deal with that kind of uncertainty, as opposed to cooperative launches with international partners, with allies, with commercial, civil, and academia, where we're doing that as friends, and we're doing that in cooperation. If something goes wrong, we're handling that as friends, and we're not having to involve the rest of the security apparatus to get after that problem.

Ars: You mentioned that SpaceX shares Starlink orbit information with your team. Is it the same story with Amazon for the Kuiper constellation?

Agrawal: Yeah, it is. The good thing is that all the US and allied commercial entities, so far, have been super cooperative with Mission Delta 2 in particular, to be able to plan out, to talk about challenges, to even change the way they do business, learning more about what we are asking of them in order to be safe. The Office of Space Commerce, obviously, is now in that conversation as well. They're learning that trade and ideally taking on more of that responsibility. Certainly, the evolution of technology has helped quite a bit, where you have launches that are self-monitored, that are able to maintain their own safety, as opposed to requiring an entire apparatus of what was the US Air Force often having to expend a tremendous amount of resources to provide for the safety of any launch. Now, technology has gotten to a point where a lot of that is self-monitored, self-reported, and you'll see commercial entities blow up their own rockets no matter what's onboard if they see that it's going to cause harm to a population, and so on. So, yeah, we’re getting a lot of cooperation from other nations, allies, partners, close friends that are also sharing and cooperating in the interest of making sure that space remains sustainable and secure.

“We’ve made ourselves responsible”

Ars: One of the great ironies is that after you figure out the positions and tracks of Chinese or Russian satellites or constellations, you’re giving that data right back to them in the form of conjunction and collision notices, right?

Agrawal: We’ve made ourselves responsible. I don't know that there's any organization holding us accountable to that. We believe it's in our interests, in the US's interests, to provide for a safe, accessible, secure space domain. So, whatever we can do to help other nations also be safe, we're doing it certainly for their sake, but we're doing it as much for our sake, too. We want the space domain to be safe and predictable. We do have an apparatus set up in partnership with the State Department, and with a tremendous amount of oversight from the State Department, and through US Space Command to provide for spaceflight safety notifications to China and Russia. We send notes directly to offices within those nations. Most of the time they don't respond. Russia, I don't recall, hasn't responded at all in the past couple of years. China has responded a couple of times to those notifications. And we hope that, through small measures like that, we can demonstrate our commitment to getting to a predictable and safe space environment.

Ars: What does China say in response to these notices?

Agrawal: Most of the time it's copy or acknowledged. I can only recall two instances where they've responded. But we did see some hope earlier this year and last year, where they wanted to open up technical exchanges with us and some of their [experts] to talk about spaceflight safety, and what measures they could take to open up those kinds of conversations, and what they could do to get a more secure, safer pace of operations. That, at some point, got delayed because of the holiday that they were going through, and then those conversations just halted, or at least progress on getting those conversations going halted. But we hope that there'll be an opportunity again in the future where they will open up those doors again and have those kinds of conversations because, again, transparency will get us to a place where we can be predictable, and we can all benefit from orbital regimes, as opposed to using them exploitively. LEO is just one of those places where you're not going to hide activity there, so you just are creating risk, uncertainty, and potential escalation by launching into LEO and not communicating throughout that whole process.

Ars: Do you have any numbers on how many of these conjunction notices go to China and Russia? I’m just trying to get an idea of what proportion go to potential adversaries.

Agrawal: A lot. I don't know the degree of how many thousands go to them, but on a regular basis, I'm dealing with debris notifications from Russian and Chinese ASAT (anti-satellite) testing. That has put the ISS at risk a number of times. We've had maneuvers occur in recent history as a result of Chinese rocket body debris. Debris can’t maneuver, and unfortunately, we've gotten into situations with particularly those two nations that talk about wanting to have safer operations, but continue to conduct debris-causing tests. We're going to be dealing with that for generations, and we are going to have to design capability to maneuver around those debris clouds as just a function of operating in space. So, we’ve got to get to a point where we’re not doing that kind of testing in orbit.

Ars: Would it be accurate to say you send these notices to China and Russia daily?

Agrawal: Yeah, absolutely. That’s accurate. These debris clouds are in LEO, so as you can imagine, as those debris clouds go around the Earth every 90 minutes, we're dealing with conjunctions. There are some parts of orbits that are just unusable as a result of that unsafe ASAT test.

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Posted Tuesday 29 July 2025 at 9:01 am AEST (my time).

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Astronomers studying the early universe have found a surprisingly modern-looking galaxy that was forming stars at an extreme pace over 11 billion years ago when the universe was just 2.6 billion years old. The galaxy, called J0107a, isn’t just massive, it’s about 10 times bigger than the Milky Way, and is creating new stars nearly 300 times faster. What’s unusual is that this galaxy shows no signs of colliding with another galaxy, which is normally how such intense star-forming activity is triggered.

Instead, researchers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found that J0107a has a structure similar to disk galaxies we see today, with a clear barred spiral shape. This “bar” is a straight feature made of stars and gas cutting across the galaxy’s center, and it plays a major role in pushing gas inward. That inflow is a key driver of star formation, and possibly also feeds the central supermassive black hole.

Bars like this are common in local galaxies, around half of them have one, and they’re thought to be long-lasting. But they’ve rarely been spotted this far back in time because distant galaxies are hard to study in detail. In this case, scientists used ALMA (a powerful radio telescope array in Chile) to study how gas moves through the galaxy by observing emissions from carbon monoxide and atomic carbon.

Their data showed that the gas inside J0107a’s bar moves and spreads in a way very similar to bars found in nearby galaxies. But one major difference is in the amount of gas. In modern galaxies, the bar holds less than 10% of the galaxy’s total mass in gas. In J0107a, it’s about 50%, and this heavy load of material seems to be fueling an intense flow of gas toward the center—about 600 solar masses every year. That’s what’s powering the huge burst of star formation.

The bar also creates strong non-circular motions that overpower the normal spinning of the galaxy’s disk. This isn’t something older galaxy models predicted. The gas flow stretches across about 20,000 light-years, roughly the distance from the center of the Milky Way to Earth.

According to Shuo Huang, the lead researcher, “The substantial amount of gas required for the growth of giant galaxies is supplied by galactic mergers or inflows from the cosmic web. While no sign of a galactic merger exists, a large gas disk has been detected around J0107a... Based on this, we assume it was created from a large amount of gas flow (called cold streams) spiraling toward the galaxy from the cosmic web.”

This finding changes how scientists think massive galaxies evolved in the early universe. Instead of forming only through violent collisions, it looks like smooth, large-scale gas flows from space itself can build disk-shaped galaxies and trigger bar formation. These bars then stir up the galaxy and push gas into the center, igniting rapid star birth. And that was already happening 11 billion years ago.

Source: ALMA, Nature

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

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Posted Monday 28 July 2025 at 12:34 pm AEST (my time).

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Next month marks the 20th anniversary of one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history: Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm that made landfall on August 29, 2005. The storm itself was bad enough, but the resulting surge of water caused havoc for New Orleans in particular when the city's protective levees failed, flooding much of New Orleans and killing 1,392 people. National Geographic is marking the occasion with a new documentary series: Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time.

The five-part documentary is directed by Oscar nominee Traci A. Curry (Attica) and co-produced by Ryan Coogler's Proximity Media, in conjunction with Lightbox. The intent was to go beyond the headlines of yesteryear and re-examine the many systemic failures that occurred while also revealing "stories of survival, heroism, and resilience," Proximity's executive producers said in a statement. "It's a vital historical record and a call to witness, remember and recon with the truth of Hurricane Katrina's legacy."

Race Against Time doesn't just rehash the well-worn narrative of the disaster; it centers the voices of the people who were there on the ground: residents, first responders, officials, and so forth. Among those interviewed for the documentary is geologist/marine scientist Ivor Van Heerden, author of The Storm: What Went Wrong and why During Hurricane Katrina: the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist (2006).

Around 1998, Van Heerden set up Louisiana State University's (LSU) fledgling Hurricane Center with his colleague Marc Levitan, developing the first computer modeling efforts for local storm surges. They had a supercomputer for the modeling, LiDAR data for accurate digital elevation models, and since there was no way to share data among the five major parishes, they created a networked geographical information system GIS) to link them. Part of Van Heerden's job involved driving all over New Orleans to inspect the levees, and he didn't like what he saw: levees with big bows, sinking under their own weight, for example, and others with large cracks.

Van Heerden also participated in the 2004 Hurricane Pam mock scenario, designed as a test run for hurricane planning for the 13 parishes of southeastern Louisiana, including New Orleans. It was essentially a worst-case scenario for the conditions of Hurricane Betsy, assuming  that the whole city would be flooded. "We really had hoped that the exercise would wake everybody up but quite honesty we were laughed at a few times during the exercise," Van Heerden told Ars. He recalled telling one woman from FEMA that they should be thinking about using tents to house evacuees: "She said, 'Americans don't live in tents.'"

Stormy weather

Mayor Ray Nagin orders a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.

ABC News Videosource

 

The empty streets of downtown New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina makes landfall.

ABC News Videosource

 

Computer generated image shows the Bowl Effect in New Orleans.

National Geographic

 

Aerial view of a broken levee after Hurricane Katrina.

Pond5

 

Crowds of stranded New Orleans residents gather at the Superdome.

PONDS

 

A helicopter carrying a rescued New Orleans resident takes flight during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

FOX Archives/FOX News Channel

 

The tens of thousands of stranded New Orleans residents in the devastating aftermath of Katrina could have used those tents. Van Heerden still vividly recalls his frustration over the catastrophic failures that occurred on so many levels. "We knew the levees had failed, we knew that there had been catastrophic structural failure, but nobody wanted to hear it initially," he said. He and his team were out in the field in the immediate aftermath, measuring water levels and sampling the water for pathogens and toxic chemicals. Naturally they came across people in need of rescue and were able to radio locations to the Louisiana State University police.

"An FBI agent told me, 'If you find any bodies, tie them with a piece of string to something so they don't float away and give us the lats and logs,'" Van Heerden recalled. The memories haunt him still. Some of the bodies were drowned children, which he found particularly devastating since he had a young daughter of his own at the time.

How did it all go so wrong? After 1965's Hurricane Betsy flooded most of New Orleans, the federal government started a levee building program with the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in charge. "Right at the beginning, the Corps used very old science in terms of determining how high to make the levees," said Van Heerden. "They had access to other very good data, but they chose not to use it for some reason. So they made the levees way too low."

"They also ignored some of their own geotechnical science when designing the levees," he continued. "Some were built in sand with very shallow footings, so the water just went underneath and blew out the levee. Some were built on piles of earth, again with very shallow footings, and they just fell over. The 17th Street Canal, the whole levee structure actually slid 200 feet."

There had also been significant alterations to the local landscape since Hurricane Betsy. In the past, the wetlands, especially the cypress tree swamps, provided some protection from storm surges. In 1992, for example, the Category 5 Hurricane Andrew made landfall on Atchafalaya Delta, where healthy wetlands reduced its energy by 50 percent between the coast and Morgan City, per Van Heerden. But other wetlands in the region changed drastically with the dredging of a canal called the Mississippi Gulf Outlet, running from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico.

"It was an open conduit for surge to get into New Orleans," said Van Heerden. "The saltwater got into the wetlands and destroyed it, especially the cypress trees. This canal had opened up, in some places, to five times its width, allowing waves to build on the surface. The earthen levees weren't armored in any way, so they just collapsed. They blew apart. That's why parts of St. Bernard saw a wave of water ten feet high."

Just trying to survive

Stranded New Orleans residents gather in a shelter during Hurricane Katrina.

KTVT-TV

 

Military personnel attend to an injured person on a cot in the Superdome.

Ed Bush

 

National Guard distributes water to New Orleans residents.

CNN

 

New Orleans resident Kevin Goodman holds his two baby nieces while seeking help from reporters in the face of dire conditions at the Convention Center.

ABC News

 

Lt. General Russell Honore outside the crowded Convention Center.

CNN

 

Stranded New Orleans residents gather underneath the interstate.

KTVT-TV

 

New Orleans residents walk down the interstate trying to find refuge.

Global Imageworks, LLC

 

Add in drastic cuts to FEMA under then-President George W. Bush—who inherited "a very functional, very well-organized" version of the department from his predecessor, Bill Clinton, per Van Heerden—and the stage was set for just such a disaster like Katrina's harrowing aftermath. It didn't help that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin delayed issuing a mandatory evacuation order until some 24 hours before the storm hit, making it much more difficult for residents to follow those orders in a timely fashion.

There were also delays in conveying the vital information that the levees had failed. "We now know that the USACE had a guy in a Coast Guard helicopter who actually witnessed the London Avenue Canal failure, at 9:06 AM on Day One," said Van Heerden. "That guy went to Baton Rouge and he didn't tell a soul other than the Corps. So the Corps knew very early what was gong on and they did nothing about it. They had a big megaphone and millions of dollars in public relations and kept saying it was an act of God. It took until the third week of September for us to finally get the media to realize that this was a catastrophic failure of the levees."

The USACE has never officially apologized for what happened, per Van Heerden. "Not one of them lost their job after Katrina," he said. But LSU fired Van Heerden in 2009, sparking protest from faculty and students. The university gave no reason for his termination, but it was widely speculated at the time that Van Heerden's outspoken criticism of the USACE was a factor, with LSU fearing it might jeopardize funding. Van Heerden sued and the university settled. But he hasn't worked in academia since, and now consults with various nonprofit organizations on flooding and storm surge impacts.

The widespread reports of looting and civil war further exacerbated the situation as survivors swarmed the Superdome and the nearby convention center. The city had planned for food and water for 12,000 people housed at Superdome for 48 hours. The failure of the levees swelled that number to 30,000 people stranded for several days, waiting in vain for the promised cavalry to arrive.

Van Heerden acknowledges the looting but insists most of that was simply due to people trying to survive in the absence of any other aid. "How did they get water on the interstate?" said Van Heerden. "They went to a water company, broke in and hot-wired a truck, then went around gave water to everyone."

As for the widespread belief outside the city that there was unchecked violence and a brewing civil war, "That doesn't happen in a catastrophe," he said. The rumors were driven by reports of shots being fired but, "There are a lot of hunters in Louisiana and the hunter's SOS is to fire three shots in rapid succession," he said. "One way to say 'I'm here!' is to fire a gun. But everybody bought into that civil war nonsense."

"Another ticking time bomb"

LSU Hurricane Center co-founder Ivor Van Heerden working at his desk in 2005.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

 

Van Heerden today.

 

Eric A. Wright discussing the new levee system in New Orleans.

Lightbox Entertainment/Daniel Waghorne

 

Press conference on the master plan to rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina

KXAS-NBC 5 Collection/UNT Libraries Special Collection

 

The 17th Street Canal in New Orleans.

Lightbox Entertainment/Daniel Waghorne

 

Sankofa Wetland Park and Nature Trail in the Lower 9th ward aims to protect the ward from future hurricanes and flooding.

Lightbox Entertainment/Daniel Waghorne

 

The levees have since been rebuilt and Van Heerden acknowledges that some of the repairs are robust. 'They used more concrete, they put in protection pads and deeper footings," he said. "But they didn't take into account—and they admitted this a few years ago—subsidence in Louisiana, which is two to two-and-a-half feet every century. And they didn't take into account global climate change and the associated rising sea levels. Within the next 70 years, sea level in Louisiana is going to rise four feet over millions of square miles. If you've got a levee with a [protective] marsh in front of it, before too long that marsh is no longer going to exist, so the water is going to move further and further in-shore."

Then there's the fact that that hurricanes these days are now bigger in diameter than they were 30 years thanks to the extra heat. "They get up to a Category 5 a lot quicker," said Van Heerden. "The frequency also seems to be creeping up. It's now four times as likely you will experience hurricane force winds." Van Heerden has run storm surge models assuming a three-foot rise in sea level. "What we saw was the levees wouldn't be high enough in New Orleans," he said. "I hate to say it, but it looks like another ticking time bomb. Science is a quest for the truth. You ignore the science at your folly."

Assuming there was sufficient public and political will, how should the US be preparing for future tropical storms? "In many areas we need to retreat," said Van Heerden. "We need to get the houses and buildings out and rebuild the natural vegetation, rebuild the wetlands. On the Gulf Coast, sea level is really going to rise and we need to rethink our infrastructure. This belief that, 'Oh, we're going to put up a big wall'—in the long run it's not going to work. The devastation from tropical storms is going to spread further inland through very rapid downpours and that's something we're going to have to plan mitigations for. But I just don't see any movement in that direction."

Perhaps documentaries like Race Against Time can help turn the tide; Van Heerden certainly hopes so. He also hopes the documentary can correct several public misconceptions of what happened—particularly the tendency to blame the New Orleans residents trying to survive in appalling conditions, rather than the government that failed them.

"I think this is a very good documentary in showing the plight of the people and what they suffered, which was absolutely horrendous," said Van Heerden. "I hope people watching will realize that yes, this is a piece of our history, but sometimes the past is the key to the present. And ask themselves, 'Is this a foretaste of what's to come?'"

Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premieres on July 27, 2025, on National Geographic. It will be available for streaming starting July 28, 2025, on Disney+ and Hulu.

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For decades we’ve been trying to make the robots smarter and more physically capable by mimicking biological intelligence and movement. “But in doing so, we’ve been just replicating the results of biological evolution—I say we need to replicate its methods,” argues Philippe Wyder, a developmental robotics researcher at Columbia University. Wyder led a team that demonstrated a machine with a rudimentary form of what they’re calling a metabolism.

He and his colleagues built a robot that could consume other robots to physically grow, become stronger, more capable, and continue functioning.

Nature’s methods

The idea of robotic metabolism combines various concepts in AI and robotics. The first is artificial life, which Wyder termed “a field where people study the evolution of organisms through computer simulations.” Then there is the idea of modular robots: reconfigurable machines that can change their architecture by rearranging collections of basic modules. That was pioneered in the US by Daniela Rus or Mark Yim at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s.

Finally, there is the idea that we need a shift from a goal-oriented design we’ve been traditionally implementing in our machines to a survivability-oriented design found in living organisms, which Magnus Egerstedt proposed in his book Robot Ecology.

Wyder’s team took all these ideas, merged them, and prototyped a robot that could “eat” other robots. “I kind of came at this from many different angles,” Wyder says.

The key source of inspiration, though, was the way nature builds its organisms. There are 20 standard amino acids universally used by life that can be combined into trillions of proteins, forming the building blocks of countless life forms. Wyder started his project by designing a basic robotic module that was intended to play a role roughly equivalent to a single amino acid. This module, called a Truss Link, looked like a rod, being 16 centimeters long and containing batteries, electronic controllers, and servomotors than enabled them to expand, contract, and crawl in a straight line. They had permanent magnets at each end, which let them connect to other rods and form lightweight lattices.

Wyder’s idea was to throw a number of these modules in a confined space to see if they would assemble into more complex structures by bumping into each other. The process might be analogous to how amino acids spontaneously formed simple organic molecules roughly 4 billion years ago.

Robotic growth

The first stage of Wyder’s experiment was set up in a space with a few terrain features, like a drop, a few obstacles, and a standing cylinder. The robots were operated by the team, which directed them to form various structures. Three Truss Links connected with the magnets at one center point formed a three-pointed star. Other structures they formed included a triangle, a diamond with a tail that was a triangle connected with a three-pointed star, or a tetrahedron, and a 3D structure that looked like a triangular pyramid. The robots had to find other Truss Links and make them part of their bodies to grow into more complex forms.

As they were growing, they were also becoming more capable. A single Truss Link could only move in a straight line, a triangle could turn left and right, a diamond with a tail could traverse small bumps, while a tetrahedron could move itself over small walls. Finally, a tetrahedron with a ratchet—an additional Truss Link the robot could use a bit like a walking stick—could assist other robots in forming tetrahedrons, which was a difficult, risky maneuver that took multiple attempts even for the skilled operators.

Still, all this growth in size and capability was orchestrated by the researchers controlling the hardware. The question was whether these self-assembly processes could work with no human overlords around.

“We wanted to know if the Truss Links would meet on their own,” Wyder says. “If the Truss Links are exactly parallel, they will never connect. But being parallel is just one configuration, and there are infinite configurations where they are not parallel.” To check how this would play out, the team used computer simulations of six randomly spawned and randomly moving Truss Links in a walled environment. In 2,000 runs, each 20 minutes long, the modules ended up with a 64 percent chance of forming two three-pointed star shapes; a roughly 8.4 percent of assembling into two triangles, and nearly 45 percent of ending up as a diamond with a tail. (Some of these configurations were intermediates on the pathway to others, so the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.)

When moving randomly, Truss Links could also repair structures after their magnets got disconnected and even replace a malfunctioning Truss Link in the structure with a new one. But did they really metabolize anything?

Searching for purpose

The name “metabolism” comes from the Greek word “metabolē” which means “change.” Wyder’s robots can assemble, grow, reconfigure, rebuild, and, to a limited extent, sustain themselves, which definitely qualifies as change.

But metabolism, as it’s commonly understood, involves consuming materials in ways that extract energy and transform their chemicals. The Truss Links are limited to using prefabricated, compatible modules—they can’t consume some plastic and old lithium-ion batteries and metabolize them into brand-new Truss Links. Whether this qualifies as metabolism depends more on how far we want to stretch the definition than on what the actual robots can do.

And stretching definitions, so far, may be their strongest use case. “I can’t give you a real-world use case,” Wyder acknowledges. “We tried to make the truss robots carry loads from one point to another, but it’s not even included in our paper—it’s a research platform at this point.” The first thing he thinks the robotic metabolism platform is missing is a wider variety of modules. The team used homogeneous modules in this work but is already thinking about branching out. “Life uses around 20 different amino acids to work, so we’re currently focusing on integrating additional modules with various sensors,” Wyder explains. But the robots  are also lacking something way more fundamental: a purpose.

Life evolves to improve the chances of survival. It does so in response to pressures like predators or a challenging environment. A living thing is usually doing its best to avoid dying.

Egerstedt in “Robot Ecology“ argues we should build and program robots the same way with “survivability constraints” in mind. Wyder, in his paper, also claims we need to develop a “self-sustained robot ecology” in the future. But he also thinks we shouldn’t take this life analogy too far. His goal is not creating a robotic ecosystem where robots would hunt and feed on other robots, constantly improving their own designs.

“We would give robots a purpose. Let’s say a purpose is to build a lunar colony,” Wyder says. Survival should be the first objective, because if the platform doesn’t survive on the Moon, it won’t build a lunar colony. Multiple small units would first disperse to explore the area and then assemble into a bigger structure like a building or a crane. “And this large structure would absorb, recycle, or eat, if you will, all these smaller robots to integrate and make use of them,” Wyder claims.

A robotic platform like this, Wyder thinks, should adapt to unexpected circumstances even better than life itself. “There may be a moment where having a third arm would really save your life, but you can’t grow one. A robot, given enough time, won’t have that problem,” he says.

Science Advances, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adu6897

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Posted Monday 28 July 2025 at 5:27 am AEST (my time).

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open for over three centuries. The proof didn’t just enthral mathematicians—it made the front page of The New York Times.

But to accomplish it, Wiles (with help from the mathematician Richard Taylor) first had to prove a more subtle intermediate statement—one with implications that extended beyond Fermat’s puzzle.

This intermediate proof involved showing that an important kind of equation called an elliptic curve can always be tied to a completely different mathematical object called a modular form. Wiles and Taylor had essentially unlocked a portal between disparate mathematical realms, revealing that each looks like a distorted mirror image of the other. If mathematicians want to understand something about an elliptic curve, Wiles and Taylor showed, they can move into the world of modular forms, find and study their object’s mirror image, then carry their conclusions back with them.

This connection between worlds, called “modularity,” didn’t just enable Wiles to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. Mathematicians soon used it to make progress on all sorts of previously intractable problems.

Modularity also forms the foundation of the Langlands program, a sweeping set of conjectures aimed at developing a “grand unified theory” of mathematics. If the conjectures are true, then all sorts of equations beyond elliptic curves will be similarly tethered to objects in their mirror realm. Mathematicians will be able to jump between the worlds as they please to answer even more questions.

But proving the correspondence between elliptic curves and modular forms has been incredibly difficult. Many researchers thought that establishing some of these more complicated correspondences would be impossible.

Now, a team of four mathematicians has proved them wrong. In February, the quartet finally succeeded in extending the modularity connection from elliptic curves to more complicated equations called abelian surfaces. The team—Frank Calegari of the University of Chicago, George Boxer and Toby Gee of Imperial College London, and Vincent Pilloni of the French National Center for Scientific Research—proved that every abelian surface belonging to a certain major class can always be associated to a modular form.

“We mostly believe that all the conjectures are true, but it’s so exciting to see it actually realized,” said Ana Caraiani, a mathematician at Imperial College London. “And in a case that you really thought was going to be out of reach.”

It’s just the beginning of a hunt that will take years—mathematicians ultimately want to show modularity for every abelian surface. But the result can already help answer many open questions, just as proving modularity for elliptic curves opened up all sorts of new research directions.

Through the Looking Glass

The elliptic curve is a particularly fundamental type of equation that uses just two variables—x and y. If you graph its solutions, you’ll see what appear to be simple curves. But these solutions are interrelated in rich and complicated ways, and they show up in many of number theory’s most important questions. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, for instance—one of the toughest open problems in math, with a $1 million reward for whoever proves it first—is about the nature of solutions to elliptic curves.

Elliptic curves can be hard to study directly. So sometimes mathematicians prefer to approach them from a different angle.

That’s where modular forms come in. A modular form is a highly symmetric function that appears in an ostensibly separate area of mathematical study called analysis. Because they exhibit so many nice symmetries, modular forms can be easier to work with.

At first, these objects seem as though they shouldn’t be related. But Taylor and Wiles’ proof revealed that every elliptic curve corresponds to a specific modular form. They have certain properties in common—for instance, a set of numbers that describes the solutions to an elliptic curve will also crop up in its associated modular form. Mathematicians can therefore use modular forms to gain new insights into elliptic curves.

But mathematicians think Taylor and Wiles’ modularity theorem is just one instance of a universal fact. There’s a much more general class of objects beyond elliptic curves. And all of these objects should also have a partner in the broader world of symmetric functions like modular forms. This, in essence, is what the Langlands program is all about.

An elliptic curve has only two variables—x and y—so it can be graphed on a flat sheet of paper. But if you add another variable, z, you get a curvy surface that lives in three-dimensional space. This more complicated object is called an abelian surface, and as with elliptic curves, its solutions have an ornate structure that mathematicians want to understand.

It seemed natural that abelian surfaces should correspond to more complicated types of modular forms. But the extra variable makes them much harder to construct and their solutions much harder to find. Proving that they, too, satisfy a modularity theorem seemed completely out of reach. “It was a known problem not to think about, because people have thought about it and got stuck,” Gee said.

But Boxer, Calegari, Gee, and Pilloni wanted to try.

Finding a Bridge

All four mathematicians were involved in research on the Langlands program, and they wanted to prove one of these conjectures for “an object that actually turns up in real life, rather than some weird thing,” Calegari said.

Not only do abelian surfaces show up in real life—the real life of a mathematician, that is—but proving a modularity theorem about them would open new mathematical doors. “There are lots of things you can do if you have this statement that you have no chance of doing otherwise,” Calegari said.

The mathematicians started working together in 2016, hoping to follow the same steps that Taylor and Wiles had in their proof about elliptic curves. But every one of those steps was much more complicated for abelian surfaces.

So they focused on a particular type of abelian surface, called an ordinary abelian surface, that was easier to work with. For any such surface, there’s a set of numbers that describes the structure of its solutions. If they could show that the same set of numbers could also be derived from a modular form, they’d be done. The numbers would serve as a unique tag, allowing them to pair each of their abelian surfaces with a modular form.

The problem was that while these numbers are straightforward to compute for a given abelian surface, mathematicians don’t know how to construct a modular form with the exact same tag. Modular forms are simply too difficult to build when the requirements are so constrained. “The objects you’re looking for, you don’t really know they exist,” Pilloni said.

Instead, the mathematicians showed that it would be enough to construct a modular form whose numbers matched those of the abelian surface in a weaker sense. The modular form’s numbers only had to be equivalent in the realm of what’s known as clock arithmetic.

Imagine a clock: If the hour hand starts at 10 and four hours pass, the clock will point to 2. But clock arithmetic can be done with any number, not just (as in the case of real-world clocks) the number 12.

Boxer, Calegari, Gee, and Pilloni only needed to show that their two sets of numbers matched when they used a clock that goes up to 3. This meant that, for a given abelian surface, the mathematicians had more flexibility when it came to building the associated modular form.

But even this proved too difficult.

Then they stumbled on a trove of modular forms whose corresponding numbers were easy to calculate—so long as they defined their numbers according to a clock that goes up to 2. But the abelian surface needed one that goes up to 3.

The mathematicians had an idea of how to roughly bridge these two different clocks. But they didn’t know how to make the connection airtight so they could find a true match for the abelian surface in the world of modular forms. Then a new piece of mathematics appeared that turned out to be just what they needed.

Lue Pan’s work in a seemingly disparate area of number theory turned out to be essential.

Photograph: Will Crow/ Princeton University

Surprise Help

In 2020, a number theorist named Lue Pan posted a proof about modular forms that didn’t initially seem connected to the quartet’s problem. But they soon recognized that the techniques he’d developed were surprisingly relevant. “I didn’t expect that,” Pan said.

After years of regular meetings, mostly on Zoom, the mathematicians started to make progress adapting Pan’s techniques, but major hurdles remained. Then, in the summer of 2023, Boxer, Gee, and Pilloni saw a conference in Bonn, Germany, as the perfect opportunity to come together. The only problem was that Calegari was supposed to travel to China at the same time to give a talk. But a difficult visit to the Chinese consulate in Chicago made him reconsider. “Eight hours later, my visa was rejected and my car was towed,” he said. He decided to scrap the China talk and join his collaborators in Germany.

Gee secured the team a room in the basement of the Hausdorff Research Institute, where they were unlikely to be disturbed by itinerant mathematicians. There, they spent an entire week working on Pan’s theorem, one 12-hour day after the next, only coming up to ground level occasionally for caffeine. “After a coffee, we would always joke that we had to go back to the mine,” Pilloni said.

The grind paid off. “There were many twists to come later,” Calegari said, “but at the end of that week I thought we more or less had it.”

It took another year and a half to turn Calegari’s conviction into a 230-page proof, which they posted online in February. Putting all the pieces together, they’d proved that any ordinary abelian surface has an associated modular form.

Their new portal could one day be as powerful as Taylor and Wiles’ result, revealing more about abelian surfaces than anyone thought possible. But first, the team will have to extend their result to non-ordinary abelian surfaces. They’ve teamed up with Pan to continue the hunt. “Ten years from now, I’d be surprised if we haven’t found almost all of them,” Gee said.

The work has also allowed mathematicians to formulate new conjectures—such as an analogue of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture that involves abelian surfaces instead of elliptic curves. “Now we at least know that the analogue makes sense” for these ordinary surfaces, said Andrew Sutherland, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Previously we did not know that.”

“Lots of things that I had dreamed we would be able to one day prove are now within reach because of this theorem,” he added. “It changes things.”

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 28 July 2025 at 5:23 am AEST (my time).

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Earth is about 71 percent water. An overwhelming 97 percent of that water is found in the oceans, leaving us with only 3 percent in the form of freshwater—and much of that is frozen in the form of glaciers. That leaves just 0.3 percent of that freshwater on the surface in lakes, swamps, springs, and our main sources of drinking water, rivers and streams.

Despite our planet’s famously blue appearance from space, thirsty aliens would be disappointed. Drinkable water is actually pretty scarce.

As if that doesn’t already sound unsettling, what little water we have is also threatened by climate change, urbanization, pollution, and a global population that continues to expand. Over 2 billion people live in regions where their only source of drinking water is contaminated. Pathogenic microbes in the water can cause cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, polio, and typhoid, which could be fatal in areas without access to vaccines or medical treatment.

Desalination of seawater is a possible solution, and one approach involves porous materials absorbing water that evaporates when heated by solar energy. The problem with most existing solar-powered evaporators is that they are difficult to scale up for larger populations. Performance decreases with size, because less water vapor can escape from materials with tiny pores and thick boundaries—but there is a way to overcome this.

Feeling salty

Researcher Xi Shen of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University wanted to figure out a way to improve these types of systems. He and his team have now created an aerogel that is far more efficient at turning over fresh water than previous methods of desalination.

“The key factors determining the evaporation performance of porous evaporators include heat localization, water transport, and vapor transport,” Shen said in a study recently published in ACS Energy Letters. “Significant advancements have been made in the structural design of evaporators to realize highly efficient thermal localization and water transport.”

Solar radiation is the only energy used to evaporate the water, which is why many attempts have been made to develop what are called photothermal materials. When sunlight hits these types of materials, they absorb light and convert it into heat energy, which can be used to speed up evaporation. Photothermal materials can be made of substances including polymers, metals, alloys, ceramics, or cements. Hydrogels have been used to successfully decontaminate and desalinate water before, but they are polymers designed to retain water, which negatively affects efficiency and stability, as opposed to aerogels, which are made of polymers that hold air. This is why Shen and his team decided to create a photothermal aerogel.

Aerogels are more rigid than hydrogels, so both liquid water and water vapor can be transported through their pores, and the only thing that previously held these materials back was their tendency to perform less efficiently as they were scaled up. Shen wanted an aerogel that would be just as efficient despite its size.

Watch problems evaporate

The spongy aerogel, 3D-printed in layers from a paste that contained carbon nanotubes and cellulose nanofibers, had thin boundaries in between its long, evenly distributed microscopic pores. This was intended to increase vapor output. Each layer was also frozen right after it was printed, so it would be solid when the next layer was printed on top.

The research team tested out the aerogel by submerging it in a cup of seawater with a curved cover made of transparent plastic. When sunlight shone through the plastic, it heated the aerogel in the cup, and water vapor evaporated and condensed on the lid, flowing into a funnel that took it to a separate container. Their system had an output of about 3 tablespoons of drinkable water, but because this aerogel is both durable and allows for scaling up without compromising efficiency, it has the potential to go much further.

"We have tested the performance for up to a week and saw no performance degradation,” Shen told Ars Technica. “While I cannot give you a definitive answer on how regularly the aerogel will need to be replaced, because this work is still in the early stages, we are now planning to do real-world tests to see its long-term performance.”

Shen and his team will continue to upgrade and scale their method. As far as advancements in water purification go, this sounds like a breath of fresh air—or a drink of fresh water.

ACS Energy Letters, 2025.  DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.5c01233

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Tesla has publicly staked its future on its robotaxis. Now the company is planning to launch a public car service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tesla is calling it a “robotaxi” service, but legally, this one will have to use cars with human drivers.

The plan appears to put the electric car maker in murky legal waters in a US state with the country’s most tightly regulated autonomous vehicle industry—and where Tesla is already being sued for misleading language around its driver assistance tech.

On Friday, a spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates ride-hailing and taxi services in the state, said that Tesla informed the agency Thursday that it planned to expand an employee-only taxi service to friends and family of employees and “select” members of the public. Technically, Tesla is legally in the clear to launch this sort of service in California: In March, it obtained a “Transportation Charter Party” permit to take Tesla employees on prearranged trips with a driver behind the wheel. But Tesla is not legally permitted to operate an autonomous-vehicle-based service there.

“Tesla is not allowed to test or transport the public (paid or unpaid) in an [autonomous vehicle] with or without a driver,” CPUC spokesperson Terrie Prosper wrote in an email. “Tesla is allowed to transport the public (paid or unpaid) in a non-autonomous vehicle, which, of course, would have a driver.”

Business Insider first reported that Tesla told employees that it planned to launch a “robotaxi” service in the Bay Area as early as Friday.

On a Wednesday earnings call with investors, Tesla vice president of AI software Ashok Elluswamy said Tesla is “working with the government to get approval” to launch in the Bay Area. “Meanwhile, we will launch the service with a person in the driver's seat just to expedite while we wait for regulatory approval,” he said.

Legally, though, Tesla isn’t currently allowed to launch any kind of service with autonomous vehicles, meaning that “person in the driver’s seat” will have to be a driver. Tesla does not have a permit to pilot autonomous vehicle technology even with a safety driver, Prosper says, “so it cannot use a drivered autonomous vehicle in passenger service.”

Tesla appears to be talking out of both sides of its mouth here. The company appears to insist to regulators that it is simply operating a taxi service in California, while suggesting to shareholders and Wall Street that the new taxi service uses “robotaxis” and is autonomous. The automaker seems to have used the technique before. It is currently in administrative court with the state of California over allegations that Tesla has misled consumers for years by using language such as “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” to sell technology that can’t drive itself, but must be overseen by a human driver at all times.

“Tesla couldn’t have it both ways,” says Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies autonomous vehicle safety. The automaker “is giving California more ammunition for the false advertising lawsuit by insisting that it’s a robotaxi when they’re telling regulators it’s really not.”

Tesla, which disbanded its public relations team in 2021, did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

California Dreamin’

Tesla told the CPUC that its new service would cover the entire Bay Area, from Sausalito and Berkeley down to Los Gatos.

Tesla has permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test driverless vehicles with a driver behind the wheel. But that’s just the first in a multistep process to win state approval to give paid rides in autonomous cars. A spokesperson for the DMV said Friday that while the agency had “recently met with Tesla to discuss the company's plans to test autonomous vehicles in the state,” Tesla had not yet applied for permits to test or deploy without a driver.

If Tesla launches its service in California this month, it would be the carmaker’s second limited taxi market. Tesla began inviting members of the public to ride in a small number of its robotaxis in Austin, Texas, last month. Texas does not have strict regulations around autonomous vehicle testing and deployments, but Tesla launched the service with employees sitting in each car’s passenger seat, to intervene if the tech goes wrong. “We are being super paranoid about safety,” Musk has said.

So far, many riders in Austin appear to be Tesla fans with big presences on X, Musk’s social media site. Riders report being satisfied with their smooth and mostly uneventful rides. But videos captured and posted by riders appear to show the robotaxis making some mistakes: briefly crossing over a double yellow line into oncoming traffic; apparently failing to detect a reversing UPS truck; and getting stranded in the middle of an intersection while making a left turn. In all these cases, the Tesla employee in the front seat appeared to intervene. A spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s federal roadway safety regulator, told WIRED last month that the agency had seen reports of the robotaxis’ mistakes and was investigating.

Musk has cast Tesla’s robotaxi project as key to the company’s future. The company reported this week that auto sales revenue had plunged 13 percent since this time last year. Its newest vehicles, the Cybertruck and a refreshed version of the Model Y have not inspired customers to open their pocketbooks. But Musk has said that investors should no longer think of Tesla as an automotive company, but as a robotics and automation company. He’s said that the company’s new focus could lead to it becoming the most valuable in the world. “A valuation of $20 trillion for Tesla is possible,” he posted on X Friday.

Musk told investors Wednesday that Tesla was working to get regulatory permission to launch its robotaxi in Arizona, Nevada, and Florida. The US does not regulate autonomous vehicle testing and deployment at the federal level; those rules are handled by the states. “I think we will probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half the population of the US by the end of the year,” Musk said.

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Posted Saturday 26 July 2025 at 1:02 pm AEST (my time).

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Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to consider migration as an urgent survival measure.

This island nation in Oceania is made up of nine coral islands and atolls inhabited by just over 11,000 people. The country’s average altitude is just 2 meters above sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to rising oceans, flooding, and storm surges, all exacerbated by the climate crisis.

A study by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team revealed that, in 2023, the sea level in Tuvalu was 15 centimeters higher than the average recorded over the previous three decades. If this trend continues, it’s projected that most of the territory, including its critical infrastructure, will be below the high-tide level by 2050.

In the face of this existential threat, an unprecedented climate visa program has begun. In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union Treaty, an agreement that provides for a migration scheme that will allow 280 Tuvaluans per year to settle in Australia as permanent residents.

The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.

The first stage of applications was open from June 16 to July 18. “We received extremely high levels of interest in the ballot with 8,750 registrations, which includes family members of primary registrants,” the Australian High Commission in Tuvalu said in a statement on July 23. The first cohort of 280 people will be drawn via a ballot on July 25, the high commission says.

“When combined with other Pacific pathways to Australia and New Zealand, nearly 4 percent of the population could migrate each year,” says Jane McAdam, a fellow at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, writing in the Conversation. “Within a decade, close to 40 percent of the population could have moved—although some people may return home or go backwards and forwards.”

Penny Wong, Australia’s foreign minister, said in a statement that the program gives Tuvaluans a chance to settle in Australia “with dignity as climate impacts worsen.” She added that this initiative reflects the deep trust between the two nations and that Tuvaluans are expected to make a valuable contribution to Australian society.

Feleti Teo, prime minister of Tuvalu, called for the support of the international community during his address to the Third UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, in June. “Tuvalu calls for the development of an international treaty on sea level rise to enshrine the legal rights of affected states and people, including the principles of statehood continuity and the permanency of maritime boundaries,” Teo said. The Tuvalu prime minister also said that his country supports the idea of a Fossil Fuels Non-Proliferation Treaty with “the ultimatum of a rapid, fair and irreversible phase out of fossil fuels across all sectors.”

The agreement with Australia is not the only action taken by Tuvalu in the face of the threat of disappearing. In 2022, the country launched an ambitious strategy to become the world’s first digital nation. This initiative includes 3D scanning its islands to digitally re-create them and preserve their cultural heritage, as well as moving government functions to a virtual environment. In order to protect national identity and sovereignty, the project is also contemplating constitutional reforms to define the country as a virtual state, a concept already recognized by 25 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

What is happening to Tuvalu could be experienced by other nations. NASA has found that global sea levels rose more than expected over the last year. Its satellite measurements reveal that the annual rate of increase has doubled since 1993, with a rise of 10 centimeters in that period. Pacific islands are particularly vulnerable to rising seas, although the impacts are not limited to that region. For example, sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico have recently risen at three times the global average, according to a study published in Nature in 2023.

Albert van Dijk, professor at Australian National University, has emphasized that climate change is affecting all the planet’s water systems. “From historic droughts to catastrophic floods, these extreme variations disrupt lives, economies and entire ecosystems. Water is our most vital resource, and its extreme behavior represents one of the greatest threats today.”

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

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Posted Saturday 26 July 2025 at 4:22 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.04 of the Rocket Report! The Pentagon's Golden Dome missile defense shield will be a lot of things. Along with new sensors, command and control systems, and satellites, Golden Dome will require a lot of rockets. The pieces of the Golden Dome architecture operating in orbit will ride to space on commercial launch vehicles. And Golden Dome's space-based interceptors will essentially be designed as flying fuel tanks with rocket engines. This shouldn't be overlooked, and that's why we include a couple of entries discussing Golden Dome in this week's Rocket Report.

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

Space-based interceptors are a real challenge. The newly installed head of the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile defense shield knows the clock is ticking to show President Donald Trump some results before the end of his term in the White House, Ars reports. Gen. Michael Guetlein identified command-and-control and the development of space-based interceptors as two of the most pressing technical challenges for Golden Dome. He believes the command-and-control problem can be "overcome in pretty short order." The space-based interceptor piece of the architecture is a different story.

Proven physics, unproven economics ... "I think the real technical challenge will be building the space-based interceptor," Guetlein said. "That technology exists. I believe we have proven every element of the physics that we can make it work. What we have not proven is, first, can I do it economically, and then second, can I do it at scale? Can I build enough satellites to get after the threat? Can I expand the industrial base fast enough to build those satellites? Do I have enough raw materials, etc.?" Military officials haven't said how many space-based interceptors will be required for Golden Dome, but outside estimates put the number in the thousands.

One big defense prime is posturing for Golden Dome. Northrop Grumman is conducting ground-based testing related to space-based interceptors as part of a competition for that segment of the Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile-defense initiative, The War Zone reports. Kathy Warden, Northrop Grumman’s CEO, highlighted the company’s work on space-based interceptors, as well as broader business opportunities stemming from Golden Dome, during a quarterly earnings call this week. Warden identified Northrop's work in radars, drones, and command-and-control systems as potentially applicable to Golden Dome.

But here's the real news ... "It will also include new innovation, like space-based interceptors, which we’re testing now," Warden continued. "These are ground-based tests today, and we are in competition, obviously, so not a lot of detail that I can provide here." Warden declined to respond directly to a question about how the space-based interceptors Northrop Grumman is developing now will defeat their targets. (submitted by Biokleen)

Trump may slash environmental rules for rocket launches. The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX have long sought, ProPublica reports. A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to "use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite" environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites along their coastlines.

Getting political at the FAA ... The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for. Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years. In addition to slashing environmental rules, the draft executive order would make the head of the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation a political appointee. This is currently a civil servant position, but the last head of the office took a voluntary separation offer earlier this year.

There's a SPAC for that. An unproven small launch startup is partnering with a severely depleted SPAC trust to do the impossible: go public in a deal they say will be valued at $400 million, TechCrunch reports. Innovative Rocket Technologies Inc., or iRocket, is set to merge with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC, founded by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. But the most recent regulatory filings by this SPAC showed it was in a tenuous financial position last year, with just $1.6 million held in trust. Likewise, iRocket isn't flooded with cash. The company has raised only a few million in venture funding, a fraction of what would be needed to develop and test the company's small orbital-class rocket, named Shockwave.

SpaceX traces a path to orbit for NASA. Two NASA satellites soared into orbit from California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday, commencing a $170 million mission to study a phenomenon of space physics that has eluded researchers since the dawn of the Space Age, Ars reports. The twin spacecraft are part of the NASA-funded TRACERS mission, which will spend at least a year measuring plasma conditions in narrow regions of Earth's magnetic field known as polar cusps. As the name suggests, these regions are located over the poles. They play an important but poorly understood role in creating colorful auroras as plasma streaming out from the Sun interacts with the magnetic field surrounding Earth. The same process drives geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting GPS navigation, radio communications, electrical grids, and satellite operations.

Plenty of room for more ... The TRACERS satellites are relatively small, each about the size of a washing machine, so they filled only a fraction of the capacity of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Three other small NASA tech demo payloads hitched a ride to orbit with TRACERS, kicking off missions to test an experimental communications terminal, demonstrate an innovative scalable satellite platform made of individual building blocks, and study the link between Earth's atmosphere and the Van Allen radiation belts. In addition to those missions, the European Space Agency launched its own CubeSat to test 5G communications from orbit. Five smallsats from an Australian company rounded out the group. Still, the Falcon 9 rocket's payload shroud was filled with less than a quarter of the payload mass it could have delivered to the TRACERS mission's targeted Sun-synchronous orbit.

Tianlong launch pad ready for action. Chinese startup Space Pioneer has completed a launch pad at Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China for its Tianlong 3 liquid propellant rocket ahead of a first orbital launch, Space News reports. Space Pioneer said the launch pad passed an acceptance test, and ground crews raised a full-scale model of the Tianlong 3 rocket on the launch pad. "The rehearsal test was successfully completed," said Space Pioneer, one of China's leading private launch companies. The activation of the launch pad followed a couple of weeks after Space Pioneer announced the completion of static loads testing on Tianlong 3.

More to come ... While this is an important step forward for Space Pioneer, construction of the launch pad is just one element the company needs to finish before Tianlong 3 can lift off for the first time. In June 2024, the company ignited Tianlong 3's nine-engine first stage on a test stand in China. But the rocket broke free of its moorings on the test stand and unexpectedly climbed into the sky before crashing in a fireball nearby. Space Pioneer says the "weak design of the rocket's tail structure was the direct cause of the failure" last year. The company hasn't identified next steps for Tianlong 3, or when it might be ready to fly. Tianlong 3 is a kerosene-fueled rocket with nine main engines, similar in design architecture and payload capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9. Also, like Falcon 9, Tianlong 3 is supposed to have a recoverable and reusable first stage booster.

Dredging up an issue at Wallops. Rocket Lab has asked regulators for permission to transport oversized Neutron rocket structures through shallow waters to a spaceport off the coast of Virginia as it races to meet a September delivery deadline, TechCrunch reports. The request, which was made in July, is a temporary stopgap while the company awaits federal clearance to dredge a permanent channel to the Wallops Island site. Rocket Lab plans to launch its Neutron medium-lift rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia, a lower-traffic spaceport that’s surrounded by shallow channels and waterways. Rocket Lab has a sizable checklist to tick off before Neutron can make its orbital debut, like mating the rocket stages, performing a "wet dress" rehearsal, and getting its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. Before any of that can happen, the rocket hardware needs to make it onto the island from Rocket Lab's factory on the nearby mainland.

Kedging bets ... Access to the channel leading to Wallops Island is currently available only at low tides. So, Rocket Lab submitted an application earlier this year to dredge the channel. The dredging project was approved by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission in May, but the company has yet to start digging because it’s still awaiting federal sign-off from the Army Corps of Engineers. As the company waits for federal approval, Rocket Lab is seeking permission to use a temporary method called "kedging" to ensure the first five hardware deliveries can arrive on schedule starting in September. We don't cover maritime issues in the Rocket Report, but if you're interested in learning a little about kedging, here's a link.

Any better ideas for an Exploration Upper Stage? Not surprisingly, Congress is pushing back against the Trump administration's proposal to cancel the Space Launch System, the behemoth rocket NASA has developed to propel astronauts back to the Moon. But legislation making its way through the House of Representatives includes an interesting provision that would direct NASA to evaluate alternatives for the Boeing-built Exploration Upper Stage, an upgrade for the SLS rocket set to debut on its fourth flight, Ars reports. Essentially, the House Appropriations Committee is telling NASA to look for cheaper, faster options for a new SLS upper stage.

CYA EUS?  ... The four-engine Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS, is an expensive undertaking. Last year, NASA's inspector general reported that the new upper stage's development costs had ballooned from $962 million to $2.8 billion, and the project had been delayed more than six years. That's almost a year-for-year delay since NASA and Boeing started development of the EUS. So, what are the options if NASA went with a new upper stage for the SLS rocket? One possibility is a modified version of United Launch Alliance's dual-engine Centaur V upper stage that flies on the Vulcan rocket. It's no longer possible to keep flying the SLS rocket's existing single-engine upper stage because ULA has shut down the production line for it.

Raising Super Heavy from the deep. For the second time, SpaceX has retrieved an engine section from one of its Super Heavy boosters from the Gulf of Mexico, NASASpaceflight.com reports. Images posted on social media showed the tail end of a Super Heavy booster being raised from the sea off the coast of northern Mexico. Most of the rocket's 33 Raptor engines appear to still be attached to the lower section of the stainless steel booster. Online sleuths who closely track SpaceX's activities at Starbase, Texas, have concluded the rocket recovered from the Gulf is Booster 13, which flew on the sixth test flight of the Starship mega-rocket last November. The booster ditched in the ocean after aborting an attempted catch back at the launch pad in South Texas.

But why? ... SpaceX recovered the engine section of a different Super Heavy booster from the Gulf last year. The company's motivation for salvaging the wreckage is unclear. "Speculated reasons include engineering research, environmental mitigation, or even historical preservation," NASASpaceflight reports.

Next three launches

July 26: Vega C | CO3D & MicroCarb | Guiana Space Center, French Guiana | 02:03 UTC

July 26: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-26 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 08:34 UTC

July 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-2 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 03:55 UTC

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Posted Saturday 26 July 2025 at 4:21 am AEST (my time).

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While the company has faced challenges, the company is aiming for what it called qualitative growth by strengthening its subscription services, direct online sales, and business-to-business (B2B) segments. Key areas of growth for LGE include automotive electronics, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, and the webOS platform.

The US tariffs are a major headache for companies around the world, given the size of the market there and President Trump's demands for bringing manufacturing to the States. To combat the rising US tariffs, LGE is trying to optimize global production and refine its market-specific approaches for premium and mass-market products.

While the company’s profits dipped, it announced an interim dividend of 500 Korean Won (approximately $0.37 USD) per share for both common and preferred, with another payout later in the year that should take the total for 2025 to at least 1,000 Korean Won (approximately $0.73 USD). You must be holding the stock on August 8, 2025, to get the payout on August 22, 2025. The firm also said it will cancel 761,427 common treasury shares on July 31, 2025, making shares more scarce which could increase the value of remaining shares for investors.

In terms of LGE’s various business divisions, things were mixed. Its Home Appliance Solution (HS) business achieved year-over-year sales growth, maintaining profitability, thanks to a dual strategy for premium and volume segments and growth in online sales and subscriptions.

Its Media Entertainment Solution (MS) business experienced declines in sales and operating profits with the latter turning negative due to market uncertainties and stiff competition. Its Vehicle Solution (VS) business showed growth in sales and operating profit thanks to increased orders from European automotive makers. Finally, its Eco Solution (ES) business saw domestic sales increase, but overseas sales growth was limited due to US tariffs. This led to a slight year-over-year drop in operating profit due to higher costs.

Image via Depositphotos.com

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Posted Saturday 26 July 2025 at 4:19 am AEST (my time).

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Most people, after suffering consequences for a bad decision, will alter their future behavior to avoid a similar negative outcome. That's just common sense. But many social circles have that one friend who never seems to learn from those consequences, repeatedly self-sabotaging themselves with the same bad decisions. When it comes to especially destructive behaviors, like addictions, the consequences can be severe or downright tragic.

Why do they do this? Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, suggest that the core issue is that such people don't seem able to make a causal connection between their choices/behavior and the bad outcome, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Psychology. Nor are they able to integrate new knowledge into their decision-making process effectively to get better results. The results could lead to the development of new intervention strategies for gambling, drug, and alcohol addictions.

In 2023, UNSW neuroscientist Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel and colleagues designed an experimental video game to explore the issue of why certain people keep making the same bad choices despite suffering some form of punishment as a result. Participants played the interactive online game by clicking on one of two planets to "trade" with them; choosing the correct planet resulted in earning points.

For each click in two three-minute rounds, there was a 50 percent chance of choosing the correct planet and being rewarded with points. Then the researchers introduced a new element: clicking on one of the two planets would result in a pirate spaceship attacking 20 percent of the time and "stealing" one-fifth of a player's points. Selecting the other planet would result in a neutral spaceship 20 percent of the time, which did not attack or steal points.

The result was a very distinct split between those who figured out the game and stopped trading with the planet that produced the pirate spaceship, and those who did not. None of the participants enjoyed losing points to the attacking space pirates, but the researchers found that those who didn't change their playing strategy just couldn't make the connection between their behavior and the negative outcome.

The team identified three distinct behavioral phenotypes as a result of their experiments, representing the varying sensitivity of people to the adverse consequences (punishment) of their actions. Sensitives easily make the connection between their choices and the outcomes and can adapt their behavior to gain rewards and avoid punishment. Those who fail to make the link are either Unawares—people who, once given further information or clues, can re-evaluate and change their behavior—and Compulsives, i.e., people who still persist in making bad decisions despite suffering consequences.

Expanding the pool

This latest study builds on that earlier work, using a variation of the same experimental online game: After a few rounds, the researchers told all the subjects which planet was linked to which ship and also which ship triggered the point losses. "We never directly tell them what the best strategy is; we just reveal how each action leads to particular cues and 'attack' (the point-loss outcome)," dit Bressel told Ars. "The reason being our studies have reliably shown all behavioral phenotypes, including Compulsives, are valuing cues and outcomes normally—and are totally aware of cue-attack relationships."

They also expanded the pool of participants beyond the Australian psychology students who were subjects in the 2023 study, sampling a general population from 24 countries of different ages, backgrounds, and experiences. And the researchers conducted six-month follow-ups in which subjects played the same game and were asked afterward whether they thought their choices and strategies were optimal.

The resulting phenotype breakdown was roughly similar to that of the 2023 study using just Australian students. About 26 percent were Sensitives, compared to 35 percent in the earlier study; 47 percent were Unawares, compared to 41 percent in 2023; and 27 percent were Compulsives, compared to 23 percent in the prior work. Those behavioral profiles remained unchanged even six months later. And the poor choices of the Compulsives could not be attributed simply to bad habits. The follow-up interviews showed that Compulsives were well aware of why they made their choices.

"The thing they seemed to specifically struggle with is seeing the link between their actions and its consequences," said dit Bressel. "Basically, lots of people (our Unaware and Compulsive phenotypes) don't readily learn how their actions are the problem. They fail to recognize their agency over things they are highly motivated to avoid. So we give them the piece of the puzzle they seemed to be missing. Correspondingly, simply telling people how their actions lead to negative outcomes completely changes the behavior of most poor avoiders (Unawares), but not all (Compulsives)."

The researchers admit it's a bit perplexing that so many Compulsives still persisted in making bad choices, even after receiving new information. Is it that Compulsives simply don't believe what the researchers have told them?

"There's maybe a little of that going on," said dit Bressel. "We ask them which actions they thought led to attacks and how they value each action, and they do strongly update their beliefs/valuations after the information reveal but not as much as the Unawares. So, Compulsives are a little less on board about the relative values of actions than other phenotypes. But we've shown this still doesn't fully account for how poorly they continue to avoid."

Better interventions needed

That's something the scientists are keen to explore further. "We showed Compulsives are very aware of how they're behaving, and also think their behavior is optimal—even though it really wasn't," said Jean-Richard Dit Bressel. "This suggested a key failure point is between recognizing the relative values of actions and forming a corresponding behavioral strategy."

Compulsives, in other words, exhibit deficits in cognitive-behavioral integration. "It's like they're thinking, 'Yeah, sure, Action A is good, Action B is bad... instead of a 50-50 split, I'll do 60-40,'" said Dit Bressel. "They really should be going cold turkey and doing 100-0. An implication of the trajectory analysis we did is that no amount of action belief updating would get them to behave optimally. We need a way to improve how those beliefs translate to perceptions of what's optimal."

What might be the underlying cause of this persistent bad decision-making? "We don't know, but the fact most people have the same profile at retest suggests this is a kind of trait: a stable cognitive-behavioral tendency," said Dit Bressel. "It could be related to genetics, but we don't have the data for that. We know there are environmental factors that contribute to the Compulsive profile: It's significantly more likely to emerge if the Action→Punisher relationship is infrequent, i.e., people will be poor avoiders and ignore helpful information if punishment probability is low, even if the punishment is severe. But this would be a case of trait-x-environment interactions. My neuroscientist side would love to explore what's going on in the brain and map what contributes to adaptive vs maladaptive decision-making."

This could help drive more effective public health messaging, which is typically focused on providing factual information about the risks of compulsive behaviors, whether we're talking about smoking, drinking, eating disorders, or gambling, for instance. The results of this study clearly demonstrate that for Compulsives, information is not sufficient to change their self-sabotaging behavior. One of Dit Bressel's lab members is now investigating better interventions for different profiles of decision-making, particularly for Compulsives.

"We definitely haven't cracked the case yet," said Dit Bressel. "There's a body of work that says early over late information intervention might do the trick, but we've shown Compulsives in low probability punishment scenarios are impervious to early information. If the issue is they can't infer the winning strategy with Action→Punisher, maybe explicitly outlining the winning strategy will make more of a difference. Or maybe some potent combination of prompts. We have ideas, but the proof will be in the pudding."

Then again, "It could be the case that no amount/type of information will be enough to really sway 'that friend,' and that something far more involved would be needed," he said. "But most people will have a least some response to helpful information, so my suggestion in the absence of a full answer is to just be a good friend and give that friend the info/advice they seem to need to hear (again). It won't go the distance for everyone, but it's cheap and you'd be surprised at how many people need what seems obvious pointed out to them."

Nature Communications Psychology, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00284-9 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 25 July 2025 at 11:54 am AEST (my time).

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Starlink users reported they couldn’t connect to SpaceX’s satellite internet service for a few hours on Thursday afternoon before service was eventually restored. Widespread Starlink outages, like the ones we reported on in 2022 and 2023, have been rare, and this appears to be the first one in 2025.

The outage began around 3:15PM ET or so, with users receiving error messages saying there is “no healthy upstream.” Starlink posted a message on X at 4:05PM ET: “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved.”

At 6:23PM ET, Starlink engineering VP Michael Nicolls followed that up with a message saying that after a 2.5-hour outage, the network has “mostly recovered.” “The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” writes Nicolls, without going into specific detail.

According to The Kyiv Independent, the outage affected Ukrainian troops who rely on Starlink terminals, citing a Telegram message from the military saying Starlink is down across the entire front. The military now says its connections are back online after going down for about 150 minutes, “the longest in the war.”

T-Mobile just opened its Starlink-powered T-Satellite messaging service to everyone yesterday, but we haven’t seen any updates on its status. During the outage, the global connectivity trackers at NetBlocks reported that overall Starlink connectivity dropped to “16 percent of ordinary levels.”

Update, July 24th: Added information from the Ukrainian military and NetBlocks, and updated to note that service has been restored.

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Two NASA satellites rocketed into orbit from California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, commencing a $170 million mission to study a phenomenon of space physics that has eluded researchers since the dawn of the Space Age.

The twin spacecraft are part of the NASA-funded TRACERS mission, which will spend at least a year measuring plasma conditions in narrow regions of Earth's magnetic field known as polar cusps. As the name suggests, these regions are located over the poles. They play an important but poorly understood role in creating colorful auroras as plasma streaming out from the Sun interacts with the magnetic field surrounding Earth.

The same process drives geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting GPS navigation, radio communications, electrical grids, and satellite operations. These outbursts are usually triggered by solar flares or coronal mass ejections that send blobs of plasma out into the Solar System. If one of these flows happens to be aimed at Earth, we are treated with auroras but vulnerable to the storm's harmful effects.

For example, an extreme geomagnetic storm last year degraded GPS navigation signals, resulting in more than $500 million in economic losses in the agriculture sector as farms temporarily suspended spring planting. In 2022, a period of elevated solar activity contributed to the loss of 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites.

"Understanding our Sun and the space weather it produces is more important to us here on Earth, I think, than most realize," said Joe Westlake, director of NASA's heliophysics division.

The launch of TRACERS was delayed 24 hours after a regional power outage disrupted air traffic control over the Pacific Ocean near the Falcon 9 launch site on California's Central Coast, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. SpaceX called off the countdown Tuesday less than a minute before liftoff, then rescheduled the flight for Wednesday.

TRACERS, short for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, will study a process known as magnetic reconnection. As particles in the solar wind head out into the Solar System at up to 1 million mph, they bring along pieces of the Sun's magnetic field. When the solar wind reaches our neighborhood, it begins interacting with Earth's magnetic field.

The high-energy collision breaks and reconnects magnetic field lines, flinging solar wind particles across Earth's magnetosphere at speeds that can approach the speed of light. Earth's field draws some of these particles into the polar cusps, down toward the upper atmosphere. This is what creates dazzling auroral light shows and potentially damaging geomagnetic storms.

Over our heads

But scientists still aren't sure how it all works, despite the fact that it's happening right over our heads, within the reach of countless satellites in low-Earth orbit. But a single spacecraft won't do the job. Scientists need at least two spacecraft, each positioned in bespoke polar orbits and specially instrumented to measure magnetic fields, electric fields, electrons, and ions.

That's because magnetic reconnection is a dynamic process, and a single satellite would provide just a snapshot of conditions over the polar cusps every 90 minutes. By the time the satellite comes back around on another orbit, conditions will have changed, but scientists wouldn't know how or why, according to David Miles, principal investigator for the TRACERS mission at the University of Iowa.

"You can't tell, is that because the system itself is changing?" Miles said. "Is that because this magnetic reconnection, the coupling process, is moving around? Is it turning on and off, and if it's turning on and off, how quickly can it do it? Those are fundamental things that we need to understand... how the solar wind arriving at the Earth does or doesn't transfer energy to the Earth system, which has this downstream effect of space weather."

This is why the tandem part of the TRACERS name is important. The novel part of this mission is it features two identical spacecraft, each about the size of a washing machine flying at an altitude of 367 miles (590 kilometers). Over the course of the next few weeks, the TRACERS satellites will drift into a formation with one trailing the other by about two minutes as they zip around the world at nearly five miles per second. This positioning will allow the satellites to sample the polar cusps one right after the other, instead of forcing scientists to wait another 90 minutes for a data refresh.

With TRACERS, scientists hope to pick apart smaller, fast-moving changes with each satellite pass. Within a year, TRACERS should collect 3,000 measurements of magnetic reconnections, a sample size large enough to start identifying why some space weather events evolve differently than others.

"Not only will it get a global picture of reconnection in the magnetosphere, but it's also going to be able to statistically study how reconnection depends on the state of the solar wind," said John Dorelli, TRACERS mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is going to really help us understand how to predict space weather in the magnetosphere."

"If we can understand these various different situations, whether it happens suddenly if you have one particular kind of event, or it happens in lots of different places, then we have a better way to model that and say, 'Ah, here's the likelihood of seeing a certain kind of effect that would affect humans,'" said Craig Kletzing, the principal investigator who led the TRACERS science team until his death in 2023.

There is broader knowledge to be gained with a mission like TRACERS. Magnetic reconnection is ubiquitous throughout the Universe, and the same physical processes produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the Sun.

Hitchhiking to orbit

Several other satellites shared the ride to space with TRACERS on Wednesday.

These secondary payloads included a NASA-sponsored mission named PExT, a small technology demonstration satellite carrying an experimental communications package capable of connecting with three different networks: NASA's government-owned Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) and commercial satellite networks owned by SES and Viasat.

What's unique about the Polylingual Experimental Terminal, or PExT, is its ability to roam across multiple satellite relay networks. The International Space Station and other satellites in low-Earth orbit currently connect to controllers on the ground through NASA's TDRS satellites. But NASA will retire its TDRS satellites in the 2030s and begin purchasing data relay services using commercial satellite networks.

The space agency expects to have multiple data relay providers, so radios on future NASA satellites must be flexible enough to switch between networks mid-mission. PExT is a pathfinder for these future missions.

Another NASA-funded tech demo named Athena EPIC was also aboard the Falcon 9 rocket. Led by NASA's Langley Research Center, this mission uses a scalable satellite platform developed by a company named NovaWurks, using building blocks to piece together everything a spacecraft needs to operate in space.

Athena EPIC hosts a single science instrument to measure how much energy Earth radiates into space, an important data point for climate research. But the mission's real goal is to showcase how an adaptable satellite design, such as this one using NovaWurks' building block approach, might be useful for future NASA missions.

A handful of other payloads rounded out the payload list for Wednesday's launch. They included REAL, a NASA-funded CubeSat project to investigate the Van Allen radiation belts and space weather, and LIDE, an experimental 5G communications satellite backed by the European Space Agency. Five commercial spacecraft from the Australian company Skykraft also launched to join a constellation of small satellites to provide tracking and voice communications between air traffic controllers and aircraft over remote parts of the world.

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Posted Friday 25 July 2025 at 2:14 am AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Tesla posted its financial results for the second quarter of 2025 this afternoon. The numbers show yet another bad three months for the automaker. As competition in the EV marketplace has exploded, Tesla has increasingly been left behind, with a small and aging model lineup, before we even contemplate how CEO Elon Musk has tarnished what was once the hottest brand in the car world. Earlier this month, we learned that sales dropped by 13 percent year over year in Q2 2025; today, the financials show that automotive revenues fell even more, dropping 16 percent year over year to $16.7 billion.

Tesla’s battery business has been feeling the pain, too. For a while, this was a growth area for the company, albeit one with a relatively minor contribution to the bottom line. During Q2 2025, Tesla’s energy generation and storage division brought in $2.8 billion in revenue, a 7 percent decline from the same period in 2024.

Sales of Carbon credits—those government-issued permits that other automakers buy in order to pollute—shrank by more than half, to $490 million. Those other automakers are now selling EVs, at least most of them, and have less need to buy credits from Tesla. It’s likely this subsidy, which has kept the company out of the red in the past, will be even less of a contributor in the coming years as the US strips away environmental protections.

However, there has been growth in the company’s services and other revenue, which grew by 17 percent year over year to $3 billion as the Supercharger network opens up to EVs from other automakers. That helps, but only some—vehicle sales are too important to Tesla’s bottom line. Total automotive revenues fell by 12 percent year over year to $22.5 billion. Tesla’s operating margin fell by about a third to 4.1 percent, a far cry from the double-digit margins that helped send its share price so high.

Net profit dropped 16 percent to $1.2 billion, while the company spent slightly more on capital expenditures. However, its free cash flow fell by 89 percent to just $146 million. Tesla’s cash and investments are much rosier, growing by 20 percent year over year to $36.8 billion.

The company’s outlook contains no firm predictions on growth, or specifics on profitability, other than to say that over time it expects “hardware-related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of AI, software and fleet-based profits.” The presentation to investors also claims that “initial production” of a more affordable model has begun, but with no other details—perhaps the stretched Model Y being prepared for China?

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Posted Thursday 24 July 2025 at 5:08 pm AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

You will be able to shop in other countries (online or in-store) and pay for international business using your domestic payment system or wallet. PayPal has partnered with several launch partners, including China's Tenpay Global, India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and Mercado Pago, which operates in South America.

For instance, a PayPal user traveling in China can buy coffee from a local shop by scanning a Weixin Pay QR code using their PayPal app. A UPI user based in India can use PayPal to buy sneakers from a US-based online store. Similarly, a Venmo user living in the US will be able to transfer money to their friend in Germany.

PayPal World is expected to go live sometime during the fall season later this year with all partners interoperable with PayPal and Venmo, the company said in a press release. Additionally, PayPal and Venmo will become interoperable in 2026, enabling users to send money to each other worldwide.

According to the company, its global payment system will serve over two billion users through various partners, enabling businesses to tap into new markets. It will also reduce the burden of investing in and building technology each time they add a new digital payment system or wallet to their checkout.

PayPal CEO and President, Alex Chriss, said that PayPal World is "a first-of-its-kind payments ecosystem that will bring together many of the world's largest payment systems and digital wallets on a single platform."

You can use various services, such as Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and AliPay, for international money transfers and accept payments for services. However, PayPal's offering aims to create a single, interoperable ecosystem of existing gateways and payment systems.

While digital payments and wallets are a common sight in various parts of the world, things become difficult when payments are made across borders. The integration will reduce the chances of missing out on popular payment options at checkout and minimize the risk of lost sales, according to the company.

Businesses can automatically accept new payment methods at checkout when new partners join, without additional development work. PayPal will continue to add more wallets and payment systems as its platform expands globally.

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Posted Thursday 24 July 2025 at 4:15 am AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Google's search results have undergone a seismic shift over the past year as AI fever has continued to escalate among the tech giants. Nowhere is this change more apparent than right at the top of Google's storied results page, which is now home to AI Overviews. Google contends these Gemini-based answers don't take traffic away from websites, but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center says otherwise. Its analysis shows that searches with AI summaries reduce clicks, and their prevalence is increasing.

Google began testing AI Overviews as the "search generative experience" in May 2023, and just a year later, they were an official part of the search engine results page (SERP). Many sites (including this one) have noticed changes to their traffic in the wake of this move, but Google has brushed off concerns about how this could affect the sites from which it collects all that data.

SEO experts have disagreed with Google's stance on how AI affects web traffic, and the newly released Pew study backs them up. The Pew Research Center analyzed data from 900 users of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel collected in March 2025. The analysis shows that among the test group, users were much less likely to click on search results when the page included an AI Overview.

Pew reports that searches without an AI answer resulted in a click rate of 15 percent. On SERPs with AI Overviews, the rate of clicks to other sites drops by almost half, to 8 percent. Google has also, on several occasions, claimed that people click on the links cited in AI Overviews, but Pew found that just 1 percent of AI Overviews produced a click on a source. These sources are most frequently Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 percent of all AI sources.

And perhaps more troubling, Google users are more likely to end their browsing session after seeing an AI Overview. That suggests that many people are seeing information generated by a robot, and their investigation stops there. Unfortunately for these people, all forms of generative AI are prone to "hallucinations" that cause them to provide incorrect information. So more people could be walking away from a search with the wrong information.

AI Overviews are integrated with Google's results, and they are appearing on more searches all the time.

Credit: Google

This problem is unlikely to improve over time. Since launching AI Overviews, Google has repeatedly expanded the number of searches that get robot summaries. The Pew Research Center says that about 1 in 5 searches now have AI Overviews. Generally, the more words in a search, the more likely it is to trigger an AI Overview, and that's especially true for searches phrased as questions. The research shows that 60 percent of questions and 36 percent of full-sentence searches are answered by the AI.

This research provides more evidence that Google's use of AI is changing the way people gather information and interact with search results. The trends are bad for web publishing, but Google's profits have never been higher. Funny how that works.

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Posted Wednesday 23 July 2025 at 12:56 pm AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Ozzy Osbourne, the legendary Prince of Darkness and one of heavy metal’s most iconic stars, has died. He was 76.

He died “surrounded by love,” his family said in a statement to The Sun on Tuesday. “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning.

He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time. Sharon, Jack, Kelly, Aimee and Louis.”

News of Osbourne’s death comes more than five years after he announced his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis in January 2020.

Born John Michael Osbourne in Birmingham, England, on Dec. 3, 1948, he was first nicknamed “Ozzy” in primary school.

He had a challenging childhood, but music provided him with an outlet.

Ozzy Osbourne signs copies of his album “Patient Number 9” at Fingerprints Music on September 10, 2022, in Long Beach, California.

Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath performs on stage at British Summer Time Festival at Hyde Park on July 4, 2014, in London.

Black Sabbath members Bill Ward, Geezer Butler, Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi in 1970.

Learning was difficult for him due to dyslexia, and the future Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee claimed to have been sexually abused by bullies when he was 11. He also recalled attempting suicide as a teen.

Osbourne credited The Beatles and their 1964 song “She Loves You” for inspiring him to pursue a music career.

When he was 15, Osbourne dropped out of school and worked several trade jobs.

Two years later, he spent six weeks in the Winson Green prison because he was unable to pay a fine after stealing from a clothing store.

Once released, Osbourne and his friend, Geezer Butler, formed their first band, Rare Breed, with Ozzy on vocals.

He became a founding member of Black Sabbath in 1967. The band is highly regarded as a major influence in the development of heavy metal music, with hits like “Paranoid,” “War Pigs” and “Iron Man.”

The group, as well as Ozzy himself, would often be criticized by critics for their music’s dark and sometimes “satanic” themes.

“When we started gigging way back when, as soon as we started playing this song’s opening chords, young girls in the audience would f–king freak out,” Osbourne told NME in 2016. “They thought we were Satan’s f–king friends or something.”

Ozzy Osbourne attends the Black Sabbath town hall event celebrating 

the release of “13” at The Angel Orensanz Foundation on June 11, 2013, in New York City.

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne pose for a picture with their dog.

Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath performing on stage at Rainbow Theatre, London, on March 16, 1973.

“That’s when the whole ‘Prince of Darkness’ s–t started,” he explained about the origin of his nickname. “When people get excited about Halloween coming around each year, all I think is, ‘Well, we used to have Halloween every f–king night.”

Ozzy was fired from the band in 1979 for alcohol and drug abuse, which he later revealed felt hypocritical at the time.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel betrayed by what happened with Black Sabbath,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir “I Am Ozzy.”

“We were four blokes who’d grown up together a few streets apart. We were like family, like brothers. And firing me for being f–ked up was hypocritical bulls–t. We were all f–ked up.”

“If you’re stoned, and I’m stoned, and you’re telling me that I’m fired because I’m stoned, how can that be? Because I’m slightly more stoned than you are?” he added.

But that’s when Sharon Arden, daughter of Black Sabbath’s manager, Don Arden, decided to manage Ozzy as a solo act.

Ozzy Osbourne performs with Black Sabbath at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., on August 4, 2013. 

Chad Rachman/New York Post

Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath pose for a band photo.

WireImage

He would go on to make 12 solo albums with hits like “Crazy Train,” “Mama, I’m Coming Home” and “No More Tears.”

Ozzy sold over 100 million albums worldwide as a solo artist and a member of Black Sabbath.

Both the band and Ozzy as a solo act were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. He joined the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Black Sabbath in 2006.

Ozzy also made headlines for his outlandish behavior.

He infamously bit the head off of a bat during a concert in January 1982. The next month, Ozzy was arrested in Texas for drunkenly peeing on a cenotaph made to honor people who died at the Battle of the Alamo.

He and Sharon, 72, married that same year. The couple had three kids: Aimee, 41, Kelly, 40, and Jack, 39. The family would go on to reach a new level of fame on a first-of-its-kind reality TV show.

Aside from Aimee, who refused to take part in the MTV series, “The Osbournes” invited cameras into their home to chronicle the raw rock-and-roll domestic life of Ozzy and his family.

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne with their children Aimee, Kelly and Jack in 1987.

The show premiered in March 2002 and ran for three years. Its first season was the most-viewed series in MTV history at the time.

Jack later alleged his father “hated” filming the wildly successful show.

“I don’t know how the Kardashians have done it for so long — it sent us crazy at the end,” Ozzy recounted in January 2023.

“I am not sorry I did it, but after three or four years I said, ‘Do you know what, we’re going to lose somebody because it is getting too crazy,'” he continued, adding that the show traumatized him and his family.

“There is rock-and-roll fame, which is pretty intense, but that Osbourne level was just unbelievable. The kids paid for it. They all ended up doing drugs. Jack got clean and sober on that show, Kelly messed up on that show, I was messed up, and Sharon got cancer.” (In 2002, Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent surgery and chemotherapy.)

Ozzy reunited with Black Sabbath on several occasions and rejoined the group in 2013 to record their final album, “13.” He also joined the band on their farewell tour from 2016 to 2017.

Ozzy struggled with heavy drug and alcohol addiction throughout his life. He was introduced to cocaine in 1971 and later claimed he took LSD every day for two years while in Black Sabbath.

At the end of his time with the band, the musician said he “got very drunk and very stoned every single day.”

In September 1989, Ozzy’s challenges got him into legal trouble when he allegedly tried to kill Sharon.

Ozzy Osbourne and family filming “The Osbornes” in 2002. 

Getty Images

Sharon Osbourne, Kelly Osbourne, Jack Osbourne and Ozzy Osbourne appear as guest presenters on MTV’s “TRL” in London on December 17, 2004.

Getty Images

Kelly Osbourne, Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon Osbourne and Jack Osbourne attend the 56th Grammy Awards at the Staples Center on January 26, 2014, in Los Angeles, California. 

WireImage

The Osbournes celebrating Ozzy’s 75th birthday in 2023. 

kellyosbourne/Instagram

He was too intoxicated to remember the incident, and Sharon ended up dropping the criminal charges against him. But a judge still ordered Ozzy to complete six months in rehab.

“We’ve come to a decision that you’ve got to die,” Sharon recalled Ozzy saying before he allegedly strangled her.

“He was calm – very, very calm,” she said in the A&E series “Biography: The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne.” “I felt the stuff on the table, and felt the panic button, and just pressed it. Next thing I know, the cops were there.”

“It’s not exactly one of my greatest f–king achievements,” Ozzy added.

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne on stage at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards on Jan. 26, 2020.

Getty Images for The Recording Academy

He was sober for many years until Ozzy announced on Facebook in April 2013 that he had been drinking and doing drugs for the past year and a half.

In February 2021, he told Variety that he had been sober for seven years.

Then, in August 2022, Ozzy stated that he was “fed up” with the staggering amount of gun violence in America and that he and Sharon would be moving to the UK.

Ozzy, Sharon, Jack and Kelly Osbourne turned another television convention 

upside down and inside out on the series “Osbournes Reloaded.”

Ozzy Osbourne attending the ceremony where the original line-up of Black Sabbath was inducted into 

the Rock Walk of Fame at Guitar Center in Los Angeles, California, on November 18, 1992.

However, he later walked back his statement and said he would rather stay in the States.

“I’m American now. To be honest with you, I don’t want to go back [to England],” he reiterated. “F–k that.”

The rocker canceled his 2023 tour three months before it was scheduled to kick off in Finland in May and declared that his touring career was officially over forever.

“This is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to share with my loyal fans…” he captioned the announcement on social media.

Osbourne performed on a bat throne with original Black Sabbath members at his farewell concert. 

Instagram/@sharonosbourne

Osbourne with Metallica’s James Hetfield at his final concert. 

Instagram/@ozzyosbourne

The crowd at Villa Park for Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning concert. 

AFP via Getty Images

Osbourne seen performing for the last time.

ð¸ Rock History ð¸, /X

He thanked and apologized to fans who bought tickets to his postponed 2019 shows, saying he was “honestly humbled by the way you’ve all patiently held onto your tickets for all this time.”

“My one and only purpose during this time has been to get back on stage,” he explained at the time. “My singing voice is fine.”

“However, after three operations, stem cell treatments, endless physical therapy, and most recently, groundbreaking Cybernics (HAL) Treatment, my body is still physically weak,” he added.

Despite the announcement that he was quitting touring in 2023, Ozzy later returned to the stage one last time in July 2025 to perform with Black Sabbath for the band’s final-ever concert in his hometown of Birmingham, England.

17

Ozzy, Kelly and Sharon Osbourne pose backstage following Kelly Osbourne’s first night of “Chicago” at the Cambridge 

Theatre on September 10, 2007, in London, England.

“I’d love to say ‘never say never’, but after the last six years or so … it is time,” he told The Guardian two months before the concert. “I lived on the road for 50-odd years, and I’ve kind of got used to not picking up

my bags and getting on the bus again.”

Ozzy also opened up about his battle with Parkinson’s shortly before his death.

“You wake up the next morning and find that something else has gone wrong,” he said in May 2025. “You begin to think this is never going to end.”

Ozzy and Sharon’s daughter Kelly took to social media shortly before the rockstar’s death to dispel rumors that her famous father was dying.

Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath performs during the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth 

Games closing ceremony at Alexander Stadium on August 8, 2022, in Birmingham, England.

She posted to her Instagram Stories in July after an AI video of Ozzy went viral. So, there’s this video going around on social media, and it’s supposed to be my dad, but it’s AI,” the TV personality told her fans at the time.

“And it starts out saying, ‘I don’t need a doctor to tell me that I’m going to die. I know I’m going to die,'” she continued. “What the f–k is wrong with you people? Why would you spend your time making a video like this?”

Bill Ward, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath announce their first new album in 

33 years and a world tour at the Whisky a Go Go on November 11, 2011, in West Hollywood, California.

The former “Fashion Police” host — who got engaged at her famous dad’s final Black Sabbath show — then clarified that Ozzy is “not dying.”

“Yes, he has Parkinson’s, and yes, his mobility is completely different than it used to be, but he’s not dying,” she said. “What is wrong with you?”

Kelly also took a moment to slam the rumors that her parents had a “suicide pact” after Sharon suggested as much back in 2007.

A selfie with Kelly Osbourne posted on Instagram weeks before her father’s death. 

Instagram/@kellyosbourne

“That was bulls–t my mum said to get attention one time,” Kelly concluded. “And my dad’s not dying. Stop.”

Ozzy is survived by his wife, Sharon, and their children: Aimee, Kelly, and Jack, as well as his children, Jessica, 45, and Louis, 50, from his first marriage to Thelma Riley, 71.

Ozzy also adopted Riley’s son from a previous relationship with Elliot Kingsley, now 59, during their marriage, which lasted from 1971 to 1982. The late star also had 10 grandchildren.

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Tesla’s eroding popularity with Americans shows little sign of abating. Each month, the Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report surveys thousands of consumers to gauge attitudes on EV adoption, autonomous driving, and the automakers that are developing those technologies. Toyota, which only recently started selling enough EVs to be included in the survey, currently has the highest net-positive score and the highest “view intensity score”—the percentage of consumers who have a very positive view of a brand minus the ones who have a very negative view—despite selling just a fairly lackluster EV to date. Meanwhile, the brand that actually popularized the EV, moving it from compliance car and milk float to something desirable, has fallen even further into negative territory in July.

Just 26 percent of survey participants still have a somewhat or very positive view of Tesla. But 39 percent have a somewhat or very negative view of the company, with just 14 percent being unfamiliar or having no opinion. That’s a net positive view of -13, but Tesla’s view intensity score is -16, meaning a lot more people really don’t like the company compared to the ones who really do. The problem is also growing over time: In April, Tesla still had a net positive view of -7.

Tesla remained at the bottom of the charts when EVIR looked more closely into demographic data. Tesla was the least-positively viewed car company regardless of income, although the effect was most pronounced among those with incomes less than $75,000, as were the results based on geography (although suburbanites held it in the most disdain) and age (where those over 65 have the most haters).

Vinfast is the only other automaker with a negative net-positive view and view intensity score, but 92 percent of survey respondents were unfamiliar with the Vietnamese automaker or had no opinion about it.

When asked which brands they trusted, the survey data mostly mirrored the positive versus negative brand perception. Only Tesla and Vinfast have negative net trust scores, with Tesla also having the lowest “trust integrity score”—those who say they trust a brand “a lot” versus those who distrust that brand “a lot,” at -19.

At least Elon Musk’s car company can avoid the ignominy of coming last in perceptions of each EV brand’s safety. Musk regularly touted misleading statistics to create an image of a car company with unparalleled safety. But after dozens of fatal crashes involving Teslas, frequently with the involvement of the company’s often-investigated driver assistance systems, it seems much of the public has actually been paying attention. But just 52 percent think of Teslas as safe, the second-worst score (yes, after Vinfast).

Robotaxi rollout was a bust

EVIR also investigated attitudes toward AVs and robotaxis. Only 1 percent of the more than 8,000 people surveyed had ridden in a robotaxi and would do it again, the same percentage that would not care to repeat the experience. More than twice as many people (46 percent) say they would never consider riding in a robotaxi than say they would consider it (21 percent). And more than half somewhat (22 percent) or strongly (31 percent) believe the technology should not be legal.

Robotaxis have been important to Tesla for some time now. Forget making money by selling cars—instead for several years now Musk has told us the future of Tesla is humanoid robots doing manual labor and a giant fleet of robotaxis driving the streets, making every other car brand irrelevant. Austin, Texas, was to be ground zero for the Tesla robotaxi, thanks to a highly liberal attitude by conservative lawmakers toward private companies experimenting on public roads there.

But just under two-thirds (65 percent) of those surveyed by EVIR were unaware that Tesla had started demoing its autonomous vehicles in the city starting in late June. Only 3 percent considered themselves well-informed.

That lucrative autonomous future starts to look a little less likely once those survey respondents were given an excerpt of an article from The Wall Street Journal about the robotaxi rollout. The article included information that will be familiar to readers of Ars Technica, including the fact that Tesla relies on a camera-only system that can be blinded by sunlight, and after reading it, half of those surveyed said they were somewhat or much less interested in using a Tesla robotaxi. Even more—53 percent—were somewhat or much less convinced that Tesla’s robotaxis are safe.

And there’s little worse for an automaker than being perceived as unsafe.

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Posted Wednesday 23 July 2025 at 2:12 am AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

A team of astronomers have discovered a curious figure in the universe. It is two distant galaxies colliding with each other to form a larger structure. From Earth’s perspective, the junction of the disks resembles the number eight lying down, similar to the infinity symbol (∞).

Because of this resemblance, the researchers—who are based at the universities of Yale and Copenhagen—have nicknamed it the “Infinity Galaxy” and have detailed their discovery in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Beyond its evocative shape, the structure intrigues the scientists because of its contents: Within it could be the first direct evidence of a newly formed primordial supermassive black hole.

The images were taken through the James Webb Space Telescope and then enriched with information from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the most powerful X-ray telescope ever created. Light from this galaxy comes from a time when the universe was only 470 million years old—roughly 13.5 billion years ago. In the dual galaxy’s structure, at least two consolidated black holes can be observed, each centered in a respective disk (the yellow points in the image below), and a region of compressed gas at the point of intersection suggests the presence of a supermassive object (the green point).

The scientists think they might have viewed signs of a direct collapse black hole. Typically, black holes are formed when stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own gravity, but there’s an alternative formation phenomenon debated in astrophysics—where a black hole forms via the collapse of gigantic gas cloud, without a star having formed. Such a possibility has been theorized, but this type of black hole has yet to be observed.

The largest black holes found in the universe, supermassive black holes, have been identified in galaxies that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But what made their formation possible is not yet fully understood. Many supermassive black holes are believed to have come into being as a result of smaller black holes merging. But with very old supermassive black holes, there does not seem to have been enough time for the first stars in the universe to evolve, collapse into stellar-mass black holes, and then merge to colossal, supermassive sizes.

So some astronomers have proposed an alternative origin for the universe’s first supermassive black holes. According to this hypothesis, the black holes would not need to form from a star or arise from mergers. Instead, the theory goes, dense clumps of matter that in other instances gave rise to galaxies could have compressed directly into massive black holes. Scientists are currently investigating this scenario, although conclusive evidence of this having happened is still lacking.

It is possible that the Infinity Galaxy offers revealing clues about the possibility of this second formation pathway. “During the collision, the gas within these two galaxies shocks and compresses. This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot, which then collapsed into a black hole,” Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale and a coauthor on the paper, said in a post on his university’s website. “While such collisions are rare events, similarly extreme gas densities are thought to have been quite common in the earliest cosmic epochs, when galaxies began to form,” Van Dokkum added.

Scientists are also considering other, less spectacular alternatives as to what’s going on in the Infinity Galaxy. Rather than being created through a direct collapse of gas, that potential extra black hole—the green spot in the image above—could instead be the signs of a black hole ejected from another galaxy as “Infinity” passes through it. Another possible scenario is that this image actually shows the collision of three galaxies, with the third eclipsed by the other larger ones.

For the moment, the team says the preliminary results are exciting. “We can’t say definitively that we have found a direct collapse black hole. But we can say that these new data strengthen the case that we’re seeing a newborn black hole, while eliminating some of the competing explanations,” Van Dokkum concluded in a blog for NASA.

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Posted Wednesday 23 July 2025 at 2:10 am AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

The students participating in the annual International Math Olympiad (IMO) represent some of the most talented young computational minds in the world. This year, they faced down a newly enhanced array of powerful AI models, including Google's Gemini Deep Think. The company says it put its model to the test using the same rules as human participants, and it improved on an already solid showing from last year.

Google says its specially tuned math AI got five of the six questions correct, which is good enough for gold medal status. And unlike OpenAI, Google played by the rules set forth by the IMO.

A new Gemini

The Google DeepMind team participated in last year's IMO competition using an AI composed of the AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 models. This setup was able to get four of the six questions correct, earning silver medal status—only half of the human participants earn any medal at all.

In 2025, Google DeepMind was among a group of companies that worked with the IMO to have their models officially graded and certified by the coordinators. Google came prepared with a new model for the occasion. Gemini Deep Think was announced earlier this year as a more analytical take on simulated reasoning models. Rather than going down one linear line of "thought," Deep Think runs multiple reasoning processes in parallel, integrating and comparing the results before giving a final answer.

According to Thang Luong, DeepMind senior scientist and head of the IMO team, this is a paradigm shift from last year's effort. In 2024, an expert had to translate the natural language questions into "domain specific language." At the end of the process, said expert would have to interpret the output. Deep Think, however, is natural language, end to end, and was not specifically designed to do math.

In the past, making LLMs better at math would involve reinforcement learning with final answers. Luong explained to Ars that models trained in this way can get to the correct answer, but they have "incomplete reasoning," and part of the IMO grading is based on showing your work. To prepare Deep Think for the IMO, Google used new reinforcement learning techniques with higher-quality "long answer" solutions to mathematical problems, giving the model better grounding in how to handle every step on the way to an answer. "With this kind of training, you can actually get robust, long-form reasoning," said Luong.

As you might expect, Deep Think takes more time to generate an output compared to the simpler versions you can access in the Gemini app. However, the AI followed the same rules as the flesh-and-blood participants, which was only possible because of its ability to ingest the problems as natural language. Gemini was provided with the problem descriptions and gave its answers within the 4.5-hour time limit of the competition.

Rigorous proofs

AI firms like DeepMind have taken an interest in the IMO over the past few years because it presents a unique challenge. While the competition is aimed at pre-university mathematicians, the questions require critical thinking and an understanding of multiple mathematical disciplines, including algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. Only the most advanced AI models have any hope of accurately answering these multi-layered problems.

The DeepMind team has pointed out some interesting aspects of Deep Think's performance, which they say come from its advanced training. In the third problem (below), for example, many human competitors applied a graduate-level concept called Dirichlet's Theorem, using mathematics outside the intended scope of the competition. However, Deep Think recognized that it was possible to solve the problem with simpler math. "Our model actually made a brilliant observation and used only elementary number theory to create a self-contained proof of the given problem," said DeepMind researcher and Brown University professor Junehyuk Jung.

The DeepMind team says the model came up with a "brilliant" solution to this problem.

Credit: Google DeepMind

As for the one Deep Think got wrong, the team says that was objectively the hardest of the competition. The question asked about the minimum number of rectangles needed to cover a given space. Jung explains that Deep Think started from an incorrect hypothesis, believing that the answer would be greater than or equal to 10, so it was lost from the start. "There's no way it's going to solve it because that is not true to begin with," said Jung.

So Deep Think lost points on that problem, but Jung notes that only five students managed to get that one right. Still, Google got 35 points to earn a gold medal. Only about 8 percent of the human participants can reach that level.

Google stresses that Deep Think went through the same evaluation as the students do. OpenAI has also announced results from the IMO, but it did not work with the organization to adhere to the established process. Instead, it had a panel of former IMO participants grade its answers and awarded itself a gold medal.

"We confirmed with the IMO organization that we actually solved five perfectly," said Luong. "I think anyone who didn't go through that process, we don't know, they might have lost one point and gotten silver."

Google says the version of Deep Think tuned for the IMO is sticking around. It is currently being rolled out to a group of trusted testers that includes mathematicians. Eventually, this model will be provided to Google AI Ultra subscribers, who pay $250 per month for access to Google's biggest and most expensive models. DeepMind plans to continue iterating on this model and will be back next year in search of a perfect score.

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Posted Tuesday 22 July 2025 at 11:34 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of June): 2,864

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Intuitive Surgical, an American biotechnology company, introduced DaVinci surgical robots in the late 1990s, and they became groundbreaking teleoperation equipment. Expert surgeons could operate on patients remotely, manipulating the robotic arms and their surgical tools based on a video feed from DaVinci’s built-in cameras and endoscopes.

Now, John Hopkins University researchers put a ChatGPT-like AI in charge of a DaVinci robot and taught it to perform a gallbladder-removal surgery.

Kuka surgeries

The idea to put a computer behind the wheel of a surgical robot is not entirely new, but these had mostly relied on using pre-programmed actions. “The program told the robot exactly how to move and what to do. It worked like in these Kuka robotic arms, welding cars on factory floors,” says Ji Woong Kim, a robotics researcher who led the study on autonomous surgery. To improve on that, a team led by Axel Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at John Hopkins University, built STAR: the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot. In 2022, it successfully performed a surgery on a live pig.

But even STAR couldn’t do it without specially marked tissues and a predetermined plan. STAR’s key difference was that its AI could make adjustments to this plan based on the feed from cameras.

The new robot can do considerably more. “Our current work is much more flexible,” Kim says. “It is an AI that learns from demonstrations.” The new system is called SRT-H (Surgical Robot Transformer) and was developed by Kim and his colleagues, Krieger added.

The first change they made was to the hardware. Instead of using a custom robot like STAR, the new work relied on the DaVinci robot, which has become a de facto industry standard in teleoperation surgeries, with over 10,000 units already deployed in hospitals worldwide. The second change was the software driving the system. It relied on two transformer models, the same architecture that powers ChatGPT. One was a high-level policy module, which was responsible for task planning and ensuring the procedure went smoothly. The low-level module was responsible for executing the tasks issued by the high-level module, translating its instructions into specific trajectories for the robotic arms.

When the system was ready, Kim’s team put it through a training phase that looked a bit like mentoring a novice human doctor.

Imitation learning

The procedure Kim chose for the robot to master was cholecystectomy, a surgical gallbladder removal routinely performed in US hospitals (roughly 700,000 times a year). “The objective is to remove the tubes connecting the gallbladder to other organs without causing the internal fluids to flow out,” Kim explained. To make that happen, a surgeon has to place three clips on the cystic duct (the first tube), cut it, and then clip and cut the cystic artery (the second tube) in a similar way.

Kim’s team broke this procedure down into 17 steps, sourced lots of porcine gallbladder and liver samples from pig cadavers to experiment on, and had a trained research assistant operate a DaVinci robot, performing the procedure over and over again to build the training data set for the robot.

Algorithms that would power the SRT-H were trained on over 17 hours of video captured from the DaVinci endoscope and cameras installed on its robotic arms. This video feed was complemented by the kinematics data—the exact motions made by the robotic arms—and natural language annotations.

Based on this data, Kim’s robot learned to perform a cholecystectomy with 100 percent success rate when operating on samples it has not been trained on. It could also accept human feedback in natural language—simple tips like “move your arm a bit to the left” or “put the clip a bit higher.” These are the sorts of hints a mentoring surgeon would give to a student and, in a similar way, SRT-H could learn from them over time.

“You can take any kind of surgery, not just this one, train the robot in the same way, and it will be able to perform that surgery,” Kim says. SRT-H was also robust to differences in anatomy between samples, other tissue getting in the way, and imperfect imagery. It could even recover from all the tiny mistakes it was making during the training process. Compared to an expert human surgeon performing the same procedure, the robot was equally precise, although a bit slower.

But it wasn’t robust against corporate affairs.

Robotic secrets

To move from operating on pig cadaver samples to live pigs and then, potentially, to humans, robots like SRT-H need training data that is extremely hard to come by. Intuitive Surgical is apparently OK with releasing the video feed data from the DaVinci robots, but the company does not release the kinematics data. And that’s data that Kim says is necessary for training the algorithms. “I know people at Intuitive Surgical headquarters, and I’ve been talking to them,” Kim says. “I’ve been begging them to give us the data. They did not agree.”

The explanation Intuitive Surgical leadership offered for restricting access to the kinematics data, according to Kim, was they were worried about the competition reverse-engineering the mechanics of their robot. “It’s really the upper management who is not up to speed with AI,” Kim argued. “They don’t realize the potential of these things. Their engineers, every scientist, they want to open-source the data. It’s just their legal department is very conservative.”

But he already sees a way around this problem. “We can start with attaching motion-tracking sensors to manual surgical tools, and get the kinematics data this way,” Kim told Ars. Then, the movements of these tools guided by the hands of expert human surgeons could be recreated by conventional robotic arms like the ones used in STAR.

And then, Kim thinks, we can go even more sci-fi than that. “I’m currently at Stanford, and I’m very involved in a humanoid robotics project—building a general-purpose model. And one of the possible applications is in the operating room,” Kim says.

Science Robotics, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adt5254

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Posted Tuesday 22 July 2025 at 11:33 am AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

After my birth, my mother became allergic to the world. That’s the only way I knew how to put it. So many things could set her off: new carpeting, air fresheners, plastic off-gassing, diesel. Perfumes were among the worst offenders. On top of that, she developed terrible food allergies. The sound of her sniffling became the chorus of my childhood. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed. I’d peek into her darkened room and see her face pinched in discomfort.

Her joints ached, her head swam. Doctors suggested that maybe she was depressed or anxious. “Well, you’d be anxious too if you couldn’t lick an envelope, couldn’t pick up your daughter in a car,” she’d reply. She tried allergists, got nowhere. Finally, she found her way to holistic health, whose practitioners told her she had something called multiple chemical sensitivity.

As long as people have complained that man-made stuff in their environment causes health problems—migraines and asthma, exhaustion and mood swings—the medical establishment has largely dismissed them. The American Medical Association, World Health Organization, and the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy & Immunology don’t recognize chemical sensitivity as a diagnosis. If they talk about it at all, they tend to dismiss it as psychosomatic, a malady of the neurotic and health-obsessed. Why, these authorities wondered, would people react to minute traces of a huge array of chemicals? And why couldn’t they ever seem to get better?

This isn’t some trivial affliction. Roughly a quarter of American adults report some form of chemical sensitivity; it lives alongside chronic pain and fibromyalgia as both evidently real and resistant to mainstream diagnosis or treatment. My mom tried a thousand things—elimination diets, antihistamines, lymphatic massage, antidepressants, acupuncture, red light therapy, saunas, heavy-metal detoxes. Sometimes her symptoms eased, but she never got better. Her illness ruled our lives, dictating what products we bought, what food we ate, where we traveled. I felt there had to be an answer for why this was happening. It didn’t take me long to learn that, if there was one, it’d come from a figure as unassuming as she is provocative: the scientist Claudia Miller.

On a warm Texas afternoon, Miller and her affable husband, Bob, lead me through the San Antonio Botanical Garden. A monarch flits by. “I’ve noticed so many fewer butterflies, so many fewer birds, even the last couple of years,” Miller observes. Her raspy voice comes out so quietly that, at times, my recording device fails to pick it up. People are perpetually leaning in close or asking her to repeat herself. At 78, Miller typically uses a cane, but Bob gets the walker out of the car so she can cover more distance. She wears her silver hair in a low side ponytail, fixed in place with a scrunchie.

With her wide, thin-rimmed glasses, Miller disappears into the scenery, but she’s a particularly visible presence in her field. Now a professor emeritus at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Miller has held several federal appointments, chaired National Institutes of Health meetings, testified before Congress, consulted for the Environmental Protection Agency, authored dozens of papers, and worked with the Canadian, German, Japanese, and Swedish governments. In all this, she has tried to make sense of and raise awareness for chemical intolerance. One patient advocate I interviewed called her “Saint Claudia” for her commitment to overlooked and misunderstood patients. Kristina Baehr, an attorney who defends victims of toxic exposures, told me, “To have experts like Dr. Miller tell them you’re not crazy, this is very real, is very life-giving to people. She’s able to validate their experience with facts, with science.”

One such fact, Miller explains, is this: Over the past century, the United States has undergone a chemical revolution. “Fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, their combustion products, and then their synthetic chemical derivatives are mostly new since World War II,” she says. “Plasticizers, forever chemicals, you name it: These are all foreign chemicals.” They’re everywhere you look, in homes and offices, parks and schools. They’re also, Miller believes, making people very sick.

In 1997, Miller proposed a career-defining theory of how people succumb to this condition. It came with a technical-sounding name, toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, and a convenient acronym, TILT. You can lose tolerance after one severe exposure, Miller says, or after a series of smaller exposures over time. In either case, a switch is flipped: Suddenly, people are triggered by even tiny amounts of everyday substances—cigarette smoke, antibiotics, gas from their stoves—that never bothered them before. These people become, in a word, TILT-ed. It’s not unlike developing an allergy, when the body labels a substance as dangerous and then reacts accordingly.

In 1999, Miller and her colleagues designed the Quick Environmental Exposure and Sensitivity Inventory, or QEESI (pronounced “queasy”), a survey to help doctors and researchers identify chemically intolerant patients. I’ve seen the QEESI cited in papers from 18 countries, but to date, most physicians still don’t know much about it. “It’s very frustrating to try to get these ideas across,” Miller says. The major problem is that, assuming TILT accurately describes the process of becoming chemically intolerant, we don’t know what biological changes occur inside the sensitized body, why so many symptoms crop up, or why one exposed person gets sick while others seem to walk away unscathed. But Miller thinks she’s closer than ever to an answer.

At the botanical garden, we approach an orchid exhibit. Sticky heat engulfs us as we enter. Orchids of varying shapes and colors fill the greenhouse, including one with spindly chartreuse petals. “What do you call this?” Miller asks. My plant-ID app comes up empty. So it goes, too, for chemically intolerant patients: The condition defies easy observation. “The world becomes like a torture chamber, and then nobody believes you,” Miller says. “That’s the worst part.” After falling ill, some people become hermits out of fear of exposure, abandoning their friends and family to live in remote areas. For others, nothing can keep them from spinning out of control. My mother knew someone who tried to escape her triggers by moving to the country in a trailer. Eventually, even that became unmanageable, and the woman shot herself in the head.

Imagine feeling incredibly sick every time you encounter a cloud of cologne or fresh paint, then being told you’re making it up. I thought about my mom. Sometimes, catering to her needs could feel exhausting. But what must that have been like for her? The thing was, I never doubted her condition—especially after what happened on one bad day.

It’s time to tell you the worst thing I have ever done to another person. When I was 10, my parents and I attended a family reunion. The trip was difficult. We fought nonstop. Everyone cried. The photographer hired to capture a family portrait accidentally exposed the film to light, and it was just as well. If we could have wiped the whole week from our minds, we would have.

During that ill-fated trip, my aunt gifted me a set of scented lip balms. My mom offered her a tight smile but, once we were alone, told me to toss them out. Instead, I hid them and, soon, weaponized them. After yet another argument, I sneaked into my mom’s room, peeled back her pillow case, and smeared the lip balms directly onto her pillow. Later that night, as she tried to sleep, she kept waking up, sicker and sicker, her head pounding. Finally, her nose helped her uncover what I’d done. She found the telltale smudges. The next day, my dad told me how she’d sobbed and howled, “Why would she do this to me?”

It remains, for me, a source of immense guilt. Later, I realized it was also the crumb of proof I needed. This was not all in my mother’s head.

I’m at Miller’s condo across the street from the UT Health Science Center, with Miller and two of her collaborators. Her dining room table is lined with household products—a votive candle, a box of matches, body lotion, scented dish detergent. Beside them are chunky gadgets that look like something out of Ghostbusters. These are particulate monitors, which measure down to parts per billion. They need to be hypersensitive, because products like the ones on the table expel tiny molecules, and people with chemical intolerance seem to react to even minuscule doses. It’s akin to someone having an allergic reaction to a bag of peanuts opened on the other end of the airplane. One of her collaborators strikes a single match in front of a sensor. The number on the screen rockets from 0 to almost 500,000 parts per billion. It’s not always about what the nose can detect—though, in this case, sulfur dioxide fills the room.

Last year, Miller’s team published research on house calls for nearly 40 people with chemical intolerance. They measured indoor pollution from products like these, as well as other irritants like dust and mold, and performed blood tests for allergies. Then they recommended tossing out scented candles or moving cans of gasoline from an attached garage to a separate storage unit, and gifted the subjects natural cleaning products. They retested the homes several more times over the course of the year. As the indoor pollution decreased, the subjects’ symptoms improved.

For years, research like this convinced Miller that there was, indeed, something very wrong with her patients. But, again, that pesky mechanism for disease eluded her. Then she learned more about mast cells.

Mast cells are a type of white blood cell that exists in nearly every tissue, including the skin, airways, and gastro-intestinal tract. When they detect something harmful, they can release hundreds of mediators, including histamine, substances that create symptoms like hives or swelling during anaphylactic shock. If the cells become overreactive, releasing too many mediators at the wrong time, a person can end up flushed, dizzy, wheezy, or exhausted. This is called mast cell activation syndrome, or MCAS. When Miller came across a book on the subject by Lawrence Afrin, a hematologist and mast cell disease researcher based in New York, she thought it sounded a lot like chemical intolerance. She called him. Many of his MCAS patients, it turned out, were sensitive to fragrances and medications.

In 2021, Miller published what she considers her second eureka moment: a paper, coauthored with Afrin and others, that explains a potential link between TILT and MCAS. The team surveyed MCAS patients and found that those who scored high on MCAS questionnaires scored high on the QEESI. These patient groups also had nearly identical symptom patterns. Had Miller’s patients had mast cell activation syndrome this whole time? MCAS is a tricky disease to diagnose and treat, but it was something. An answer for the scientific community. An answer for her patients. And an answer for herself.

Because that’s the other part of this story, the part Miller hasn’t been comfortable talking about until now: She, the condition’s leading researcher, suffers from chemical intolerance too.

Miller has difficulty searching her memory about her past. Exact years don’t come back to her, her retellings wander. Attribute it to age or brain fog or both. Still, over hours of conversations and dozens of emails, her story came together.

Born in Milwaukee as the only child of a patent attorney and a teacher, Miller was drawn to science from a young age. After earning her BA in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her master’s in environmental health from UC Berkeley, she spent several years in Chicago working for OSHA and the United Steelworkers union as an industrial hygienist, touring steel mills, coke ovens, and smelters to monitor worker health and safety. She began seeing snapshots of the condition that would define her career. Once, she was called to meet with women who soldered in an electronics plant. “They had some outbreaks of so-called mass psychogenic illness,” Miller said. “A manager brought one of these women into the office. He actually started soldering right in front of us and she starts to have her symptoms, sneezing or whatever.” To the manager, this proved that it was psychological—why should his worker be impacted if he and Miller were not? Miller suspected something else was at play, though she couldn’t put her finger on what.

She met Bob, a fellow industrial hygienist, through OSHA. By 1977, the Millers were newlyweds living in an old home in a verdant area of Lake Forest. They loved gardening and the foxes that visited the nearby pond. But the house had wasps and spiders. Miller did her research and found an EPA-approved pesticide for indoor use, which an exterminator sprayed on her floorboards and eaves. “That changed our whole lives,” Miller said.

Immediately, Miller was walloped with fatigue and mired in confusion. Her husband felt OK, so they decided to still go on their honeymoon in New Orleans. They left their two-month-old Burmese kitten with Miller’s parents. On the trip, they got a call. “This cat looks kind of droopy,” Miller remembers her parents saying. The next day, the kitten died.

Miller suspected that the pesticide had affected both her and her cat, but she couldn’t figure out how to get well. Then she was referred to Theron Randolph, an infamous allergist who broke ranks with the medical establishment after working with chemically sensitive patients. Other allergists stood by the idea that “the dose makes the poison”—basically, that any substance, even water or oxygen, can be harmful in excess, but trace chemicals shouldn’t sicken patients. Randolph disagreed, saying that small doses mattered and that bodies could accumulate toxic burdens over time. He also mounted a campaign against corn, believing it caused inflammation and brain fog. For this and other work, he was ousted from his faculty position at Northwestern University Medical School. By the time Miller met him, he’d become a lightning rod for criticism from peers, who accused him of relying too heavily on patient testimonials and unconventional testing methods.

Unaware of this controversy and desperate to regain her health, she checked herself in for three weeks at one of the “environmental medical units” Randolph had established in the wing of a hospital. In Randolph’s opinion, Miller had to clear out her body before she could determine what was triggering her illness. Miller was confined to a unit with three other sick women, all with different symptoms. The rooms were outfitted with materials that wouldn’t outgas—ceramic-lined floors and walls, metal furniture. The hospital filtered in fresh air, with air-locked entrances. No disinfectants or fragrances were allowed inside. The program began with a nearly weeklong fast. By her third day, Miller felt incredible: “Your head is clear, you can remember things.”

It piqued Miller’s scientific curiosity. Randolph spent a few minutes with patients each day, and Miller flooded him with questions. Eventually, she delayed his rounds so much that he asked if she wanted to come to his staff meetings. Soon, she became a collaborator of sorts and, in the summer of 1979, presented at an NIH meeting on mass psychogenic illness. She discussed case studies of patients who fell ill after specific chemical exposures. This wasn’t hysteria, she argued; there was cause and effect. Afterward, she said, attendees lined up at the microphone to challenge her—a glimpse at the pushback that would shadow her for years.

Randolph suggested Miller attend medical school. If she had any hope of breaking through to the establishment, she recalls him saying, “you’ve got to learn everything they know.” But there were a few problems. The stay at the environmental medical unit only temporarily improved her health. When she returned to her Chicago home, she became sick again. So she and her husband moved to Texas, where Miller became a medical student at UT. “If I had revealed my own intolerances, I would never have been accepted,” she told me. She pretended she was merely interested in allergy and immunology. All the while, she privately struggled. If a patient came in reeking of cigarette smoke, she might be sidelined with dizziness. By that point, most meals made her sick too. “Her main food was chocolate,” Bob jokes. Sometimes, she would fast before her exams to try to regain some of the clarity she felt in Randolph’s care.

After earning her degree, Miller began her “real” work in earnest. She was appointed to the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, where she met Nicholas Ashford, an environmental policy lawyer and MIT professor. When the state of New Jersey tapped Ashford to study chemical sensitivity, he tapped Miller as his coauthor. So began a career-long collaboration. They published their New Jersey report in 1989, followed by a seminal book, Chemical Exposure: Low Levels and High Stakes, in 1991.

Miller confided in Ashford about her condition, but he advised her to continue keeping it a secret. “You don’t want to cloud the good science that you’re doing,” she recalls him telling her. She obliged. The Department of Veterans Affairs contracted her to study Gulf War veterans exposed to chemical weapons who came home and could no longer tolerate common smells like WD-40 or a girlfriend’s nail polish. She corresponded with congressman Bernie Sanders for years to try to get the government to build environmental medical units. She met with some of the 100 EPA workers who, after their department installed latex-backed carpet, complained about blurred vision and chest pain. She testified before the Food and Drug Administration about patients who’d received breast implants and suddenly couldn’t drink alcohol or caffeine. All the while, she suffered her illness in silence. Then, some 40-plus years after her pesticide exposure, Miller found her way to mast cells—and, with that, the confidence to finally come forward.

When Miller and I are alone in her condo, she shows me some of her art. In her office, we stand before two illustrations depicting Don Quixote and his famously misguided quest to become a hero. The first piece shows the aftermath of when he mistook windmills for giants and attacked them. He and his horse lay on the ground, battered, with their legs in the air. “He’s tilting at windmills,” she says. “That’s what I feel like I’m doing.” I understand the play on words, but I don’t say what I’m thinking: that Don Quixote, in his deep obsession, imagined enemies where there were none.

Miller comes across as single—almost monolithically—minded. Her preferred talking points include Elon Musk, whom she brought up to me by phone, in person, over emails. Her research has found that those with high chemical-intolerance scores are 5.7 times more likely to have a child with autism and 2.1 times more likely to have one with ADHD. (Sample size of one here, but I, a child of a chemically intolerant woman, have ADHD.) During my visit, Miller handed me a copy of Musk’s mother’s memoir, which has one line mentioning that she painted her husband’s plane while pregnant with Elon. Miller speculates that this exposure may have influenced his neurological development. (In 2021, Musk publicly stated he has Asperger’s, an autism spectrum disorder.) An article about this “could crack open the field,” as she put it. Perhaps, she wondered aloud, he might even build Randolph-style environmental medical units. Unprompted, Miller wrote me an email one day that read, in its entirety: “When I was an eight-year-old girl, living in Milwaukee, I never imagined I would become a doctor and diagnose the richest man in the world.”

Another sticking point: terminology. She reviles the name “multiple chemical sensitivity,” which she sees as a stigmatizing and imprecise label. On its face, the term does not acknowledge patients TILT-ed by, say, mold exposure, a common initiating event. It’s also dismissed in lawsuits under the Daubert and Frye standards, which let judges block expert testimony on conditions lacking wide scientific acceptance. Multiple chemical sensitivity may describe how many patients feel, Miller says, but it’s a diagnosis without a clear medical explanation. Chemical intolerance is a more accurate term, she argues, and TILT is that missing medical explanation—and that should be the focus of research. This has become one of the issues at the core of her fracturing with the chemical intolerance community. The other, no surprise, is money.

Funding is scarce in this niche and polarizing area. At UT, Miller was able to piece together government grants for some of her work, but she also routinely invested her own money. In 2013, everything changed. An heiress named Marilyn Brachman Hoffman died, leaving more than $50 million to a foundation in her name. Hoffman was a fellow sufferer of chemical intolerance and, throughout her life, corresponded with a handful of scientists, including Miller. In her personal will and trust, Hoffman also gifted $5 million to Harvard for research on “toxicant-induced loss of tolerance.” She noted that Miller should join the advisory committee. Indeed, Miller did so for a year as a part-time senior scientist. Then, in 2015, she and her colleagues set up the Hoffman Program for Chemical Intolerance out of UT Health San Antonio, with funding from the foundation.

The Harvard group never produced any research specifically on TILT (though they did study indoor air pollution, among other things). And, in recent years, the foundation has turned its attention elsewhere—namely, to research about multiple chemical sensitivity. Miller has felt left out in the cold. Hoffman specifically mentioned TILT in her will, not multiple chemical sensitivity. The executor of Hoffman’s will, an estate lawyer who became president of the foundation, worked for a large law firm that had defended pesticide and petrochemical companies. Was the foundation funding multiple chemical sensitivity instead of TILT, Miller wondered, as a way to delegitimize patients? (When asked for comment, the foundation said it’s still open to funding projects related to TILT but added: “The fact that we do not solely use the term TILT, which is almost exclusively associated with Claudia Miller’s work, may be a problem for her, but it is not a conspiracy to hurt people.”)

Miller’s distrust is, in many ways, understandable. Her work butts up against the interests of huge companies and powerful people; she has spent her career watching her patients get dismissed. In an email to her coauthor Ashford, she mentioned that members of the foundation board considered her difficult: “Yes I am difficult—I am precise about my science and will not tolerate any tampering with the truth or any attempts to derail my research.”

I witnessed a piece of the drama myself when I attended an international conference on chemical intolerance, held over Zoom. Though there was one talk specifically on TILT, most of the presenters used the term multiple chemical sensitivity. After a Canadian physician concluded one session, the hosts fielded an audience question. Miller’s coauthor, Ashford, crackled to life. He urged the conference attendees to read his work with Miller and Afrin on mast cells. “We think we have cracked the code on chemical sensitivity,” he said. He then pivoted to criticizing the conference. “Without clarifying what’s causing or priming the patient, we’re not going to get anywhere,” he said. “And I’m very disappointed to see this isn’t emphasized.” He blinked. Silence hung in the digital air. Finally, one of the cohosts diplomatically thanked Ashford for “that intervention.” (Later, Miller told me that she’d been invited to present but had refused because of the focus on multiple chemical sensitivity: “I just couldn’t stomach it.”)

Whether you consider it steadfastness or stubbornness or something else, Miller’s approach has come at the cost of her relationships. Many people I reached out to opted not to speak with me. I began to get similar reactions when I asked sources about her work. They didn’t want to criticize her: She has dedicated her life to this understudied condition, but …

Her biggest barrier is that TILT has yet to be proven. “Where the evidence is not strong, you very often find strongly held opinions,” Jonathan Samet, former dean of the Colorado School of Public Health and member of the Hoffman Foundation’s scientific advisory board, told me. When I asked him specifically about TILT, he took a deep breath. He noted that few people have been so serious about this issue as Miller. “I don’t want to go into a critique—I mean, I think it’s very reasonable to make hypotheses,” he said. “I think the more challenging question is: What is the research that actually tests the hypothesis?”

Supposing that TILT is real, mast cells remain difficult territory. There’s no definitive cause of MCAS, only more (yes) hypotheses. Questions remain: Could TILT cause MCAS, or do patients have preexisting MCAS, which is exacerbated during exposure events? Are these conditions, in fact, related at all? “This is the danger of mistaking association for causation,” Afrin says. “Just because two things are associated does not even begin to say whether one causes the other.”

That 2021 paper that Miller sees as the culmination of her life’s work? It was based on surveys of 147 diagnosed MCAS patients from Afrin’s clinic. Of that group, 59 percent—or 87 people—met the criteria for chemical intolerance. It’s intriguing data but by no means conclusive. Nobody has yet taken a cohort of TILT-ed patients and done lab testing to investigate whether they have MCAS. “In my opinion, that still needs to be done,” Afrin says. “Different doctors have different styles—and Claudia, she’s pretty convinced that we have enough associative evidence that it’s a slam-dunk case. But TILT is just one of a zillion different diseases that MCAS is capable of driving.” And who to fund that research? TILT-ed patients would need to be well enough to travel to a clinic, where MCAS testing then costs thousands of dollars.

Then there’s the string of bodies left in Miller’s wake: An investigator on her UT team stopped speaking to her after she disapproved of some of his research and sent him a cease-and-desist letter for using her survey methodology. Another former staff member, Tatjana Walker, is now executive director of the Hoffman Foundation. The relationship is respectful but strained. When I told Miller that I was arranging to meet Walker, who also lives in San Antonio, she insisted that I could simply call Walker instead. The next day, Miller sent an email to me, Walker, several members of the foundation’s scientific advisory board, and Ashford. In it, she tried to set up a meeting between Walker and me—at Miller’s condo.

I arranged a separate chat with Walker over breakfast. Miller came up quickly. “She’s got a really strong vision of what she thinks the phenomenon is,” Walker said. “And I would not be at all surprised to find out that she’s correct.” As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. “But, in science, we try to take a step back and look at the bigger landscape.” She added that the foundation funds work about multiple chemical sensitivity because that’s the most generally understood term. “Claudia’s invested a ton of time, a lot of thought, and, in many ways, her life,” she said. “That’s it: She’s not the only person who has a thought about it.”

In Miller’s second Don Quixote art piece, the protagonist lies on his deathbed, looking back on his life. Soldiers in the foreground, a windmill in the distance. At this point in the novel, Don Quixote has given up his fantasies. He advises his beloved niece to never marry a man like him.

I still hoped that Miller’s work might bring my own family answers. About 14 years ago, my mom moved to a coastal town in Mexico. I called her up to discuss what I’d learned. As it turned out, she’d become familiar with mast cells several decades before. And? “When I got blood work done, it didn’t show high levels of mast cell activation,” she said. She’d tried a few commonly prescribed mast cell stabilizers, just in case. They didn’t work. My heart sank. Maybe, she added, the tests have changed since then. I told her it could take multiple tests to pin down an MCAS diagnosis and that Afrin said that MCAS patients often need to experiment with a cocktail of meds to find a combination that works. “I would try it again,” my mom said, kindly.

Whatever the case, since moving to Mexico, her health has improved. This aligns with the prevailing treatment for those with chemical intolerance: Avoid your triggers. My mom suspects that living in a foggy part of the San Francisco Bay Area with a lot of mold might have contributed to being TILT-ed. Where she lives now, it’s dry, and many buildings are open-air. She still gets sick and can’t tolerate fragrances and certain foods. But she’s able to go for walks on the beach and run errands. She has more energy at 70 than she did throughout much of my childhood. She says stress reduction was one of the best things for her—and accepting that she might always feel adrift. “I had to stop freaking out,” she said. (Not surprisingly, stress can also exacerbate MCAS flare-ups.)

Today, chemical intolerance is an accepted medical diagnosis in Japan and a recognized disability in Canada. It’s unclear what a path forward might look like in the United States, though the Hoffman Foundation recently put out a request for proposals, which mentioned interest in expanding on mast cell theories and TILT. Miller is ready for everyone else to come around. “I’m not saying I deserve a Nobel Prize,” she tells me. “But it’s at that level.” Her husband chimes in: “Basically a new theory of disease. She thinks big, but the rest of the world doesn’t think that way.”

Miller’s symptoms have improved, which she attributes to stabilizing her mast cells with antihistamines and cromolyn. She also takes pre- and probiotics, plus pancreatic enzymes, to aid her digestion. Still, she can’t drive—she has neuropathy, which she believes stemmed from her pesticide exposure. At the end of our day at the botanical garden, her husband gets behind the wheel of their SUV. Miller rides in back beside a roaring air filter, which she says prevents her from getting sleepy from a buildup of fumes. But she’s exhausted anyway, and the noise drowns out her voice, which is thinner than ever. “The question is, how do you get any of this into medical training?” Miller asks. Her eyelids droop behind her glasses.

There may not be an answer in her lifetime; I hope there will be one in mine. Walker told me that, back when she was working with Miller, “one of Claudia’s favorite expressions was: Science advances one funeral at a time.” It’s much harder to let go of your own ideas than it is to pick up the thread of someone else’s. Though, who knows, maybe that’s what progress requires, like Don Quixote surrendering his illusions on his deathbed. It made me think back to a night in San Antonio when I went out to dinner with Miller and her husband. They paused by a tall water fountain in the restaurant’s courtyard. Miller stepped close and tossed a penny underhand to make a wish. The coin winked in the air and then fell to the ground. Miller wasn’t concerned: “Some lucky person will find it exactly perfect.”

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Posted Tuesday 22 July 2025 at 4:29 am AEST (my time).

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In their normal state, the materials follow the usual rules of thermodynamics. But in what's called a “metastable” state, a kind of temporary balance, they behave in reverse. “When heated, the material shrinks instead of expanding,” said Prof. Shirley Meng, senior author of the study published in Nature. This is linked to what’s known as a disorder–order transition inside the material’s structure. The team recorded a negative thermal expansion rate of −14.4(2) × 10⁻⁶ °C⁻¹, which means the material actually contracts when warmed up. This goes against a common theory called the Grüneisen relationship, which usually explains why materials expand with heat.

And pressure? Even stranger. When they pushed the material on all sides at levels seen in Earth's tectonic plates, it expanded instead of getting smaller. “Negative compressibility is just like negative thermal expansion,” explained Prof. Minghao Zhang. “If you compress a particle of the material in every direction… it will expand.”

They also found that electricity can reset the material’s structure. By tweaking the voltage limits, they recovered almost 100% of the original structure and performance. This has big potential for battery tech, especially electric vehicles (EVs). “When we use the voltage, we drive the material back to its pristine state. We recover the battery,” said Zhang. He added: “You just do this voltage activation… your car will be a new car. Your battery will be a new battery.”

The research may lead to materials with zero thermal expansion, helpful in everything from buildings to aircraft. Zhang noted, “Take every single building, for example. You don't want the materials making up different components to change volume that often.”

As they move forward, the team wants to understand how redox chemistry can further control these effects and expand practical uses. “One of the goals is bringing these materials from research to industry,” said co-first author Bao Qiu. Their work opens up a new way of thinking about material design, where energy doesn’t just power devices, but reshapes the building blocks themselves.

Source: University of Chicago, Nature

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Posted Monday 21 July 2025 at 12:28 pm AEST (my time).

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To see how closely these clocks agreed with each other, the team ran 38 measurements known as frequency ratios. Four of these had never been done directly before, and many were done with better precision than ever. The experiment helps move us closer to updating how the world defines one second potentially switching from cesium clocks to optical ones.

Helen Margolis from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory said, “The accurate time and frequency signals provided by atomic clocks are essential for many everyday technologies like GPS, managing power grids and keeping financial transactions in sync.”

Connecting these clocks over long distances was tricky. Scientists used two linking methods: GPS signals from satellites and custom optical fiber cables. GPS was accessible to all clocks but didn’t offer the best accuracy due to noise and signal issues. Fiber links used in France, Germany and Italy offered 100 times better precision but could only cover short distances. For clocks in the same lab, like those in Germany and the UK, short fiber cables helped reduce uncertainty even more.

The findings were published in Optica, a journal focused on optical science. The team also looked at how the various frequency ratios compared across the different systems to spot any mismatches or patterns.

“These measurements provide critical information about what work is still needed for optical clocks to achieve the precision and reliability required for use in international timekeeping,” said Marco Pizzocaro from Italy’s INRiM. He added that the setup acted like a distributed lab, which could be used for deeper physics research, like searching for dark matter or testing the foundations of physics.

Coordinating all ten clocks and keeping them running in sync across six countries took a lot of preparation. Some results didn’t match predictions, but having so many clocks operating together helped spot where things went wrong.

“Not all the results confirmed what we expected, and we observed some inconsistencies in the measurements,” said Rachel Godun from NPL. “However, comparing so many clocks at once and using more than one technique for linking the clocks made it easier to identify the source of the problem.”

The researchers say more work is needed to cut down measurement uncertainty and make sure these optical clocks stay reliable over time. If they do, these clocks could soon be the ones we use to define time worldwide. As Thomas Lindvall from Finland’s VTT MIKES put it: “With a coordinated set of measurements, it becomes possible to check consistency while also providing more trusted results.”

Source: Optica (link1, link2)

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Posted Monday 21 July 2025 at 12:28 pm AEST (my time).

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