The link was too juicy not to click.

In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?

After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.

Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction.

Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. “Science was more fragmented” then, Khelfaoui says. “You wanted different audiences …  to have access to your work.” The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions).

Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries.

Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.

Suzanne Scarlata, a chemist and biochemist at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, as Naturwissenschaften is now known, had not heard about the retractions before being contacted for this story. “That’s crazy,” she says, “I don’t understand why they were flagged.”

Scarlata suspects Springer Nature’s internal policing software removed the paper and posted the retraction notice unilaterally, without human supervision: “I think it just happened with their algorithm,” she says. “It’s a mistake they should probably rectify.”

Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.” The company also nixed an editorial that Scarlata planned to write about the retractions.

The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work.

Starting in the 1920s, physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg promoted the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which proposes that subatomic particles exist in a strange superposition of multiple states and only cohere into definite form when observed or measured—as in the famous Schrödinger’s cat paradox. Planck opposed this notion, arguing that external reality existed beyond human measurements.

In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly.

The debate over the Copenhagen interpretation remains active today, which explains why Gingras and Khelfaoui find the retractions so troubling: A key scientist’s views on an important controversy have been memory holed.

Both Scarlata and Gingras are concerned that papers by less prominent scientists have disappeared as well without anyone realizing. At a minimum, Gingras wants Planck’s papers restored. “Whoever did it, I don’t care,” he says, “just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”

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I’m finding the heatwave hitting Europe really scary. It’s bad enough in itself, with many records being broken, especially for the higher nighttime temperatures that make it so much harder to cope. But I just keep thinking, “If it’s like this now, what’s it going to be like in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time?”

The answer, of course, is hotter and hotter and hotter. In the UK, national weather service the Met Office has just warned that, by 2056, there could be nine days in a row with temperatures above 40°C (104°F), with some places hitting 45°C (113°F). In just 30 years! I’ve seen at least one piece asking “is this the new normal?” about the current heatwave, but we’re never going to have normal in our lifetimes again – just ever more extreme heat.

It’s possible to get through even worse heatwaves than this if all your infrastructure and systems are geared up to cope. But the UK is very much not prepared. The air conditioning in New Scientist’s office, for instance, is failing to keep up with the heat as I write – and lots of people have to endure this hot weather without any air conditioning at all. In a sign of the times, a meeting on adapting to extreme heat – part of London Climate Action Week – got cancelled because of extreme heat.

Climate scientists are continually warning of the need to prepare for hotter heatwaves, worse droughts, more flooding and rising seas. During heatwaves like this one, they might even get a little media coverage. But then the weather cools, the news agenda moves on and nothing is ever done.

That’s not just my view – it’s the official verdict of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, which advises the UK government. “Adaptation progress is either too slow, has stalled, or is heading in the wrong direction,” it said in a report last year. Everyone seems to assume this green and pleasant land is going to remain green and pleasant, but it won’t. We’re heading towards catastrophe, but never looking up.

There are many aspects of this that frighten me. Firstly, emissions are still rising, so the fundamental cause of the problem is getting worse. True, it’s not getting worse as fast as it was, but we are currently on course for average global surface temperatures to rise by between 2.1°C and 3.3°C by 2100, and possibly even more.

Even these alarming numbers are a little misleading because the oceans that cover most of the planet don’t warm as fast as the land. Average land temperatures are therefore going to go up by a lot more than the above numbers imply.

And what really matters to us is extreme weather, not the average. The projections for future extremes are already dire, and there are reasons to think that we’re in for extremes even greater than those currently projected for a given level of warming. For starters, heatwaves are already more extreme than projected in some parts of the world. One reason for this is that climate models may not be capturing how the dynamics of the jet streams change in a warmer world. Another is that regional models haven’t accounted for reductions in sunlight-blocking air pollution.

The next level beyond is how bad the knock-on effects of this extreme weather will be. These kinds of things are very difficult to project because so many complex systems are involved, but here, too, there is reason to think we are underestimating the impacts.

For starters, we could see mass deaths even among young people as heatwaves get more extreme. Then there’s our ability to feed people, the basis of civilisation. There’s growing evidence that global warming is already hitting food production, pushing up prices and causing yet more deforestation as farmers try to compensate.

As ever more weather extremes hit the world at the same time, the economic impacts are going to get ever more serious, too. One 2024 study warned that the result could be the worst global financial crisis ever.

And I haven’t even mentioned the wild cards, such as the Amazon drying up or the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation shutting down. One researcher I chatted with at a recent conference thinks a slowdown of this crucial current system around 12,000 years ago triggered extreme seasonality in places like Britain, with sweltering summers, but temperatures plummeting tens of degrees below freezing in winter.

The fact is, the world is changing fast and we need to change just about every aspect of our lives to adapt – our homes and offices, factories and schools, cars and trains, farms and gardens, and so on. But it’s not happening.  That’s why if you’re not scared witless by this heatwave, you should be.

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This week’s heatwave is the hottest ever recorded in Europe, as well as the most humid, and it is likely to cause thousands of deaths.

Although a potential “super El Niño” is forming in the Pacific Ocean, this did not play a role in the heatwave, a study by the World Weather Attribution network of scientists has found. Instead, global warming is clearly to blame.

The study analysed how likely the average daily maximum temperature projected for 26 to 28 June in western and central Europe would have been in the cooler climates of 1976 and of 2003.

While the weather pattern – a low-pressure heat dome that is trapping hot air from the south – is not unusual, the temperatures are. 50 years ago, a typical June heatwave would have been about 3.5°C cooler, and the temperatures seen over the next three days would have been a less than one-in-10,000-year occurrence.

Daytime temperatures have exceeded 44°C  (111°F) in one French town, and nighttime temperatures have remained above 30°C (86°F) in parts of Spain.

“This event would not have been possible in June without climate change,” Theodore Keeping at Imperial College London said at a media briefing on 25 June. “The three-day nighttime temperatures would not have been possible at any time of year without climate change.”

The humidity has also been unprecedented, reaching more than 50 per cent in many British cities. Dew-point temperatures have been in the low 20s, as compared to the single digits during the July 2022 heatwave that set the UK’s temperature record.

The wet-bulb globe temperature, which measures not just air temperature but also humidity, heat radiation and air movement, has broken or is expected to break records in almost half of European cities, the study found.

Humidity amplifies health risks because it slows evaporation, making sweating less effective. While older people or those who have a chronic illness are in particular danger, so are migrants and people experiencing homelessness.

“What we see very clearly… is how unequal the effects of this heatwave are and how that really demonstrates the inequality that widens due to climate change,” said Friederike Otto, also at Imperial College London. “Because it’s of course people who are particularly vulnerable who are most likely to lose their lives.”

While it’s too soon to look at excess mortality, a previous study found a smaller heatwave in June and July of 2025 killed 2300 people in London and 11 other European cities.

“The health impacts of this heatwave are likely to be extremely high across large parts of northern and central Europe,” said Keeping.

Heatwaves will become even more intense and frequent unless we rapidly cut fossil fuel emissions, the researchers stressed. And Europe, the fastest warming continent, is not ready, as it has an ageing, urban population living in cities built for a cooler era. In the UK, only 5 per cent of homes have air conditioning.

Besides AC, Europe should invest in passive cooling like building insulation, ventilation, green roofs and walls and trees along streets, they said. It should also expand its heat response to include oft-forgotten groups like people with mental health conditions and those who are pregnant, said Carolina Pereira Marghidan at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

“Europe has heat action plans, but research has also shown that sometimes they do not cover all the groups that may be vulnerable,” she said.

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•     Omega-3 supplements alone may not improve brain health, especially if paired with an unhealthy lifestyle.
•     A new study found no difference in memory or brain health between people taking omega-3 supplements and those taking a placebo.
•     Eating omega-3-rich foods like salmon and walnuts, along with healthy habits, may benefit brain health more than supplements.

 Many people take an omega-3 fish oil supplement to help lower their risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids have been shown to lower blood pressure, boost good cholesterol, maintain cell health, and reduce the risk for cancer, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease. The body, though, doesn't produce omega-3s on its own. Instead, these fatty acids must be obtained from foods such as salmon, herring, mackerel, sardines, walnuts, chia seeds, and flaxseeds, or by taking supplements.

But a new clinical trial found that supplements did nothing to improve memory, cognition, or brain cell loss.

The results of the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial were recently published in The Lancet journal eBioMedicine. The study divided 365 people without dementia between the ages of 55 and 80 into treatment and placebo groups. All had extremely low omega-3 levels and at least one risk factor for dementia, such as obesity, sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure, or cholesterol. Nearly 50 percent had at least one copy of the APOE4 gene, which increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's. 

The treatment group received a high-dose omega-3 algae supplement (2,000 milligrams of DHA) each day for 24 months. The control group took a placebo for the same period. Both groups also took a vitamin B complex. All participants underwent MRI brain scans, blood draws, and cognitive testing at various points throughout the study.

Even though the levels of omega-3 had risen in the brains of the people who took the supplement, there were no improvements in cognition or in the size of the hippocampus—the brain's memory center.

“In fact, there was no real difference between people taking an omega-3 supplement and those taking a placebo,” lead study author Dr. Hussein Yassine, the Volke Endowed Professor of Neurology at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles, told CNN.

The researchers suggest that supplements are most effective for those who adhere to a healthier lifestyle.

“In the Mediterranean, high omega-3 levels are very strong predictors of good cognition,” Yassine said. “But people in the Mediterranean are not popping supplements. They're eating fatty fish, exercising, meeting with friends, and living slowly with less stress."

“In that context, omega-3s are shining, helping the brain,” he added. “But if you eat a typical Western diet with fast food, don't exercise, and are stressed out all day from work, our study showed having more omega-3 in your brain doesn't move the needle.”

More research is needed on the topic of omega-3 supplementation, memory, and cognition. 

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New observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have eliminated the last remaining impact threat posed by asteroid 2024 YR4, ruling out the possibility that the near-Earth object could strike the Moon in December 2032.

NASA said observations collected by Webb on February 18 and 26, 2026, enabled scientists to refine the asteroid's orbit enough to "rule out a chance of lunar impact on Dec. 22, 2032." Instead, asteroid 2024 YR4 is now expected to pass the Moon at a distance of about 13,200 miles (21,200 km). The agency stressed that the update "reflects improved precision in our understanding of where the asteroid is expected to be in 2032 rather than a shift in its orbital path."

The announcement closes a remarkable chapter in planetary defence that began in late 2024, when the approximately 60-metre-wide asteroid briefly became the most closely watched near-Earth object in the world.

Discovered on December 27, 2024, by the ATLAS telescope in Chile, 2024 YR4 initially appeared to have a small chance of colliding with Earth on December 22, 2032. As astronomers gathered more observations, the impact probability briefly climbed to around 3%—the highest ever recorded for an asteroid of its size—before steadily falling as its orbit became better understood.

By early 2025, international observations had ruled out any significant risk to Earth. However, astronomers were left with another possibility: a roughly 4% chance that the asteroid could instead strike the Moon.

"The probability that asteroid 2024 YR4 will strike the Moon on 22 December 2032 is now approximately 4%," the European Space Agency (ESA) had said last year, noting that "there is a 96% chance that the asteroid will not impact the Moon."

ESA said such an impact, while unlikely, would have presented an extraordinary scientific opportunity.

"It is a very rare event for an asteroid this large to impact the Moon – and it is rarer still that we know about it in advance. The impact would likely be visible from Earth, and so scientists will be very excited by the prospect of observing and analysing it," said Richard Moissl, Head of ESA's Planetary Defence Office.

"It would certainly leave a new crater on the surface. However, we wouldn't be able to accurately predict in advance how much material would be thrown into space, or whether any would reach Earth," he added.

The asteroid also exposed an important blind spot in planetary defence. Because 2024 YR4 approached Earth from the direction of the Sun, it remained hidden from ground-based telescopes until after its closest approach.

"We looked into how Neomir would have performed in this situation, and the simulations surprised even us," Moissl said.

"Neomir would have detected asteroid 2024 YR4 about a month earlier than ground-based telescopes did. This would have given astronomers more time to study the asteroid's trajectory and allowed them to much sooner rule out any chance of Earth impact in 2032."

He added, "As an infrared telescope, like Webb, Neomir would have also immediately given us a much better estimate for the asteroid's size, which is very important for assessing the significance of the hazard."

The latest NASA observations underscore the value of space-based infrared telescopes in tracking faint asteroids. According to NASA, Webb made "among the faintest ever observations of an asteroid," extending the object's observational record by nearly eight months at a time when it had become too faint for other telescopes. That additional data allowed scientists to eliminate the remaining uncertainty surrounding its 2032 flyby.

Although asteroid 2024 YR4 is now confirmed to pose no threat to either Earth or the Moon, scientists say its discovery remains one of the most significant real-world tests of the international planetary defence system, demonstrating how continued observations can rapidly transform an object once considered hazardous into one whose future path is known with high confidence.

Source: NASA, ESA

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

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Posted Friday 26 June 2026 at 2:28 pm AEST (my time).

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Ford recently announced that over the last three years, it's had to rehire about 350 "gray beard" engineers to mentor younger staff and reprogram diagnostic systems and AI tools that were failing to meet up to quality expectations.

The company's VP of vehicle hardware engineering, Charles Poon said that leaders overlooked the deep experience of veterans who survived many product cycles. Poon admitted that simply replacing them with AI was a huge mistake, and that while AI is "a fantastic tool," it remains "only as good as the information you use to train it."

The rehired engineers now run mandatory meetings to troubleshoot vehicles and reprogram automated engineering software and AI tools to prevent glitches before production. These technical specialists hunt for failure points before parts ever reach the plant floor, helping prevent the massive recalls and defects that previously cost the company billions as it aims to cut one billion dollars in expenses this year.

In last year's JD Power Quality Survey, an annual study that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership, Ford finished 10th among mainstream brands and scored below the industry average. But this year, JD Power ranked the automaker as the top mainstream brand, placing it above the likes of Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ford attributed this massive improvement directly to the expertise of these returned engineers.

Ford's realization that AI cannot magically design and test quality vehicles without senior human oversight is just the tip of the iceberg. When Careerminds looked at companies that conducted AI-driven layoffs, researchers found out that 35.6% of those companies had to rehire more than half of the employees they previously fired. Another 32.7% had to rehire between 25% and 50% of them.

In 2024, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, proudly announced that its new chatbot was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. As a result, the fintech company froze hiring and cut hundreds of positions. But by mid 2025, and into 2026, Klarna was scrambling to recruit human agents again because customer satisfaction had plummeted. It turns out, while AI is very good at answering basic questions like how to check an account balance, when faced with complex customer issues that require nuance, the thing usually resorts to the unhelpful, robotic corporate jargon we all know and love.

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Posted Friday 26 June 2026 at 2:27 pm AEST (my time).

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A new chip architecture from IBM can integrate nearly 100 billion transistors on a chip the size of a human fingernail—nearly twice the transistor density of the company’s previous generation of chip technology. The resulting improvement in chip compute performance and energy efficiency comes from what IBM describes as the “world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology” for AI data centers.

“It’s not just an incremental step, it’s a meaningful leap forward,” said Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, in an advance media briefing. He described the new chip technology as “pointing to a future where computing becomes significantly more powerful without a corresponding increase in energy.”

It’s worth unpacking what the “world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology” means, because it is impractical to build reliably functional chips with transistors and other features smaller than 1 nanometer due to various physical limitations. Instead, IBM is basically claiming that its new “nanostack” architecture can deliver the computing performance improvements that would be expected if a theoretical chip could be built with physical features smaller than 1 nanometer.

Specifically, IBM describes its new chip technology as being built at the 0.7-nanometer node, which it has named the 7 angstrom node because 1 nanometer consists of 10 angstroms.

But keep in mind that such node numbers have nothing to do with the actual physical dimensions of IBM’s chip features. Older generations of chips developed in the 1970s and 1980s had physical features with dimensions matching the number in the name of their chip technology’s node or process—such as chips made at the 180-nanometer node—but that has not been the case for decades and certainly not for the latest chip generations made with a 3-nanometer or 2-nanometer process.

To overcome the physical scaling limits facing modern chip designers, IBM’s new nanostack architecture vertically stacks transistors in a staggered layout to pack more transistors into the same chip space. The nanostack architecture builds on the company’s prior development of nanosheet transistors that paved the way for its 2-nanometer chip node introduced in 2021.

The basic unit of IBM’s nanostack architecture consists of two transistors stacked and bonded together. Each transistor consists of three nanosheets that are individually 5 nanometers thick, equivalent to about 15 rows of silicon atoms. There is also a distance of about 9 nanometers separating each nanosheet.

Performance gains for the AI era

The nanostack architecture could pave the way for 50 percent higher computing performance or 70 percent greater energy efficiency than IBM’s previous generation of 2-nanometer node chips, according to projections from the company’s published technical reports. The company introduced its nanostack transistor architecture at the 2025 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits held in Kyoto, Japan.

IBM researchers also showed how the nanostack architecture can provide 40 percent improvement in scaling for static random-access memory (SRAM) during the VLSI 2026 symposium. SRAM allows for fast but energy-intensive read and write operations that are crucial in many AI applications.

The memory improvement is made possible through a staggered-channel design for the chip’s SRAM bit cells—memory storage units consisting of six transistors—that reduces overall cell height by 40 percent and enables more SRAM to be squeezed into the same chip space.

That will probably be welcome news for chip designers looking to support AI workloads, given how SRAM scaling has fallen off drastically in recent generations of chip technologies. For example, SRAM scaling improved just a few percent between the 3-nanometer chip generation and the 2-nanometer chip generation, Gambetta explained.

“This achievement of 40 percent will eventually industrialize itself in AI workflows, which require higher bandwidth and high efficiency,” Gambetta said.

The roadmap for sub-1 nanometer nodes

As a company that performs chip technology research, IBM does not manufacture commercial chips that could end up in AI data centers or consumer devices. Instead, IBM has partnered with semiconductor companies such as Rapidus in Japan to mass manufacture its previous generation of 2-nanometer node chips based on the nanosheet architecture, or to commercialize related technology in another partnership with Samsung in South Korea.

Other companies have followed up on IBM’s pioneering work without any direct collaboration. For example, Taiwan’s TSMC independently developed nanosheet transistors for its own proprietary 2-nanometer node technology.

“Nanosheet has become the foundation of the next generation of transistor scaling,” said Huiming Bu, vice president of IBM Semiconductors Global R&D and IBM Research, during the media briefing. “Today, nanosheet is adopted by all leading foundries for most of the 3-nanometer chips and all of the 2-nanometer chips.”

IBM declined to name specific companies that it may partner with to commercialize the newest sub-1-nanometer node technology. But Bu expects that commercial chips made at the sub-1-nanometer node and incorporating the newest nanostack architecture could begin production as early as in the next five years and most likely within a decade.

“It will replace nanosheet as today’s mainstream in leading foundries, whether it’s CPUs or GPUs,” Bu said. “Within a decade, this will become another mainstream that we have invented and helped industry to transform.”

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Posted Friday 26 June 2026 at 8:54 am AEST (my time).

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For most of human history, our view of “close to the Sun” was defined by the orbit of Mercury, with its 88-day orbit and barren, baking surface. But from the moment we started discovering exoplanets, it became very clear that our own Solar System was anything but a guide to the rest of the galaxy. Planets with orbits only a few days long are strikingly common, with the proximity to the star creating things that seem bizarre from our perspective: metal vapor in the atmosphere, or atmospheres puffed out to ridiculously low densities.

Now, we can apparently add an additional oddity: overlapping magnetic fields. Researchers have found a star/planet combo that experiences periodic brightening, which they ascribe to the interactions between the magnetic fields of both bodies.

Looking for repetition

This is one of those cases where theory came before discovery. People had already proposed that a planet orbiting close to its host star could interact with it if its magnetic field were sufficiently strong. And, in a number of cases, researchers have found evidence that this is happening, with one case of an extremely young star emitting flares seemingly in response to the orbit of its innermost planet.

An international team of researchers has created the most comprehensive look at flaring in a star with a close-in planet. The star itself is called GJ 436, a red dwarf half the mass of the Sun that resides about 30 light-years from Earth. It has a single known exoplanet that is about four times as massive as Earth, and it completes an orbit every 2.6 days.

The researchers focused on the chromosphere, a thin layer near the exterior of the star that has emissions that are dominated by a relatively small number of ions and is known to be influenced by the star’s magnetic environment. The researchers used specific emissions from hydrogen and calcium ions as a marker for activity in the chromosphere.

We’ve been observing GJ 436 for years, so the team had a huge amount of archival data to search through. The team looked for periodic fluctuations in the emissions at the relevant wavelengths as a potential sign of a fluctuating magnetic influence. They found one, roughly the same period as the planet’s orbit, suggesting that the magnetic interactions were either limited to, or peaked at, one specific orbital configuration.

Why didn’t the signal line up precisely with the planet’s orbit? A model they produced helps explain this by also including factors like the star’s rotation, the uneven distribution of activity across the star’s surface, and the fact that the planet’s axis of rotation (and thus its magnetic field) probably isn’t precisely perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. With all of those factors considered, it’s possible to figure out how all of these details can produce a signal that lags the orbital period by a few hours.

It comes and goes

There were some other oddities, though. One is that there are no signs of enhanced activity from various other elements that are thought to be present in the chromosphere of most stars. The researchers, however, note that the chromosphere itself has multiple layers and propose that the signal they’re seeing is originating in the lower chromosphere.

The second issue was that in some observations, there were no periodic signals at all. Because we have enough archival observation data, however, the researchers were able to track when the signal appeared and disappeared. And they were able to find a periodicity to that—one that lined up precisely with the star’s cyclic activity. (Think of our Sun’s solar cycle, and apply that to a different star.)

The researchers suspect that, during high solar activity, the signal from the planet’s magnetic influence is swamped. At low periods in the cycle, the researchers suspect that there simply isn’t enough activity there for the magnetic interactions to enhance. So, they think that we see the enhanced chromosphere emissions only at intermediate levels of stellar activity.

How is the magnetic influence showing up on the star in the first place? The researchers consider a number of theoretical models, but the only one that produces enough energy at the chromosphere is one where loops of magnetic field connect the fields of the planet and the star. This model allows them to estimate the strength of the planet’s magnetic field, which they put at a minimum of 6 Gauss, over 10 times the strength of Earth’s.

While that all may seem a bit extreme, it’s not especially unusual, even in our Solar System. The magnetic field strength is similar to that of Jupiter, and Neptune’s magnetosphere extends out to far greater distances than the gap between GJ 436 and its planet.

As we noted above, this is the most comprehensive look at magnetic-driven flaring in an exosolar system, but it’s not the first. And there are hundreds of additional systems with close-in planets that we can still examine. So, in time, having measurements of exoplanet magnetic fields may become commonplace.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv3075 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 26 June 2026 at 8:40 am AEST (my time).

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All the Homo naledi skeletons in Rising Star Cave are female, and that probably didn’t happen by accident.

In 2013, a team of anthropologists led by Lee Berger unearthed the remains of more than 20 small-bodied hominins (ancient relatives of humans), all 335,000 to 236,000 years old, from the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa. Excavations at Rising Star have sparked debate about whether these little hominins had all ended up in the caves by tragic accident, or whether they’d been carefully placed there by other members of their enigmatic species, dubbed Homo naledi.

Now there’s a plot twist that may speak to how the remains got there: All of the hominins in Rising Star are female, at least according to the proteins in their dental enamel.

Little bits of teeth had a big surprise

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology molecular scientist Palesa Madupe and her colleagues recently analyzed the proteins in dental enamel from 23 Homo naledi teeth unearthed in four different cave chambers deep in the Rising Star system. Those 23 teeth came from at least 20 different individuals, ranging from babies with their first tiny teeth to older adults with teeth worn down from decades of chewing.

All of the samples contained a protein called amelogenin-X, or AMELX, which is encoded in the DNA of the X-chromosome. But not a single sample contained the male version, AMELY, which is encoded on the Y-chromosome.

In genetically male humans, dental enamel usually contains about a tenth as much AMELY as AMELX, and Madupe and her colleagues say that given the level of AMELX in their samples, they should have been able to detect AMELY if it was there. But it seemingly wasn’t. It appears that every single skeleton in the cave system, meaning every known Homo naledi (except the ones for whom the anthropologists found only bones, not teeth), is genetically female.

The odds of that being a coincidence are about the same as the odds of flipping a coin 20 times and landing on the same side every time: 0.0000954 percent, according to Madupe and her colleagues. In other words, the metaphorical coin must be weighted—in this case, by hominins doing things on purpose, like laying their dead to rest in the narrow, twisting darkness of Rising Star.

“This was no longer chance, at this point,” Berger (also a co-author of the recent study) tells Ars Technica.

Rising Star is a tomb

It’s technically possible that the code for AMELY just got deleted from the DNA; that happens sometimes in humans, and it has happened in at least one Neanderthal. But it’s extremely rare—so rare that it’s unlikely to explain what’s going on with Homo naledi. It’s much more likely that the dead hominins in Rising Star actually are all genetically female.

It’s not unusual to find mostly female groups of primates in nature: Chimpanzees and gorillas both live in groups where nearly all of the adults are female. Even so, the group inevitably includes children of both sexes. But even the babies in Rising Star are all female.

“It is rarely the case that we have such clear evidence of culture as this case is,” University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks, another co-author of the recent study, tells Ars Technica. “It’s like, there is no other process that can make this happen.”

It’s technically possible, perhaps, that Homo naledi divided up the work of hunting and gathering, or even some kind of ritual activity, in a way that meant females were the ones venturing deep into the cave and getting lost or trapped. But if they took the children with them, then we should see males among the tiny skeletons that make up half the sample. The most likely option now looks like Homo naledi buried its dead.

Berger and his colleagues have been arguing in favor of that point for years, but now there’s more: It also looks like Homo naledi, with its chimp-sized brain, even had a concept of gender as a part of an individual’s identity that mattered even in death.

Some aspects of this reconstruction will need updates.

Credit: Kiona Smith

What else do Homo naledi’s proteins tell us?

The protein analysis also offers some hope of answering one of the many lingering questions about Homo naledi: How are they related to us and the other members of the hominin family tree? The bones themselves offer more questions than answers.

Homo naledi’s face, hands, and legs look more like ours and other recent hominins, but its torso looks more like apes and earlier hominins called Australopithecines. It walked very much like us, but was also still built for spending more time in the trees than we do. And its brain is about the size of a chimpanzee’s, but it’s shaped and organized a lot like ours.

It turns out that five of the 20 Homo naledi in the study have a version of a particular protein in common with Paranthropus robustus, an even earlier hominin relative that lived between 2 million and 1 million years ago. And in 15 of the Homo naledi teeth, Madupe and her colleagues found another protein version that’s apparently unique to Homo naledi. That’s not quite enough to build a hominin family tree with, but it’s a tantalizing hint, and an indication that ancient proteins in teeth could reveal even more about extinct hominins.

University of Copenhagen paleoproteomics researcher Enrico Cappellini, also a co-author of the study, hopes the team will sequence proteins from other South African hominins, as well as species from Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia in east Africa. That could reveal whether that protein variant is actually unique to Homo naledi; if so, it could be used to identify other fossils. And comparing the protein variants of Homo naledi to those in species like Homo erectus and Australopithecus africanus could help shed light on how all of these species are related.

“That’s the aspiration, to start to have molecular evidence that is rich enough to be informative for reconstruction of early hominin evolution in Africa and outside Africa,” Cappellini tells Ars Technica.

Getting that kind of evidence is going to require not just sampling more hominins from more species, but taking a risk on sampling that requires cutting deeper into fossil teeth. Dentin, the material inside teeth, contains more proteins than enamel, which means it might offer more answers—but at the cost of damaging rare and irreplaceable fossils.

“For now, we wanted to deliver these results and see the feedback from the scientific community,” says Cappellini. “Based on that, we will continue with further analysis.”

Some of that analysis may eventually include ancient DNA. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of our closest hominin relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans, but the Homo naledi remains at Rising Star are older, and South Africa’s heat breaks down DNA faster and more thoroughly than where those other remains were found. A decade ago, Berger’s team tried sequencing Homo naledi DNA, but the material in the bones had broken down too much to get a sample. Since then, Hawks says, the team has unearthed other bones that might be better preserved, and sampling and sequencing technologies have also improved.

“We are assessing whether it’s now promising to do DNA sampling, and I am hopeful,” says Hawks. “I can’t yet predict what outcome we might get.”

Artist’s reconstruction of the burial of an adult H. naledi found in Feature 1 from the Dinaledi Chamber.

Credit: L. Berger et al., 2023

So where are the males?

Meanwhile, where are all the Homo naledi males? Hominins are a long, long way from reproducing by parthenogenesis, so they must be somewhere.

When Berger and his colleagues discovered the species—and up until they got the results of the protein analysis back in 2024—they assumed that male and female Homo naledi just happened to be very similar in size and build, since all the skeletons looked so much alike. Many ape species, like gorillas, have drastic size differences between the sexes, which scientists call sexual dimorphism. Homo naledi was, Berger thought, the least sexually dimorphic hominin anyone had ever seen.

So much for that idea! “Our study helps resolve the long-standing mystery of why Homo naledi lacked significant variation,” says Madupe in a recent press release about the study. “It’s probably because they could have all belonged to one sex.”

No one actually knows what a male Homo naledi looks like, and that opens up some interesting possibilities. There could, of course, be a chamber in Rising Star or at another nearby site where Homo naledi laid its menfolk to rest. But Hawks has another suspicion.

“I do think that there are other fossils from other sites that we have previously ruled out as naledi, in some cases, because they’re bigger than naledi,” he says. “If the males are much larger, differently developed, we don’t know that we don’t already have a male that we haven’t recognized as Homo naledi, because we’re looking for something that looks much more like our small female sample.”

Exploration team members Megan Berger and Rick Hunter navigate the narrow chutes leading to the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave in South Africa, where fossil elements belonging to Homo naledi were discovered.

Credit: Robert Clark/National Geographic

Extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence

The case for burial in the Rising Star system has been contentious for years. Part of the challenge is that it’s hard to know for sure when something counts as a grave, given the wide diversity in how our own species deals with its dead. Where is the line between laying the dead to rest and simply disposing of the body?

But part of the contention comes because the scientific community tends to set a very high bar for accepting evidence that other species (even other hominins) actually do the things that we’ve always thought make humans special. Hominins have been making stone tools for at least 3 million years, but anthropologists and animal behavior researchers still put tool-making in a different category of behavior than, say, painting a cave wall or imagining an afterlife. And for many anthropologists, earlier hominins with those capabilities—once considered uniquely human—are a hard sell.

There’s an ongoing debate about Neanderthal art and abstract thought despite a growing pile of evidence. And that sort of debate rises in intensity when the early hominins in question have brains as relatively small as Homo naledi’s, which is about the size of a chimpanzee’s.

“There is a divide in the field between those that think that humans evolved from cultural species that were before us, and those that believe that culture originated with modern humans,” says Hawks, “so they resist any claims of culture earlier unless they have some sort of extraordinary evidence.”

But the existence of culture in the hominins that preceded (and sometimes overlapped with) us isn’t really such an extraordinary claim anymore. That’s partly thanks to the evidence from other species like Neanderthals and partly thanks to other evidence at Rising Star that suggest that Homo naledi used fire, something that our species and Neanderthals were also doing by this point in prehistory. They even left behind engravings on the rock, which Berger, Hawks, and their colleagues described in a 2023 paper.

Those engravings in Rising Star stayed on Berger’s mind for months afterward. “Those symbols weren’t meant for us. Whatever they’re meant for, it certainly wasn’t for a Homo sapiens,” he says. “They were meant either for them to come back to, their descendants to come back to, or some other purpose, but they weren’t meant for us.”

Moments after discovery, Lee Berger holds a photographic scale next to a crosshatched engraving in the passage between the Hill Antechamber burial chamber and the Dinaledi Burial Chamber known as Panel A.

Credit: Mathabela Tsikoane/National Geographic

Making first contact

“This is our first contact with a—and I think it’s important to repeat this—a non-human species. Their brains are not human brains,” says Berger. And he’s deeply concerned about how humanity navigates that first contact.

Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically, anatomically, and cognitively very much like us. So much so that some anthropologists argue that we shouldn’t consider them separate species at all. And no other hominin species, meaning none of the Australopithecines and not even Homo erectus, have presented us with such clear evidence that they tended to their dead and etched art or symbols on the cave walls nearby. In other words, Homo naledi might have thought and felt in ways that we have to recognize as on a level with our own cognition.

Homo naledi’s protein results, with their grave implications (not sorry), prompted Berger and his team to pause their excavations in the cave system, although analysis in the lab continues. He hopes the protein study will prompt anthropologists and Homo sapiens in general to seriously think about the ethics of digging up the graves of an intelligent and cultured but non-human species.

“It certainly will mean we have to stop digging hominins like dinosaurs,” Berger says. “I think that we have the responsibility to be respectful, but we also have a responsibility to also be real. This is more like a Star Trek episode, you know? I know what we do if it’s a human culture, but it isn’t one.” The first step, he points out, is understanding more about Homo naledi and their culture, which will require more excavation and more lab work.

Cell, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.044 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 26 June 2026 at 8:39 am AEST (my time).

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Formula E is in its final year for the current technical regulations, with a new single-seater EV set to be introduced at the start of next season, which begins in December in Saudi Arabia. The new car, known as GEN4, is a big upgrade—at times more powerful than a Formula 1 car, although heavier and with much less downforce. As speeds rise with the GEN4 car, we knew the sport would become too fast for some of its current venues.

With the release of the season 12 calendar for 2026–2027, that limitation has become clear: a 21-race lineup across 13 cities that now includes several traditional race tracks.

The Saudi double-header is scheduled for December 18 and 19 and is the only season 12 round this year. Then the series starts 2027 off with a string of Formula 1 venues in North America: Mexico on January 16, the Circuit of the Americas in Texas on February 7, and the Miami International Autodrome on February 20. The addition of COTA to Formula E’s calendar makes it the seventh US location for the sport since 2015, including the American Airlines Arena in actual Miami; Long Beach, California; Brooklyn, New York; Portland, Oregon; Homestead-Miami, and the Hard Rock Stadium on the outskirts of Miami.

The race at COTA will use the shorter version of that circuit, as used by NASCAR for its visits, rather than the full F1 configuration. This spares the inevitable lap-time comparisons between the two series, but the new calendar marks a clear departure from one of the series’ original selling points: racing in city centers where no other series could come visit.

Some traditional Formula E tracks remain. Berlin-Templehof takes place in May, as does the Monaco e-Prix. But the indoor-outdoor ExCel Arena in London has been outgrown; instead, Formula E will race at the Brands Hatch circuit in Kent, just outside London, in late May. It is believed that rather than use either the Indy or GP configurations of this historic circuit, the sport will use a unique layout, similar to the way Formula E’s Monaco is ever so slightly changed from the F1 layout used a couple of weeks later.

Zandvoort in the Netherlands—another F1 venue—takes place in mid-June, followed by Jarama in Spain at the end of that month, then Shanghai at another F1 track in early July, and the season finale in Japan in late July.

Brands Hatch and its swooping elevation change will test the GEN4 car.

Formula E

 

Formula E

 

“We are incredibly proud to unveil our biggest and most ambitious calendar to date. Expanding to 21 races across 13 iconic cities is a huge milestone, and welcoming world-renowned tracks like COTA in Austin, Zandvoort, and Brands Hatch provides the ultimate stage to showcase our new GEN4 era,” Alberto Longo, Formula E cofounder and chief championship officer, said in a statement.

“Every stop on this calendar has been chosen to deliver maximum sporting drama. Launching the season with our first-ever opener under the lights in Jeddah to demonstrate the speed of these GEN4 cars sets a spectacular tone, while grouping our races into distinct continental clusters ensures we do so as sustainably as possible. The tracks are faster, the competition is fiercer, and we cannot wait to get this historic season underway,” Longo said.

There’s also a new format for weekends with double-header events, which is most of them. On the first day, the cars will race for 30 minutes with high downforce bodywork. This is a true sprint race, where the aim is just to go flat-out. The second day will feature a more traditional 45-minute e-prix, where the drivers will need to stay on top of energy management, as they do currently.

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Posted Thursday 25 June 2026 at 10:31 am AEST (my time).

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For decades, biologists thought that early tetrapods, ancient vertebrates that started conquering the land over 300 million years ago, developed like modern amphibians—beginning their lives as purely aquatic tadpoles and then metamorphosing into terrestrial adults. “A lot of that comes from this old ‘scala naturae’ idea that you had fish that evolved into the next stage up, which were amphibians, and then amphibians evolved into the next stage up, which were reptiles that evolved into birds and mammals,” said Jason Pardo, a research associate at the Field Museum.

We’ve never had evidence that early tetrapods had an amphibian lifestyle; we have assumed it because it made intuitive sense. “It’s easier to make the transition from water to land if you’re already making that transition as part of your life cycle,” Pardo said. But now, a new Science study that Pardo co-authored with Arjan Mann (the Field Museum’s assistant curator of early tetrapods) shows our most basic assumptions about the first tetrapods that started living on land might be wrong.

Baby monsters

The researchers’ study focused mainly on embolomers, an extinct group of large predators that lived roughly 300 million years ago. Embolomers looked like a cross between a crocodile and an eel, with large skulls full of sharp teeth, followed by long, eel-like bodies. It had short, stocky limbs adapted mainly for paddling in water, but also capable of powering brief, clumsy excursions on land. They are thought to be one of the first vertebrates that made a partial transition from an aquatic to a terrestrial lifestyle. These animals could reach over three meters in length, but to understand the very beginning of their life cycle, scientists focused on examining some of their centimeter-scale babies.

One of the most important specimens in the study was an embolomere fossil designated FMNH PR 1082, which has been sitting in the collections at the Field Museum for decades. “I think it’s been there for about 50 or 60 years. It was originally found by a collector,” Mann said. The fossil was initially classified as a different tetrapod species due to its very small size. But armed with modern imaging techniques like electron microscopy, Pardo and Mann realized the fossil was in fact a very young embolomere that died before it could even consume its first meal. “We were able to identify features that linked it to embolomers like the shape of the vertebrae, the radial spines on the tail, and the nice little fangs,” Mann said.

The team also realized that this young embolomere looked like a miniature adult. What’s more, the individual had an abdominal yolk, a portion of the egg’s yolk sac that an embryo internalizes into its body cavity just before hatching to use as an energy reserve. (According to the researchers, this internal yolk mass suggests the ancestral tetrapod egg was relatively large and nutrient-dense, like the ones laid by reptiles and birds, as opposed to the small eggs laid by amphibians and fish.) Despite having hatched recently, the specimen lacked the external gills that tadpoles should have, and there were signs of ossification in its bones—it was a youngling, but it was no tadpole.

The lack of a tadpole phase so early in life suggested there was no metamorphosis in this animal’s life cycle, which led Pardo and Mann to hypothesize the development of early tetrapods was direct, as it is in the reptiles or mammals that appeared much later.

Then they started looking at other fossils to make sure the FMNH PR 1082 was not some kind of outlier. It turned out it wasn’t.

Skipping the tadpole

To confirm this wasn’t an isolated case, the team looked at a second, even smaller embolomere hatchling that also showed no signs of external gills. Once this was confirmed, the team started checking fossil collections in other museums across America, looking for youngsters of other ancient lineages to see whether the missing tadpole phase was a broader evolutionary trend. They found that a tiny hatchling of Phlegethontia longissima, a strange group of early tetrapods that lost their limbs entirely. These had a head dominated by large eyes and a partially ossified jaw—but again, no external gills.

Then, the researchers started looking further out along the evolutionary tree at earlier animals that hadn’t yet fully made the transition from fins to limbs. They focused on fossils that had historically been thought to be larval lungfish. Pardo and Mann’s re-examination revealed that these were young megalichthyids, early finned tetrapodomorphs that predated emobolomeres by 20 to 30 million years.

The smallest of these specimens measured just two centimeters. In a few cases, multiple individuals were preserved together in the same concretion, indicating that these animals may have remained in groups for some time after hatching. But even this species showed signs of direct development, with gradually ossifying bones rather than undergoing an abrupt, amphibian-like metamorphosis.

“We looked at a number of different species that represent different lineages in the transition from fish to tetrapods, and what we found is that none of them have anything that looks remotely like a tadpole,” Pardo said.

Without the tadpole phase and metamorphosis, though, the transition from water to land was probably way tougher than we thought.

Amphibian innovation

“We have lots of assumptions in our field that are based on relatively limited data,” Pardo said. One of those assumptions was that a distinct aquatic larval stage made the water-to-land transition easier for early tetrapods. While direct development, without undergoing a radical metamorphosis early in the animal’s lifecycle, might appear to be a simpler solution, it likely made the lives of young embolomers considerably harder.

The first challenge they faced was being tied to the same environment throughout their entire lifespan. Unlike amphibian tadpoles, they lived in the same ecological niche as larger juveniles and three-meter-long adults and had to compete with them for resources. Then there was the problem of supporting their body mass on land. The team noted in the paper that juvenile embolomers had weak, poorly developed limbs at hatching, which probably left them unable to move long distances across land. They were likely stuck wherever they hatched.

“It certainly makes it harder to not have a tadpole stage,” Pardo said.

He suggested that this is evidence that amphibian metamorphosis is not an ancient evolutionary stepping stone that enabled the first animals to expand out of water and conquer the land, which was then preserved in modern frogs or toads. Instead, it might be an evolutionary innovation that amphibians developed much later in response to challenges coming with the water-to-land transition.

“It may be something unique to amphibians that emerged as an adaptation to their specific way of living on land,” Pardo said. “Instead of being primitive, it may actually be something new, something novel and exciting. We’ve never thought about it this way.”

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb7635

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Posted Wednesday 24 June 2026 at 9:24 am AEST (my time).

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Scientists from the Universiti Malaysia Sabah have discovered a newly identified “parasite of parasites” in the tropical forests of Borneo. More specifically, it is what the researchers describe as a hyperparasite—an organism capable of parasitizing other parasites. In this case, its targets are zombie fungi.

The new fungal species, named Pleurocordyceps cornusynnemata for its distinctive horn-shaped structure, has been described in the journal Phytotaxa.

The Discovery

The new hyperparasite was identified during a series of field expeditions in the remote Danum Valley region of the Malaysian state of Sabah. According to Phys.org, researchers came across Pleurocordyceps cornusynnemata almost by chance while examining a dead ant.

The newly discovered fungus specifically targets ants already infected by Ophiocordyceps, commonly known as the zombie fungus. This microorganism infects insects—particularly ants—by manipulating their nervous systems and driving them to perform behaviors that facilitate the spread of its spores before ultimately killing the host.

A Parasite of Parasites

Unlike the zombie fungus, the hyperparasite does not take control of the ant itself. Instead, it attacks the zombie fungus already growing inside the insect. “Rather than manipulating the insect's nervous system itself, Pleurocordyceps infiltrates and feeds directly on the thriving Ophiocordyceps tissue inside the host,” said Jaya Seelan Sathiya Seelan, deputy director of Malaysia Sabah's Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ITBC) and one of the species’ discoverers, in an interview with AFP.

There are other hyperparasites in the world, but Seelan noted that this is the first with this particular horn-shaped structure. “This rare discovery reveals yet another hidden layer of complexity within tropical ecosystems and demonstrates how much remains unknown about the biodiversity of our forests,” the ITBC said in a press release.

Big Implications

During the same expeditions, the researchers also discovered a new species of fungus lethal to spiders, one that spreads its spores throughout the arachnid’s body before killing it.

These findings extend beyond scientific curiosity and could have significant practical applications, including potential benefits for human health. “These newly documented fungi hold immense potential,” Seelan told the AFP, “both as sources for developing next-generation antimicrobial drugs and as highly effective biocontrol agents against agricultural pests.”

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

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Posted Wednesday 24 June 2026 at 9:22 am AEST (my time).

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Last year, we featured a lengthy interview with tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. The prolific Doctorow is back with a provocative new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts, focusing on AI and related issues: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

Doctorow doesn’t actually enjoy talking about AI, but he’s constantly being asked to comment on it. “I made the tactical error of being sick of talking about AI,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I wrote a book about why I think it’s a dumb thing to keep asking people to talk about, and now I have to talk about it.” Reverse Centaur is Doctorow’s attempt to “sort out the bullshit from the material reality.”

In automation theory, per Doctorow, a “centaur” describes a human augmented with a technology, like machine learning, or even just driving a car or using autocomplete. A reverse centaur “is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine,” Doctorow said in a speech last December. He gave the example of an Amazon delivery driver, surrounded by AI cameras monitoring their driving, who essentially serves as a peripheral to the delivery van.

Being a centaur is generally viewed as a positive thing; few people relish being a reverse centaur. And yet the AI industry seems intent on using those tools to create more reverse centaurs. It’s one thing to incorporate AI tools into the medical field to help radiologists process X-ray images and spot potential tumors they might otherwise miss. It’s quite another to fire nine out of 10 radiologists and let AI make the diagnoses, with the remaining radiologist solely responsible for checking the AI’s work—and, ultimately, taking the blame for any errors.

Doctorow is not virulently anti-AI; he uses AI tools regularly and sees potential in many of those tools as useful plugins or cool new apps. But he is nonetheless alarmed at all the hype surrounding AI, the enormous capital expenditures, the unrealistic expectations and self-serving messaging, and the potentially catastrophic economic consequences when the AI bubble inevitably pops.

“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”

Naturally, Doctorow has some ideas about how to push back against the prevailing narrative of AI’s inevitability. Ars caught up with him to learn more.

Macmillan Publishing

 

Macmillan Publishing

 

Ars Technica: We touched briefly on AI last year when we chatted about your prior book. Reverse Centaur seems like a natural outgrowth of that.

Cory Doctorow: Enshittification is primarily a thesis about how firms in the absence of constraint get tilted to the bad, but it’s also a thesis about how the constraint of competition, when it falls away, produces all kinds of perverse outcomes. One of those perverse outcomes is that firms that have saturated their markets can no longer grow, and they have to find other markets. There’s a ticking bomb when you saturate your market because it’s only a matter of time until investors start to worry that you’re not a growth stock, you’re a mature stock. Mature stocks trade at a small fraction of the multiple that growth stocks do.

There’s an enormous amount of liquidity in growth stocks, which means that you can use growth stocks to grow. You can buy other companies with shares, and shares are an endogenous substance that you make on the premises by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. Firms with growth stocks can grow by typing zeros, whereas firms that are mature, they have to use money if they want to grow, and you’re not allowed to make money on the premises. If you do, the Treasury Department shows up and takes you away in handcuffs. So you can see why firms would be very anxious to maintain the perception that they have room for growth even after they have 90 percent market shares.

That’s why those firms started promoting stories about how they were going to conquer imaginary markets. Imaginary markets have no agreed-upon valuation because you just made them up. Unless you can turn an imaginary market into a real market pretty quickly, you need to come up with another imaginary market and announce that this is the new imaginary market you’re going to conquer. It’s easier than you’d think because the capital markets have the object permanence of a toddler, and they would lose a game of peekaboo if they were drafted to play in the league. So you can say, “Oh, actually, it’s not metaverse. It’s crypto. It’s not crypto. It’s Web3. It’s not Web3. It’s something else.” And the markets will forgive you, provided you do it quickly enough.

But something different happened with AI. It is much, much bigger in terms of capitalization than anything we’ve ever seen—not just bigger than other tech bubbles, bigger than other bubbles. When I wrote the book, capital expenditure (CapEx) globally was $700 billion, now it’s $1.4 trillion. Meta wasted $60 billion on the metaverse. They spent $150 billion in the last three years on AI, and they say they’re going to spend another $150 billion this year.

So this is a much bigger bet, and it raises the question: If the material basis for this is creating a narrative so that you can continue to grow by dint of having a highly liquid growth stock, what’s the ideological basis? Why are people willing to make such a bigger bet? Some of it is that there’s more “there” there with AI. It’s real computer science. It was remarkable 10 years ago, when a couple of computer scientists and their grad students took some existing techniques, applied them in a new way, and got a very surprising result that turned out to not only produce dividends the first time around, but to have somewhat linear returns on investment, which is not usually the case.

There was a lot of low-hanging fruit in AI, although it’s tapering off now because, as they say in finance, anything that can’t go on forever has to stop. So we’re losing the end of that growth period in terms of returns to scale.

Ars Technica: Why do you think AI is so appealing to political and business leaders in particular? 

Cory Doctorow: It’s not just that it makes for a good demo. AI really appeals to a fantasy that I think all of us have to some extent but that powerful people really have, of a world without people in it—because hell really is other people. You can’t get stuff done without other people helping you. You can’t have romance without a romantic partner. You can’t have social media without people to socialize with. You can’t play a board game, or do a startup, or build a bridge, or build a house, or do politics without other people. And other people stubbornly refuse to organize everything they do to make you happy.

Particularly if you’re rich and powerful, it’s very galling. So AI is very attractive. One of the reasons DOGE fired so many government workers was because it played into the fantasy that you can have a government without government employees. In the corporate sphere, it’s the fantasy of a business without workers, because every corporate leader is haunted by the secret fear that if they don’t show up for work, everything goes on just fine. But if the workers don’t show up, everything shuts down. Maybe they’re not really driving the car, maybe they’re strapped in the backseat with a toy steering wheel.

If that’s the case, AI will let them wire the toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain. So you can have an amazing idea as a corporate visionary, and you don’t have to have any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things, who tell you you’re actually an idiot. You just type some stuff to the chatbot, and it shits out your product. If you combine those two things—the material necessity to have a growth narrative and the ideological attractiveness of a world without people—you get $1.4 trillion in CapEx for a sector that is turning over $50 billion a year and has to replace all of its assets every 24 to 30 months.

Ars Technica: You raised an interesting point recently on your blog: Workers actually wanted earlier technological breakthroughs and often had to fight to get them into the workplace. With AI, people are more likely to feel that the technology is being shoved down our throats; some workers are even required to use it.

Cory Doctorow: I think that’s entirely right. One of the things that I’ve been attending to a lot lately is the difference between the bubbles that we had before and the bubble that we’re having now. People will say, “Oh, Amazon wasn’t profitable, and it became profitable. And the web wasn’t profitable, and it became profitable. The web was a bubble.” Of course the web was a bubble. You don’t get pets.com and all those Super Bowl ads without a bubble. But it is a very obvious error of logic to say, “Once, there was a thing that lost money and then it made money, therefore, if you are losing money, someday you’ll make money.”

The thing that made the web profitable was not that it was unprofitable; it was things like good unit economics, where every time someone started using the web, the web got less unprofitable. Every time a web user used the web again, the total profits generated went up. Every generation of web technology made the web more profitable. That’s the opposite of AI. Every AI customer loses money for the company, every use of AI by that customer loses money for the company, and every generation of AI loses more money than the last one. AI is the money-losingest thing our species has ever done. We have never lost as much money as we’ve lost on AI.

Another giant material difference is the social reception. If you look back to the business press of the aughts and the late ’90s, it’s full of hand-wringing editorials about how bosses will cope with workers who are smuggling in the web. You look at those same press outlets today, and it’s full of people saying, “What are we going to do about the fact that no one in the workplace wants to use AI?”—along with ads for firms that will spy on your workers for you so that you can punish the workers who refuse to use AI.

Ars Technica: AI nonetheless does have thoughtful, sensible defenders.

Cory Doctorow: One of the paradoxes that I try to explore in this book is the workers who are not fools, who are historic good, reliable narrators of their own experience, and who tell you that AI is making their lives better. The foundational idea of science fiction is that what the gadget does is less important than who it does it for and who it does it to. I call those people centaurs. They are workers who are assisted by technology and who decide how that technology is going to assist them. Whereas the workers who hate it are workers who are being asked to produce more with AI at the expense of quality, at a higher speed, at the expense of their own wellbeing, and who understand that they’re being recruited to be what Dan Davies calls accountability sinks—to take the blame when the AI screws up their job.

Once you put it that way, it’s very easy to see why some workers would say, “Oh yeah, I found a thing that AI is good for and I use it, and that’s fine. I’m even excited about it.” And why other workers would be like, “This is making me miserable.” It’s the difference between the words on the Greek temple, “Know thyself,” and your boss shining 16 cameras in your face and going, “I know you better than you do. And by the way, I think you could work an extra hour a day without breaking a sweat.”

Ars Technica: You make a point of emphasizing that you are not fundamentally anti-AI, despite sharply criticizing the industry. 

Cory Doctorow: I have many comrades who describe themselves as anti-AI, and I’ve had some very spirited, productive, but heated debates with those people because I don’t think AI is exceptional. That means that I don’t think it’s exceptionally evil. The argument that it’s the fruit of the poisonous tree, that it was made by bad people in bad ways, so you shouldn’t use it—I think it’s very foolish. That is not the merit on which we judge technology.

You can talk about whether giving money to these companies is bad. I think it is. You can talk about whether the environmental impact of using foundation models is unsustainable and unsupportable. I think, by and large, it is. But that is not to say that statistical inference using convoluted deep neural networks is bad or—and this is where I get into many arguments—that scraping the web to train a convoluted neural network is bad. I think it’s fine. Scraping is good, actually.

I think it’s very dangerous to say, “The way that we’re going to fix the problems we have with AI is to make it illegal to make a record of what’s on the Internet.” I think that’s catastrophic. That’s how we never again will know what was on CBS News before it turned into Chud News. Everything Nate Silver ever published on his website was just zeroed out by Disney. You can only see it at the Internet Archive because we scrape. It’s just bonkers to say, “It is theft to make transient copies of works, to analyze those transient copies, to publish the results of your analysis.”

Those are all socially beneficial activities, and we will all lose if we prohibit them, not least because the firms that creative workers are worried about them, the big media companies, are extremely capable of entering into arrangements with the Big Tech companies to license their corpuses to them in order to try and put us all out of a job. If we get the right to decide who can train an AI with our work, our bosses are just going to modify our contracts to say, “Great, you now must license that right to me. And it’s non-negotiable.” Failure to learn from that lesson is not tragedy. It is farce.

Rather than ask for a new copyright law, we could make a new labor law, because the only people who’ve ever beaten AI are the Hollywood screenwriters and actors. And the reason they were able to beat them is because uniquely, among workers in America, they are exempt from the Taft-Hartley Act‘s prohibition on what’s called sectoral bargaining, which is when all the workers in a sector bargain with all the employers in a sector. Now, there are so few workers in America who aren’t media workers, who care about copyright, that it rounds to zero, but every single worker in America would benefit from extending sectoral bargaining across the board.

Ars Technica: It could be catastrophic, economically speaking, when the AI bubble finally bursts. But you point out that there might very well be something useful left over when that happens. 

Cory Doctorow: I advise to go long on laser tag arenas because you can definitely turn a data center into one of those. There’s not much else you can do with them, unfortunately. A bubble is a way for insiders to pump, and then dump, some mania to the normy investors, to people who’ve been flushed into the capital markets because they’ve been denied a defined-benefits pension and who are only really offered market-based pensions. That means you have to be the sucker at the table. You have to put your money into the market if you don’t want to die homeless and starving after you retire.

The dot-com bubble was very bad. It separated a lot of pension funds and ordinary investors from their money, but it left behind something very useful. In the early years of the aughts, there was, amid the carnage, quite a liberating vibe where all the stupid money went home and you could get servers for pennies on the dollar. Everybody knew how to code.

A generation of humanities undergraduates were induced to drop out of university and learn Python, Perl, and HTML, and a lot of them were really creative. Your rent dropped by two-thirds in San Francisco. I bought six $1,200 Steelcase Leap chairs, still in the plastic wrap, from a failed dot-com guy on a sidewalk on 19th Street in the Mission District for $25-$50 each and used them as a dining room set for the next 10 years.

So there was a very productive residue that was left behind by the dot-com bubble. It gave rise to a more robust form of the web, Web 2.0, full of things that were more useful, more interesting, more thought-through, more creative, more innovative than the stuff that the bubble threw off in Web 1.0. There are other examples of bubbles that are less likely to throw off that residue. Around that time, we also had Enron. Enron produced nothing, although I do have a pad of Enron stationery that a friend in Austin bought at the bankruptcy auction and sent to me.

So we can distinguish between bubbles with productive residues and unproductive bubbles while still not saying that bubbles are good. Bubbles are bad and destructive. When the cryptocurrency bubble bursts, all that’s going to be left are shitty monkey JPEGs and worse Austrian economics. But when AI bursts, you’re going to be able to buy GPUs for pennies on the dollar. You’re going to have your pick of applied statisticians, many of whom are very creative and have interesting ideas for things you could build with AI but are stuck building the things their bosses want to build. There are going to be these open source models that have barely been touched. Any time someone tries to optimize them, they find so many opportunities to make them run on lower-end and commodity hardware.

DeepSeek was a spin-out of a Chinese hedge fund; the fund gave them $6 million and said, “Go play with these open source models. See what you can squeeze out of them.” When they launched, their model was so good running on commodity hardware that the market did a mass sell-off, $600 billion in 24 hours—the largest 24-hour decapitalization of any firm in the history of markets. If you’ve got cheap hardware and you’ve got applied statisticians, you’ve got these open source models and you’ve got a technology that fundamentally is interesting and has done useful things and will do useful things in the future—that’s a better setup than one in which we’re all running around arguing about whether the word-guessing program is going to wake up, become God, and turn us into paperclips.

Ars Technica:  You also push back a little on the “AI is coming for your job” messaging.

Cory Doctorow: I think we have to distinguish between the AI doing your job and the AI being incapable of doing your job, but your boss is such a sucker that he fires you and replaces you with the AI anyway. There’s infinite evidence for the second one. I think that there’s very little evidence for the first one, at least so far. A lot of the stories we’ve heard, when you interrogate them, just turn out to be nonsense. There’s a chapter in the book about how many of the demos for AI have just turned out to be people in India pretending to be robots.

The most egregious example was when Amazon announced that cashiers were now out of a job because now you could just walk into [an Amazon Go store], grab stuff off the shelf, and walk out again, and the AI knows what you took. There wasn’t an AI. It was three people in India watching each customer through a network of cameras in the ceiling trying to guess what you put in your bag.

I think there’s lots of things that skilled workers will ask AI to do that will help them do their jobs. There’s lots of things that skilled workers will ask AI to do that they’ll be wrong about and that won’t help them do their jobs. And there’s probably space at the margin to replace humans with AI, at least in some cases. But the idea that we’re at a “jobspocalypse” is such a self-serving narrative. If you’re trying to convince people that the way you’re going to turn $1.4 trillion in CapEx into more than $1.4 trillion in revenue is by convincing bosses to fire workers and replace them with chatbots, you have to have a story about how the chatbot can do anyone’s job.

Here’s a wager. If you ever have the opportunity to interview Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, I want you to ask them this. Someday, you will retire. Right now, I want you to make a binding decision. Will the thing that wipes your ass and takes care of you when you are too old and frail to take care of yourself be a person or an AI? We’re just going to use whatever it is that’s around at that time, and you get to choose. I think we should ask anyone who says they know how to fix things, would they themselves go to an old folk’s home run according to the principles they’re establishing?

Ars Technica: We are now starting to see news stories about how companies that invested in AI are suddenly getting hefty bills. 

Cory Doctorow: They’re getting the bill because the AI companies are trying to get out before they’re stuck holding the bag. They want to do IPOs, and to do IPOs, they need to clean up their balance sheet. So they’re like, “I bet these [companies] are pretty price-insensitive. Let’s just jack it. Let’s go from a 90 percent subsidy to a 40 percent subsidy and more than double everyone’s prices. They’ll hang in there.” And then you get the CTO of Uber saying, “I’m not sure why we put AI in the business to begin with, and I really don’t know why we’d use it if it was $20,000 a seat. So I don’t know that we are going to use AI anymore.”

This is quite a backfire. It actually shows you how insulated these people are from any sense of how their products are received, from what people think of them, from the actual fundamentals of real businesses that have to bring in more money than they spend. It’s weird. I’m hardly a captain of industry or one of the great champions of markets, but I do understand that, by and large, firms should bring in more money than they spend if they are to be an attractive investment prospect.

Ars Technica: We hear plenty about the negative aspects of AI. What do you like about it?

Cory Doctorow: I have a couple of local models on my computer, which is just a framework laptop running Ubuntu. It doesn’t even have a GPU. I use Whisper to transcribe audio. I will sometimes want to cite something I’ve heard in a podcast and not remember where I heard it. One time, I just threw the last 30 hours of audio I’d listened to at Whisper, and it shot out verbatim logs that were good enough that when I searched the full text, I could find it. And it gave me time codes so I could check the transcript. That’s amazing.

The idea that I might someday have a computer full of audio and video files with full text indexing is great. I could even imagine conversational interfaces to that: “Where’s the photo of my daughter at her birthday party where she’s dressed like a pirate?”

AI doesn’t have to be 100 percent accurate for that to be useful. It doesn’t have to be free from false positives. It can just be OK. That stuff’s running on your own computer. It’s not burning down a rainforest. It’s not consuming the last three drops of potable water left in Nevada. There is a certain kind of person who is performatively horrified by AI: “But, but, but that’s energy you wouldn’t have used.” I’m like, “You have never said that about someone who turns cell shading on while playing an MMORPG.” Everything you do with your computer burns electricity.

I’ve been using another chatbot where I paste my daily blog post in and say, “Find my typos.” It finds a lot of the errors that are normally not caught by a regular spell checker: doubled-up words, punctuation marks, or words that are actual words but are misspellings for other words. When you dial up the sensitivity to the point where it actually catches all of those, it also gets a lot of false positives. That’s fine for 1,500 to 3,000 words. I never feed it a book. On a 100,000-word manuscript, it’s going to give me thousands of false positives, and it just won’t be useful. I treat this like a plugin to my word processor. It’s fine. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s not.

I have a friend, Patrick Ball, who is the best programmer I know, and he founded and works at an NGO called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). They’re one of the most important NGOs that no one’s ever heard of. What they do is very rigorous statistical extrapolations of information that’s not in the record, about wars, civil wars, coups, oppressive states, and they’re used for truth and reconciliation, human rights tribunals, war crimes trials. They’ve worked on every high-profile war crimes trial in the century.

Patrick is using a bunch of Copilots to write software to do a lot of special-purpose stuff. For example, they work with Innocence Project of New Orleans, which has exonerated a bunch of [wrongly convicted] people. They can go through all the arrest reports from the New Orleans PD and find the ones that have linguistic correlates that match successful exonerations. Then they give those to the lawyers who would otherwise just be starting alphabetically or chronologically, sorting to the top the ones that are most like the ones that led to a successful exoneration.

It’s not like they’re asking the chatbot to write a brief for them, but this is a hugely important function, and it is getting innocent people out of prison. You don’t want innocent people in prison. That should be the least controversial thing in the world. That’s just good, and the proof is in the pudding.

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Posted Wednesday 24 June 2026 at 9:21 am AEST (my time).

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is set to launch Tuesday to test a new reentry vehicle designed to deliver cargo anywhere in the world from low-Earth orbit.

The company developed the new saucer-shaped reentry pod, called Starfall, under a veil of secrecy. Its purpose is to support the “transport and delivery of goods through space,” according to an environmental assessment published by the Federal Aviation Administration last month.

The first demonstration of the Starfall vehicle is scheduled for Tuesday morning. At least one of the Starfall vehicles will ride into orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, perhaps alongside another undisclosed payload. After circling the planet two times, the Falcon 9’s upper stage will release Starfall to reenter the atmosphere and target a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean around 800 miles west of California.

That is according to airspace and maritime warning notices telling pilots and sailors to steer clear of the Starfall splashdown zone.

The mission has a one-hour launch window beginning at 6:43 am EDT (10:43 UTC) Tuesday. SpaceX’s official webpage for the mission includes a timeline of key events during the launch, but it is devoid of any more information about the payload or the exact sequence of events for the Falcon 9’s upper stage. In its public messaging, SpaceX is effectively treating the launch like it would a classified mission for the US government.

From here to anywhere

What we do know about Starfall primarily comes from the FAA’s environmental assessment. In that document, the FAA writes that Starfall will “enable point-to-point delivery of critical cargo through space on rapid timelines” and provide access to space for commercial in-space manufacturing, a nascent market that, so far, is largely geared toward pharmaceuticals. Starfall could bring those materials back to Earth for commercial use. A private company named Varda Space Industries is already working in this area.

The FAA’s environmental review approved SpaceX’s proposal for two Starfall reentry demonstrations. It did not specify if these demos would happen on one or two missions. SpaceX intends to recover the vehicle, including parachutes and heat shields, “to the to the maximum extent practicable,” the FAA said.

The Starfall vehicle is cylindrical in shape, with a diameter of 10.2 feet (3.1 meters) and a height of 2.5 feet (0.75 meters). Starfall weighs approximately 4,600 pounds (2.1 metric tons) with capacity for about 2,200 pounds (1 metric ton) of payload, for a total weight of 6,800 pounds (3.1 metric tons). Designed exclusively for cargo, Starfall is smaller than SpaceX’s human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft used for ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

A closer look at the Starfall reentry vehicle.

Credit: SpaceX

The first Starfall Demo mission will spend a few hours in low-Earth orbit, but the vehicle could also fly on shorter suborbital trajectories after launching on either Falcon 9 or the much larger Starship rocket. This version of Starfall is not capable of de-orbiting itself, but instead relies upon its launch vehicle to guide it back into the atmosphere. After separating from its rocket carrier, the disc-shaped vehicle uses compressed nitrogen gas to point its heat shield in the right direction for reentry.

So who might use something like Starfall? The US military is one obvious answer. The Pentagon is already working with SpaceX on a concept named Rocket Cargo or Point-to-Point Delivery, which would use Starship to deliver massive loads of equipment and supplies to far-flung locations in less than an hour. Starship is an enormous vehicle, nearly 20 stories tall and 30 feet wide, that must land at prepared sites. Starfall could prove to be a more versatile option for lighter deliveries.

The military has also signed agreements with Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Anduril for studies and development of technologies for global cargo delivery from space. Notwithstanding Starship, which is still undergoing experimental flight tests, SpaceX may have an early advantage with the Starfall delivery vehicle.

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Posted Tuesday 23 June 2026 at 6:23 pm AEST (my time).

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NVIDIA has announced that 35 AI high-performance computing (HPC) supercomputers are planned to open throughout Europe this year. This marks what the company describes as the largest single-year expansion of AI infrastructure in the history of the continent.

These new systems, unveiled at ISC High Performance 2026, will be placed at a number of national supercomputing centres, AI factories, and research institutes to provide advanced computing resources to more than three million researchers. Describing AI, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang stated, "AI is the new instrument of science, and Europe is building the infrastructure to put it in the hands of millions of researchers."

Built on NVIDIA's Blackwell and Hopper architectures, the new systems will support research in climate science, healthcare, clean energy, quantum computing, and other scientific fields. Among the major projects are the Barcelona Supercomputing Center's MareNostrum 5 AI upgrade, BavariaAI's Blue Swan platform in Germany, Italy's IT4LIA AI factory, Germany's HammerHAI project, and Sweden's Mimer AI Factory.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center plans to expand MareNostrum 5 with NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 and GB200 NVL4 systems. In total, the BSC expects to deliver up to 20 exaflops of AI training performance and 33 exaflops of AI inference performance. This increased computational capability will support research efforts related to climate modelling, biotechnology, energy systems, etc.

Furthermore, as part of the IT4LIA project, more than 8,000 GPUs, each based on NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL4 architecture, will be used in Italy. This represents one of the largest AI factory initiatives announced to date. Additionally, the Blue Swan platform from BavariaAI will include about 1,000 GPUs to help develop multimodal AI models for use in the medical field, robotics, and various areas of scientific research.

NVIDIA also emphasized in the announcement how rapidly growth of accelerated computing usage is taking place within both energy and climate-related research. The company said Siemens Energy uses NVIDIA-powered technologies to significantly accelerate the process of designing and simulating hydrogen-capable gas turbines. Using those same acceleration technologies, Siemens was able to reduce simulation time by up to 77 percent.

The company also highlighted several quantum computing initiatives across Europe. CINECA, EuroHPC, and Pasqal are integrating a quantum processing unit into Italy's CINECA supercomputing centre using NVIDIA's CUDA-Q platform. Meanwhile, researchers at Germany's Julich Supercomputing Centre recently simulated a universal 50-qubit quantum computer on the JUPITER supercomputer.

The announcement demonstrates Europe's continued commitment to building out its infrastructure supporting AI and supercomputing as governments, research organizations, and technology companies compete to build out their respective computing capacities and secure their positions in advanced scientific research.

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Posted Tuesday 23 June 2026 at 6:57 am AEST (my time).

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Microsoft has announced plans to build a new datacenter campus in Pecos, Texas, as the company continues to invest billions in AI infrastructure. The new facility, called project Kilby, will reportedly have a capacity of 2 gigawatts and will be one of the largest single capacity additions in the company’s history.

To power the campus, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal with Chevron to supply natural gas from the Permian Basin, America's largest oil field. This deal is set to become the largest collaboration to date between a U.S. oil and gas giant and Big Tech.

It’s no secret that Big Tech has often been criticized for exploiting natural resources for its AI developments. Microsoft is trying to mitigate some of that negative consensus by promising to build its own power supply for the new datacenter, independent of the public grid.

The Pecos datacenter will be powered by a power plant hub, built by Chevron, with up to 2.5 gigawatts of gas-fired capacity, with potential to scale to up to 5 gigawatts. The facility will include at least seven GE Vernova turbines, with first power potentially coming online as early as late 2027 or early 2028.

The power plant hub is part of an approximately $7 billion investment by Chevron, making it one of the largest dedicated energy projects tied to a single datacenter campus in the U.S. Microsoft hasn’t publicly disclosed the amount it’s investing in the new datacenter.

Microsoft has also committed to implementing a closed-loop cooling system that will only require an initial water charge to operate. The company said that “the total lifecycle water use of this datacenter is only a fraction of that consumed annually by a typical fast-food restaurant.”

What the press release doesn’t mention, however, is how much water the natural gas plant itself will consume, or how a 20-year fossil fuel commitment squares with the company's pledge to be carbon negative by 2030.

The construction of the new datacenter should provide over 6,000 construction jobs at peak build-out, and create hundreds of operational job roles once the facility is built.

Via: Reuters

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Posted Tuesday 23 June 2026 at 6:57 am AEST (my time).

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What do you need to make a good espresso? Ground coffee, of course; a machine capable of generating pressure; and hot water, preferably heated to between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s it. But could one perhaps do without that last element? No, not the water itself, but the need to heat it.

The Colombian researcher Francisco Trujillo led a team at Australia’s University of New South Wales that claims to have invented what it calls “ultrasonic espresso.” As Trujillo explains, it is “a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavor, oils, aroma, and caffeine from ground coffee.”

Although the process takes longer than the conventional method (three minutes versus 30 seconds), it consumes 75 percent less energy—a considerable benefit for coffee shops and restaurants, but especially for businesses that produce industrial quantities of coffee, such as those making ready-to-drink products.

Sonic Brew

The experimental system directs ultrasonic waves directly into the filter containing the ground beans in water. Instead of relying on heat, the technology harnesses a phenomenon known as acoustic cavitation. This involves the formation and collapse of tiny bubbles that generate microcurrents which, in this experiment, facilitate the extraction of soluble compounds from the coffee.

To generate those microcurrents, the scientists designed a device capable of transmitting ultrasonic vibrations throughout the entire filter basket, transforming it into a sort of acoustic reactor. This design allows the waves to hit multiple points simultaneously and accelerate the movement of liquids around the coffee particles. “Ultrasound helps us replace heat with mechanical energy,” explains Trujillo.

The goal of this entire process, described in greater detail in this month’s issue of the Journal of Food Engineering, is to achieve a concentration comparable to that of an espresso. To do so, the researchers adjusted variables such as grind size, ultrasound power, and brewing time. Using a fine grind and 100 watts of power, they obtained beverages with levels of dissolved solids and extraction yields equivalent to those considered ideal by the Specialty Coffee Association.

When the experiments were repeated under the same conditions but without ultrasound, it was not possible to achieve these values. The ultrasonic system made it possible to produce coffee with an intensity similar to that of espresso in just a few minutes—the researchers found the optimal time to be between two and a half and three minutes—using water at room temperature.

The team also analyzed various chemical parameters. The concentrations of caffeine and chlorogenic acid were similar to those obtained by conventional methods. No significant differences were observed in pH or in the overall composition of the volatile compounds responsible for the aroma.

Taste Test

A group of 100 people participated in sensory tests in which they compared ultrasonic espresso with conventional espresso. Ultimately, the participants showed no notable preference for either method. The scores for aroma, flavor, bitterness, and overall acceptance were virtually equivalent.

They also compared filtered coffee prepared using the conventional method and with ultrasound. “In the case of filtered coffee, the ultrasonically processed version was generally preferred, and participants rated its bitterness as more pleasant,” noted Trujillo.

In addition to replicating the sensory characteristics of espresso, the new technique could offer environmental benefits. Measurements taken by the researchers indicate that, to produce beverages of the same intensity, the ultrasonic system used just 24 percent of the energy consumed by a typical espresso machine.

The authors emphasize that coffee produced using ultrasound is not identical to traditional espresso. However, the results suggest that it is possible to produce beverages with comparable chemical and sensory characteristics without heating the water.

The research opens up the possibility of developing new coffee makers capable of preparing everything from espresso to filtered coffee and cold brew using the same technology. If these systems are ever brought to market, the characteristic sound of an espresso machine could be replaced by the inaudible vibrations of ultrasound.

This story was originally published by WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Sunday 21 June 2026 at 7:44 am AEST (my time).

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Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK) in Heidelberg had recreated a key chemical reaction from the early universe, producing results that could change scientists' understanding of how the first stars formed.

The study focused on the helium hydride ion (HeH⁺), which is widely regarded as the first molecule to form in the universe. Scientists believe HeH⁺ appeared around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had cooled enough for electrons and atomic nuclei to combine into neutral atoms in a period known as recombination. This marked the beginning of chemistry in the cosmos.

Immediately after the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was extremely hot and dense. As it expanded and cooled, hydrogen and helium became the dominant elements. Once neutral helium atoms formed, they could react with ionised hydrogen nuclei, or protons, to create helium hydride ions.

Although simple in structure, HeH⁺ played an important role in the young universe. It was the first step in a chain of reactions that eventually produced molecular hydrogen (H₂), a molecule made up of two hydrogen atoms and now the most abundant molecule in the universe. Molecular hydrogen later became a key ingredient in the formation of the first stars.

At the time, the universe had entered a phase often called the cosmological "dark age." Matter had become transparent to light following recombination, but there were still no stars or galaxies producing visible light. Several hundred million years would pass before the first stars appeared.

For those first stars to form, large clouds of gas had to collapse under their own gravity. To do that, the gas needed to cool by releasing energy. While hydrogen atoms can help with this process at high temperatures, they become less effective below about 10,000 degrees Celsius. Molecules can continue the cooling process by releasing energy through rotational and vibrational motions.

Scientists have long considered HeH⁺ a potentially important coolant because of its comparatively large dipole moment, a property that describes how electric charge is distributed within a molecule and allows it to release energy efficiently. The amount of helium hydride present in the early universe may therefore have influenced how easily the first stars could form.

At the same time, HeH⁺ was constantly being destroyed. Under primordial conditions, its main destruction mechanisms were recombination with free electrons and chemical reactions with hydrogen atoms. These reactions ultimately helped produce molecular hydrogen, linking the formation and destruction of HeH⁺ to the chemistry that shaped the early universe.

For many years, theoretical studies suggested that reactions between HeH⁺ and hydrogen atoms would become much slower at low temperatures. Scientists believed there was an energy barrier along the reaction pathway that reduced the chances of the reaction taking place in the cold conditions of the early universe. The new study suggests otherwise.

To investigate the process, researchers recreated a closely related reaction using deuterium, a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen that contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. When HeH⁺ collides with deuterium, it forms an HD⁺ ion and a neutral helium atom. This allows scientists to study the reaction in a controlled way while closely mimicking the behaviour of the original reaction involving hydrogen.

The experiments were carried out at the Cryogenic Storage Ring (CSR) at MPIK, a specialised facility designed to recreate conditions similar to those found in space. Researchers stored HeH⁺ ions in the 35-metre storage ring for up to 60 seconds at temperatures just a few kelvins above absolute zero and merged them with a beam of neutral deuterium atoms. By adjusting the speeds of the two particle beams, the team measured how the reaction rate changed with collision energy, which is directly related to temperature.

The researchers found that the reaction rate remains almost constant as temperatures decrease. In other words, the reaction does not slow down at low temperatures as earlier models predicted.

“Previous theories predicted a significant decrease in the reaction probability at low temperatures, but we were unable to verify this in either the experiment or new theoretical calculations by our colleagues,” explained Dr Holger Kreckel of MPIK.

“The reactions of HeH⁺ with neutral hydrogen and deuterium therefore appear to have been far more important for chemistry in the early universe than previously assumed,” he continued.

According to the researchers, the reaction appears to be barrierless, meaning there is no energy obstacle preventing it from taking place efficiently even at very low temperatures. The findings support recent theoretical work led by physicist Yohann Scribano, whose group identified an error in a widely used potential energy surface, a mathematical model used to describe how the energy of a system changes during a chemical reaction. The error appears to have caused previous studies to significantly underestimate reaction rates under primordial conditions.

The new calculations closely match the experimental results. Together, they suggest that helium chemistry in the early universe may need to be re-evaluated.

Because molecules such as HeH⁺ and molecular hydrogen played an important role in cooling primordial gas clouds, the findings could help scientists build more accurate models of how the first stars formed. By showing that helium hydride was likely destroyed more efficiently than previously thought, the study offers new insight into the chemical processes that shaped the universe during its earliest stages and helped set the conditions for the emergence of the first stars.

Source: Max-Planck Institute, EDP Sciences

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

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Posted Sunday 21 June 2026 at 7:43 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don’t mention Starship in the body of this week’s report, so I’ll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX’s mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There’s still a fair bit of work to go before Flight 13, so don’t count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell’s comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a like like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.

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.

Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after “detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems,” according to a social media post. “The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause.” Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currently of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.

Gravity still winning… The two-stage, 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket was awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. It was the fourth time in five months that Isar Aerospace, headquartered near Munich, Germany, had reached a target launch date for the second test flight of the Spectrum launch vehicle. Isar called off a launch attempt on January 21 due to an issue with a pressurization valve, and then halted a countdown on March 25, moments before liftoff, when engineers detected rising temperatures in the rocket’s liquid propane fuel. Isar officials attributed the problem to a delay earlier in the countdown caused by an unauthorized boat in restricted waters along the rocket’s flight path. Managers stood down from another launch attempt on April 9 to evaluate a suspected leak in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel.

Swift reboost mission ready for launch. Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What’s more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget? The company that came back to NASA with the most compelling solution was a startup named Katalyst Space Technologies, and they have already given the agency a satisfying answer, Ars reports. Katalyst’s reboost satellite, named Link, was built in less than a year and is now integrated with an air-launched Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket for a ride to space slated for no earlier than June 27.

More steps to go… The speed of development of the robotic mission to rescue NASA’s Swift observatory has been remarkable. Now, the mission needs to work. “To be honest, no one thought it was going to be possible. No one thought we would get as far as we’ve already gotten today,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics program. “And I have to be honest, there are still risks ahead of us, but I’m both deeply thankful and as optimistic as I can be that we’ll meet those challenges because of the people that have worked on it.” (submitted by EllPeaTea)

New launch pad in the works at Cape Canaveral. Space Launch Delta 45, the military unit that runs Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, is exploring the potential creation of a new rocket launch complex for Naval Ordnance Test Unit and US Army missions, Florida Today reports. The new location, known as Launch Complex 51, would be located about 2 miles north of Port Canaveral, making it the spaceport’s closest pad to public areas. LC-51 would encompass about a 50-acre area.

Better real estate… The new pad would replace Launch Complex 46, which lies within the explosive clear zone of Blue Origin’s nearby Launch Complex 36. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded on that launch pad during a preflight test last month. LC-46’s proximity to LC-36 means the two pads cannot operate simultaneously without disruption. LC-46 has hosted a handful of small satellite launches and hypersonic missile tests in recent years.

Changes in attitude at Latitude. French launch startup Latitude has removed all mentions of the Zephyr name from its website, now referring to its rocket simply as “Our Launcher,” European Spaceflight reports. The rocket, previously known as Zephyr, is a two-stage launch vehicle that will stand 19 meters (62 feet) tall and is designed to deliver up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) to low-Earth orbit. The company is currently targeting the second half of 2027 for the rocket’s inaugural flight.

Due diligence… Latitude did not explain the reason for the change, but one plausible explanation is trademark risk. The Zephyr name is already trademarked within the aerospace sector by Airbus subsidiary AALTO, whose solar-powered High Altitude Platform Station aircraft bears the name. The Zephyr trademark filing, which was granted by the European Union Intellectual Property Office in 2005, covers unmanned aerial vehicles, satellites, parts and fittings, and “launching apparatus for the aforesaid goods.”

China’s Zhuque-2E breaks up in orbit. The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, Ars reports. The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.

50, 100, 150?… A US Space Force spokesperson said the military is tracking at least 51 objects attributed to the breakup of the upper stage. That number may increase as the Space Force’s network of tracking radars get a better handle on the debris cloud. Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the orbital intelligence company LeoLabs, told Ars the fragmentation event likely generated 100 to 150 pieces of debris. The second stage of the Zhuque-2E rocket, made by a Chinese company called LandSpace, measured between 25 and 30 feet (about 8 meters) long and 11 feet (3.35 meters) in diameter. The main body of the rocket’s upper stage is now orbiting between 208 miles and 263 miles (335-by-424 kilometers) at an inclination of 54.5 degrees to the equator. This is close to the same altitude of the International Space Station and a number of SpaceX’s Starlink direct-to-cell communications satellites. The good news is atmospheric drag will likely bring most of the debris down within a matter of months to a year.

Relativity announces commercial Mars mission. Relativity Space plans to launch a Mars orbiter in 2028 as part of a new initiative to privately develop planetary missions, Space News reports. The company announced June 17 its Interplanetary Sciences Program, which aims to support science missions in partnership with NASA, industry, academia and philanthropic organizations. The first of those missions is a Mars science and telecommunications orbiter mission planned for late 2028. The payload will include an atmospheric profiling instrument suite contributed by NASA’s Ames Research Center, a radar instrument to map subsurface ice and geology, and a communications relay package.

Short on details... The robotic mission to Mars would launch on Relativity’s Terran R reusable rocket, which is progressing through development in advance of its inaugural flight, perhaps as soon as next year. Relativity offered little information on the mission, such as its size, mass, power, or cost. Since its founding in 2015, Relativity’s central focus has been on launch. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, took over as chief executive of Relativity a little more than a year ago, teasing new areas of focus such as orbital data centers, philanthropic space science ventures, and national security missions. This isn’t the first time Relativity has touted a Mars mission. Relativity and Impulse Space announced in 2022 plans for a Mars lander that would launch on Terran R, with the lander itself built by Impulse. The companies said in 2023 they were planning to launch the mission as soon as 2026, but neither has provided recent updates on those plans.

Japan’s H3 rocket returns to flight. Japan successfully launched an H3 rocket powered solely by liquid-fueled engines for the first time June 12, overcoming a mission failure six months ago, Kyodo News reports. H3 rocket No. 6, carrying a dummy payload and small satellites, lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, two days later than originally planned due to unfavorable weather forecasts at the launch site. JAXA said the rocket was successfully placed into its planned orbit.

Lower cost... This new configuration of the H3 rocket, designated the H3-30S, flies without the aid of solid rocket boosters. Instead, designers added a third hydrogen-fueled engine to the H3’s core stage, which typically has two main engines. The new variant is tailored to launch medium-class satellites at lower cost than the heavier version of the H3 with two or four strap-on boosters. The June 12 launch was the return to flight for the H3 program after a failure in December resulted in the loss of a Japanese navigation satellite. The failure was blamed on the collapse of the H3’s payload support structure, damaging the rocket’s second stage and leading to the unplanned separation of the satellite from the launch vehicle.

SpaceX gives a ride to a competitor. AST SpaceMobile, a company seeking to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink direct-to-cell communications service, launched three “BlueBird” satellites on a dedicated mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, Spaceflight Now reports. The launch followed the loss of AST SpaceMobile’s previous BlueBird satellite on a failed launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket in April. The satellites are among the largest ever sent into space, with deployable antennas that unfurl to cover an area of about 2,400 square feet (223 square meters) once in orbit. This allows AST to link up with unmodified smartphones on Earth.

Bottleneck... AST SpaceMobile hoped to launch 45 satellites this year, but that was before one of its primary launch vehicles, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, was grounded after an explosion on its launch pad last month in Florida. With this week’s successful Falcon 9 launch, AST SpaceMobile will reach the halfway point of the 2026 with just three new satellites in orbit.

For Amazon, Europe’s Ariane 6 stands apart. Amazon now has hundreds of flight-ready satellites standing idle in Florida, waiting to join the company’s low-Earth orbit Internet constellation, Ars reports. “They’re built, and sitting in a payload processing facility waiting for trips to orbit,” said Steve Metayer, vice president of Amazon Leo Production Operations, during a teleconference with reporters. “And we’re currently manufacturing several satellites a day.” Several years ago, Amazon entrusted three unproven rockets—United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and Europe’s Ariane 6—to launch the bulk of the company’s constellation of more than 3,200 satellites. Of that group, only the Ariane 6 has come through for Amazon.

A new lift record for Europe… France-based Arianespace has emerged as a critical partner for Amazon, which, to date, has had the majority of its 331 satellites launched on Atlas V rockets. However, Amazon has just one more mission booked on this rocket, which is operated by United Launch Alliance, as the vehicle is slated for retirement. Arianespace’s Ariane 64 rocket launched its third mission for Amazon Wednesday morning from French Guiana. This mission debuted larger strap-on solid rocket boosters, increasing the Ariane 64’s carrying capacity from 32 to 36 Amazon Leo satellites. It also marked the heaviest payload ever launched by a European rocket.

Rebuild underway at Blue Origin’s Florida launch pad. Blue Origin has started rebuilding a launch pad severely damaged in a New Glenn explosion less than three weeks ago as it works to resume launches by the end of the year, Space News reports. Jeff Bezos and Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s owner and CEO, spoke about the pad rebuild at the VivaTech conference in Paris. Limp said Launch Complex 36 has been cleared of all debris, and crews “started the reconstruction” of the pad earlier this week. Both reiterated their earlier statements that Blue Origin will fly the New Glenn rocket again before the end of the year, an achievement that would defy the expectations of many officials at NASA.

Mark 1 next year… NASA has a keen interest in the reconstruction of the launch pad and the return to flight of New Glenn. The rocket is a key element in the agency’s Artemis program to return US astronauts to the surface of the Moon. Blue Origin’s first prototype lunar lander, called Blue Moon Mark 1, was supposed to launch in the next few months on a New Glenn rocket to begin testing core technologies for a future human-rated Moon lander. After the pad explosion last month, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman suggested Blue Origin look for an alternate rocket for the Mark 1 lander. Limp said that won’t be necessary, stating that Mark 1 is now targeted for launch early next year, once New Glenn is back in service.

Next three launches

June 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-28 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14:00 UTC

June 23: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 02:10 UTC

June 23: Falcon 9 | Starfall Demo | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 09:43 UTC

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Posted Saturday 20 June 2026 at 8:52 am AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix

MAJURO, Marshall Islands—Perched on the bow of an aluminum landing craft, Anne Cohen gazed a few yards ahead of the vessel toward a yellow robot gliding across the emerald Majuro lagoon.

The unmanned surface vehicle, called Yellowfin, was quickly becoming one of the coral researcher’s most dependable guides in these Central Pacific waters.

“She’s the best dive buddy,” said Cohen, a tenured scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod. Programmed to navigate to a precise set of coordinates, the robot cut through small swells like a tiny sailboat without a mast, directing Cohen toward a destination she had traveled thousands of miles to revisit.

When the robot finally paused, hovering in place, Cohen recognized it as her cue. Somewhere below should be a patch of reef she’d been observing over the last few years, and she was eager to see how it was faring. Each visit carried a growing weight of uncertainty.

Since 2023, record-breaking marine heat waves have swept through the tropics, fueling the most severe global coral bleaching event ever recorded. More than 80 percent of the world’s reefs have been impacted in at least 83 countries and territories. Corals have been so stressed by the extreme temperatures, they’ve expelled the tiny algae living inside their tissues that provide them with food and their brilliant hues, leaving them pale, ghostly and struggling to survive. Many have not recovered.

Cohen hoped the reef beneath her might be different.

She yanked on her black and yellow snorkel fins, spit into her mask so it wouldn’t fog underwater and slid off the boat, her slight frame barely making a splash. Within seconds of peering into the blue, she let out a squeal muffled by her snorkel, astonished at the scene unfolding beneath her.

Towering pinnacles of chestnut-colored tabletop corals rose from the sandy seafloor like trees, their broad plate-like canopies sheltering fish hiding in their shadows. Dense thickets of staghorn corals stretched in every direction, their golden antler-like branches twisting across a sprawling reef extending as far as the eye could see, bursting with shades of mustard yellow, pink and lavender pastels.

“It’s like a wonderland,” Cohen said, popping her head above the surface, beaming. “I feel like Alice.”

In today’s oceans, the scene felt almost surreal, said Cohen, 62, who has spent the last 30 years studying coral reefs and the impacts of climate change on marine environments.

But it was a confirmation of something she had long believed: that even as hotter temperatures devastate coral reefs, some still possess an extraordinary ability to endure. She was determined to find out how.

Unlocking the secrets behind their resilience, she said, could one day help scientists and conservationists restore, or even cultivate, reefs better equipped to survive a warming planet.

Searching for super reefs

Over the last decade, a significant part of Cohen’s research has focused on tracking down these reefs that are somehow defying the odds.

In 2018, she started a project dedicated to this search called Super Reefs, named after a number of reefs she’d encountered around the world that seemed to be thriving even while others nearby bleached or died.

“We saw these corals that were behaving as if there was no heat wave at all,” she recalled. “I kind of felt like there was Superman or Superwoman coming in there and flexing their muscles, being super, super strong.”

Three years later she launched a joint global initiative with The Nature Conservancy and Stanford University aimed at not only finding heat-tolerant communities, but also protecting them.

Even the hardiest of reefs are not invincible, she said.

Coastal development projects such as ports or harbors that require dredging can bury corals beneath sediment. Agricultural runoff, sewage and plastic pollution introduce harmful pathogens and excess nutrients that spark coral disease or toxic algal blooms that suffocate the tiny animals. Bottom trawling—a fishing method that drags weighted nets across the seafloor—can crush entire reefs, while dynamite fishing can shatter centuries-old coral colonies in seconds.

“That would be like taking a sledgehammer to crush a hermit crab,” Cohen said.

Already, the world has lost more than half of its coral reefs to the combined pressures of climate change and other human activity. Some scientists warn that without significant intervention, more than 90 percent of tropical reefs could disappear in the next 25 years.

The goal of the new Super Reefs initiative was to specifically identify coral strongholds in places where governments had already demonstrated an invested interest in creating marine-protected areas—designated zones in the ocean where human activities are limited or prohibited to safeguard critical ecosystems.

Belize, Hawaii, and the Marshall Islands fit the bill. All had plans to create or strengthen already established marine-protected areas when the project launched.

This was important, Cohen said. She didn’t want to collect data just for the sake of it. She wanted to make sure the research her team conducted could inform practical decisions related to where and how to protect super reefs. The next challenge was narrowing their search.

Not every reef that shows signs of resilience is a super reef.

By definition, Cohen said, super reefs have to have scientifically proven capabilities of surviving hotter temperatures over time, either because they have genetically adapted to extreme heat or because local ocean conditions like cooler currents have shielded them. They also have to be able to potentially reseed other reefs.

“If we can protect these more climate-resilient reefs and make sure that they are protected from other human impacts like pollution or dredging or other things, then we’re securing those more heat-resistant strains for the future until we can really get global warming under control,” said Lizzie McLeod, global ocean director at The Nature Conservancy, who supported Cohen in the initial stages of the Super Reefs project.

Over the last few years, the Super Reefs team has identified resilient reefs in each of its target locations. But Cohen is convinced they have only scratched the surface.

“There are so many potential super reefs out there that we don’t even know exist,” she said. “We have to go find them.”

In the Marshall Islands, Cohen hopes some of these reefs might eventually become part of something larger. For years, she’d been dreaming of creating a vast network of protected super reefs that would span multiple Pacific island nations and be linked by ocean currents so that their offspring could help replenish reefs throughout the region.

“We want to create the first ‘super reef blue corridor’ across millions of square kilometers of ocean, connecting the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu,” she said.

In April, Cohen visited the Marshall Islands to formally pitch her idea and test new technology she believed could dramatically accelerate the search for super reefs in the Pacific.

A nation built on coral 

It was her seventh trip to the Pacific nation made up of 29 low-lying atolls and five islands. Majuro—the capital of the Marshall Islands—was one of those atolls, consisting of more than 60 tiny islands that encircle a lagoon spanning more than 100 square miles.

Each visit, she was struck by how intimately the Marshallese peoples’ lives are connected to coral. It formed the very foundation beneath their feet.

“Everything that you see, all the sand, all the land, is all made of coral,” Cohen said. “We wouldn’t be here without it.”

Long before people settled on these atolls, ancient corals built them over millions of years, slowly growing around the rims of volcanoes that eventually sank beneath the sea, leaving rings of reef encircling shallow turquoise lagoons. Over time, broken coral skeletons, rubble and sand accumulated into the thin ribbons of land where Marshallese communities have lived for thousands of years, in many places only a few feet above sea level.

Now, many of these are facing existential threats due to climate change.

A 2021 World Bank analysis shows 40 percent of existing buildings in Majuro are endangered by rising sea levels driven by global warming. Several of them are local schools.

“We’re the first to go with the sea level rise,” said Anthony M. Muller, the Marshall Islands’ minister of natural resources and commerce, speaking from his office overlooking the Majuro lagoon, where giant commercial fishing vessels flying flags from China, Panama, Liberia and Hong Kong sat anchored offshore.

For the Marshallese people, the prospect of losing coral reefs to climate change is also deeply unsettling, said Dua Rudolph, deputy director of the Marshall Islands Conservation Society (MICS), a Majuro-based non-government organization that has been collaborating with the Super Reefs team since 2020.

The majority of Marshallese people, he said, rely on fishing for subsistence or their livelihoods. And those fish depend on the reefs. It’s their home, source of food and spawning grounds. “When the reef leaves, the fish leave also,” Rudolph said. “People are going to start going hungry.”

Already, he said, many reefs throughout Majuro have experienced periods of extensive bleaching. He’d seen it firsthand while conducting in-water surveys to monitor reef health in recent years, especially in 2024, during the last El Niño event—a climate pattern that typically occurs every two to seven years and is often associated with intense marine heat waves.

The majority of Majuro’s formerly “pristine” reefs turned white, they were so stressed, he said. “To see it at that scale was pretty sad.”

So when Cohen first reached out to him via email about the possibility of working together to find and protect coral refugia defying such trends, he thought it sounded almost too good to be true—practically a “fairy tale,” he said.

It felt like this was an opportunity, he said, to “fight back” the “one big enemy that we’ve all been facing.”

Science for action 

To begin searching for Majuro’s super reefs, Cohen worked with Woods Hole oceanographers Weifeng Zhang and Yan Jia to build a computer model that could simulate a decade’s worth of temperatures, currents and wave energy throughout the atoll’s lagoon. The goal was to pinpoint Majuro’s hottest waters—places where any surviving corals would likely possess an unusual ability to withstand extreme heat.

To test the model, Cohen asked Rudolph’s team to deploy underwater temperature loggers and current sensors on reefs throughout the Majuro lagoon. They identified several sites of interest, but one in particular stood out just offshore a community on the southwestern edge of Majuro, named Laura. There, the water temperature appeared to run nearly two degrees hotter than much of the rest of the capital, Cohen said.

Credit: Paul Horn/Inside Climate News

Then Rudolph’s team from MICS collected samples from a variety of coral species at each site to test for heat tolerance with scientists from the Resist, Recover and Rebuild group at Stanford University, which studies how corals adapt to climate change.

Together, they built their first coral-testing lab on a local dock using picnic coolers, aquarium heaters, chillers and temperature controllers. Inside the coolers, they exposed the collected coral fragments to carefully controlled bursts of heat “designed to mimic the extreme temperatures reefs experience during hot days at low tide,” said marine biologist Stephen Palumbi, who oversees the coral recovery program at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. It soon became apparent, he said, which corals bleached quickly under heat stress and which ones could endure.

By the end of the experiments, Palumbi said they were able to rank which corals appeared most capable of surviving extreme heat and pinpoint where they came from. True to what Cohen’s model had indicated, some of the toughest were from Laura, inside the Majuro lagoon.

Rudolph and his team at MICS, along with staff from The Nature Conservancy, have since shared these findings with the community of Laura, with the hopes of building support for creating a locally managed marine area around the super reef identified off their shores. The effort is being guided by a process called Reimaanlok—Marshallese for “looking to the future”—a community-led conservation framework that brings together local leaders, landowners and residents to determine whether and how an area should be protected based on both traditional knowledge and modern science.

“The Reimaanlok process is designed to ensure conservation areas are community-led, culturally appropriate and sustainable over the long term,” said Alicia Edwards, the protected areas’ network coordinator for the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority, the government agency responsible for managing the country’s marine resources and fisheries.

At first, Rudolph said, some leaders were hesitant. The idea of limiting fishing in any area did not sit well in a community of about 900 people—almost all of whom are fishers.

The super reef site is a common fishing ground. At night, community members wade along the shallow reef flat using spears and machetes to snag fish and octopus, oftentimes crushing fragile corals beneath their feet without knowing it, said Jina David, a local councilman in Laura who has been advocating for the proposed protected area. Fishing boats regularly drop their heavy anchors onto the reef too, he said.

But after explaining the science and reasoning behind the idea of creating a protected area around the reef, Rudolph said, some attitudes have begun to shift, especially after learning that it would not only benefit Laura residents long-term, but likely other communities too.

“We don’t just do things that would benefit only one or two people,” Rudolph said of Marshallese culture. “More often, you see communities agreeing on things that will benefit more people.”

Research has shown that reducing fishing pressure and other human disturbances inside marine protected areas can help fish populations rebound and even spill into surrounding areas. Coral reefs that retain their diversity and ecological balance are also generally better equipped to recover from the impacts of climate change such as coral bleaching, said Edwards.

Cohen’s team had also found evidence that Laura’s super reef could serve as a source of recovery for the broader atoll. Using ocean current data to model where coral larvae released from the reef would likely travel, they found that the offspring from Laura’s most resilient reef could spread throughout Majuro, potentially helping populate distant reefs with the next generation of heat-tolerant corals.

Still, David said, it will probably be at least two years before the community comes to consensus to protect Laura’s super reef.

“We’re going to have to find a way to convince people this is something we really need,” he said. Otherwise, “we might overfish and kill everything here. Nothing would be left for the future generation.”

Just beyond his beachside home, David had already observed a once thriving reef disappear.

“We don’t do fishing out here on our beach because all the corals on this side of the island have been dying,” he said. “If you go snorkeling here, you will hardly see any live coral.”

He worries the situation will only worsen as ocean temperatures continue to rise. “The water is heating up,” he said. “It’s hot, actually, to the touch.”

Science for scale 

For Cohen, the case of Laura was proof that the Super Reefs strategy could work. Scientists can identify reefs that could withstand extreme heat and generate the data communities and governments need to make informed conservation decisions.

But this case study also underscored a larger challenge. Finding just a handful of reefs in Majuro had taken years of modeling and lab experiments. And testing a coral’s heat tolerance in a cooler is just the beginning of understanding its threshold, Cohen said.

To identify the strongest of super reefs, she said, she needed to be able to monitor vast areas of reef year after year to see how they respond to heat waves in their natural environment.

“We want to do it bigger, better, faster,” said Cohen. But, she added, “We need new tools.”

That’s where Yellowfin comes in.

Originally, the vehicle had been built by Cohen’s colleague, Peter Traykovski—a coastal oceanographer and engineer at Woods Hole—to map underwater seascapes and track erosion along shifting coastlines using sonar. But Cohen asked Traykovski to adapt it for her research by mounting a GoPro beneath its hull so it could continuously take photographs as it surveyed a coral reef.

Yellowfin can now capture up to 20,000 images while surveying 40 miles of reef in a single day.

That’s far more than a team of divers can cover in weeks using traditional coral monitoring methods, which require researchers to swim or dive along a reef to assess the state of its health, Cohen said.

“Nobody can do that,” she said of Yellowfin’s capabilities. “Not even if you had a team of 100 divers.”

By conducting multiple surveys year after year of the same reef and comparing the images from each of those, Cohen said she can easily identify areas that have bleached, died or recovered. She can also pinpoint which coral colonies seem completely unphased by higher temperatures.

“You’ve got corals in the same area with very different responses to heat, and that’s what Yellowfin is finding,” she said. And it’s doing it fast. “We can do this over huge areas, very easily and in a very short amount of time.”

But the system is still a work in progress. This past trip to Majuro was, in part, an opportunity to refine and practice using the technology, so they could be assured that when the next heat wave hits, Yellowfin can be deployed without any glitches, Traykovski said.

To do that, Cohen and Traykovski spent multiple days returning to the reef Cohen had described as a “wonderland” early on in the expedition. It was the perfect testing ground for Yellowfin to survey a large area of reef and for Cohen to collect samples of corals that showed promising signs of resilience, she said. She could see from past years’ photos that some sections that had bleached had since recovered.

One afternoon, seated at the back of the boat with a laptop and remote controller in hand, Traykovski guided Yellowfin along a series of GPS waypoints, sending the bright yellow vessel back and forth across the reef in precise “lawnmower” patterns.

“Heads up,” he yelled to Cohen and other snorkelers in the water. “Watch out for Yellowfin.”

As it cruised by, it continued snapping two photographs every second of the seafloor below. Each image was tagged with GPS coordinates, which would allow researchers to return to the same section of reef, or even the same coral colony, during future expeditions.

Previously, Cohen would scan these images manually after each trip, spending hours on end looking for corals that stood out because of their ability to resist or recover from heat stress.

Recently, her team at the Cohen Lab at Woods Hole has begun training AI models to analyze these images automatically.

They are also using Yellowfin images to create detailed three-dimensional models of the reef to get a better idea of how the depth, angle or orientation of individual coral colonies may affect how much heat they are exposed to.

“With 3-D models we can see how a coral’s position relative to the coral next door can influence its survival during a heat wave,” Cohen said. “This information is not captured from the 2-D top-down images created by Yellowfin and may explain why some bleach and others don’t.”

When Yellowfin finished its survey, Traykovski then directed it to start finding particular corals Cohen wanted to check on.

She was especially interested in tabletop corals that form large circular flat-topped platforms on the reef, some bigger than a queen-sized bed. Their broad canopies provide shelter for countless fish and other marine creatures, making them some of the most iconic and ecologically important species in the Marshall Islands. They’re also notoriously sensitive to heat stress and are often among the first corals to bleach, she said.

She carried laminated photos of some of the corals Yellowfin had helped photograph in previous surveys to bring underwater with her so she could examine how they were doing now compared to then.

“Both of these pictures were taken here in the Marshall Islands in 2024,” she said, showing off one of the laminated pages. “What you can see in each picture is one coral that’s bleached and the other—exactly the same species—that’s not bleached. That’s not sick. That’s absolutely healthy, almost like it’s been immunized or vaccinated against the heat.”

That contrast was what fascinated her.

Why had one coral succumbed to heat stress while the other remained healthy, she wondered. Did it possess a genetic trait that made it more tolerant of heat? Or was it actually a different species that only looked similar? Cohen suspected there was far more genetic diversity among tabletop corals than scientists have previously documented in Majuro.

A few moments later, Yellowfin slowed to a stop. “They should be right there,” Traykovski said, pointing to the robot hovering at the surface.

Still, spotting them underwater wasn’t always straightforward, Cohen told AJ Alik, a fisheries officer at MICS who was on board to help for the day. A coral that had bleached, died or broken apart might look nothing like it did in the photographs, she explained.

As she prepared to enter the water, Cohen studied her laminated images for clues, searching for landmarks near the corals that she could look for on the reef, if necessary, to confirm she was in the right place.

But after freediving down about 10 feet below the yellow robot, Cohen quickly found what she was looking for. She popped her head up to breathe. “I think that’s it.”

One of the two massive tabletops was still alive, to her relief.

Then, Alik and Cohen dove down again together to clip a small fragment from the living coral. They tagged the colony with an identification number and attached a matching label to the sample bag so the fragment could later be traced back to the colony it came from.

Later, Cohen would send the samples to collaborators at James Cook University in Australia for genetic analysis, along with others she’d collected on this expedition from tabletop corals that had bleached—according to Yellowfin’s photos—but now seemed recovered, as well as from seemingly healthy corals persisting alongside neighbors showing signs of heat stress. If researchers could identify the traits associated with heat tolerance, Cohen said, they could return to those same corals later on and use them in future reef restoration efforts.

Rebuilding resilient reefs 

Globally, coral researchers and conservationists have dedicated enormous efforts to replanting fragments of corals on damaged and depleted reefs with hopes that they will help build a new reef. But in general, Cohen said, the long-term success rate of these initiatives is not very high. Many of the corals they’ve been planting are the same ones vulnerable to bleaching elsewhere, she said.

Effective restoration, she said, must employ the help of corals that can take the heat.

That approach—using scientifically proven heat-resilient corals to rebuild damaged reefs—is very new, said Palumbi. While scientists have spent around a decade testing corals for heat tolerance, only recently have they begun applying those findings to restoration.

“The idea of using them as a supply chain for restoration projects is something that really grew out of the Super Reefs project,” Palumbi said.

Alik and his colleagues at MICS are in the early stages of experimenting with this approach by planting small underwater plots of corals that they tested with Palumbi for heat tolerance. In time, Alik said, those colonies could become a nursery of sorts—a source of coral fragments that could be used in larger restoration efforts in Majuro, and possibly beyond.

A Super Reef blue corridor 

It was time to think bigger, Cohen said.

To really give reefs a greater chance of enduring more frequent and severe heat waves, it would not be enough to protect a few super reefs here and there in isolation, she said. They needed to be connected.

On a hot, humid Sunday afternoon, she presented her idea to several Marshallese authorities in charge of managing the country’s marine resources and a group of teachers and high school students from Majuro who had come to learn about super reefs.

They gathered on Bokanbotin, a small island about a 10-minute boat ride away from downtown Majuro owned by a local family that had established the waters around the island as a legally recognized marine protected area. Recently, Cohen had begun working with the island’s owner, Sherwood Tibon, to build a small science lab and education center where local children could learn about coral reefs. Eventually, she hopes Bokanbotin will become one of the primary research hubs for her next initiative.

Having grown up in South Africa, Cohen told the group she had long been inspired by protected wildlife corridors there, which give elephants, lions, wildebeest, and other animals the freedom to roam, migrate, and breed across landscapes and neighboring country borders to ensure they sustain healthy, genetically diverse populations.

Credit: Paul Horn/Inside Climate News

More recently, conservationists have started to advocate for the protection of “blue corridors”—migratory pathways used by marine megafauna, such as whales and sharks, to travel between different habitats used to feed, mate, or give birth to their young.

Now, Cohen wanted to create something similar, but specifically for heat-tolerant corals—a “super reef blue corridor.”

Nowhere else was there such a thing yet, she said. She believed the Marshall Islands had an opportunity to help create the first.

This corridor, she said, would include a network of protected super reefs and restoration sites, where she envisioned heat-tolerant corals being planted like underwater “forests,” throughout the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu. Most importantly, she added, each of the selected sites would be strategically connected by ocean currents to encourage interbreeding of these resilient animals.

“We need to create maximum opportunity for them to create this oceanic shield of heat tolerance,” she said.

It would be like a “super highway” for “super corals,” she said, where their eggs and sperm would have the best chance of meeting to produce more “super babies.”

Coral larvae can drift hundreds of miles from their parents before settling on a reef for the rest of their lives.

It was an ambitious idea, she said, that would require political support and significant financial backing—about $10 million by her estimate—as well as community buy-in. Not every super reef can be cordoned off to fishing and other activities, she said.

“People need to live. People need to eat. They need to fish.” It would be critical, she said, to consult with and co-design any protected areas in this corridor with communities that would be impacted, as is being done in Laura.

But overall, the idea seemed feasible, the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority’s Edwards said. “The idea of creating a multi-national network of marine-protected areas connecting resilient reefs across the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu is a very promising concept,” she said.

Other experts agree. “Protecting source reefs and well-placed stepping stones between them can maintain dispersal networks that can share heat-tolerant adaptations and provide new coral larvae to help degraded reefs recover,” said Emily Darling, director of coral reefs at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Accounting for connectivity between high-integrity, climate-resilient reefs multiplies their conservation value across an entire region.”

Once established, Cohen said, this first Super Reef corridor could serve as a proof of concept for creating similar protected networks around the globe.

Future corridors might be created between Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, she said, or India, the Maldives, and the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean.

Ultimately, she said, the success of these networks would depend on countries’ willingness to collaborate and select which reefs they would prioritize. Her role, as she sees it, is to deliver the scientific data to inform those choices. She wants to ensure that resources are directed where they can have the greatest impact—as quickly as possible.

“This is an urgent mission,” she said.

Forecasters recently warned that El Niño conditions have formed once again in the tropical Pacific and are expected to strengthen by this fall.

 In the coming months, Cohen said, “We have a pretty strong chance of having a heat wave in the Marshall Islands.” She was already having nightmares of it ravaging the vibrant reefs she’d just visited.

“It’s just a horrible feeling,” she said, gazing out toward a shallow reef offshore Bokanbotin.

But she wanted to be there when it hit. She had already started to plan her return trip to the Marshall Islands before she left.

“We want to be there in the peak of that heat wave to send Yellowfin out and see how the corals are doing,” she said. “I have a pretty good idea which corals will resist because we’ve seen them do it before. But we need to make sure.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Posted Saturday 20 June 2026 at 8:47 am AEST (my time).

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Relativity Space, the rocket company led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt, was picked to launch NASA’s Aeolus payload to Mars in 2028, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Under a new public-private partnership, Relativity Space will provide the “spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations” to fly Aeolus to Mars, where the payload will “provide the first integrated, daily, global view of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and clouds.”

The Aeolus payload will have four instruments on board for studying the Martian atmosphere, which NASA says will “directly inform entry, descent, and landing systems and support safer, more predictable mission planning for astronauts.”

Schmidt, who served as CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, became Relativity Space’s CEO in 2025, a couple of years after it launched the “world’s first 3D-printed rocket,” Terran 1, which failed shortly after launch. Relativity Space’s larger Terran R rocket isn’t scheduled to have its first launch until later this year.

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Posted Saturday 20 June 2026 at 8:47 am AEST (my time).

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A theoretical study from researchers at the University of Surrey suggested that the direction of time may not be fundamentally fixed in certain quantum systems. The work, published in Scientific Reports, examined how the “arrow of time” could emerge from microscopic physics and found that time-reversal symmetry can remain intact even in models used to describe processes such as energy loss and thermalisation.

The arrow of time refers to the observed one-way direction from past to future in everyday life. In macroscopic processes, this is easy to see. Spilled milk spreads across a table and does not gather back into a glass, and heat flows from hotter objects to colder ones. These processes shape the common sense idea that time moves in a single direction.

However, at the level of fundamental physics, many equations do not prefer a direction of time. Time-reversal symmetry means that the same physical laws can describe a system whether time moves forward or backward. This has made it difficult to explain why irreversible behaviour appears in the large-scale world even when the underlying rules do not require it.

Dr Andrea Rocco, Associate Professor in Physics and Mathematical Biology at the University of Surrey, described this contrast: "One way to explain this is when you look at a process like spilt milk spreading across a table, it's clear that time is moving forward. But if you were to play that in reverse, like a movie, you'd immediately know something was wrong – it would be hard to believe milk could just gather back into a glass.

However, there are processes, such as the motion of a pendulum, that look just as believable in reverse. The puzzle is that, at the most fundamental level, the laws of physics resemble the pendulum; they do not account for irreversible processes. Our findings suggest that while our common experience tells us that time only moves one way, we are just unaware that the opposite direction would have been equally possible."

The study focused on open quantum systems, which are quantum systems that interact with a surrounding environment. This environment, often described as a heat bath, can exchange energy and information with the system. The researchers used this framework to study how a direction of time might appear even when the underlying physics does not enforce one.

A key part of the analysis involved the Markov approximation. This is a simplification used in many models where the system is assumed not to retain memory of its past states. The idea is that changes depend only on the current state, not on earlier history. This is commonly used when studying thermalisation, which is the process where a system settles into equilibrium with its environment.

The study also used concepts such as master equations, including the Lindblad and Pauli equations, which describe how probabilities of different quantum states change over time. Another related model discussed was quantum Brownian motion, which describes the random-like movement of a quantum particle interacting continuously with its environment. In these descriptions, a “memory kernel” can appear, which is a mathematical term that accounts for how past states influence current behaviour.

The researchers found that applying the Markov approximation did not break time-reversal symmetry. Even when the system interacted with an effectively infinite heat bath, the resulting equations of motion remained symmetric in time. This meant that the same mathematical description could, in principle, run forward or backward in time without contradiction.

The study further showed that standard frameworks used in open quantum systems, including quantum Brownian motion and master equations like the Lindblad and Pauli forms, could be written in a time-symmetric way. These equations are typically used to describe processes that look irreversible, such as dissipation and thermalisation, but the results suggested they can also be interpreted as allowing evolution in both time directions.

Thomas Guff, Research Fellow in Quantum Thermodynamics, said: "The surprising part of this project was that even after making the standard simplifying assumption to our equations describing open quantum systems, the equations still behaved the same way whether the system was moving forwards or backwards in time. When we carefully worked through the maths, we found that this behaviour had to be the case because a key part of the equation, the "memory kernel," is symmetrical in time.

We also found a small but important detail which is usually overlooked – a time discontinuous factor emerged that kept the time-symmetry property intact. It’s unusual to see such a mathematical mechanism in a physics equation because it's not continuous, and it was very surprising to see it appear so naturally."

The researchers also noted that deriving a one-way arrow of time from time-reversal symmetric microscopic dynamics remains an open problem across fields such as thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, particle physics, and cosmology. Their results suggested that some standard descriptions of irreversible behaviour in open quantum systems may be better understood using a time-symmetric formulation of Markovianity.

According to the study, processes such as thermalisation, which are usually treated as irreversible, could in theory be described in a way that allows evolution in either time direction under the same rules. This does not imply that time reversal occurs in everyday life, but rather that the underlying equations do not strictly enforce a single direction.

Overall, the findings suggested that the perceived direction of time may emerge from how physical systems are modelled and approximated, rather than from a fundamental asymmetry in the laws themselves. The researchers noted that this perspective could have implications for ongoing work in quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and cosmology on the origin of time’s arrow.

Source: University of Surrey, 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 Friday 19 June 2026 at 12:54 pm AEST (my time).

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Plague swept through groups of hunter-gatherers in southeastern Siberia 5,500 years ago, leaving dozens dead in its wake—with DNA from Yersinia pestis bacteria still trapped inside their teeth.

University of Oxford ancient DNA researcher Ruairidh Macleod and his colleagues recently sequenced the telltale bacterial DNA in teeth from plague victims at four ancient cemeteries in the area around Russia’s Lake Baikal. The tragedy that befell these communities is now the earliest known plague outbreak, courtesy of the oldest strain of Y. pestis ever sequenced.

Unearthing a new backstory for the plague

Until recently, scientists who study the evolution of diseases have held two fairly solid ideas about the origins of plague, the disease caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. It’s a scourge so awful that it has gone down in history as not just a plague but the plague. The first idea is that the earliest strains didn’t have the right genetic traits to be really lethal. And the second is that the plague first began menacing humans when the first farmers settled in densely packed towns alongside rats and domestic animals.

But the dead of Ust’-Ida I cemetery, near Lake Baikal, tell a very different story.

“Our findings demonstrate that the earliest known outbreaks of plague occurred in prehistoric hunter-gatherers centuries before infections are observed in Neolithic farmers,” wrote Macleod and his colleagues in their recent paper.

That challenges our previous assumption that plague spillover was a side effect of people taking up farming and settling in permanent villages and towns, living closer to each other and to an assortment of animals (and their fleas).

“Much of the accepted theory around epidemiology of disease in the past is that this kind of thing shouldn’t occur in hunter-gatherers because hunter-gatherers are constantly moving around the landscape because they’re in such small groups all the time,” said Macleod in a press conference. “The theory, at least, is that infectious disease can’t really take hold and devastate entire communities in this way.”

So much for that theory.

Welcome to the world’s first plague cemetery

The Angara River flows from the depths of Lake Baikal. The people who lived along it thousands of years ago survived by hunting, foraging, and fishing. They would have lived in relatively small groups, but they seem to have stayed connected across hundreds of kilometers through marriage and family ties. Although their lifestyle would have been one of constant movement, they buried their dead in cemeteries such as Ust’-Ida, interring them with offerings of clay pots, stone tools, and bone and antler points.

This map shows the location of Ust’-Ida I and Shumilikha cemeteries near Lake Baikal and the Angara River

Credit: By Tara Young, taray@ualberta.ca and NASA https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/api/ – NASA’s freely offered

GDEM https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/api/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21156871

At Ust’-Ida, archaeologists with the Baikal Archaeology Project unearthed a grim mystery: an unusually high number of dead children, a cluster of radiocarbon dates suggesting that many of the cemetery’s occupants died at around the same time, and no evidence of violence. Something tragic happened to this ancient hunter-gatherer community, but what? Archaeologists thought ancient DNA might shed some light on the mystery.

Macleod and his colleagues started with shotgun sequencing, a technique used to identify the DNA sequences in a sample when scientists don’t know exactly which organisms they’re looking for. They used samples from the roots of 46 ancient people’s teeth from four different cemeteries along the Angara River.

And to their complete surprise, they found plague.

Fun fact: Because dental roots are fed by lots of blood vessels, anything in your bloodstream is likely to pass through your teeth at some point, which means if you die with the plague, it may leave its DNA behind in your teeth. “This is really cool evidence that the plague was in the bloodstream, which is lethal,” said co-author Frederik Seersholm, a University of Copenhagen ancient DNA researcher who clearly knows a fun fact when he sees one, in a press conference.

About 11 of the 31 people Macleod and his colleagues tested at Ust’-Ida had Y. pestis DNA in their teeth, and Macleod says that’s “consistent with pretty much everybody [in the cemetery] having died of plague,” not just those 11. That’s because the detection rate for plague DNA in the remains at Ust’-Ida matches that at Smithfield’s, a known mass grave specifically for plague victims in London. It’s safe to assume everyone buried there had the plague.

“We really didn’t know what to expect going into this, so it was a complete surprise that we discovered this really, really early evidence for large-scale lethal outbreaks of plague amongst these hunter-gatherer communities at this point in time,” said Macleod in the press conference.

Ancient DNA and future outbreaks

Macleod and his colleagues managed to sequence a full Yersinia pestis genome from at least one of the samples, and it turns out to be the oldest strain of Y. pestis ever sequenced. According to the research, it’s very close to the base of the plague family tree, emerging just a few hundred years after Y. pestis last shared a common ancestor with another bacterium called Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. This ancient plague isn’t quite the one we’re familiar with today or the version that devastated medieval Europe.

This very early version of Yersinia pestis doesn’t have some of the genes that made its descendants so virulent; it’s missing, for example, a gene that produces Yersinia murine toxin, which helps the bacteria survive passing through a flea’s digestive tract on its way from a wild prairie dog to an unlucky hiker. It also lacks the right genes to form buboes (the painful swelling and darkening of the lymph nodes that gives bubonic plague its name). But its genome, not to mention the bodies it left in its wake, reveals that this early strain of Y. pestis was still horrifically deadly and probably deeply unpleasant to have.

“There are really a kind of perfect cocktail of other types of virulence genes that cause it to be so deadly—particularly, unfortunately, for children,” said University of Copenhagen evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev during the press conference.

Understanding that perfect cocktail could be useful for battling modern epidemics, despite this strain of Y. pestis being so different from the ones circulating now in North America and Asia.

“What it gives you is an idea of which mutations in combination {…} are something that survives in nature,” said Willerslev. Because any combinations of features that work well tend to reappear (in the same microbe or in a different species), he said, studying ancient bacterial DNA “actually gives you some information on how these pathogens, including the plague, will develop.”

Why did the plague kill so many children?

Bubonic plague spreads through flea bites, but pneumonic plague is a respiratory disease, which spreads in a similar way to the flu or COVID-19, and that seems to be how this early version would have passed from person to person. So we can assume it would have come with respiratory symptoms like cough and difficulty breathing, along with fever. But for children, it probably would have been even worse.

When archaeologists plotted the ages of the dead on a graph, they noticed a sharp peak in children between 7 and 11 years old. Adults older than 20, on the other hand, had the lowest death rate. That lines up with data from plague outbreaks thousands of years later in London, when parish records document local children bearing the brunt of the plague’s death toll.

The Y. pestis genomes that Macleod and his colleagues sequenced offer a clue about why. According to Iversen, the 5,500-year-old strain carries a gene that makes what’s called a superantigenic toxin: a chemical that triggers a dramatic, disorganized overreaction by the immune system. Children are especially vulnerable to this kind of reaction, said Oxford University immunologist Astrid Iversen during the press conference, because their immune systems are still learning how to respond to pathogens.

Telling the story of an ancient outbreak

The outbreak probably started when the bacteria made the leap from an infected marmot (a type of ground squirrel that’s still a common plague carrier in the area) to a single person and then spread like wildfire through several interconnected hunter-gatherer groups along the river. For millennia, people around Lake Baikal have hunted marmots for food and for their fur, and close contact with a plague-ridden marmot can spread the infection. This is how it goes: accidentally inhale a few droplets of blood while skinning your latest kill or eat an undercooked marmot stew, and you’ve just doomed your whole band. And the neighbors.

Why are all the plague reservoirs also things I want to pick up and hug?

Credit: By Stéphane Magnenat – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7566004

That scenario is supported by the fact that people at Ust’-Ida carried the same strain of plague as those buried 37 kilometers away at another cemetery, Shumilikha, which is what epidemiologists would expect to see if they were part of the same outbreak. The burial customs at the two cemeteries suggest they belonged to different subcultures within the wider Isakovo tradition, but DNA from the plague victims reveals threads of kinship connecting them—and the plague may have made those threads deadly.

Macleod and his colleagues sequenced the DNA of the plague victims, piecing together how they were related and (through radiocarbon dating) when each member of the family died. That data revealed that the plague seemed to have spread among family members, often killing several at close enough to the same time that siblings often share graves.

“The incidence of detected infections among co-buried kin… would be consistent with the transmission of plague among humans, particularly via pneumonic transmission in the scenario of concurrent deaths,” wrote Macleod and his colleagues.

Or as Macleod put it during the press conference, direct spread between people makes a lot more sense than “an outlandish scenario that absolutely everybody got together at the same time and ate the same infected marmot.”

At Ust’-Ida, a young boy shares a grave with his aunt; both had Yersinia pestis in their bloodstreams when they died. The aunt also has a teenage niece buried nearby in a grave alongside a teenage boy who isn’t biologically related to her (it’s hard to tell if they were adopted siblings or cousins, a couple, or just close friends). And the boy’s father is buried nearby in yet another grave.

“It’s so obvious from the way people are buried… that somebody was around to bury the dead that knew who these people were when they were alive,” said Macleod. “And that adds a really really human element to the scientific work that we’ve done, seeing the impact on communities and how these communities responded to this very tragic set of events.”

Nature, 2026 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10540-5 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 19 June 2026 at 8:18 am AEST (my time).

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Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.

With Samokutyaev’s death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.

Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev.

Credit: Roscosmos

“The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich,” officials with Russia’s space agency said in a statement.

Samokutyaev joined the cosmonaut corps in 2003. Two years later, after his basic training, he qualified for spaceflight assignments.

To ISS and back, twice

He launched for the first time on April 4, 2011, flying as the commander of Soyuz TMA-21 with flight engineers Andrey Borisenko from Roscosmos and NASA astronaut Ron Garan. Their spacecraft was named Gagarin in honor of the world’s first human in space, who had lifted off 50 years earlier from the same launch site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Samokutyaev served as a flight engineer on the space station’s 27th and 28th expedition crews. In addition to Borisenko and Garan, he worked with Dmitri Kondratyev of Roscosmos, Cady Coleman of NASA, and Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency) for about a month and Sergey Volkov of Roscosmos, Mike Fossum with NASA, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa for the second part of his stay.

Aleksandr Samokutyaev, Expedition 28 flight engineer, in the International Space Station’s Zvezda

service module with a view of space shuttle Atlantis outside the window during the STS-135 mission on July 12, 2011.

Credit: NASA

On July 10, 2011, the US space shuttle Atlantis arrived at the space station, and for nine days, the four STS-135 astronauts joined Samokutyaev and his Expedition 28 colleagues aboard the orbiting laboratory. Not only was it the last time that a shuttle would visit the ISS, but it was the final mission of the 30-year program.

On August 3, 2011, Samokutyaev performed his first spacewalk, venturing outside of the ISS with Volkov to relocate equipment, install a materials science experiment, and hand-deploy a micro-satellite.

After 164 days in Earth orbit, Samokutyaev returned to Earth on Soyuz TMA-21 with Borisenko and Garan, landing safely on the steppe of Kazakhstan.

Cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev on his first spacewalk outside of the International Space Station on August 3, 2011.

Credit: Roscosmos

Samokutyaev returned to the ISS three years later, this time with Elena Serova—one of only two female cosmonauts in Roscosmos’ corps at the time and only the fourth to fly into space—and NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore on board Soyuz TMA-14M. Samokutyaev spent about two months as an Expedition 41 flight engineer, sharing the space station with cosmonaut Max Surayev, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman (later of Artemis II fame), and ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst from Germany.

On October 22, 2014, Samokutyaev went outside for his second career spacewalk, working with Surayev to jettison unneeded equipment and conduct a detailed photographic survey of the station’s Russian segment exterior. In total, Samokutyaev logged 10 hours and one minute on his two spacewalks.

Samokutyaev then transferred with Serova and Wilmore onto the Expedition 42 crew, working with his 2003 cosmonaut classmate Anton Shkaplerov, as well as NASA astronaut Terry Virts and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti from Italy. The three returned to Earth on March 11, 2015, adding 167 days to Samokutyaev’s time in space for a total of 331 days, 11 hours, and 23 minutes.

Samokutyaev was the 518th person to enter orbit and the 527th to fly above 50 miles (80 km), according to the Association of Space Explorers’ Registry of Space Travelers.

From pilot to politician

Aleksandr Samokutyaev, Expedition 41 flight engineer, works with test samples in a microgravity

science glovebox in the Poisk mini-research module of the International Space Station.

Credit: NASA

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Samokutyaev was born on March 13, 1970, in the city of Penza, Russia. He graduated from the Yuri Gagarin Air Force Academy in 2000 and flew as a pilot, senior pilot, and deputy squadron commander in the Russian Air Force before being selected to train as a cosmonaut.

Prior to his first launch, Samokutyaev trained as a member of the Expedition 23/24 backup crew. Similarly, he served on the Expedition 41/42 backup crew before his second mission.

In 2017, an interdepartmental commission recommended that Samokutyaev be dismissed from being an instructor and the deputy commander of the cosmonaut corps, reportedly due to medical concerns. Two years later, he graduated with honors from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and, taking up a new career as a politician in 2021, was elected as a deputy to the State Duma of the Russian Federation.

“Alexander Mikhailovich Samokutyaev did much to glorify our Penza region and improve the lives of people in his native region. His fond and cherished memory will forever remain in our hearts,” the regional government wrote in an obituary posted to its website.

For his service to the Russian space program, Samokutyaev was awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation, receiving the Gold Star medal and the honorary title of Pilot-Cosmonaut of the Russian Federation. He also received the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” (4th Class), medals from the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and departmental awards from Roscosmos.

Samokutyaev is survived by his wife, Oksana Nikolaevna, and daughter, Anastasia Aleksandrovna.

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Posted Friday 19 June 2026 at 8:17 am AEST (my time).

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Last week, we looked at a new study of the origin of complex cells, one that showed that our ancestors’ genomes were pieced together from bits and pieces of multiple species. It put a spotlight on a phenomenon called horizontal gene transfer, in which a gene from one species is incorporated into the genome of a distantly related species. The frequency of horizontal gene transfer means that, in addition to the neatly branching trees that relate species by common descent, there are small threads connecting distant branches of the tree of life.

It’s easy to see why horizontal gene transfer would be common among microbes. They often live in complex communities that are likely awash in the DNA of dead and damaged cells. Plus, bacteria and archaea lack a membrane between their DNA and the rest of the cell, making it easier for environmental DNA to find its way to the genome.

However, a new study this week shows that horizontal gene transfers are remarkably common even in multicellular animals. And it does so by examining the genomes of multiple cockroach species, which have had bits of bacterial DNA for millions of years.

Going horizontal

Neither bacteria nor archaea keep their DNA in a structure like the nucleus. As a result, any DNA that finds its way inside the cell has the potential to become intermingled with the genome and be incorporated permanently. That permanent incorporation is often aided by the DNA damage repair enzymes, which sometimes “fix” damage by inserting any DNA they come across in a cell.

Another reason horizontal gene transfer is a big factor among microbes is that they lack dedicated germ cells. If foreign DNA gets incorporated into the genome of any cell, it will be inherited by any descendants of that cell. In contrast, in multicellular animals, any foreign DNA incorporated into the genome of a liver cell will not be inherited by anything. So, you not only have to get the foreign DNA into the nucleus, but it also needs to get into the nucleus of the right cell.

Horizontal gene transfer in complex, multicellular animals was expected to be rare. When researchers started sequencing animal genomes, they found lots of bits of viruses scattered throughout most of them. But they didn’t find many pieces of bacterial DNA. That was partly because the software that assembled the genome from individual fragments of genome sequence was made to treat bacterial sequence as contamination. That is not unreasonable, given that we were typically growing up lots of copies of the animal DNA by placing it in bacteria.

Since then, we’ve developed techniques that allow us to sequence DNA without growing lots of copies in bacteria. We’ve also got the ability to obtain sequence-extended fragments of DNA, sometimes many thousands of bases long. These “long read” DNA sequences will often cover both borders where the bacterial sequence meets the animal sequence, making clear that the bacterial version wasn’t the result of contamination.

Over time, it has become clear that dozens of animal genes have originated from horizontal gene transfer—including a number in our own genome. And that’s just genes. If you consider areas of the genome that don’t encode genes, the contribution from other species gets considerably larger.

Lots of DNA, little impact

A team decided to gain perspective by making a comprehensive list of horizontally transferred DNA found in a group of related animal species. They chose cockroaches, and they had a good reason.

Cockroaches are closely related to termites. Termites don’t get a lot of nitrogen in their diet of wood, which is largely comprised of a polymer of sugar molecules. To make up for that, they rely on endosymbiotic bacteria called Blattabacterium that reside inside the termite’s body, and are very efficient at recycling the nitrogen that would be excreted as waste in other species. While the roaches’ diets have diversified considerably, they’ve held on to the Blattabacterium. Since these bacteria live inside the animals’ bodies and are transferred to ensuing generations by being placed in their eggs, there are plenty of opportunities for horizontal gene transfer.

Indeed, there is a lot of Blattabacterium DNA in cockroach species. Setting a minimum length of 50 bases long, the team found anywhere from a low of 93 instances of bacterial sequence to a high of 4,900, depending on the roach species. Most of these were short—the median size was just 160 bases long. Depending on the species, 75 percent or more were outside of regions that encode genes.

Some of the inserts seem to have been around since the origin of the cockroach lineage, and others are shared among closely related species, suggesting that they originated more recently.

It’s clear that most of these sequences aren’t really doing anything useful for the roaches—they got there by accident and simply don’t do enough damage for evolution to get rid of them. But their frequency suggests that horizontal gene transfer is a fairly regular occurrence, at least on evolutionary timescales. So, it’s possible that horizontal gene transfer may play a larger role as a source of diversity in the genomes of animals than we’ve appreciated.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2604240123 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 18 June 2026 at 5:05 pm AEST (my time).

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