Google wants to launch a battalion of satellites into orbit around the Earth to monitor fires on the ground in real time, then collect all that photographic data and use AI to better identify fires in their critical early stages.

FireSat is a partnership between Google, the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance, and the satellite builder Muon Space. The collaborative effort was announced in 2024 with the goal of launching satellites specifically designed to spot wildfires. The first satellite of the proposed 50-plus strong constellation launched in March 2025.

The group hopes to get the full constellation up there by 2029. Then, the satellites will be able to orbit the Earth, snapping images of every fire-prone place on the globe. The photos would be captured about 20 minutes apart, enough to catch a small fire before it grows too big, or to observe the progress of an active blaze.The information about a fire’s location could then be beamed to data analysts and machine intelligence systems on the ground more quickly than ever.

“We want to make sure that we can learn fast to be able to detect and track fires,” Brian Collins, the executive director of the Earth Fire Alliance, says. “We want to transform the way the world and the United States looks at fire.”

This group’s effort isn’t the only mission to put fire-tracking satellites into orbit right now. The Canadian WildfireSat program is a government-funded effort to launch its own fire-specific satellites dedicated to monitoring blazes across the country. In the 2025 fire season so far, nearly 9 million acres have already burned in the fires active in Canada. But the launch of Canada’s fire satellites is still a ways off, slated for launch in 2029. Google wants to get into space more quickly—and use its AI chops to speed up the process of figuring out when fires start.

Satellites already in orbit have been snapping pics of wildfires for years. Google has incorporated data collected by NOAA weather satellites to show wildfire boundaries and evacuation zones in Maps. But detecting fires from space—especially small ones or fires that are just starting—can be tricky. Satellites currently in orbit tend to detect heat with microbolometer sensors, thermal imaging chips that, unlike other thermal cameras, don’t require cooling. The problem with that, says Christopher Van Arsdale, a researcher at Google, is that microbolometer images can have a narrow field of view and come back with grainier, lower-resolution images. That can make detecting fires in their earlier stages hard, because lots of heat signatures on the ground—hot roofs or even light reflected off water surfaces—can look very similar to wildfires to a thermal camera.

“If you look at a noisy picture, everything kind of looks like a tiny fire,” Van Arsdale says. “So you have to really know what you're looking at for that to be useful. You need these very high-fidelity pictures in order to actually do a good job with detection.”

Google and Muon’s fire satellites are outfitted with image-capture equipment that works to solve this problem. They will take photos of the same spot using two different types of cameras—one more standard camera that covers visible and short wave infrared and one cryo-cooled thermal camera that takes shots in higher resolution than a traditional microbolometer. Then those images are sent to data centers where Google’s computer vision and machine intelligence prowess comes into play.

“The whole job of the constellation after it collects the data is really to funnel it to a data center where we can take the imagery and analyze it to understand if what we're looking at is likely a fire or a false positive,” Van Arsdale says. “Fundamentally, the main problem with all of these systems for early detection is separating out false positives.”

By cross-referencing the different photo types and collecting millions of pixels of imagery over time, Google is hoping its AI system will be able to reliably see the forest fire for the trees. The platform can leverage all the imagery from the satellites, collate the different image types, then analyze and compare that information to historical data to look for trends that typically signal the beginnings of a fire.

Test Flight

There is one FireSat satellite in orbit currently circling the globe. It captures images and tests what it will take to reliably snap pics of the planet in short enough intervals to track the movements of a wildfire. Google says it plans to show off images captured by the satellite sometime this summer.

The FireSat operation plans to launch three more satellites in early 2026, and eventually work up to its final number of 52 satellites over the course of the next few years. At full capacity, the satellites should be able to detect a fire as small as ten square meters and then collect updates on the spread every 20 minutes or so. The goal is that the window between updates is short enough to give them the types of information first responders can actually put to good use.

“With fire in particular, times are compressed so much that you have to apply technology to make a decision within the timeframe that you can impact the outcome of what's happening,” Collins says.

Krystal Azelton, a senior director at the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable space policies, says that while satellites and AI tech may provide better data, it's crucial that the data makes it into the right hands.

“The trend towards AI to assist with all of this is obviously going to produce better results, but it's not going to produce consistent results necessarily.” Azelton says. “This is a really big positive because one of my biggest concerns about any kind of environmental monitoring from space is whoever's providing the data, how do you get the data into the end user?” Azelton says. “There's a lot of tech solutions out there, but how do you get them into the hands of people actually using it?

Van Arsdale says the goal of the FireSat team is to make its tracking data as accessible as possible, and it’s committed to working directly with firefighting agencies to do so.

“There's this sort of fog of war associated with fires, where you don't know where they are when they start,” Van Arsdale says about trying to pitch the idea of this vast swath of data collection to firefighting officials. “We're just going to give you a picture of everything that's going on that you could possibly care about.”

Speed Run

While more information is usually better in disaster situations, it isn’t clear if this kind of satellite detection will be all that much faster than what currently exists. Camera networks like those deployed by AlertWildfire have been the first to spot fires all across the West Coast, including the deadly Palisades Fire in Los Angeles this past January. There’s also the fact that while FireSat cameras may be able to pick up a fire the moment it starts, just having that information doesn't mean firefighters will be able to mobilize and get to the blaze in time.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist who runs the blog Weather West and has long tracked wildfires, says that while satellite-enabled updates may not solve all the realities of response time, it would be useful for sharing information with people in immediate danger and keeping people informed as the fire spreads.

“It doesn't really solve the core underlying problems, but it's probably a beneficial thing to do,” Swain says. “It does help to know exactly where a fire is as soon as possible. It unfortunately doesn't give us much of an edge under the most extreme conditions.”

These FireSat efforts also come at a time of increased investment in the tech aimed at fighting wildfires. Namely, an uptick in private companies hoping to help build new firefighting solutions—and profit off that tech. In June, President Trump signed an executive order for a “common sense” approach to fighting wildfires, which called for prioritizing the efforts of fire tech companies while also combining federal disaster agencies and instructing federal agencies to “declassify historical satellite data to improve wildfire prediction and revise or eliminate rules that impede wildfire detection, prevention, and response.”

That focus, along with the sweeping cuts to federal disaster programs like FEMA and the US Forest Service means that with fewer public resources to tackle the problem, private industry is moving to close those gaps.

Swain cautions that while lots of this tech might be helpful, relying on private companies to solve widespread societal problems like disaster response comes with problems.

“Even if you assume the best possible motive,” Swain says. “That this is truly in the public interest and that private companies are able to effectuate that, there's then the question of, OK, are we actually going to have access to this data in the long run, or is this going to be the equivalent of a 30-day free trial?”

He points out that internet-of-things companies have gone out of business and left customers with products that no longer work, and that Google itself has a long history of killing off services.

“It's the classic tech industry challenge of continuity,” Swain says. “We've seen this happen.”

Azelton believes there will always be a need for “a baseline of government, truly and fully public data that's out there, that's accessible to anybody and everybody that can and should be supplemented by commercial data and partnerships like this, and that they need to be designed in a way that they can be in the hands of everyone who needs them.”

It's a feat that Google seems keen on facilitating, even if it isn't immediately profitable for the company. It's also easy to see this as a sort of mea culpa for Google, a company that has made a number of climate commitments, despite the fact that, like all purveyors of generative AI technology, it consumes lots and lots of energy. (In 2024, Google’s emissions bumped up by 50 percent because of its generative AI efforts.) Humanity's ever increasing consumption of energy has worsened climate change, which has in turn played a part in worsening wildfires.

“If Google admits, you know, what we do harms the planet, but we're trying to find ways of stewarding as well, and these are the ways in which we're trying to be regenerative and restorative,“ says Moriba K. Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “At least having a more honest conversation about it I think would be refreshing.”

In late May, Google highlighted the FireSat program very briefly at the end of its I/O developer conference. It was a real tonal shift, a blink-and-you-miss-it moment of environmental angst and self-congratulation after a two-hour deluge of breathless AI-fueled futurism. Maybe launching enough satellites to keep track of all the damage is an effort to atone for the vast energy AI uses. Maybe it will even work.

Update, June 24 at 1 pm: A previous version of this story inaccurately reported the duration between each satellite imagery capture. The shots are taken about 20 minutes apart.

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After a decade of construction, a large new reflecting telescope publicly released its first images on Monday, and they are nothing short of spectacular.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's primary mirror is 8.4 meters in diameter, which makes it one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. However, the real secret sauce of the telescope is its camera—the automobile-sized Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera—which has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels. Which is rather a lot.

The observatory is on a remote 2,682-meter-high (8,799 ft) mountain in northern Chile, a region of the planet with some of the best atmospheric "seeing" conditions.

The main goal of the telescope is to scan the entire Southern Hemisphere sky by taking 1,000 high-definition photographs every three nights for the next 10 years. The idea is that, assembled end to end, the observatory will provide a high-definition, four-dimensional film of the Universe changing over a decade. It will seek to encompass everything from nearby asteroids and comets to distant supernovae.

Who was Vera Rubin? She was an American astronomer who was the first person to establish the presence of dark matter in galaxies. The observatory named in her honor was funded by the US Department of Energy and the US National Science Foundation. International partners, including the French National Centre for Scientific Research, will help to store the 20 terabytes of data collected every night.

The only bummer about Monday's announcement is the fact that it was funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The Trump administration has sought to halve the science budgets of both agencies in the coming years. And the prospect of losing that funding, juxtaposed against the phenomenal start of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, reminds us of what we stand to lose if we slash basic science funding in this country.

Source: Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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On Monday, June 23, shortly after 9 pm UTC, hundreds of seeds, fungi, algae, and human DNA samples, many of which have never been exposed to space before, will make their maiden voyage aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the mission is hoping to be the first to send plant tissues and seeds into a polar low Earth orbit and back, to allow scientists to study how biological systems are affected by the harsh levels of radiation found high above Earth’s poles. The information they glean, researchers hope, could one day help spacefarers grow crops on other planets.

The samples will travel in a small biological incubator called MayaSat-1, developed by the Genoplant Research Institute, a Slovenian aerospace company specializing in space-based biological research. At an altitude above 500 kilometers, the incubator, housed inside a larger capsule, will cross zones near the North and South poles where concentrations of charged particles emitted by the sun are high due to the Earth’s magnetic field. When it passes through these regions, it will be exposed to up to 100 times more radiation than objects orbiting at similar altitudes around the equator, like the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule will orbit Earth three times, in a mission lasting around three hours, before re-entering the atmosphere and splash-landing in the Pacific Ocean. If all goes to plan, the incubator will be collected from a location around nine hours off the coast of Hawaii and shipped back to Europe, where the real exploration will begin.

Among several research participants with samples aboard the mission is Božidar Radišič, who will be following the launch livestream closely from his office at the Research Nature Institute in Slovenia. The Martian Grow project, led by Radišič and his team, is sending approximately 150 cannabis seeds into space in MayaSat-1 to test their resilience and potentially accelerate their evolution. It’s not a gimmick, though, or a quest for an otherworldly high.

Having dedicated much of his working life to studying the cannabis plant, Radišič believes it is uniquely qualified for space agriculture. It grows fast, adapts well, and has been an agricultural crop for thousands of years. According to Radišič, if at some point we want to grow life on Mars, this makes it an ideal candidate. “Sooner or later, we will have lunar bases, and cannabis, with its versatility, is the ideal plant to supply those projects,” he tells WIRED. “It can be a source of food, protein, building materials, textiles, hemp, plastic, and medicine. I don’t think many other plants give us all these things.”

Best known for producing the cannabinoids THC and CBD, Cannabis Sativa L. contains hundreds of different compounds, many of which are still being discovered and the effects of which we don’t fully understand. What we do know is that it is a resilient plant, coping well with stressors such as UV light and radiation (such as gamma rays), which are used to aid in its cultivation here on Earth. It has also grown in climates from the highlands of Tibet to the jungles of Southeast Asia and the deserts of Afghanistan and can be raised in controlled conditions.

Gary Yates, a plant researcher and head of cultivation at Hilltop Leaf, a medical cannabis manufacturing facility in the UK, agrees that the versatility of cannabis makes it a “leading contender” for a space crop. “Its hardiness makes it perfect for an extreme environment,” he tells WIRED. “It has shown great resilience and can grow in unexpected places. It doesn’t demand too much water, is known to thrive in low-nutrient soil, and has demonstrated phytoremediation potential, for removing toxins and heavy metals from the ground.”

Previous research has highlighted how conditions in space, such as microgravity and radiation, can influence plant genetics—and for Radišič, this is the key reason to send those cannabis seeds into orbit. “The point is to explore how, and if, cosmic conditions affect cannabis genetics, and we may only find this out after several generations,” he says.

According to D. Marshall Porterfield, professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University, who has been studying plant growth in space for several decades, the impact of radiation exposure on biological materials during space flight is “well understood” through previous studies. “It randomly causes mutations. Some of those mutations might turn up genes, they might turn down genes, they might knock out genes, they could disrupt whole signaling pathways,” he explains. “As a result, you get variable responses in the biological materials that could lead to new genetically stabilized mutations that could then be identified and derived.”

Radišič is not the first to query the effects of space travel on cannabis. A collaborative research team including a group that is based at the University of Colorado Boulder sent cannabis tissue cultures to the ISS in 2019. Nothing has been published, however, on how exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity impacts the cannabis plant.

He’s also not the only researcher working to expose plants to higher radiation levels than previously studied. Porterfield, who is one of the scientists working on NASA’s LEAF mission—a lunar plant-growth experiment that will go to the moon with Artemis III in 2027—says we know “almost nothing” about the impact of radiation exposure beyond low Earth orbit. Understanding how variability in radiation impacts plants will be a “critical focus” of the LEAF mission.

“We’ve been trapped in lower orbit for the last 30 years and haven’t advanced a lot of the basic research that we need to go to deep space, where you find galactic cosmic radiation,” he says. “There may be some unexpected responses from this variable source of radiation. Plant responses to these radiation issues are going to be important for future agricultural systems on the moon.”

Once MayaSat-1 has returned, for the next two years Radišič and his team will work with the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia to breed generations of clones from the space seeds to study genetic changes and plant adaptations, including “alterations in cannabinoid profiles”—how much CBD, THC, and other compounds the plants go onto develop. The second phase of their study will then involve simulating Martian soil conditions and growing plants in controlled low-gravity environments on Earth.

Lumír Ondřej Hanuš, a chemist at Palacký University Olomouc in Czechia and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has been studying the cannabis plant since the 1970s. A research adviser on the project, he believes that there are “many possibilities” for scientific investigation once the seeds have returned.

As well as potential genetic and epigenetic changes, the Martian Grow team will look for structural and physiological changes, such as differences in leaf size, chlorophyll content, root architecture, photosynthetic rates, and water use. They will examine what happens after the plant is exposed to stressors such as disease, and analyze the activity of enzyme hormones and secondary metabolites, which could lead to the identification of new compounds.

“Whether there are changes or not, both results will be important for the future, so we know how to grow cannabis in the space environment,” Radišič adds.

We’re still some way off from actually growing cannabis on Mars, though, or any plant for that matter. Microgravity, extreme temperatures, lack of nutrients, and toxins in the soil do not make favorable conditions for cultivation.

“We will have to adapt to the environment on Mars, and slowly adapt our plants for them to survive,” says Petra Knaus, the CEO of Genoplant. “For now, we believe it will only be possible [to grow plants] in a closed system container with the conditions adapted.” For future missions, Genoplant is developing a new space capsule in this vein, scheduled for its first reentry test in 2027, that will enable researchers to grow seeds in space and monitor them for several years.

While cannabis could potentially be a supercrop for the space age, back on Earth, it is still predominantly thought of as a recreational drug (albeit one widely used for medicinal purposes), which has prevented regulators and researchers from fully acknowledging its scientific potential. Hanuš is optimistic that the findings from the project, whatever they look like, could dispel some of this stigma and speed up its scientific acceptance.

“If interesting results are published, it could speed up our understanding of cannabis,” he says. “It is a very important plant, which I think has a big future if humanity ever crosses into space and starts life on another planet.”

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TCAT started testing seven battery-electric buses (BEBs) in 2021 as part of a pilot program funded by a federal grant. Over two years, the buses ran on 41 different routes in Tompkins County.However,t the buses had issues during colder months, with lower driving range and performance. To understand why, researchers looked at real-world data and developed what they called “Optimal Temperature Zone” (OTZ) models—these models show how much energy the buses would have used in ideal temperatures between 16°C and 30°C.

When temperatures dropped to between −4°C and 0°C, the buses used about 48.0% more energy, including both power used to drive and energy regenerated through braking, compared to OTZ predictions. Even in the wider range of −12°C to 10°C, energy use still jumped by 28.6%.

Half of this extra energy went into heating the batteries themselves. These bus batteries work best at about 24°C, so when it’s cold, they need extra power to warm up before the bus can even get moving. The other major factor was the cabin’s heating system, especially on urban routes where doors open and close often, letting in cold air.

“With an all-electric vehicle, the battery is the only onboard energy source,” said Max Zhang, senior author of the study and a professor at Cornell. “Everything has to come from it.”

The study also found that regenerative braking—the process that lets the battery recharge a bit while the bus slows down—didn’t work as well in cold conditions. One reason is that these bus batteries are huge, about eight times bigger than typical electric car batteries, and it’s harder to keep the temperature even across all the battery cells.

To improve the buses' performance in winter, the researchers suggested a few short-term fixes: parking them indoors to keep them warmer, charging batteries while they’re still warm, and reducing the length of time the doors stay open during stops. On a bigger scale, cities might need to rethink their transit infrastructure. That includes checking how many charging stations they have, whether buses can be kept in heated garages, and how to adjust routes and schedules.

“You have to try to optimize the schedule of all of the buses and to consider the capability of your infrastructure – how many charging stations you have, and if you have your own garage,” said lead author and PhD student Jintao Gu.

The team found that rural routes, which have fewer stops, use less extra energy in cold weather than urban ones. That could help transit agencies decide which routes are better for electric buses during colder months.

“One of the lessons we’ve learned is that these buses should be designed for the whole country, including states with colder climates,” said Zhang. “But any lessons are good lessons. This helps us learn as a society and do better.”

Source: Cornell University, ScienceDirect

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 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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For many species, producing an embryo is a bit of a contest between males and females. Males want as many offspring as possible, and want the females to devote as many resources as possible to each of them. Females do better by keeping their options open and distributing resources in a way to maximize the number of offspring they can produce over the course of their lives.

In mammals, this plays out through the chemical modification of DNA, a process called imprinting. Males imprint their DNA by adding methyl modifications to it in a way that alters the activity of genes in order to promote the growth of embryos. Females do similar things chemically but focus on shutting down genes that promote embryonic growth. In a handful of key regions of the genome, having only the modifications specific to one sex is lethal, as the embryo can't grow to match its stage of development.

One consequence of this is that you normally can't produce embryos using only the DNA from eggs or from sperm. But over the last few years, researchers have gradually worked around the need for imprinted sites to have one copy from each parent. Now, in a very sophisticated demonstration, researchers have used targeted editing of methylation to produce mice from the DNA of two sperm.

Imprinting and same-sex parents

There's a long history of studying imprinting in mice. Long before the genome was sequenced, people had identified specific parts of the chromosomes that, if deleted, were lethal—but only if inherited from one of the two sexes. They correctly inferred that this meant that the genes in the region are normally inactivated in the germ cells of one of the sexes. If they're deleted in the other sex, then the combination that results in the offspring—missing on one chromosome, inactivated the other—is lethal.

Over time, seven critical imprinted regions were identified, scattered throughout the genome. And, roughly 20 years ago, a team managed to find the right deletion to enable a female mouse to give birth to offspring that received a set of chromosomes from each of two unfertilized eggs. The researchers drew parallels to animals that can reproduce through parthenogenesis, where the female gives birth using unfertilized eggs. But the mouse example obviously took a big assist via the manipulation of egg cells in culture before being implanted in a mouse.

By 2016, researchers were specifically editing in deletions of imprinted genes in order to allow the creation of embryos by fusing stem cell lines that only had a single set of chromosomes. This was far more focused than the original experiment, as the deletions were smaller and affected only a few genes. By 2018, they had expanded the repertoire by figuring out how to get the genomes of two sperm together in an unfertilized egg with its own genome eliminated.

The products of two male parents, however, died the day after birth. This is either the product of improperly compensating for imprinting or simply because the deletions had additional impacts on the embryo's health. It took until earlier this year, when a very specific combination of 20 different gene edits and deletions enabled mice generated using the chromosomes from two sperm cells to survive to adulthood.

The problem with all of these efforts is that the deletions may have health impacts on the animals, and may still cause problems if inherited from the opposite sex. So, while it's an interesting way of confirming our understanding of the role of imprinting in reproduction, it's not necessarily the route to using this as a reliable reproductive tool. Which finally brings us to the present research.

Roll your own imprinting

Left out of the above is the nature of the imprinting itself: How does a chunk of chromosome and all the genes on it get marked as coming from a male or female? The secret is to chemically modify that region of the DNA in a way that doesn't alter base pairing, but does allow it to be recognized as distinct by proteins. The most common way of doing this is to link a single carbon atom (a methyl group) to the base cytosine. This tends to shut nearby genes down, and it can be inherited through cell division, since there are enzymes that recognize when one of the two DNA strands is unmodified and adds a methyl to it.

Methylation turns out to explain imprinting. The key regions for imprinting are methylated differently in males and females, which influences nearby gene activity and can be maintained throughout all of embryonic development.

So, to make up for the imprinting problems caused when both sets of chromosomes come from the same sex, what you need to do is a targeted reprogramming of methylation. And that's what the researchers behind the new paper have done.

First, they needed to tell the two sets of chromosomes apart. To do that, they used two distantly related strains of mice, one standard lab strain that originated in Europe and a second that was caught in the wild in Thailand less than a century ago. These two strains have been separated for long enough that they have a lot of small differences in DNA sequences scattered throughout the genome. So, it was possible to use these to target one or the other of the genomes.

This was done using parts of the DNA editing systems that have been developed, the most famous of which is CRISPR/CAS. These systems have a protein that pairs with an RNA sequence to find a matching sequence in DNA. In this case, those RNAs could be made so that they target imprinting regions in just one of the two mouse strains. The protein/RNA combinations could also be linked to enzymes that modify DNA, either adding methyls or removing them.

To bring all this together, the researchers started with an egg and deleted the genome from it. They then injected the heads of sperm, one from the lab strain, one from the recently wild mouse. This left them with an egg with two sets of chromosomes, although a quarter of them would have two Y chromosomes and thus be inviable (unlike the Y, the X has essential genes). Arbitrarily, they chose one set of chromosomes to be female, and targeted methylation and de-methylation enzymes to it in order to reprogram the pattern of methylation on it. Once that was done, they could allow the egg to start dividing and implant it into female mice.

Rare success

The researchers spent time ensuring that the enzymes they had were modifying the methylation as expected, and that development started as usual. Their general finding is that the enzymes did change the methylation state for about 500 bases on either side of the targeted site, and did so pretty consistently. But there are seven different imprinting sites that need to be modified, each of which controls multiple nearby genes. So, while the modifications were consistent, they weren't always thorough enough to result in the expected changes to all of the nearby genes.

This limited efficiency showed up in the rate of survival. Starting with over 250 reprogrammed embryos that carried DNA from two males, they ended up with sixteen pregnancies, but only four that died at birth, and three live ones; based on other experiments, most of the rest died during the second half of embryonic development. Of the three live ones, one was nearly 40 percent larger than the typical pup, suggesting problems regulating growth—it died the day after birth.

All three live births were male, although the numbers are small enough that it's impossible to tell if that's significant or not.

The researchers suggest several potential reasons for the low efficiency. One is simply that, while the probability of properly reprogramming at least one of the sites is high, reprogramming all seven is considerably more challenging. There's also the risk of off-target effects, where the modification takes place in locations with similar sequences to the ones targeted. They also concede that there could be other key imprinted regions that we simply haven't identified yet.

Sorting that out would be needed if we want to use this approach as a tool, which might be potentially useful as a way to breed mice that carry mutations that affect female viability or fertility. But this work has already been useful even in its inefficient state, because it serves as a pretty definitive validation of our ideas about the function of imprinting in embryonic development, as well as the critical role methylation plays in this process. If we weren't largely right about both of those, the efficiency of this approach wouldn't be low—it would be zero.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425307122  (About DOIs).

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Zubaida starts her day at eight in the morning, sorting discarded plastics, glass, and chemicals with her bare hands, to collect items she can sell. With waste-segregation centers in this part of East Delhi currently shut down, she and other waste-pickers from the Seemapuri slum work outside by a dusty road through the hottest hours of the day, under the blazing sun. There is no fan or shade. With Delhi’s heat wave season here, they are constantly exposed to intense high temperatures.

On June 11, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued a red alert for Delhi, warning of a high risk of heat illness and heat stroke. Temperatures that week pushed beyond 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) across northern India, with the real-feel temperature, which factors in how humidity augments the effects of heat, spiking at an alarming 54 degrees Celsius. Prolonged exposure to such high heat can raise a person’s body temperature to dangerous levels. It’s potentially fatal.

In the face of this inferno, the IMD advised people to avoid going outdoors during the daytime, and markets and streets were deserted during the day. But even when extreme heat strikes, Delhi’s large, informal workforce continues to work. Street vendors, rickshaw pullers, and waste pickers have reported dizziness, infections, breathing difficulties, and persistent fatigue during recent heat waves. “We cannot stop,” says Zubaida. “We earn each day to eat each day. If we miss a day, we miss a meal.”

At present, heat action plans (HAP) are India’s primary approach for managing heat waves and keeping essential services running. Developed annually by state, district, and city governments—the Delhi government released its citywide HAP for 2025 in April—these plans are designed to help cities prepare for, respond to, and recover from extreme heat. And they’re not working.

This has driven nonprofits and research organizations to show how HAPs can be improved—with one key idea being to use geographic information systems (GIS) that combine satellite imagery with local data to provide cities with a granular, building-by-building views of their heat. Action plans, often plagued by generalization, can then be tailored to better protect those at the highest risk.

Places like Ahmedabad and Tamil Nadu have seen falls in heat-related illnesses and deaths since introducing their plans (Ahmedabad’s was the first to be implemented in India, back in 2013). But with most HAPs there are still major gaps when it comes to their implementation, coordination, and funding. A 2023 study found that 95 percent of HAPs do not have detailed mapping of heat-prone areas or vulnerable populations. Without this kind of granular data, it becomes difficult to allocate resources where they are needed most.

What is still missing is a hyperlocal targeted response to risk, says Radhika Khosla, associate professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. She explains that heat risk is really the intersection of three things: the hazard—where temperature and humidity are highest within different city regions; exposure—which communities are most exposed to heat; and their vulnerability—factors like socioeconomic status, health conditions, levels of outdoor work, access to electricity, and the conditions of the built environment. Right now, most plans aren’t collecting and analyzing this sort of data, Khosla says. “Often where the actions are taken may not be where the most vulnerable are.”

Heat doesn’t just differ between cities; it varies significantly within them. The urban heat island effect—the phenomenon of cities being hotter than surrounding rural areas—is often discussed at the city scale, but what isn’t understood well enough is how differently it is felt at ground level. A slum settlement with a tin roof can be about 6 degrees Celsius hotter than a nearby independent house with a garden, even though they are both on the same street. The way heat is absorbed, trapped, and felt can shift block by block, depending on land use, construction materials, density, and the presence or absence of green cover, says architect and climate researcher Ujjvala Krishna. Because heat is granular, city-level HAPs are too broad to provide solutions that are specific to the most vulnerable.

To understand just how local heat stress can be, Krishna and her team at the nonprofit Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) conducted a study in a ward in north Bengaluru of just two square kilometers. That ward has a mix of land use and building types—high-rise apartments, low-income informal settlements, large independent houses, old industrial zones, and commercial areas. “Because the built environment and green cover were so heterogeneous, we saw land-surface temperature differences of up to 9 degrees Celsius within the same ward,” Krishna says.

Krishna and her team at ATREE first plotted the different land uses within the Marappanapalya ward in north Bengaluru.

Image: Ujjvala Krishna/ATREE

 

They then used satellite imagery to map surface heat across the ward, and investigated how this correlated with land use.

Image: Ujjvala Krishna/ATREE

 

“And that is exactly how most cities are built,” Krishna says. Urban land use is shifting rapidly, and large plots are being converted to high-rise towers, which increases density, reduces airflow, and traps heat for more people in a smaller area.

Delhi’s 2025 heat action plan made some progress towards addressing the data gap. It included high-resolution, ward-level land surface temperature maps that identified the city’s most heat-vulnerable areas—neighborhoods that are also lacking basic infrastructure to cope with extreme temperatures. However, the quality and application of that data remain limited. “It’s a step forward, but GIS and remote-sensing analysis still need to be more advanced to influence decision-making,” says Raj Bhagat Palanichamy, senior program manager of geoanalytics at WRI India, an independent research organization that works with India’s local and national governments.

Palanichamy points out that many land-surface temperature maps currently used are based on satellite datasets originally designed for agricultural monitoring, which might not be calibrated for complex multi-use urban landscapes. They may be incapable of the specificity needed to support targeted interventions in a city like Delhi.

To try to better capture that variability, SEEDS, a Delhi-based disaster-preparedness nonprofit, along with Chintan, a nonprofit working on waste management and livelihoods, have used GIS mapping of indoor heat risks across homes in low-income settlements in Delhi, located near landfills and industrial zones, and inhabited by waste pickers.

They used an artificial intelligence model called Sunny Lives—built by SEEDS and Microsoft—to assess indoor heat risk across different types of buildings. “Our model looks at how heat is experienced inside individual homes,” says Anshu Sharma, cofounder of SEEDS. “If the outside temperature is 40 degrees Celsius, a house with a tin roof can reach 45 degrees Celsius indoors. And that’s where the most vulnerable people—infants, elderly, and the unwell—are stuck during the hottest times of the day.”

SEEDS and Chintan also calculate the wet-bulb temperature, a measure that combines heat and humidity to indicate the effectiveness of evaporative cooling—or in human terms, sweating. The higher the humidity, the higher the wet-bulb temperature, and the less effective sweating is at keeping someone cool—meaning they are more likely to experience heat stress.

The team tracked conditions in homes topped with tin roofs, tiles, plastic sheeting, and concrete to figure out which are at the highest risk of extreme indoor heat. “That trained the model to recognize patterns, which we then combined with satellite imagery to identify roof types and building materials at scale. We can now assess indoor heat exposure for individual buildings even without installing sensors for similar geographic locations.”

Sharma believes this kind of micro-level resolution should guide the next generation of heat action plans in India. “We now have the tech to zoom in down to individual buildings and clusters, and it’s available and affordable. The same temperature doesn’t impact everyone the same way, and our planning has to reflect that,” he says.

“What we need are ward-level plans, because that’s the smallest administrative unit where the nuances of heat can actually be addressed,” Krishna says. At that level, resources can be better allocated, responsibilities assigned to local bodies, and interventions coordinated with residents’ welfare associations, slum group associations, hospitals, and schools. She also suggests building a heat vulnerability index to take stock of everyone in the area based on age, gender, and socioeconomic status and identify the most vulnerable groups.

“The more granular your data, the more targeted your response can be,” Krishna adds. Instead of generic advisories like “drink more water,” localized data could drive specific actions: change market or factory hours, deploy cost-effective heat shelters, or set up oral rehydration solution stations in high-footfall areas. “If you know who’s most vulnerable, you can act faster,” she adds.

But as Delhi goes through another searing summer, against a backdrop of rising heat-related deaths and increasing climate stress, many of the relief measures already promised by the government—such as placing 3,000 water coolers in public places, altering timings of construction work, and building daytime shelters for outdoor workers and homeless people—are yet to be carried out.

This year, the heat feels even more unbearable for Zubaida. “My blood pressure drops, I get splitting headaches,” she says. Frequent and prolonged power cuts in her neighborhood also mean there’s little respite at home. “We need proper shelter and some shade to work under.”

Part of the problem is that heat action plans aren’t legally binding, says Tamanna Dalal, a senior research associate at the New Delhi-based Sustainable Futures Collaborative, an environmental research organization. “Heat waves aren’t recognized as state-specific disasters in most parts of India,” she explains. “Right now, only about eight states have formally declared heat waves as disasters. This means that local authorities aren’t obligated to prioritize heat action unless they get direct rapid response guidelines during the heat wave from higher levels.”

The national government also doesn’t recognize heat waves as “notified” disasters, meaning they can’t trigger financial assistance under the country’s disaster-management legislation.

As a result, whatever measures are taken tend to be short term and reactive. Temporary measures like school closures ordered by the education department or oral rehydration solution stockpiling orders by health departments are being repeated each year. But these measures don’t do anything to build structural resilience for cities to adapt to worsening heat conditions.

It is ultimately about building more heat-resilient cities that can adapt and mitigate simultaneously, while integrating heat with other policy goals such. as energy, water, job creation, and air quality, explains Khosla.

Some of the funding pathways already exist. “We found that 18 centrally sponsored schemes have direct linkages to long-term solutions listed in HAPs, like piped water supply, rooftop solar, et cetera,” says Dalal. But many local officials don’t know these resources are available. A recent amendment to India’s national disaster mitigation fund now helps states finance heat-related actions but awareness remains very low. India is still in the early stages of heat planning in the country, and large-scale capacity building is urgently needed to help implementers see heat as a chronic threat in a warming world.

“We are soon reaching the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is going to be irreversible,” Dalal says, referring to the targeted limit for global warming set out in the Paris Agreement, which the world is almost certain to break. “This will impact every aspect of our daily lives. The next few years are critical in implementing some of the long-term solutions, because they take years to implement and even longer to have an impact.”

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Of course, the launch did not go unnoticed by Tesla's most vocal and well-funded critic, Dan O'Dowd. O'Dowd is the billionaire founder of a group called The Dawn Project, which has dedicated itself to highlighting what it calls critical safety failures in Tesla's Full Self-Driving software.

He refers to himself as an expert in creating "unhackable" software for military and aerospace clients, and ran for U.S. Senate back in 2022 on a single-issue platform: to "make computers safe for humanity" by banning Tesla's FSD. In 2023, He was banned from advertising on X after He made promoted posts that show Tesla FSD among other things, failing to stop at Stop signs.

Last year, his group, The Dawn Project, paid for a Super Bowl ad, where a Tesla equipped with FSD did not act on a child-sized mannequin in the road. That commercial ends with a message, urging parents to "boycott Tesla to keep your kids safe."

Today, O'Dowd took to X to slam the launch of the Robotaxi service, saying the "Tesla Cultists are celebrating victory" over a system he believes is years behind the competition (especially Waymo). He pointed out that with only fourteen cars operating for half the day, the system was already making significant errors, a rate he claims is consistent with community-tracked FSD data.

The videos shared by the creators (Rob Maurer and Ed Niedermeyer), O'Dowd mentioned in his post, appear questionable, depending on your perspective. In Maurer's video, a trip that was otherwise smooth had a few unnerving seconds of the vehicle slightly swerving into the wrong lane, correcting itself, swerving again, correcting itself, and then finally settling.

The other video from Ed Niedermeyer shows something entirely different. Niedermeyer captured a Tesla Robotaxi approaching an "extensive crime scene" with multiple police vehicles parked on the side of the road.

On his personal Bluesky account (Ed stopped posting on X late last year, in protest of Musk), He claims the Tesla braked hard twice for no clear reason. In his commentary, Niedermeyer argued the car "shouldn't react to any of these police vehicles," and that it was concerning how it reacted to some but not others, before stopping in the "middle of the road instead of defaulting to a minimal risk condition."

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Experimental archaeologist Greer Jarrett of Lund University in Sweden has been sailing in the footsteps of Vikings for the last three years.

If you want to learn more about how and where the Vikings sailed, making the journey through the fjords yourself in replica boats is a practical, hands-on approach to achieving that end. Greer Jarrett, an archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, has spent the last three years doing just that, sailing more than 5,000 kilometers along known Viking trade routes in open, spare-rigged clinker boats similar to those used by the Vikings.

Not only has Jarrett learned a great deal about the boats themselves, he also identified four possible havens along the Norwegian coast, part of what may have been a decentralized network that played a crucial role in trade and travel during that period. And those ports are located farther out to sea than other major ports and hubs known to date, according to a paper he published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

It's just the latest intriguing discovery enabled by the growing field of experimental archaeology, whereby researchers seek to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies. Experimental archaeologists have, for instance, built their own versions of Early Upper Paleolithic adzes, axes, and chisels. The resulting fractures and wear enabled them to develop new criteria for identifying the likely functions of ancient tools. Others have tried to cook like the Neanderthals, concluding that flint flakes were surprisingly effective for butchering birds, and that roasting the birds damages the bones to such an extent that it's unlikely they would be preserved in the archaeological record.

Kent State University's Metin Eren has done practical experiments to study, for instance, the trajectories of atlatls attached to spears tipped with replica Clovis points, and how their performance compares to javelins used by Neanderthals. He even fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon—solely to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who purportedly did the same to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. (It did not work, so myth: busted. But it did snag Eren an Ig Nobel prize.)

Taking a hands-on, experimental archaeological approach to studying the Vikings makes sense in light of the dearth of contemporary written sources. "We have a few things written by outsiders, but there's very, very few accounts written or delivered by people from Scandinavia during that period," Jarrett told Ars. "We normally rely on indirect forms of evidence, be that genetics or archaeology or linguistics, which show strong, very frequent connections across maritime areas in the North Atlantic. But because traveling by boat is kind of an archaeologically invisible act, you don't leave any footprints. So we have very little information about the voyages between these points."

Garrett and his crew used four or five different replica boats for their test voyages. Most were built by volunteers, enthusiasts, or students Jarrett had met during his considerable time in the field. They then sailed along the west coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula, a core area of Viking seafaring.

"These are reconstructions of traditional Norwegian boats from the 1800s and early 1900s," said Jarrett. "My idea was, because of this really long-term continuity in traditional boat building practices, especially in Norway, it might be possible to use these later boats which have lots of similarities to try and work out the potentials of where people might have gotten out. It's the idea of suggesting potentials based on practical experience to try and join those dots between the different evidence we have across the Viking world."

That decision has led to some criticism from colleagues because of the enormous gap in time, but Jarrett defends his choice. "The Viking Age ends in the 11th century, and we're talking about boats from 800 years later," he said. "But the construction techniques and the way they are rigged and their general performance characteristics are similar enough. Because this is a project about voyages and not a project about boat building, it seemed like a defensible analogy."

Seeking safe harbor

"On the long-range voyages, we worked in watches of four hours on and four hours off, and that is just about long enough to get some sleep on your off watch, but also just about short enough that you don't get really, really, really cold, which is obviously a risk," said Jarrett. "It was manageable, but we looked like penguins. I mean, we're wearing six layers of wool at any time and sleeping all stacked together for warmth. But other times it's really nice. The spring and the autumn in Scandinavia, there's much more likelihood of high-pressure cycles, which means that it's clearer and sunnier than in the summer itself."

Nonetheless, there were some rough moments, such as when the mast spar holding up the mainsail snapped, forcing the crew to improvise and lash two oars together to hold the sail so they could continue their journey. It took several days to repair the boat so it could sail again. There was no safety boat following along in case the crew got into trouble, and no engine, although they did have a life raft, which the crew has yet to use.

Based on his sailing trials, Jarrett believes that the Vikings had no need for navigational tools like maps, a compass, or a sextant, relying instead on what he calls "mental maps"—or a "maritime cultural mindscape"—based on sailors' memories and experiences passed down orally through generations. Those maps might also be informed by the myths linked to well-known coastal landmarks, such as skerries, small islets, or reefs.

"People had been moving by boat along the west coast of Scandinavia for a really, really, really long time, probably since the late Neolithic, if not earlier—thousands of years before the Viking age," said Jarrett. "There are big trading networks in place beforehand, and that is reflected in the names, place names along the west coast. My primary argument is if you spend 3,000 years traveling up and down a coastline in which you can use the coast at all times for navigation, then it's unnecessary to develop instrumentation."

"Instruments are used when you are in a place out in the open sea that you don't know," Jarrett continued. "We definitely know they didn't have compasses because those don't arrive from China until the 1200s. There are these ideas about sunstones and sundials, or little sun compasses, which are entirely possible. But there's no legitimate proof of either of them archaeologically yet. I may well be proved wrong if we find them at some point, but I don't think they're necessary for this at all."

This type of sailing boat is known as a faering. It was built at a folk high school in Norway as part of Greer Jarrett's research project.

Greer Jarrett

 

The boat at sea.

Greer Jarrett

 

Based on the sailing trials, archaeological and documentary evidence of Viking Age maritime centers, and digital reconstructions of past sea levels. Jarrett was able develop a useful set of criteria for evaluating potential havens. For instance, the site should be reachable in low visibility, with land or sea marks that sailors could use as bearings; large enough to accommodate multiple vessels of at least the size of a fyring (which can house a crew of four to 10 people); provide good protection from sea swell and storm surges; and have access to fresh water, among other criteria. Four sites scored sufficiently high by those criteria to qualify as possible Viking havens.

The four sites are Smørhamn, located at the confluence of Oldersund and the Frøysjø, where an inn and trading post are known to have existed since at least the late 17th century; the archipelago of Sørøyane between Stad and Ålesund, near where the sea battle of Hjörungavágr was fought circa 986 CE; Bjørnsund, a number of small islands off the southwestern tip of Hustadvika; and the island of Storfosna, which appears on 16th and 17th century charts.

"I'm not saying, 'This is where they went,'" said Jarrett. "I'm saying that, with these kinds of boats under these conditions, it would be possible to go to these places. And it's much more difficult—not impossible, but much more difficult—to go to these other places or to sail in these other conditions."

Pining for the fjords

The next step is for Jarrett and other archaeologists to hunt for evidence in support of his hypothesis. "Most of these sites have never been excavated," said Jarrett. "There's been a long assumption that these are landing places with the idea that you are dragging your boat ashore. I'm very opposed to that idea because these are two-and-a-half-ton boats, let alone the cargo. Unless you have a team of oxen and 20 people at your command, there is no way you're getting them on the beach. I'm very convinced that these places have jetties and mooring posts likely preserved underwater. All of that organic material survives much better underwater than it does on land. So I think that's very possible."

They might also find smaller items suggestive of a thriving harbor community. "Whenever you go into land, you've got something that's broken, so you need to do repairs," said Jarrett. "So things like clink nails or piles of balustones or signs of smithing—the typical kind of things you'd use for repairing your ship, I think are possible to find." Jarrett's methodology might also prove useful for studying other seafaring communities. 

Cold winds off the coast of northern Norway.

Greer Jarrett

 

A katabatic wind caused this fembøring to capsize off the coast of Kunna in 2023.

HRS Nord-Norge

 

The practical experience of sailing the same seas as the Vikings naturally led to some surprising insights. "You are able to ask very different questions the minute you walk away from your desk and get on a boat," said Jarrett. "I think it's essential to do that because you think in new ways. In terms of the results themselves, the boats are extremely seaworthy crafts. When you get in them for the first time, you don't think that, because they're very, very light. They feel very flimsy, and they're very low in the water compared to a modern sailing boat. So you feel really in touch with the wave, which is kind of scary. But because they're so flexible and because of the way they're rigged, they're actually really stable, even in big waves."

"We kept going out thinking, 'Oh, this is maybe the limit of what this boat can tolerate,' and then it would be fine, and we'd be, 'Okay, let's go a little bit in slightly bigger waves with slightly stronger wind,'" Jarrett continued. "So I think our comfort zones definitely visibly expanded during that period. And I had the chance to work with the same crews over three years. By the end of those three years, we were doing stuff that we would never have been able to do at the beginning."

Another big difference from modern boats, Jarrett discovered, is that one cannot sail a traditional Viking craft alone. "It has to be a collaborative effort because of how you need a person at the front and the back of the boat basically at all times," he said. "So developing the crew together and gaining not only skills, but also trust between us meant that we could do things in 2024 that seemed completely insane just a couple of years earlier. I cannot imagine what that is like if you have an entire lifetime of Viking sailors working together for 30 years. It must be an incredible way of creating social bonds."

DOI: Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2025. 10.1007/s10816-025-09708-6  (About DOIs).

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Tours of electric vehicle factories have quickly become the hottest ticket in Beijing, with tens of thousands of people signing up each month for the chance to win a free visit. Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi, which has reinvented itself as an EV maker in recent years, started offering the one-hour tours in January to visitors interested in seeing its factory up close and getting a race car experience in a Xiaomi EV.

As Chinese EV brands expand from competing on low prices to promoting premium features and sleek designs, they are increasingly putting their factories in the spotlight. At least two Chinese EV brands, Xiaomi and Nio, offer regular tours for the general public this year, and three more automakers have announced plans to follow suit.

“More and more Chinese EVs are using factory tours as an important channel of communication between the brand and the outside world. It offers a chance to not only see the production line up close, but also experience the human side of the brand," says Freya Zhang, a research analyst at the investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, who has been organizing tours for foreign investors to visit Chinese electric vehicle startups for two years.

People who have visited the Xiaomi factory say they were struck by the amount of automation on display. The company says that the overall automation rate at the factory has reached 91 percent, with some production lines like casting fully automated.

“The factory is huge with only a handful of workers. As I stood there watching, it was all robotic arms doing the work. The robots were all running pre-set programs—picking up parts from one place and delivering them to another, all in a very orderly manner,” says Yuanyuan, a Beijing resident who took her 13-year-old daughter on the Xiaomi tour last month. Yuanyuan says she had been applying to get tickets since January, but since the limited spots are awarded on a lottery basis, she was only finally able to secure them in May.

The EV factory tour trend is not entirely new: Chinese companies have long opened their manufacturing plants to potential investors, entrepreneurs, and groups of young students, but they haven’t become a universal tourist attraction until now. Like Coca Cola, Ben & Jerry’s, and other household names in the West, some Chinese EV brands have become so popular that the idea of getting a behind-the-scenes look has become exciting to a wide range of Chinese consumers. Many of the tourists aren’t even potential carbuyers but are just there to marvel at the industrial robots as a weekend activity.

Zhao Mingfei, a Beijing resident, says he first learned about Xiaomi’s tours by watching livestream broadcasts by the company’s founder, Lei Jun, whose charismatic personality and annual motivational speeches have turned him into a celebrity in China. Zhao says he has long admired the CEO and owns a number of Xiaomi consumer gadgets. He tried to sign up for a tour in January immediately after registration opened, but didn’t get a spot. In February, however, he was one of 60 lucky people selected from more than 7,000 applicants, according to a screenshot he shared with WIRED of the reservation system.

Xiaomi released its first EV model, the SU7, in early 2024. By the end of the year, foreign diplomats, investors, and guests from other Chinese companies had already started arriving at the company’s factory in Beijing to participate in one-off tours, but the company didn’t create a standardized experience for the public until the start of 2025. At first, Xiaomi offered just three tours with 20 participants each per month.

But the excursion proved incredibly popular, and Xiaomi quickly began scheduling significantly more slots. In July, the company said it will offer one tour every weekday and six tours most weekends, accommodating more than 1,100 visitors in total. When July registration opened, however, over 27,000 applications flooded in overnight, according to the Xiaomi app—so the chances of snagging a ticket remain slim.

Those lucky enough to secure a spot can expect to first be taken to an exhibit hall to learn about notable innovations in Xiaomi’s electric cars. The visitors then hop on a shuttle and go into three working production lines out of six total to observe the workers and robots in action.

Afterwards, they can test ride a model Xiaomi SU7 on a racecourse, where a trained racecar driver demonstrates how the car can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in just a few seconds. “It felt awesome—takes off really fast, with an instant kick,” Zhao tells WIRED. Recently, Xiaomi also started selling affordable meals at the factory and souvenirs to complete the experience.

Another visitor notes that the shuttle will temporarily stop if it gets in the way of a robot, which is programmed to do its job on a strictly timed schedule and is thus less flexible than a human worker. Yuanyuan recalls that after the tour ended, her daughter remarked: “I need to study harder, otherwise I won’t be able to find a job in the future. It’ll be robots doing all the work.”

Xiaomi’s factory is a prime example of how Chinese companies are quickly evolving from labor-intensive manufacturing to highly automated manufacturing, thanks to new advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence. In recent years, the Chinese government has been heavily promoting the idea of “lights-out factories” that require no human labor, meaning the machines can toil away in the darkness without anyone needing to turn the lights on. Companies that have managed to achieve this high level of automation, from Foxconn to home appliance giants, have turned their factories into marketing opportunities, inviting humans to marvel at the technology rather than do work.

Nio, another leading EV maker in China, has been publicly showcasing one of its highly automated factories since late 2023. In 2024, over 130,000 people visited the factory, where certain production lines like the body shop have achieved 100 percent automation, according to a statement sent by the company. Zhang says when her latest tour group visited Nio’s factory in the city of Hefei last month, the participants were able to view three out of the four production lines. (The car painting process, however, was excluded from public visits.)

“What’s immediately noticeable is that there are very few workers on the production lines. On some lines, there are actually more industrial robots than people,” says Zhang. “But we have yet to see any Chinese factories employ humanoid robots.”

At Nio, the guided tours also serve as a customer loyalty perk in addition to a marketing tool. Unlike Xiaomi, which requires people to apply for a ticket but offers the experience free of charge, Nio’s tours require prospective visitors to register through an app and pay 1,000 “Nio points,” equivalent to about $14. Users can pay for the points or acquire them for free by using the Nio app regularly, which means that people who regularly interact with the brand potentially get a free tour.

Nio and Xiaomi are part of a new class of Chinese automakers who are adopting tactics from tech startups in order to better reach and engage younger customers directly, says Zhang. In addition to opening up their factories, they are finding small ways to establish their brand identity.

At BYD’s headquarters, for example, visitors are given coffees with latte art depicting the names of BYD’s different car models. BYD, Nio and Xiaomi have even organized tours for elementary school students to visit. “That’s surely a way to cultivate potential consumers from a young age,” Zhang says.

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Tesla finally did the damn thing. The company launched its hotly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd — and we’re now starting to see some of the first reactions roll in.

But first, we have to get a few important caveats out of the way. Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised. The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger seat who can react to a dangerous situation by hitting a kill switch. Other autonomous vehicle operators would place safety monitors in the driver or passenger seats, but typically only during the testing phase. Tesla is unique in its use of safety monitors during commercial service.

The rides are limited to a geofenced area of the city that has been thoroughly mapped by the company. And in some cases, Tesla is using chase cars and remote drivers as additional backup. (Some vehicles have been spotted without chase vehicles.)

The service is invite only at launch, according to Tesla’s website. A number of pro-Tesla influencers have received invites, which should raise questions about how unbiased these first critical reactions will be. Tesla hasn’t said when the service will be available to the general public.

The limited trial includes 10-20 Model Y vehicles with “Robotaxi” branding on the side. The fully autonomous Cybercab that was first revealed last year won’t be available until 2026 at the earliest. The service operates in a small, relatively safe area of Austin from 6AM to 12AM, avoiding bad weather, highways, airports, and complex intersections.

Despite those hours, the robotaxi service seems to have gotten off to a slow start. Several invitees had yet to receive the robotaxi app by 1PM ET on Sunday. Sawyer Merritt, who posts pro-Tesla content on X, said he saw 30 Waymo vehicles go by while waiting for Tesla’s robotaxi service to start. Musk posted at 1:12PM that the service would be available later that afternoon, adding that initial customers would pay a “flat fee” of $4.20 for rides — a weed joke with which Musk has a troubled history.

While riders waited, the company published a new robotaxi page to its website detailing a lot of the rules and guidelines of the service. Visitors are invited to sign up for updates about when Tesla’s robotaxi service may come to their area. (Musk has said there could be up to a thousand robotaxis on the road “in a few months.”)

After finally being granted access to the app, Merritt posted an image of the service area map, which appeared to cover a small area bordered by the Colorado River to the north, Highway 183 to the east, Highways 290 and 71 to the south, and Zilker Part to the west.

And then the rides began — and they appeared to be mostly uneventful. Several invitees livestreamed themselves summoning their first cars, interacting with the UI, and then arriving at their destination. Several videos lasted hours, as the invitees would conclude a trip and then hail another car immediately after. One tester, Bearded Tesla Guy, described the app’s interface as “basically Uber.” Many had some difficulty finding the pickup location of their waiting Tesla robotaxi.

“This is like Pokemon hunting,” one person on Herbert Ong’s livestream said, “but its robotaxi hunting.”

Once inside, the Tesla-employed safety monitor would ask the riders to show their robotaxi apps to prove their identities. Otherwise the safety monitors kept silent throughout the ride, despite riders trying to get them to talk. I’m assuming that Tesla will need to come up with some other way to identify their riders if they plan on removing the safety monitors from the passenger seat. Waymo, for example, asks customers to unlock their vehicle through the ridehail app.

The rear screen instructs the riders to fasten their seatbelts, and after pressing an animated “start ride” button, the vehicle gets underway. Riders can also start the ride from a similar button in the app. Since riders are registering for the robotaxi app using their preexisting Tesla profiles, they’re greeted with their preferred music apps on the rear screen with all their playlists and saved tracks.

The front display shows a visualization similar to consumer vehicles using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature — even though Musk had said the robotaxis are running on a special version of FSD that’s not available to the average Tesla owner. There are “pull over,” “stop in lane,” or “support” buttons on the center display. Another tester, Chuck Cook, said the visualization lacked some of the controls that a normal Tesla might have.

Pressing the support button places the rider in a queue as they wait for the remote operator to connect. On Cook’s livestream, it took approximately two minutes before an operator finally connected. “We appreciate you calling in,” the operator said (though the cellular connection was poor). “We’re here for any issues to support your ride.”

Throughout the various trips, the robotaxis encountered a bevy of normal situations, like U-turns, speed bumps, pedestrians, construction, and more. The vehicles maintained speeds of about 40 mph or slower. Common words to describe the ride was “smooth,” “great,” and “normal.” One tester said on X that they got the robotaxi to “mess up” in a way that required the remote operator to help out — though they declined to describe it as a disengagement.

Ashok Elluswamy, the head of the company’s self-driving team, posted a photo of several dozen people in a room with 10 large monitors on the wall showing live camera feeds from several vehicles. “Robotaxi launch party,” Elluswamy wrote.

Where Tesla goes from here is the real challenge. Musk has said he also wants to launch a robotaxi service in California, where the regulatory process is a lot more complex than Texas. And even though he has said he wants to take things slow, he also claims that Tesla will have over a thousand driverless vehicles on the road “within a few months.”

Meanwhile, Waymo is operating more than 1,500 driverless vehicles in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin — with plans to expand to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, DC in the near future. The Alphabet-owned company has said it will grow its fleet to 2,000 vehicles by next year.

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After her adventures in Wonderland, the fictional Alice stepped through the mirror above her fireplace in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass to discover how the reflected realm differed from her own. She found that the books were all written in reverse, and the people were “living backwards,” navigating a world where effects preceded their causes.

When objects appear different in the mirror, scientists call them chiral. Hands, for instance, are chiral. Imagine Alice trying to shake hands with her reflection. A right hand in mirror-world becomes a left hand, and there’s no way to align the two perfectly for a handshake because the fingers bend the wrong way. (In fact, the word “chirality” originates from the Greek word for “hand.”)

Alice’s experience reflects something deep about our own universe: Everything is not the same through the looking glass. The behavior of many familiar objects, from molecules to elementary particles, depends on which mirror-image version we interact with.

Mirror Milk

At the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice holds her cat Kitty up to the mirror and threatens to push her through to the other side. “I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink,” she says.

Alice was onto something. Just over two decades before the book’s publication, Louis Pasteur discovered while experimenting with some expired wine that certain molecules can be chiral. They can come in distinct left-handed and right-handed structural forms that are impossible to superimpose. Pasteur found that, while they contain all the same components, the mirror versions of chiral molecules can serve distinct chemical functions.

Lactose, the sugar found in milk, is chiral. While either version can be synthesized, the sugars produced and consumed by living organisms are always the right-handed ones. In fact, life as we know it uses only right-handed sugars—hence why the genetic staircase of DNA always twists to the right. The root of this “homochirality” remains one of the biggest mysteries clouding the origins of life.

Kitty couldn’t have digested looking-glass milk. Worse, if it had contained any bacteria with the opposite handedness, her immune system and antibiotics would have been ill suited to put up a fight. A group of prominent scientists recently cautioned against the synthesis of mirror-image lifeforms for this reason—if any were to escape the lab, they could evade regular lifeforms’ defense mechanisms.

Shrinking Down

Continuing down the rabbit hole, we see traces of chirality all the way to elementary particles.

Pasteur’s work on molecules rested on a previous discovery by Augustin-Jean Fresnel, who in 1822 realized that different quartz prisms could send light’s electric field twirling in one of two directions—clockwise or counterclockwise. If each particle of light could leave a smoke trail in its wake, a right-handed screw of smoke would emerge from one prism and a left-handed screw from another.

Nowadays, physicists consider chirality a fundamental property of all elementary particles, just like charge or mass. The particles that don’t have mass are always traveling at the speed of light, and they also all carry an intrinsic angular momentum as though they’re spinning like a top. If the particles are flying in the direction of your thumb, their spin follows the direction your fingers curl—on either your right hand or your left.

The situation is a bit more complicated for massive particles, such as electrons and quarks. Because a massive particle travels more slowly, a speedy observer could overtake it and effectively reverse its direction of motion, thus flipping its apparent handedness. For this reason, when describing the chirality of massive particles, physicists often refer to the mathematical description of the particle’s quantum properties. When you rotate a particle, its quantum wave function shifts left or right depending on its chirality.

Almost every elementary particle has a twin through the looking glass. A negatively charged left-handed electron is mirrored by the anti-positron, a negatively charged right-handed particle.

In looking-glass world, Alice finds all logic turned on its head: People run in order to stay in place, and they celebrate “un-birthdays” on all the days they weren’t born. Similarly, our universe differs from its mirror image. The weak force—the force that’s responsible for radioactive decay—is felt only by left-handed particles. This means that some particles will decay in the normal world while their counterparts in the mirror would not.

Plus, there’s one particle that seems not to show up in the mirror at all. The neutrino has only ever been observed in its left-handed form. Particle physicists are investigating whether the right-handed neutrino exists or if neutrinos’ mirror images are simply identical, which could help explain why the universe contains something rather than nothing.

There’s a lot we can learn about our own world by peering through the looking glass. Just be careful not to drink the milk.

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

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A NASA spacecraft bound for an unexplored metal-rich asteroid has reignited its plasma thrusters, continuing its cruise deeper into the Solar System after switching to a backup fuel line.

The $1.4 billion Psyche mission, built to explore an asteroid with the same name, has four electric thrusters fueled by xenon gas. Psyche's solar electric propulsion system is more fuel efficient than conventional rocket thrusters, and it works by flowing xenon through an electromagnetic field, which ionizes the gas and expelling the ions at high speed to produce thrust.

The plasma engines generate lower thrust than chemical rocket engines, but they can accumulate years of run time over the course of a mission, enabling a spacecraft to make significant changes in its velocity to steer its way through space.

Psyche launched in October 2023 to kick off a six-year trip to its asteroid destination, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The robotic mission proceeded normally until April 1, when the spacecraft detected a drop in pressure inside the line that feeds xenon fuel to its four thrusters. The craft reacted to the pressure signature by powering off the thrusters.

Back in action

The good news is two-fold. First, one of the advantages of using electric thrusters is flexibility. With conventional thrusters, key burns on a deep space mission often must happen at the appointed time. In the case of this mission, the electric thrusters could remain powered off from April 1 until the middle of this month with no effect on the mission's scheduled arrival at asteroid Psyche in August 2029.

Secondly, the Psyche spacecraft's propulsion system has a backup fuel line. Ground controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ended up commanding the probe to switch to the backup line last month, and test burns showed the thrusters worked well. The spacecraft resumed "full thruster operations" on Monday, according to NASA.

The spacecraft, built by Maxar Space Systems, will operate its electric thrusters for the equivalent of three months between now and November to keep the mission on track for arrival at asteroid Psyche in 2029.

"Through comprehensive testing and analysis, the team narrowed down the potential causes to a valve that may have malfunctioned in the primary line," NASA said in a statement Friday. "The switch to the identical backup propellant line in late May restored full functionality to the propulsion system."

The next waypoint on Psyche's voyage will be a flyby of Mars in May 2026. Officials expect Psyche to keep that date, which is critical for using Mars' gravity to slingshot the spacecraft deeper into the Solar System, eventually reaching the asteroid belt about four years from now.

At Psyche, the spacecraft will enter orbit and progressively move closer to the asteroid, using a suite of sensors to map its surface, measure its shape, mass, and gravity field, and determine its elemental composition. Observations through telescopes suggest Psyche is roughly 140 miles (226 kilometers) in diameter, or about the width of Massachusetts. But it's likely not spherical in shape. Scientists describe its shape as more akin to a potato.

Potatoes come in lots of shapes, and researchers won't know exactly what Psyche looks like until NASA's asteroid explorer arrives in 2029. Psyche will be the first metallic, or M-type, asteroid visited by any spacecraft, and scientists are eager to study an object that's largely made of metals—probably iron, nickel, and perhaps some rarer elements— instead of rocky minerals.

With the Psyche spacecraft's plasma thrusters back in action, these goals of NASA's billion-dollar science mission remain achievable.

"The mission team's dedication and systematic approach to this investigation exemplifies the best of NASA engineering," said Bob Mase, Psyche project manager at  JPL, in a statement. "Their thorough diagnosis and recovery, using the backup system, demonstrates the value of robust spacecraft design and exceptional teamwork."

But there's still a lingering concern whatever problem caused the valve to malfunction in the primary fuel line might also eventually affect the same kind of valve in the backup line.

"We are doing a lot of good proactive work around that possible issue," wrote Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator at Arizona State University, in a post on X.

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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.

John Belizaire says he has a secret hiding in plain sight. But before revealing it, the CEO of Soluna, a green data center development firm headquartered in Albany, New York, asks people to picture the last time they drove through a gusty stretch of countryside and saw wind turbines in the distance. But when they zoom into that frame, he asks, did they notice that not all of those turbines were spinning despite it being windy?

It’s not typically because they’re broken, Belizaire said. It’s because they’ve been turned off.

Electric grids across the country don’t always have the capacity to carry all of the energy an intermittent power plant can produce. So while at times there’s more than enough wind to produce more power, Belizaire said, there’s no place for that power to go due to aging transmission systems and a lack of local load.

That’s how we end up with stranded renewable energy—available energy going to waste because there isn’t a user for it. In an analysis of hundreds of renewable projects around the country, Soluna estimates upwards of 30 to 40 percent of renewable energy goes unused.

That’s the secret. There’s power already generated and ready to use, it’s just being curtailed, Belizaire said.

As power demand surges, largely due to data centers servicing artificial intelligence products and cryptocurrency, interested developers, power plant operators and environmentalists are trying to sort out how to use the full capabilities of existing renewable power plants. These decisions are playing out as more data center developers supply their own gas plants to secure onsite power and bypass lengthy wait times to connect to the grid.

More than a third of data centers are expected to adopt onsite power generation by 2030, according to a new survey of data center operators, utility companies, and service providers from Bloom Energy, a fuel cell technology company. By 2035, that figure climbs to nearly half.

Data center developers want to have control over their timelines and have immediate access to power, said Aman Joshi, Bloom Energy’s chief commercial officer. The firm’s survey found there’s a one-to-two-year gap between when developers expect grid power and when utilities can realistically deliver it.

“Decisions around where data centers get built have shifted dramatically over the last six months, with access to power now playing the most significant role in location scouting,” Joshi said. “The grid can’t keep pace with AI demands, so the industry is taking control with onsite power generation.”

Soluna, like other data center developers looking to rely on renewable energy, buys the excess power from wind, hydro, and solar plants that they can’t sell to the grid. By the end of the year, Soluna will have three facilities totaling 123 megawatts of capacity in Kentucky and Texas and seven projects in the works with upwards of 800 total megawatts.

Belizaire and I talked about how in Texas, where I report from, there’s plenty of curtailed energy from wind and solar farms because of the region’s transmission capacity. In West Texas, other data center developers are also taking advantage of the unused wind energy, far from major load centers like Dallas and Houston, by co-locating their giant warehouses full of advanced computers and high-powered cooling systems with the excess energy.

One data center developer using curtailed renewable power in Texas is IREN. The firm owns and operates facilities optimized for Bitcoin mining and AI. It developed a 7.5-gigawatt facility in Childress and broke ground on a 1.4-gigawatt data center in Sweetwater.

IREN purchases power through the state grid’s wholesale market during periods of oversupply, said Kent Draper, the company’s chief commercial officer, and reduces its consumption when prices are high. It’s able to do that by turning off its computers and minimizing power demand from its data centers.

But curtailment is an issue all over the world, Belizaire said, from Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, California, and Arizona in the US, to Northern Ireland, Germany, Portugal, and Australia.

“Anywhere where you have large utility-scale renewable development that’s been built out, you’re going to find it,” Belizaire said.

In a March analysis, the US Energy Information Administration reported that solar and wind power curtailments are increasing in California. In 2024, the grid operator for most of California curtailed 3.4 million megawatt hours of utility-scale wind and solar output, a 29 percent increase from the amount of electricity curtailed in 2023.

A Soluna report, using data from regional transmission organizations and independent system operators, estimated that at the end of 2021 there were 14.9 terawatt hours of wind and solar generation curtailed, or the equivalent of $610 million in lost revenue. The renewable electricity wasted in 2021 was enough to power 1.3 million households for a year, the report found.

So how does Soluna go about using curtailed energy?

The firm co-locates its data centers at a renewable energy plant and signs a power purchase agreement with the plant for a portion of its capacity. That way, the power producer can still satisfy its other obligations, like to the grid. The contracts used to be for around five years, but now they average about 10.

Soluna’s behind-the-meter strategy allows the company to source power in three ways. Its officials can buy it directly from the source at a low fixed price. It’s a cheap rate as that power would have been otherwise wasted. Or Soluna can use subtractive energy, paying for electrons directly from the wind farm that would have been sold to the grid. As a last resort, they can buy power directly from the grid. (It’s a less ideal option because depending on the makeup of the grid, it’s a mix of renewable and fossil fuel sources.)

This distributed generation approach has allowed Soluna to score some of the lowest prices for power this kind of data center has seen, Belizaire said, and source upwards of 75 percent of its energy from green sources.

Because of the intermittent nature of renewables, grids are grappling with how to maintain stability and reliability as they become more reliant on variable energy sources. Battery storage technology has made meaningful contributions but is still working to scale and upgrading transmission lines infamously takes a long time.

Soluna sees its flexible load data centers as a solution. The data centers can ramp down their computing when the grid needs more energy and ramp up when there’s excess energy to take.

“We’ve become almost like a battery,” Belizaire said. “I like to say computing is a better battery than battery systems.”

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We’ve all been there after a long trip—staring blankly at emails, counting the hours until bed. Yet when 2 am hits, you’re still wide awake, mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, trapped in the grip of jet lag. That’s the price for crossing time zones too fast.

Our internal clock, or circadian rhythm, governs everything from sleep to digestion to hormones and uses light to maintain its natural 24-hour cycle. But when we land in a new time zone, and day suddenly turns to night, this rhythm is thrown off balance. Most travelers adjust within a few days, perhaps with the help of a melatonin pill. But in the meantime, jet lag affects sleep, mood, and metabolism.

A complete cure for jet lag is unlikely, but scientists have found ways to help our bodies keep up. “Even reducing jet lag by a day improves the productivity and well-being of so many people,” says Svetlana Postnova, a professor of neurophysics at the University of Sydney, speaking from over 10,000 miles and 10 time zones away.

Since 2015, Postnova has worked with Australian airline Qantas, which is set to launch the world’s longest flights in 2027, connecting Sydney to both London and New York, nonstop. These 19- to 22-hour journeys will offer passengers an unusual experience: two sunrises on a single trip. Or at least that’s what it should look like inside the cabin. This is where Postnova’s expertise comes in. “The timing of lights is key,” she says.

On long-haul flights, airlines typically serve meals shortly after take-off and before landing, keeping the cabin dark in between to give passengers a chance to rest. But ultra-long-haul travel presents new challenges. Sitting in darkness for most of a 22-hour flight wouldn’t just be dull, it would make adjusting to a new time zone even harder, Postnova explains.

Before Qantas launched its 17-hour Perth-to-London route in 2018, Postnova’s team helped fine-tune lighting and meal schedules to help passengers align their body clocks. For the upcoming flights, they’re going further—experimenting not just with timing but with different light colors. “If it were up to scientists like me who want to minimize jet lag, we’d flood the cabin with bright white light,” says Postnova. “But that would upset a lot of people.”

Instead, they’ve created 12 lighting scenes, including a sunrise simulation that moves gradually from the front to the back of the cabin. One key setting is the “awake” mode, a blue-enriched light designed to help passengers stay awake at the right times. “Blue light has a much stronger effect on our circadian clocks than, say, green or red,” says Postnova. Hence the common advice to avoid screens before bed.

The best strategy? Tricking yourself into a new rhythm, even in the days before travel. There are apps to help with this, of course. Timeshifter, developed by a neuroscientist and his team, suggests a personalized schedule for light exposure and sleep based on flight itineraries. For my recent trip from Mexico to Switzerland, the app advised wearing sunglasses at the airport before departure, sleeping through dinner on the flight, and going straight to bed upon arrival. If only I had known before takeoff.

But jet lag isn’t just about light exposure and sleep. While the brain is our master clock, other tissues like the liver and muscles have their own clocks that regulate metabolism, the body’s process of turning food into energy. A 2024 experiment from the University of Surrey and the University of Aberdeen found that metabolism recovers from jet lag faster than the brain. The researchers simulated a transatlantic flight by delaying participants’ bedtimes by five hours while controlling their food intake in a lab. “We wanted to see if meal timing could prepare the body for jet lag or shift work, in the same way that people use light and melatonin,” says lead author Jonathan Johnston, a professor of chronobiology and integrative physiology at the University of Surrey.

Over five days, blood tests showed that while participants felt groggy, their metabolism bounced back much quicker than their levels of melatonin, the hormone associated with sleep. This suggests meal timing and composition could also be key to reducing jet lag, Johnston explains. “It would be fantastic if we could come up with a single strategy to help synchronize all of people’s clocks.”

Translating such lab experiments to the real world comes with logistical and ethical challenges. “You can’t just take a plane full of people or recruit people and put them on a strict schedule,” says Johnston. And even if meals were set, there’s no guarantee passengers won’t sneak in a late snack.

To test the effectiveness of light interventions, Postnova and her team have found a pragmatic approach. Select Qantas passengers, in exchange for frequent flyer points, wear wristbands that monitor their movements, light exposure, skin temperature, and glucose levels. They also provide feedback on their sleep patterns and overall well-being through questionnaires for 10 days following the flight. “We can design scenarios in the lab or models based on desired effects,” says Postnova. “But in reality, there are lots of things that come into play, and people have different rhythms.”

So, while we don’t yet have a way to comprehensively avoid jet lag, at least researchers and airlines aren’t asleep on the job in their hunt for a cure.

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Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We're marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular perception of sharks, shark conservation efforts, and our culture at large.

(Many spoilers below.)

Jaws tells the story of Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the new police chief for Amity Island, a New England beach town and prime summer tourist attraction. But that thriving industry is threatened by a series of shark attacks, although the local mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), initially dismisses the possibility, ridiculing the findings of visiting marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). The attacks keep escalating and the body count grows, until the town hires a grizzled shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to hunt down and kill the great white shark, with the help of Brody and Hooper.

Benchley wrote his novel after reading about a sports fisherman named Frank Mundus, who captured a very large shark in 1964; in fact, the character of Quint is loosely based on Mundus. Benchley wrote an early draft of the screenplay, which underwent multiple revisions during production. In the end, he estimated that his contributions amounted to the basic storyline and the mechanics. Spielberg wasn't the studio's first choice for director; initially they hired Dick Richards, but Richards kept referring to the shark as a whale. Eventually, he was fired and replaced with the 26-year-old Spielberg, who had just finished his first feature film (The Sugarland Express).

Spielberg was given a $3.5 million shooting budget and a timeframe of 55 days for filming. However, the production was troubled from the start, largely due to the director's insistence on shooting on location in Martha's Vineyard; Jaws was the first major film to be shot on the ocean. Spielberg later admitted, "I was pretty naive about Mother Nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy." Unwanted boats kept drifting into the frame; cameras kept getting waterlogged; Carl Gottlieb (who played the local news editor Meadows) was nearly decapitated by a propeller; Dreyfuss nearly got stuck in the shark cage; and several actors suffered from seasickness. Frustrated crew members took to calling the movie "Flaws."

A shark strikes

"duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh...."

Universal Pictures

 

RIP Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie), the shark's first victim.

Universal Pictures

 

Local vandals have a bit of fun with the Amity billboard.

Universal Pictures

 

The shark claims a young boy (Jeffrey Voorhees) as its next victim.

Universal Pictures

 

Everyone wisely runs out of the water.

Universal Pictures

 

Marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) measures a newly caught tiger shark and swears it can't be the one responsible for the deaths. Nobody listens to the scientist.

Universal Pictures

 

There were three pneumatically powered full-sized mechanical sharks built for the shoot, nicknamed "Bruce," and they kept malfunctioning. The pneumatic hoses kept taking on seawater; the skin was made of neoprene foam, which soaked up water and became bloated; and one of the models kept getting tangled up in seaweed. In the end, Spielberg opted to shoot most of the early scenes without ever showing the actual shark, which actually heightened the tension and suspense, especially when combined with John Williams' ominous theme music ("duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh...").

In the end, shooting ran for 159 days, and the budget ballooned to $9 million. All the delays gave Spielberg and his writers (especially Gottlieb) extra time to refine the script, often just prior to filming the scenes. A lot of the dialogue was improvised by the actors. And it was all worth it in the end, because Jaws went on to become a major summer box office success. All told, it grossed $476 million globally across all its theatrical releases and won three Oscars, although it lost Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Jaws inspired many, many subsequent films, including Ridley Scott's Alien in 1979, described in pitch meetings as "Jaws in space. Audience reactions were often extreme, with many people becoming fearful of swimming in the ocean for fear of sharks. And while the sequels were, shall we say, underwhelming, the original Jaws has stood the test of time. Ars spoke with marine biologist and shark conservationist David Shiffman, author of Why Sharks Matter, to discuss the film's depiction of sharks and its enduring place in popular culture.

Ars Technica: Let's start by talking about the enormous impact of the film, both good and bad, on the general public's awareness of sharks.

David Shiffman: A lot of folks in both the marine science world and the ocean conservation communities have reported that Jaws in a lot of ways changed our world. It's not that people used to think that sharks were cute, cuddly, adorable animals, and then after Jaws, they thought that they were bloodthirsty killing machines. They just weren't on people's minds. Fishermen knew about them, surfers thought about them, but that was about it. Most people who went to the beach didn't pay much mind to what could be there. Jaws absolutely shattered that. My parents both reported that the summer that Jaws came out, they were afraid to go swimming in their community swimming pools.

No, really, the water’s fine!

"You knew." The young boy's mother (Lee Fierro) confronts Brody.

Universal Pictures

 

Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) assures news cameras that the water is perfectly safe.

Universal Pictures

 

"That's some bad hat, Harry."

Universal Pictures

 

Still hungry: The shark chows down on a new victim.

Universal Pictures

 

Brody's son looks on in horror.

Universal Pictures

 

David Shiffman: I have encountered people who were so scared that they were afraid to go in the bathtub. A lot of movies are very scary, but they don't have that real-world impact. I love Jurassic Park, but I'm not afraid that a T. rex is going to eat me when I go into an outhouse, even though that's about as realistic as what's portrayed in Jaws. There's something called the "Jaws Effect" in public policy literature, which is a way of measuring how fictional portrayals of real-world issues affect what citizens think about that issue and what policy preferences they support as a result. It's fascinating how a fictional portrayal can do that, because I cannot stress enough: That is not what sharks look like or how they behave.

The movie also was the first time that a scientist was the hero. People half a generation above me have reported that seeing Richard Dreyfuss' Hooper on the big screen as the one who saves the day changed their career trajectory. "You can be a scientist who studies fish. Cool. I want to do that." In the time since Jaws came out, a lot of major changes have happened. One is that shark populations have declined globally by about 50 percent, and many species are now critically endangered.

And shark science has become much more professionalized. The American Elasmobranch Society—I'm on the board of directors—was founded in 1983, and now we have about 500 members in the US, Canada ,and Mexico. There have since been subsequent organizations founded in Australia and the Pacific Islands, Europe, South America, and a new one starting this year in Asia.

And then, from a cultural standpoint, we now have a whole genre of bad shark movies.

Ars Technica: Sharknado!

David Shiffman: Yes! Sharknado is one of the better of the bunch. Sitting on my desk here, we've got Sharkenstein, Raiders of the Lost Shark, and, of course, Shark Exorcist, all from the 2010s. I've been quoted as saying there's two types of shark movie: There's Jaws and there's bad shark movies.

Ars Technica: Populations of the tiger shark, the great white, and couple of other species have declined so dramatically that many are on the verge of extinction. Is it just a coincidence that those declines started shortly after Jaws came out? 

David Shiffman: The short answer is not that Jaws caused this, but that perhaps Jaws made it easier for it to happen because people weren't outraged the way they might've been if it happened to say, whales, whose populations were also declining around the same time. The number one threat to shark species as a whole is unsustainable overfishing practices. People are killing too many sharks. Sustainable fisheries for sharks can and do exist, and the US largely has done a good job with this, but around the world, it's a bad scene.

“A whole genre of bad shark movies”

Admit it, the scene with the chainsaw guy taking out a flying shark in Sharknado (2013) was pretty awesome.

 

Sharktopus (2010): The title says it all.

 

2014's Avalanche Sharks: because "snow is just frozen water.

 

There might be sharks under all that snow.

 

For instance, shark fin soup started to be a problem around the 1980s thanks to the economic boom in China and the emergence of a new middle class there. Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese and Southeast Asian delicacy. It's associated with the emperor and his court. It's not shark meat that's used. It's the little skeletal fin rays from the fins that are basically a bland, noodle-like substance when they're dried and boiled. The purpose of this was for people to say, "I have so much money that I can eat these incredibly rare delicacies." That was not caused by Jaws. But perhaps it was allowed to happen because there was less public sympathy for sharks.

It's worth noting that shark fin soup and the shark fin trade is no longer the biggest or only threat to sharks. It hasn't been in about 20 years. Ironically, a lot of that has to do with Chinese government efforts not to save the ocean, but to crack down on public corruption. A lot of government officials used to throw extravagant banquets for their friends and family. The new Chinese government said, "We're not doing that anymore." That alone saved a lot of endangered species. It was not motivated by concern about the state of the ocean, but it had that effect.

Ars Technica: People have a tendency to think that sharks are simply brutal killing machines. Why are they so important to the ecosystem?

David Shiffman: The title of my book is Why Sharks Matter because sharks do matter and people don't think about them that way. These are food chains that provide billions of humans with food, including some of the poorest humans on Earth. They provide tens of millions of humans with jobs. When those food chains are disrupted, that's bad for coastal communities, bad for food security and livelihoods. If we want to have healthy ocean food chains, we need a healthy top of the food chain, because when you lose the top of the food chain, the whole thing can unravel in unpredictable, but often quite devastating ways.

 So sharks play important ecological roles by holding the food chain that we all depend on in place. They're also not a significant threat to you and your family. More people in a typical year die from flower pots falling on their head when they walk down the street. More people in a typical year die falling off a cliff when they're trying to take a selfie of the scenery behind them, than are killed by sharks. Any human death or injury is a tragedy, and I don't want to minimize that. But when we're talking about global-scale policy responses, the relative risk versus reward needs to be considered.

Ars Technica:  There's a scene in Jaws where Hooper is talking about his personal theory: territoriality, the idea that this rogue great white came in and made this his personal territory and now he'll just keep feeding until the food runs out. Is that a real scientific premise from the 1970s and how valid is it?

The hunt begins

The town hires grizzled shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) to kill the great white shark.

Universal Pictures

 

Tossing chum into the water to draw out the shark.

Universal Pictures

 

The shark suddenly appears while Brody is distracted.

Universal Pictures

 

Quint regales his crew with horrific shark stories.

Universal Pictures

 

Hooper in a shark cage, hoping to harpoon the shark with a tranquilizer. It doesn't go well.

Universal Pictures

 

David Shiffman: Rogue sharks are nonsense. It is nonsense that is still held by some kooks who are ostensibly in my field, but it is not supported by any evidence whatsoever. In all of recorded human history, there is proof that exactly one shark bit more than one human. That was the Sharm el-Sheikh attacks around Christmas in Egypt a few years ago. Generally speaking, a lot of times it's hard to predict why wild animals do or don't do anything. But if this was a behavior that was real, there would be evidence that it happens and there isn't any, despite a lot of people looking.

Was it commonly believed in the 1970s? No. Did Peter Benchley make it up? No. It's a thing in some animals for sure. In some neighborhoods, people will pick up gators and move them hundreds of miles away; the gators will move back to that exact same spot. I think the same thing has been shown with bears. Wolves certainly have a home range. But for sharks, it's not a thing.

Ars Technica: Quint has a famous monologue about surviving the USS Indianapolis sinking and witnessing crew members being eaten by sharks. How historically accurate is that?. 

David Shiffman: We don't really know how many of the people who were killed following the sinking of the Indianapolis were killed by sharks. Certainly, firsthand accounts report that sharks were present. But those people were in the water because they were on a boat that exploded after being hit by a torpedo. That is not good for your health. So a lot of those people were either mortally wounded or killed by that initial explosion, and then perhaps were scavenged by sharks. Those are also people who are in the water bleeding, making a lot of noise. That's an incredible scene in the movie. But the deaths Quint attributes to sharks is more people than have been reliably documented as killed by sharks in the history of the world ever.

Ars Technica: How accurate is Jaws in terms of how and why sharks attack humans? For instance, someone says that people splashing in the water mimics what sharks want to hunt. 

David Shiffman: Anyone who tells you they know exactly why a wild animal does or does not do something is someone who you should be a little skeptical of. But a leading theory, which I think makes sense, is this idea of mistaken identity. Some of the people who are most commonly bitten by sharks, though it's still astronomically rare, are surfers. These are people who are cutting through the water with a silhouette that resembles a seal, wearing black neoprene, which is modeled after seal blubber. Sharks have been patrolling the ocean since before there were trees on land, and it's only in the last hundred years or so that they've had to wonder, is that my preferred prey, or is it a human using technology to mimic my preferred prey for recreational purposes?

If you've been in the ocean, there's been a shark not that far from you, and it knew you were there, and you probably had no idea it was there and had a pleasant day in the water. The sharks that do bite people, they take a little bite and they go, what is that? And swim away. That can be real bad if it hits a major artery or if you're far from shore. Again, I don't want to minimize the real harm. But it is not a shark hunting you because it has a taste for human flesh. They don't have hands. They explore their environment with their mouths and most things in their environment they can eat.

I think Mythbusters tested fish blood versus mammal blood versus chicken blood, I think. And the sharks were attracted to fish blood and had no reaction to the others. So these are animals that are very, very, very well adapted for environmental conditions that in some cases don't really exist anymore.

Man vs. great white

Brody fights off an increasingly aggressive great white.

Universal Pictures

 

RIP Quint.

Universal Pictures

 

Brody clings to the mast, about the only part of the Orca still above water.

Universal Pictures

 

Ding-dong, the shark is dead! Also: Hooper lives!

Universal Pictures

 

The survivors paddle their way back to shore.

Universal Pictures

 

With humans, most of the time, what happens is an immediate bite, and then they swim away. With seals or large prey, they'll often hit it really hard from below, sometimes knocking it completely out of the water. Or if they're hunting whales or something that they can't fit in their mouth, they just take a huge bite and swim away. With fish, they swallow them whole to the extent possible. Sometimes there's a shaking motion to snap a neck or whatever. You see that with some land predators, too. It's nothing like what's seen there—but what an awesome scene.

Ars Technica: What is your favorite scene in Jaws and the one that makes you cringe the most?

David Shiffman: Oh, man. It's really a great movie, and it holds up well. It was hailed as revolutionary at the time because you hardly ever see the shark. But the reason they did that was because the model of the shark that they built kept breaking. So they decided, let's just shoot it from the shark's eye view and save money and annoyance. I love the scene when Hooper realizes that the tiger shark that they've caught is obviously not the right species and the reaction that people have to that—just this idea that science and expertise can be used to solve problems. Whenever a shark bites someone, there are people who go out and kill any shark they can find and think that they're helping.

One of my favorite professional experiences is the American Alasdair Rank Society conference. One year it was in Austin, Texas, near the original Alamo Drafthouse. Coincidentally, while we were there, the cinema held a "Jaws on the Water" event. They had a giant projector screen, and we were sitting in a lake in inner tubes while there were scuba divers in the water messing with us from below. I did that with 75 professional shark scientists. It was absolutely amazing. It helped knowing that it was a lake.

Ars Technica: If you wanted to make another really good shark movie, what would that look like today? 

David Shiffman: I often say that there are now three main movie plots: a man goes on a quest, a stranger comes to town, or there's a shark somewhere you would not expect a shark to be. It depends if you want to make a movie that's actually good, or one of the more fun "bad" movies like Sharknado or Sharktopus or Avalanche Sharks—the tagline of which is "snow is just frozen water." These movies are just off the rails and absolutely incredible. The ones that don't take themselves too seriously and are in on the joke tend to be very fun. But then you get movies like Netflix's Under Paris (2024); they absolutely thought they were making a good movie and took themselves very seriously, and it was painful to watch.

I would love to see actual science and conservation portrayed. I'd love to see species that are not typically found in these movies featured. The Sharknado series actually did a great job of this because they talked with me and other scientists after the success of the first one. Sharknado II is thanked in my PhD dissertation, because they funded one of my chapters. In that movie, it's not just great whites and tiger sharks and bull sharks. They have a whale shark that falls out of the sky and hits someone. They have a cookie-cutter shark that falls out of the sky and burrows through someone's leg. There's a lot of shark diversity out there, and it'd be nice to get that featured more.

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Welcome to Edition 7.49 of the Rocket Report! You may have noticed we are a little late with the report this week, and that is due to the Juneteenth holiday celebrated in the United States on Thursday. But that hasn't stopped a torrent of big news this week, from exploding Starships to significant reuse milestones being reached in Asia.

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

Honda stamps passport to the skies with a hopper. An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet (275 meters) Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker's test facility in northern Japan, Ars reports. Honda's hopper is the first prototype rocket outside of the United States and China to complete a flight of this kind, demonstrating vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology that could underpin the development of a reusable launch vehicle.

A legitimately impressive feat... Honda has been quiet on this rocket project since a brief media blitz nearly four years ago. Developed in-house by Honda R&D Company, the rocket climbed vertically from a pedestal at the company's test site in southeastern Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's main islands, before landing less than a meter from its target. Honda said its launch vehicle is "still in the fundamental research phase," and the company has made no decision whether to commercialize the rocket program. (submitted by Fernwaerme, TFargo04, Biokleen, Rendgrish, and astromog)

European launch companies seek protection. In a joint statement published on Monday, Arianespace and Avio called for European missions to be launched aboard European rockets, European Spaceflight reports. The statement warned that without "sustained support," European rocket builders risked losing out to institutionally backed competitors from the US.

Seeking to permanently embed European preference... "Major space powers support their industries through stable and guaranteed institutional markets, enabling long-term investments, innovation, and the preservation of leadership,” explained the statement. The pair argues that Europe risks falling behind not due to a lack of technical capability but because of structural market weaknesses. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Increasing launch cadence may threaten ozone layer. The rapidly growing number of rocket launches could slow the recovery of the ozone layer, a new study in the journal Nature finds. The ozone layer is healing due to countries phasing out CFCs, but rocket launches could slow its recovery if the space industry continues growing, Radio New Zealand reports. "At the moment, it's not a problem because the launches happen too infrequently," said University of Canterbury atmospheric scientist Laura Revell, one of the authors of the study. "As we get more and more launches taking place—because there are companies out there with very bold ambitions to increase launch frequency—this is potentially going to be a problem."

Forecasting a lot of growth in launch... In a conservative growth scenario, about 900 total launches a year, there is some ozone loss but not significant amounts," said Revell. "But when we look at a more ambitious scenario, when we looked at the upper limits of what might be launched in future—around 2,000 launches year—we saw levels of ozone loss that are concerning in the context of ozone recovery," she said. Ozone losses are driven by the chlorine produced from solid rocket motor propellant and black carbon, which is emitted from most propellants, the study says. (submitted by Zaphod Harkonnen)

Space may soon be pay-to-play with the FAA. The Federal Aviation Administration may soon levy fees on companies seeking launch and reentry licenses, a new tack in the push to give the agency the resources it needs to keep up with the rapidly growing commercial space industry, Ars reports. The text of a budget reconciliation bill released by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) earlier this month calls for the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST, to begin charging licensing fees to space companies next year.

The price of poker keeps going up... The fees would phase in over eight years, after which the FAA would adjust them to keep pace with inflation. The money would go into a trust fund to help pay for the operating costs of the FAA's commercial space office. Cruz's section of the Senate reconciliation bill calls for the FAA to charge commercial space companies per pound of payload mass, beginning with 25 cents per pound in 2026 and increasing to $1.50 per pound in 2033. Subsequent fee rates would change based on inflation. The overall fee per launch or entry would be capped at $30,000 in 2026, increasing to $200,000 in 2033, and then be adjusted to keep pace with inflation.

Landspace tests Zhuque-3 rocket. Chinese launch startup Landspace carried out a breakthrough static fire test Friday as it builds towards an orbital launch attempt with its Zhuque-3 rocket, Space News reports. The Zhuque-3’s nine methane-liquid oxygen engines ignited in sequence and fired for 45 seconds, including gimbal control testing, before shutting down as planned. The successful test lays a solid foundation for the upcoming inaugural flight of the Zhuque-3 and for the country’s reusable launch vehicle technology, Landspace said.

Similar in design to Falcon 9 ... Friday’s static fire test used a first-stage identical to the one intended for Zhuque-3’s inaugural flight, planned for later this year, and covered the full ground-based launch preparation and ignition sequence, including propellant loading, tank pressurization, staged engine ignition, steady-state operation and a programmed shutdown. Payload capacity to low Earth orbit will be 21 metric tons when expendable, or up to 18,300 kg when the first stage is recovered downrange. Alternatively, it can carry 12,500 kg to LEO when returning to the launch site.

Kuiper launch scrubs due to hardware issue. United Launch Alliance and its customer, Amazon, will have to wait longer for the second launch of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites following a scrub on Monday afternoon. "United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 551 carrying Amazon’s second Project Kuiper mission, Kuiper 2, is delayed due to an engineering observation of an elevated purge temperature within the booster engine," ULA said in a statement. "The team will evaluate the hardware, and we will release a new launch date when available."

Back to the VIF in a spiff... On Tuesday, ULA rolled the Atlas V rocket back to its Vertical Integration Facility to address the issue with the nitrogen purge line on the vehicle. In addition to this mission, ULA has six more Atlas 5 rockets that have been purchased by Amazon to fly satellites for its constellation. As of Friday morning, ULA had not set a new launch date for the Kuiper 2 mission, but it could take place early next week. (submitted by ElllPeaTea)

Varda's next launch will use in-house spacecraft. Varda Space Industries is preparing to launch its fourth spacecraft, W-4, on a SpaceX rideshare mission scheduled to launch as soon as June 21 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Space News reports. The Los Angeles-based startup manufactures pharmaceuticals in orbit and returns them to Earth using specialized reentry capsules.

No longer using Rocket Lab... For its first three missions, Varda had partnered with Rocket Lab to use its Photon spacecraft for in-space operations. However, with W-4, Varda is debuting its first spacecraft built entirely in-house. The company is consolidating design and production internally in an effort to shorten the timeline between missions and increase flexibility to tailor vehicles to customer requirements. Varda decided that vertical integration was essential for scaling operations. (submitted by MarkW98)

Vandenberg becomes SpaceX west. One of the defining events early in the history of SpaceX is when the company was effectively booted from Vandenberg Space Force Base in 2005 after completing the first successful test firing of the Falcon 1 rocket there. This set the company off on a long romp to Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean before acquiring a launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. When SpaceX finally returned to Vandenberg half a decade later, it had the Falcon 9 rocket and was no longer the scrappy upstart. Since then, it has made Vandenberg its own.

Falcons flying frequently... According to Spaceflight Now, on Monday, SpaceX launched the 200th overall orbital flight from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, a batch of 26 Starlink V2 Mini satellites. Among the 199 previous orbital launches from SLC-4E, 131 of them were Falcon 9 rockets. The pad was first occupied by the Atlas-Agena rocket shortly after the Air Force Western Test Range activated in May 1964. SpaceX is currently going through the review process for acquiring SLC-6 as well to use for its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China tests launch abort system. China carried out a successful pad abort test early Tuesday for its next-generation crew spacecraft for moon and low-Earth orbit missions, Space News reports. Footage of the test shows the escape system rapidly boosting the Mengzhou spacecraft away from the ground. Around 20 seconds later, the vehicle reached a predetermined altitude. The return capsule separated from the escape tower, and its parachutes deployed successfully. China is planning to conduct an in-flight escape test at maximum dynamic pressure later this year.

No longer reliant on the rocket... According to the agency, Mengzhou shifts from the traditional model of "rocket handles abort, spacecraft handles crew rescue," as used by the Shenzhou, to a system where the Mengzhou spacecraft takes full responsibility for both abort control and crew safety. "The success of this test lays an important technical foundation for future crewed lunar missions," a Chinese statement read. "Development work on related spacecraft, such as the Long March 10 launch vehicle and the lunar lander, is progressing steadily and will proceed to further testing as scheduled." (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Another Starship explodes unexpectedly. SpaceX's next Starship rocket exploded during a ground test in South Texas late Wednesday, dealing another blow to a program already struggling to overcome three consecutive failures in recent months, Ars reports. The late-night explosion at SpaceX's rocket development complex in Starbase, Texas, destroyed the upper stage that was slated to launch on the next Starship test flight. The powerful blast set off fires around SpaceX's Massey's Test Site, located a few miles from the company's Starship factory and launch pads.

A major anomaly ... SpaceX confirmed the Starship, numbered Ship 36 in the company's inventory, "experienced a major anomaly" on a test stand as the vehicle prepared to ignite its six Raptor engines for a static fire test. These hold-down test-firings are typically one of the final milestones in a Starship launch campaign before SpaceX moves the rocket to the launch pad. The company later said the failure may have been due to a composite overwrap pressure vessel, or COPV, near the top of the vehicle. On Thursday, aerial videos revealed that damage at the test site was significant but not beyond repair. (submitted by Tfargo04)

ArianeGroup will lead reusable engine project. The French space agency CNES announced Tuesday that it had selected ArianeGroup to lead a project to develop a high-thrust reusable rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. The ASTRE (Advanced Staged-Combustion Technologies for Reusable Engines) project will also include contributions from SiriusSpace and Pangea Aerospace.

Company will take a test and learn approach... The project aims to develop a full-flow staged combustion methalox reusable rocket engine capable of producing between 200 and 300 tonnes of thrust, placing it in roughly the same class as the SpaceX Raptor engine. According to the agency, the goal of the project is "to equip the French and European space industry with new capabilities for strategic applications." (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

June 21: Falcon 9 | Transporter-14 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 21:19 UTC

June 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-23 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 05:47 UTC

June 23: Atlas V | Project Kuiper KA-02 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10:54 UTC

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While the development is certainly interesting, and potentially bad for factory workers, we do not know many of the details such as which robots are being planned for use at the factory, what they’ll look like, or how many will be deployed. While Foxconn has trialed robots made by Chinese firm UBTech, the report states that Foxconn is developing its own robots with Nvidia.

The news was told to Reuters via unnamed sources who are not allowed to discuss the matter, so they did so under anonymity. They said that the robots will start work early next year and will contribute to the production of Nvidia’s GB300 AI servers. Foxconn has been training the robots to pick and place objects, insert cables, and do assembly work, but it’s not clear exactly what their role will be on the factory floor and whether jobs will be impacted.

One of the sources that spoke to Reuters said that the Houston factory was the best place to trial the robots because it is more spacious, giving robots more room to move about. Last month, a Foxconn subsidiary, which is in charge of the group’s AI server business, said there were two robots being developed which are expected to be showcased in November.

One of the robots will have legs, while the other will use a wheeled autonomous mobile robot base. Predictably, the latter version will cost less money than the one with legs, but pricing is unknown at this point.

Reuters noted that these two businesses are not the only ones working on robots. It also said that Mercedes-Benz and BMW have been testing robots on production lines and that Tesla is developing its own robots too. China is also getting heavily invested in the sector. Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, believes that they will be in wide use in manufacturing facilities within five years.

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“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in an aside in a long blog post last week. The average query, Altman wrote, uses 0.34 watt-hours of energy: “About what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes.”

For a company with 800 million weekly active users (and growing), the question of how much energy all these searches are using is becoming an increasingly pressing one. But experts say Altman’s figure doesn’t mean much without much more public context from OpenAI about how it arrived at this calculation—including the definition of what an “average” query is, whether or not it includes image generation, and whether or not Altman is including additional energy use, like from training AI models and cooling OpenAI’s servers.

As a result, Sasha Luccioni, the climate lead at AI company Hugging Face, doesn’t put too much stock in Altman’s number. “He could have pulled that out of his ass,” she says. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for more information about how it arrived at this number.)

As AI takes over our lives, it’s also promising to transform our energy systems, supercharging carbon emissions right as we’re trying to fight climate change. Now, a new and growing body of research is attempting to put hard numbers on just how much carbon we’re actually emitting with all of our AI use.

This effort is complicated by the fact that major players like OpenAI disclose little environmental information. An analysis submitted for peer review this week by Luccioni and three other authors looks at the need for more environmental transparency in AI models. In Luccioni’s new analysis, she and her colleagues use data from OpenRouter, a leaderboard of large language model (LLM) traffic, to find that 84 percent of LLM use in May 2025 was for models with zero environmental disclosure. That means that consumers are overwhelmingly choosing models with completely unknown environmental impacts.

“It blows my mind that you can buy a car and know how many miles per gallon it consumes, yet we use all these AI tools every day and we have absolutely no efficiency metrics, emissions factors, nothing,” Luccioni says. “It’s not mandated, it’s not regulatory. Given where we are with the climate crisis, it should be top of the agenda for regulators everywhere.”

As a result of this lack of transparency, Luccioni says, the public is being exposed to estimates that make no sense but which are taken as gospel. You may have heard, for instance, that the average ChatGPT request takes 10 times as much energy as the average Google search. Luccioni and her colleagues track down this claim to a public remark that John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, made in 2023.

A claim made by a board member from one company (Google) about the product of another company to which he has no relation (OpenAI) is tenuous at best—yet, Luccioni’s analysis finds, this figure has been repeated again and again in press and policy reports. (As I was writing this piece, I got a pitch with this exact statistic.)

“People have taken an off-the-cuff remark and turned it into an actual statistic that’s informing policy and the way people look at these things,” Luccioni says. “The real core issue is that we have no numbers. So even the back-of-the-napkin calculations that people can find, they tend to take them as the gold standard, but that’s not the case.”

One way to try and take a peek behind the curtain for more accurate information is to work with open source models. Some tech giants, including OpenAI and Anthropic, keep their models proprietary—meaning outside researchers can’t independently verify their energy use. But other companies make some parts of their models publicly available, allowing researchers to more accurately gauge their emissions.

A study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers of Communication evaluated 14 open-source large language models, including two Meta Llama models and three DeepSeek models, and found that some used as much as 50 percent more energy than other models in the dataset responding to prompts from the researchers. The 1,000 benchmark prompts submitted to the LLMs included questions on topics such as high school history and philosophy; half of the questions were formatted as multiple choice, with only one-word answers available, while half were submitted as open prompts, allowing for a freer format and longer answers. Reasoning models, the researchers found, generated far more thinking tokens—measures of internal reasoning generated in the model while producing its answer, which are a hallmark of more energy use—than more concise models. These models, perhaps unsurprisingly, were also more accurate with complex topics. (They also had trouble with brevity: During the multiple choice phase, for instance, the more complex models would often return answers with multiple tokens, despite explicit instructions to only answer from the range of options provided.)

Maximilian Dauner, a PhD student at the Munich University of Applied Sciences and the study’s lead author, says he hopes AI use will evolve to think about how to more efficiently use less-energy-intensive models for different queries. He envisions a process where smaller, simpler questions are automatically directed to less-energy-intensive models that will still provide accurate answers. “Even smaller models can achieve really good results on simpler tasks, and don't have that huge amount of CO₂ emitted during the process,” he says.

Some tech companies already do this. Google and Microsoft have previously told WIRED that their search features use smaller models when possible, which can also mean faster responses for users. But generally, model providers have done little to nudge users toward using less energy. How quickly a model answers a question, for instance, has a big impact on its energy use—but that’s not explained when AI products are presented to users, says Noman Bashir, the Computing & Climate Impact Fellow at MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

“The goal is to provide all of this inference the quickest way possible so that you don’t leave their platform,” he says. “If ChatGPT suddenly starts giving you a response after five minutes, you will go to some other tool that is giving you an immediate response.”

However, there’s a myriad of other considerations to take into account when calculating the energy use of complex AI queries, because it’s not just theoretical—the conditions under which queries are actually run out in the real world matter. Bashir points out that physical hardware makes a difference when calculating emissions. Dauner ran his experiments on an Nvidia A100 GPU, but Nvidia’s H100 GPU—which was specially designed for AI workloads, and which, according to the company, is becoming increasingly popular—is much more energy-intensive.

Physical infrastructure also makes a difference when talking about emissions. Large data centers need cooling systems, light, and networking equipment, which all add on more energy; they often run in diurnal cycles, taking a break at night when queries are lower. They are also hooked up to different types of grids—ones overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels, versus those powered by renewables—depending on their locations.

Bashir compares studies that look at emissions from AI queries without factoring in data center needs to lifting up a car, hitting the gas, and counting revolutions of a wheel as a way of doing a fuel-efficiency test. “You’re not taking into account the fact that this wheel has to carry the car and the passenger,” he says.

Perhaps most crucially for our understanding of AI’s emissions, open source models like the ones Dauner used in his study represent a fraction of the AI models used by consumers today. Training a model and updating deployed models takes a massive amount of energy—figures that many big companies keep secret. It’s unclear, for example, whether the light bulb statistic about ChatGPT from OpenAI’s Altman takes into account all the energy used to train the models powering the chatbot. Without more disclosure, the public is simply missing much of the information needed to start understanding just how much this technology is impacting the planet.

“If I had a magic wand, I would make it mandatory for any company putting an AI system into production, anywhere, around the world, in any application, to disclose carbon numbers,” Luccioni says.

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Late Wednesday night at about 11PM CT, SpaceX was about to perform a static fire test of Ship 36, ahead of a planned 10th flight test for its Starship, when there was suddenly a massive explosion at the Massey’s Testing Center site. SpaceX says “A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for,” and that there are no hazards to residents in the area of its recently incorporated town of Starbase, Texas.

The site continues to burn at this time, about two hours after the explosion, with live camera feeds from NASASpaceflight and LabPadre showing the site, as well as the response from local fire departments. According to the people narrating on NASASpaceflight, the explosion occurred before the static fire test was supposed to start, and about 30 minutes or so after the propellant load sequence began. During a static fire test, the vehicle’s rocket engines fire while it remains attached to the launch mount, so Ship 36 was not scheduled to lift off just yet.

The cause of this latest incident and the extent of possible damage to the test site are unknown, but it follows explosions during the seventh, eighth, and ninth Starship flight tests earlier this year.

Fox 26 Houston says that, according to authorities, there have been no injuries reported, while KRGV news said that Brownsville Fire Department crews were responding to the incident.

SpaceX issued this statement about the incident about 90 minutes after the incident in a post on X:

On Wednesday, June 18 at approximately 11 p.m. CT, the Starship preparing for the tenth flight test experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase. A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for.

 

Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials. There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing operations continue.

This flight test would’ve continued using SpaceX’s “V2” Starship design, which Elon Musk said in 2023, “holds more propellant, reduces dry mass and improves reliability.” SpaceX is also preparing a new V3 design that, according to Musk, was tracking toward a rate of launching once a week in about 12 months.

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The blackout that took down the Iberian grid serving Spain and Portugal in April was the result of a number of smaller interacting problems, according to an investigation by the Spanish government. The report concludes that several steps meant to address a small instability made matters worse, eventually leading to a self-reinforcing cascade where high voltages caused power plants to drop off the grid, thereby increasing the voltage further. Critically, the report suggests that the Spanish grid operator had an unusually low number of plants on call to stabilize matters, and some of the ones it did have responded poorly.

The full report will be available later today; however, the government released a summary ahead of its release. The document includes a timeline of the events that triggered the blackout, as well as an analysis of why grid management failed to keep it in check. It also notes that a parallel investigation checked for indications of a cyberattack and found none.

Oscillations and a cascade

The document notes that for several days prior to the blackout, the Iberian grid had been experiencing voltage fluctuations—products of a mismatch between supply and demand—that had been managed without incident. These continued through the morning of April 28 until shortly after noon, when an unusual frequency oscillation occurred. This oscillation has been traced back to a single facility on the grid, but the report doesn't identify it or even indicate its type, simply referring to it as an "instalación."

The grid operators responded in a way that suppressed the oscillations but increased the voltages on the grid. About 15 minutes later, a weakened version of this oscillation occurred again, followed shortly thereafter by oscillations at a different frequency, this one with properties that are commonly seen on European grids. That prompted the grid operators to take corrective steps again, which increased the voltages on the grid.

The Iberian grid is capable of handling this sort of thing. But the grid operator only scheduled 10 power plants to handle voltage regulation on the 28th, which the report notes is the lowest total it had committed to in all of 2025 up to that point. The report found that a number of those plants failed to respond properly to the grid operators, and a few even responded in a way that contributed to the surging voltages.

As the voltages rose, they approached a threshold at which grid hardware needs to disconnect to protect the equipment. But the report found that some of the hardware disconnected before the threshold was reached. Some of the disconnections took out a complicated mix of electrical demand, power plants, and regional distribution, resulting in changing voltages and an imbalance between northern and southern Spain.

At that point, things spun out of control, with the grid frequency dropping. That led to it falling out of sync with its connection to France, causing that to shutdown. The blackout had long since passed the point of intervention.

What to do?

It may be tempting to view the cascading failures as a sign of incompetence on the part of the grid operators. But these are the same operators who managed the process of black-starting the grid to normal operations within a matter of hours. There should (and undoubtedly will) be questions about the low number of plants dedicated to grid stabilization, but that can be handled with a simple policy fix. An equally focused correction can likely address any problems at the problematic facility that triggered the whole chain of events.

The real issue is why so much hardware on the grid didn't follow its operating specifications, either disconnecting early or failing to respond properly to the calls for stabilization.

Notably missing in all of this is any mention of renewable power. Spain has a lot of it, and it tends to be used to meet a higher fraction of demand during the spring and fall, when heating and cooling demand is lowest. Opponents of renewable energy were quick to point to the Iberian blackout as evidence of the unreliability of wind and solar (accusations that The New York Times was willing to echo). The investigation indicates that all these accusations were completely without merit.

Updated to better reflect the mix of things that were taken out during the grid failure.

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The axolotl seems like something out of science fiction. This perpetually youthful-looking Mexican salamander possesses a superpower that defies biology as we know it: the ability to regenerate entire limbs, parts of its heart, and even its spinal cord. But how does an amputated limb know whether to regenerate an entire arm from the shoulder down or just a hand from the wrist? This mystery of “positional identity” has fascinated scientists for decades.

A team at Northeastern University, led by James Monaghan, has unraveled a key piece of this biological puzzle. In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers reveal an elegant molecular mechanism that acts like a GPS coordinate system for regenerating cells. Surprisingly, the secret lies not in producing more of a chemical signal, but in how quickly it is destroyed.

Monaghan’s lab houses about 500 axolotls cared for by a team ranging from undergraduate students to postdocs. “Raising axolotls involves managing a complex aquatic system and being patient, as they reach sexual maturity within a year. It’s slower than with other model organisms, but also more exciting. In many experiments, the team is exploring completely new terrain,” Monaghan says.

For more than two decades, Monaghan’s lab has been studying the axolotl to understand how it regenerates complex organs such as its limbs, spinal cord, heart, and tail. His lab’s research focuses on uncovering why nerves are essential to this process and what unique cellular properties allow axolotls to regenerate tissues that other animals cannot. These findings could transform our understanding of bodily regeneration and have important applications in regenerative medicine.

“For years we’ve known that retinoic acid, a derivative of vitamin A, is a crucial molecule that screams to cells ‘build a shoulder!’” explains Monaghan. “But the puzzle was how the cells in the regenerating limb-stump controlled their levels so precisely to know exactly where they were on the axis from shoulder to hand.”

To unpick this mystery, the team focused on a cluster of stem cells that form at the wound site after a limb is lost in animals like the axolotl that are capable of regeneration. Known as the blastema, it’s this base of stem cells that then orchestrates regeneration. The prevailing theory was that differences in retinoic acid production might explain why a shoulder (proximal) amputation leads to an entire limb being regenerated, while a wrist (distal) amputation only regenerates the hand.

“Our big surprise was to discover that the key was not in how much retinoic acid was produced, but in how it was degraded,” says Monaghan. The team discovered that cells in the distal part of the limb, the wrist, are awash in an enzyme called CYP26B1, whose sole function is to destroy retinoic acid. In contrast, cells in the shoulder have hardly any of this enzyme, allowing retinoic acid to accumulate to high levels.

This difference creates a chemical gradient along the limb: lots of retinoic acid in the shoulder, little in the wrist. It is this gradient that informs cells of their exact location.

In humans, this pathway of cellular plasticity is absent or closed. “Therefore, the great challenge is to understand how to induce this blastemal state in our cells, a key transient structure in regeneration. If achieved, it would be possible for our cells to respond again to positional and regenerative signals, as they do in the axolotl,” explains the researcher.

Tricking the Cells Into Over-Regenerating

To confirm their discovery, the researchers conducted an experiment. They amputated axolotl legs at the wrist and administered a drug called talarozole, which inhibits the CYP26B1 enzyme. By “turning off the brakes,” retinoic acid accumulated to extremely high levels in a place where it normally shouldn’t. As a result the wrist cells, “confused” by the high concentration of retinoic acid, interpreted position as being the shoulder. Instead of regenerating a hand, they proceeded to regenerate a complete, duplicated limb. “It was the ultimate test,” Monaghan says.

The team went a step further to identify which genes were activated by these high levels of retinoic acid. They discovered a master gene that was specifically activated in shoulder areas: Shox. An abbreviation of “short stature homeobox gene,” Shox is so called because mutations to it in humans cause short stature. “We identified Shox as a critical instruction manual in this process,” Monaghan explains. “It’s the gene that tells developing cells to ‘build the arm and forearm bones.’”

To confirm this, the team used Crispr gene-editing technology to knock out the Shox gene in axolotl embryos. The resulting animals had peculiar limbs: normal-sized hands and fingers, but significantly shorter and underdeveloped arms and forearms. This demonstrated that Shox is essential for shaping proximal, but not distal, structures, revealing that regeneration uses distinct genetic programs for each limb segment.

This study not only solves a long-standing mystery of regenerative biology, but also provides a molecular road map. By understanding how the axolotl reads and executes its genetic instructions for regeneration, scientists can begin to think about how, someday, we might learn to write our own genetic instructions.

“The axolotl has cellular properties that we want to understand at the deepest level,” says Monaghan. “While regeneration of a complete human limb is still in the realm of science fiction, each time we discover a piece of this genetic blueprint, such as the role of CYP26B1 and Shox, we move one step closer to understanding how to orchestrate complex tissue repair in humans.”

To bring this science closer to clinical applications, one crucial step is to succeed in inducing blastema formations of stem cells at sites of amputation in humans. “This is the ‘holy grail’ of regenerative biology. Understanding the minimal components that make it up—the molecular signals, the cellular environment, the physiological conditions—would allow us to transform a scar into a regenerative tissue,” explains Monaghan.

In his current research, there are still gaps to be filled: how the CYP26B1 gradient is regulated, how retinoic acid connects to the Shox gene, and what downstream factors determine the formation of specific structures, such as the humerus or radius bones.

From Healing to Regeneration

Monaghan explains that axolotls do not possess a “magic gene” for regeneration, but share the same fundamental genes as humans. “The key difference lies in the accessibility of those genes. While an injury in humans activates genes that induce scarring, in salamanders there is cell de-differentiation: the cells return to an embryonic-like state, where they can respond to signals such as retinoic acid. This ability to return to a ‘developmental state’ is the basis of their regeneration,” explains the researcher.

So, if humans have the same genes, why can’t we regenerate? “The difference is that the salamander can reaccess that [developmental] program after injury.” Humans cannot—they only access this development pathway during initial growth before birth. “We’ve had selective pressure to shut down and heal,” Monaghan says. “My dream, and the community’s dream, is to understand how to make the transition from scar to blastema.”

Monaghan says that, in theory, it would not be necessary to modify human DNA to induce regeneration, but to intervene at the right time and place in the body with regulatory molecules. For example, the molecular pathways that signal a cell to be located in the elbow on the pinky side—and not the thumb—could be reactivated in a regenerative environment using technologies such as Crispr. “This understanding could be applied in stem cell therapies. Currently, laboratory-grown stem cells do not know ‘where they are’ when they are transplanted. If they can be programmed with precise positional signals, they could integrate properly into damaged tissues and contribute to structural regeneration, such as forming a complete humerus,” says the researcher.

After years of work, understanding the role of retinoic acid—studied since 1981—is a source of deep satisfaction for Monaghan. The scientist imagines a future where a patch placed on a wound can reactivate developmental programs in human cells, emulating the regenerative mechanism of the salamander. Although not immediate, he believes that cell engineering to induce regeneration is a goal already within the reach of science.

He reflects on how the axolotl has had a second scientific life. “It was a dominant model a hundred years ago, then fell into disuse for decades, and has now reemerged thanks to modern tools such as gene editing and cell analysis. The team can study any gene and cell during the regenerative process. In addition, the axolotl has become a cultural icon of tenderness and rarity.”

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

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While COVID-19 transmission remains low in the US, health experts are anxious about the potential for a big summer wave as two factors seem set for a collision course: a lull in infection activity that suggests protective responses have likely waned in the population, and a new SARS-CoV-2 variant with an infectious advantage over other variants.

The new variant is dubbed NB.1.8.1. Like all the other currently circulating variants, it's a descendant of omicron. Specifically, NB.1.8.1 is derived from the recombinant variant XDV.1.5.1. Compared to the reigning omicron variants JN.1 and LP.8.1, the new variant has a few mutations that could help it bind to human cells more easily and evade some protective immune responses.

On May 23, the World Health Organization designated NB.1.8.1 a "variant under monitoring," meaning that early signals indicate it has an advantage over other variants, but its impact on populations is not yet clear. In recent weeks, parts of Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, have experienced increases in infections and hospitalizations linked to NB.1.8.1's spread. Fortunately, the variant does not appear to cause more severe disease, and current vaccines are expected to remain effective against it.

Still, it appears to be swiftly gaining ground in the US, fueling worries that it could cause a surge here as well. In the latest tracking data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NB.1.8.1 is estimated to account for 37 percent of cases in the US. That's up from 15 percent two weeks ago. NB.1.8.1 is now poised to overtake LP.8.1, which is estimated to make up 38 percent of cases.

It's important to note that those estimates are based on limited data, so the CDC cautions that there are large possible ranges for the variants' actual proportions. For NB.1.81, the potential percentage of cases ranges from 13 percent to 68 percent, while LP.8.1's is 23 percent to 57 percent.

Increased vulnerability

Regardless of the point estimate, there is no doubt that NB.1.8.1 is spreading in the US. And it's doing the same in Europe. On Friday, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warned that, while COVID-19 activity is currently low, a slow summer increase is beginning and could end up being large.

"(i)ncidence could increase in the coming weeks," Edoardo Colzani, ECDC's Head of Respiratory Viruses, said in a statement. "We do not anticipate the NB.1.8.1 variant to pose a greater public health risk than other Omicron-descendant variants, nor do we expect a significant impact on vaccine effectiveness against severe disease. However, following a winter with low SARS-CoV-2 circulation, population immunity against SARS-CoV-2 may have partly waned—particularly among older adults and other individuals who are at higher risk of severe disease—potentially increasing vulnerability as virus activity rises," he added.

The US, which tends to have waves after Europe does, is in the same position. The US has also had a quiet winter, and population immunity is probably low. But, unlike Europe, America's COVID-19 policies are currently in disarray. With the installation of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the country's top health official, recommendations for COVID-19 vaccinations have been pulled back. In particular, vulnerable pregnant people, healthy children, and healthy adults under 65 may face barriers to access due to abrupt changes by Kennedy and the Food and Drug Administration. The Trump administration has also clawed back billions in funding for state public health efforts, including vaccination.

Staff cuts and policy changes at the US CDC have also taken a toll. On Monday, another CDC official involved in shaping COVID-19 vaccine policy resigned. The official, Fiona Havers, was responsible for collecting data on COVID-19 and RSV hospitalizations. In an email obtained by Reuters, she told her CDC colleagues today that she no longer had confidence that the COVID-19 and RSV data would be used "objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions."

On June 25–27, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will meet to vote on recommendations for the use of COVID-19 vaccines. Last week, Kennedy fired all 17 experts on the committee and replaced them with several anti-vaccine panelists.

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An experimental obesity pill that works in a different way from the wildly popular Ozempic may help people lose weight, according to results from a small, preliminary human trial.

Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs reduce food intake by stimulating a feeling of fullness. They act on the brain to promote satiety and on the gut to slow the movement of food through the stomach, helping people feel full longer. As a result, people on the drugs lose weight because they eat less.

But a new drug may be able to burn energy, and thus fat, without reducing appetite. In a Phase I trial described today in the journal Nature Metabolism, the drug led to statistically significant weight loss in participants after two weeks. Dubbed SANA, the drug is derived from salicylate, a compound used to make aspirin. Developed by Eolo Pharma of Montevideo, Uruguay, it activates a pathway called creatine-dependent thermogenesis.

Creatine is perhaps best known as a nutritional supplement taken after exercise to help build muscle mass, but the compound also occurs naturally in the human body and is important for energy production.

“It has been known for a long time that creatine has good effects on metabolism,” says Carlos Escande, cofounder and chief scientific officer of Eolo. In the 1970s, researchers found that rats exposed to cold used a lot of creatine. It wasn’t until a decade ago that a Harvard team found that creatine is used in fatty adipose tissue during exposure to cold to generate heat.

The process of burning energy and generating heat to maintain a stable internal temperature is known as thermogenesis. Creatine-dependent thermogenesis refers to how the breaking down of creatine, particularly in fat cells, contributes to this heat and energy production.

“What we have found is that our compound stimulates this creatine-dependent heat production pathway,” Escande says.

In the first part of the trial, Eolo scientists randomly assigned 17 healthy-weight individuals to receive either a placebo or a single pill of SANA at a low, medium, or high dose. At all doses, the drug was safe and well-tolerated with no serious side effects. In the second part of the trial, they tested the drug in 24 participants with obesity for 15 days. Volunteers were randomly sorted into three groups to receive either a placebo or a low, medium, or high dose of SANA twice a day for the length of the study. Each group had six people taking the drug and two on a placebo. During the study period, participants stayed at a clinical facility where they received high-carbohydrate meals.

At the end of the two weeks, the participants taking the highest dose of SANA showed weight loss of about 3 percent, which is comparable to the weight loss seen in people taking Ozempic and Wegovy over the same period of treatment. They were also asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding appetite and satiety, and none reported decreased appetite or satiety.

While injected GLP-1 drugs are incredibly effective at spurring weight loss, they also come with some downsides. There can be gastrointestinal side effects and loss of muscle mass. The drugs are also expensive, at $1,000 a month or more in the US before insurance. Drug companies are interested in developing anti-obesity pills because of their relatively cheap cost to manufacture compared to injectables, and the fact that some patients would prefer to take a pill.

“There's still an unmet clinical need, and that's where Eolo wants to help,” says María Pía Garat the company’s CEO.

Eolo didn’t exactly set out to make a weight-loss pill. Researchers at the company were originally trying to develop a drug to target inflammation, especially the kind that occurs in obesity and type 2 diabetes. But when they started testing their experimental drug in mice, it not only improved inflammation but also led to a reduction in body weight while they were on a high-fat diet. They have performed experiments out to nine months and found that the mice eventually dropped to their starting weight even while they were still eating the same, high-fat diet.

In mice, SANA also preserved lean muscle mass. MRI scans show that mice treated with SANA had a greater percentage of lean body mass compared to controls, despite substantial fat loss.

“We’ve had stimulants before to try to increase your caloric output,” says Hans Schmidt, chief of bariatric surgery and co-director for the Center for Weight Loss and Metabolic Health at Hackensack University Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the study.

One of those was the drug combination fenfluramine-phentermine, known as fen-phen, which was sold in the 1990s for weight loss but was taken off the market for causing heart damage. “Those work on overall metabolism. They make you jittery, make you energized. This seems to work specifically at a cellular level on your fat cells,” he says.

Of course, Eolo’s study was very small, and the drug will need to be tested in more people to better understand its effects. The company is planning a Phase II trial later this year that will include around 100 participants with obesity and follow them for 12 weeks. They hope to conduct that trial in the United States. Garat thinks Eolo’s drug could eventually be used as a stand-alone approach or in combination with GLP-1 drugs to produce more weight loss.

“Right now we are bringing a backhoe to the construction site when we need many more tools. We need more mechanisms like this that work on pathways other than appetite,” says Angela Fitch, former president of the Obesity Medicine Association and the cofounder and chief medical officer of Knownwell, a primary care company specializing in obesity care. Fitch is not involved with Eolo.

Current GLP-1s can achieve up to 20 percent weight loss, and while that may be enough for some patients, others may still need to lose more to get to a healthy weight. “New medications,” she says, “present the opportunity to make an even greater impact.”

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Scott Bolton’s first encounter with Io took place in the summer of 1980, right after he graduated from college and started a job at NASA. The Voyager 1 spacecraft had flown past this moon of Jupiter, catching the first glimpse of active volcanism on a world other than Earth. Umbrella-shaped outbursts of magmatic matter rocketed into space from all over Io’s surface. “They looked amazingly beautiful,” said Bolton, who is now based at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. “It was like an artist drew it. I was amazed at how exotic it looked compared to our moon.”

Scientists like Bolton have been trying to understand Io’s exuberant volcanism ever since. A leading theory has been that just below the moon’s crust hides a global magma ocean, a vast contiguous cache of liquid rock. This theory dovetails neatly with several observations, including ones showing a roughly uniform distribution of Io’s volcanoes, which seem to be tapping the same omnipresent, hellish source of melt.

But now, it appears that Io’s hell has vanished—or rather, it was never there to begin with. During recent flybys of the volcanic moon by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, scientists measured Io’s gravitational effect on Juno, using the spacecraft’s tiniest wobbles to determine the moon’s mass distribution and therefore its internal structure. The scientists reported in Nature that nothing significant is sloshing about just beneath Io’s crust.

“There is no shallow ocean,” said Bolton, who leads the Juno mission.

Independent scientists can find no fault with the study. “The results and the work are totally solid and pretty convincing,” said Katherine de Kleer, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

The data has reopened a mystery that spills over into other rocky worlds. Io’s volcanism is powered by a gravity-driven mechanism called tidal heating, which melts the rock into magma that erupts from the surface. Whereas Io is the poster child for this mechanism, tidal heating also heats many other worlds, including Io’s neighbor, the icy moon Europa, where the heat is thought to sustain a subterranean saltwater ocean. NASA launched the $5 billion Clipper spacecraft to search Europa’s sky for signs of life in the proposed underground ocean.

But if Io doesn’t have a magma ocean, what might that mean for Europa? And, scientists now wonder, how does tidal heating even work?

Melting Magma

Heat drives geology, the rocky foundation upon which everything else, from volcanic activity and atmospheric chemistry to biology, is built. Heat often comes from a planet’s formation and the decay of its radioactive elements. But smaller celestial objects like moons have only tiny reserves of such elements and of residual heat, and when those reserves run dry, their geological activity flatlines.

Or, at least, it should—but something appears to grant geologic life to small orbs throughout the solar system long after they should have geologically perished.

Io is the most flamboyant member of this puzzling club—a burnt-orange, crimson, and tawny Jackson Pollock painting. The discovery of its over-spilling cauldrons of lava is one of the most famous tales in planetary science, as they were predicted to exist before they were discovered.

On March 2, 1979, a paper in Science ruminated on Io’s strange orbit. Because of the positions and orbits of neighboring moons, Io’s orbit is elliptical rather than circular. And when Io is closer to Jupiter, it experiences a stronger gravitational pull from the gas giant than when it is farther away. The study authors figured that Jupiter’s gravity must therefore be constantly kneading Io, pulling its surface up and down by up to 100 meters, and, per their calculations, generating a lot of frictional heat within it—a mechanism they described as “tidal heating.” They conjectured that Io may be the most intensely heated rocky body in the solar system. “One might speculate that widespread and recurrent surface volcanism would occur,” they wrote.

Just three days later, Voyager 1 flew by. An image taken on March 8 documented two gigantic plumes arching above its surface. After ruling out all other causes, NASA scientists concluded that Voyager had seen an alien world’s volcanic eruptions. They reported their discovery in Science that June, just three months after the prediction.

The planetary science community quickly coalesced around the idea that tidal heating within Io is responsible for the never-ending volcanism on the surface. “The unknown part that’s been an open question of decades is what that means for the interior structure,” said Mike Sori, a planetary geophysicist at Purdue University. Where is that tidal heating focused within Io, and just how much heat and melting is it generating?

NASA’s Galileo spacecraft studied Jupiter and several of its moons around the turn of the millennium. One of its instruments was a magnetometer, and it picked up a peculiar magnetic field emanating from Io. The signal appeared to be coming from an electrically conductive fluid—a lot of fluid, in fact.

After years of study, scientists concluded in 2011 that Galileo had detected a global magma ocean just below Io’s crust. Whereas Earth’s mantle is mostly solid and plasticky, Io’s subsurface was thought to be filled with an ocean of liquid rock 50 kilometers thick, or almost five times thicker than the Pacific Ocean at its deepest point.

A similar magnetic field was coming from Europa, too—in this case, apparently generated by a vast ocean of salty water. The implications were profound: With a lot of rocky material, tidal heating can make oceans of magma. With plenty of ice, it can create oceans of potentially habitable liquid water.

Volcanic Vanishing Act

By the time the Juno spacecraft started swinging around Jupiter in 2016, the belief that Io had a magma ocean was widespread. But Bolton and his colleagues wanted to double-check.

During flybys in December 2023 and February 2024, Juno came within 1,500 kilometers of Io’s scorched surface. Although the remarkable images of active volcanoes drew everyone’s attention, the goal of these flybys was to find out if a magma ocean truly lay beneath the moon’s rocky skin.

To investigate, the team used an unlikely tool: Juno’s radio transponder, which communicates with Earth, sending and receiving signals. Because of Io’s unevenly distributed mass, its gravitational field isn’t perfectly symmetrical. That uneven gravitational field subtly alters the motion of Juno as it flies by, causing it to accelerate or decelerate a little.

That means Juno’s radio transmissions will experience the Doppler effect, where the wavelength shifts slightly in response to Io’s uneven gravitational field. By looking at the incredibly small shifts in the transmissions, Bolton’s team was able to create a high-fidelity picture of Io’s gravitational field and use that to determine its internal structure. “If there were indeed a global magma ocean, you’d see a lot more distortion as Io orbited around Jupiter and as the tidal forces flexed it and changed its shape,” said Ashley Davies, a volcanologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn’t involved with the new study.

But Bolton’s team did not find this level of distortion. Their conclusion was clear. “There cannot be a shallow magma ocean fueling the volcanoes,” said study coauthor Ryan Park, a Juno co-investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

So what else might be powering Io’s volcanoes?

On Earth, discrete reservoirs of magma of different types—from the tarlike viscous matter that powers explosive eruptions to the runnier, honey-esque stuff that gushes out of some volcanoes—are located within the crust at various depths, all created by the interactions of tectonic plates, the moving jigsaw pieces that make up Earth’s surface. Io lacks plate tectonics and (perhaps) a diversity of magma types, but its crust may nevertheless be peppered with magma reservoirs. This was one of the original lines of thought until Galileo’s data convinced many of the magma ocean theory.

The new study doesn’t rule out a far deeper magma ocean. But that abyssal cache would have to be filled with magma so iron-rich and dense (because of its great depth) that it would struggle to migrate to the surface and power Io’s volcanism. “And at some depth, it becomes tricky to distinguish between what we would call a deep magma ocean versus a liquid core,” Park said.

For some, this raises an irreconcilable problem. Galileo’s magnetometer detected signs of a shallow magma ocean, but Juno gravity data has emphatically ruled that out. “People are not really disputing the magnetometer results, so you have to make that fit with everything else,” said Jani Radebaugh, a planetary geologist at Brigham Young University.

Researchers disagree on the best interpretation of the Galileo data. The magnetic signals “were taken as probably the best evidence for a magma ocean, but really they weren’t that strong,” said Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a coauthor of the new study.  The induction data couldn’t distinguish between a partly molten (but still solid) interior and a fully molten magma ocean, he said.

Heavy Water

Perhaps the main reason scientists study Io is because it teaches us about the fundamentals of tidal heating. Io’s tidal heating engine remains impressive—there’s clearly a lot of volcano-feeding magma being generated. But if it’s not producing a subsurface magma ocean, does that mean tidal heating doesn’t generate water oceans, either?

Scientists remain confident that it does. Nobody doubts that Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which is also tidally heated, contains an underground saltwater ocean; the Cassini spacecraft not only detected signs of its existence but directly sampled some of it erupting out of the moon’s South Pole. And although there is some light skepticism about whether Europa has an ocean, most scientists think it does.

Crucially, unlike Io’s odd magnetic field, which seemed to indicate that it concealed an ocean’s worth of fluid, Europa’s own Galileo-era magnetic signal remains robust. “It’s a pretty clean result at Europa,” said Robert Pappalardo, the Europa mission’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The icy moon is far enough from Jupiter and the intense plasma-flooded space environment of Io that Europa’s own magnetic induction signal “really sticks out.”

But if both moons are tidally heated, why does only Europa have an inner ocean? According to Nimmo, “there’s a fundamental difference between a liquid-water ocean and a magma ocean. The magma wants to escape; the water really doesn’t.” Liquid rock is less dense than solid rock, so it wants to rise and erupt quickly; the new study suggests that it doesn’t linger at depth long enough inside Io to form a massive, interconnected ocean. But liquid water is, unusually, denser than its solid icy form. “Liquid water is heavy, so it collects into an ocean,” Sori said.

“I think that’s the big-picture message from this paper,” Sori added. Tidal heating might struggle to create magma oceans. But on icy moons, it can easily make watery oceans due to the bizarrely low density of ice. And that suggests life has a multitude of potentially habitable environments throughout the solar system to call home.

Hell’s Poster Child

The revelation that Io is missing its shallow magma ocean underscores just how little is known about tidal heating. “We’ve never really understood where in Io’s interior the mantle is melting, how that mantle melt is getting to the surface,” de Kleer said.

Our own moon shows evidence of primeval tidal heating too. Its oldest crystals formed 4.51 billion years ago from the stream of molten matter that got blasted off Earth by a giant impact event. But a lot of lunar crystals seem to have formed from a second reservoir of molten rock 4.35 billion years ago. Where did that later magma come from?

Nimmo and coauthors offered one idea in a paper published in Nature in December: Maybe Earth’s moon was like Io. The moon was significantly closer to Earth back then, and the gravitational fields from the Earth and the sun were battling for control. At a certain threshold, when the gravitational influence of both were roughly equal, the moon might have temporarily adopted an elliptical orbit and gotten tidally heated by Earth’s gravitational kneading. Its interior might have remelted, causing a surprise secondary flourish of volcanism.

But exactly where within the moon’s interior its tidal heating was concentrated—and thus, where all that melting was happening—isn’t clear.

Perhaps if Io can be understood, so too can our moon—as well as several of the other satellites in our solar system with hidden tidal engines. For now, this volcanic orb remains maddeningly inscrutable. “Io’s a complicated beast,” Davies said. “The more we observe it, the more sophisticated the data and the analyses, the more puzzling it becomes.”

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

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The China National Space Administration has shared the first image from its Tianwen-2 probe, which is en route to Kamo‘oalewa, a near-Earth asteroid.

The image was captured by a camera onboard the probe, which is currently more than 3 million kilometers from Earth, and shows one of its wings with its solar panels deployed. It is also the first glimpse the CNSA has offered of its space probe, which launched on May 29 on a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Zeyuan Town, China. The design of Tianwen-2’s panels is similar in appearance to those on Lucy, NASA’s space probe that is exploring asteroids floating near Jupiter. These serve to meet the power demands required for the trip.

Tianwen-2’s mission is to land on the surface of Kamo‘oalewa, collect samples, and return to Earth. The spacecraft is scheduled to land on the asteroid’s surface in July 2026. Before then, it will spend several months studying Kamo‘oalewa from a safe distance, to determine its sampling area, before proceeding with landing maneuvers, a particularly difficult task given the asteroid’s low gravity.

Once the samples have been collected, Tianwen-2 will travel back to Earth and send its samples down to the surface in a capsule, before then attempting to use Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to head toward 311P/PanSTARRS, an unusual-looking asteroid beyond Mars that has some of the characteristics of a comet, including visible tails. Tianwen-2 is expected to conduct this mission until 2035.

The Enigma of the Hawaiian Quasi-Moon

Kamo‘oalewa is one of Earth’s seven known quasi-moons—objects that appear to be orbiting our planet, but which aren’t actually gravitationally bound to Earth, and are actually asteroids circling the sun in an orbit similar to Earth’s.

Discovered in 2016 by astronomers at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii, Kamo‘oalewa—whose name means “oscillating celestial object” in Hawaiian—is located approximately 4.65 million kilometers from our planet, 12 times further away from Earth than the moon. Kamo‘oalewa is estimated to be roughly 40 to 100 meters in diameter, has maintained its current orbit for 100 years, and will probably maintain it for 300 more.

It’s hoped that Tianwen-2 can solve the mystery of Kamo‘oalewa’s origin. One theory is that it’s a chunk of rock that broke off from the moon millions of years ago. The sampling mission will help multiple scientific investigations into the composition of rocky celestial bodies, as well as aid scientists in the search for clues about the formation of the solar system.

Observational evidence and modeling suggest that Kamo‘oalewa has been orbiting the sun for millions of years, albeit with an unstable trajectory. A direct exploration of this asteroid could, in addition, expand knowledge about nearby celestial objects that might potentially pose a threat to Earth.

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

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