Welcome to Edition 7.48 of the Rocket Report! The shock of last week's public spat between President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has worn off, and Musk expressed regret for some of his comments going after Trump on social media. Musk also backtracked from his threat to begin decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft, currently the only way for the US government to send people to the International Space Station. Nevertheless, there are many people who think Musk's attachment to Trump could end up putting the US space program at risk, and I'm not convinced that danger has passed.

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

Quebec invests in small launch company. The government of Quebec will invest CA$10 million ($7.3 million) into a Montreal-area company that is developing a system to launch small satellites into space, The Canadian Press reports. Quebec Premier François Legault announced the investment into Reaction Dynamics at the company's facility in Longueuil, a Montreal suburb. The province's economy minister, Christine Fréchette, said the investment will allow the company to begin launching microsatellites into orbit from Canada as early as 2027.

Joining its peers ... Canada is the only G7 nation without a domestic satellite launch capability, whether it's through an independent national or commercial program or through membership in the European Space Agency, which funds its own rockets. The Canadian Space Agency has long eschewed any significant spending on developing a Canadian satellite launcher, and a handful of commercial launch startups in Canada haven't gotten very far. Reaction Dynamics was founded in 2017 by Bachar Elzein, formerly a researcher in multiphase and reactive flows at École Polytechnique de Montréal, where he specialized in propulsion and combustion dynamics. Reaction Dynamic plans to launch its first suborbital rocket later this year, before attempting an orbital flight with its Aurora rocket as soon as 2027. (submitted by Joey S-IVB)

Another year, another delay for Themis. The European Space Agency’s Themis program has suffered another setback, with the inaugural flight of its reusable booster demonstrator now all but certain to slip to 2026, European Spaceflight reports. It has been nearly six years since the European Space Agency kicked off the Themis program to develop and mature key technologies for future reusable rocket stages. Themis is analogous to SpaceX's Grasshopper reusable rocket prototype tested more than a decade ago, with progressively higher hop tests to demonstrate vertical takeoff and vertical landing techniques. When the program started, an initial hop test of the first Themis demonstrator was expected to take place in 2022.

Tethered to terra firma ... ArianeGroup, which manufactures Europe's Ariane rockets, is leading the Themis program under contract to ESA, which recently committed an additional 230 million euros ($266 million) to the effort. This money is slated to go toward the development of a single-engine variant of the Themis program, continued development of the rocket's methane-fueled engine, and upgrades to a test stand at ArianeGroup's propulsion facility in Vernon, France. Two months ago, an official update on the Themis program suggested the first Themis launch campaign would begin before the end of the year. Citing sources close to the program, European Spaceflight reports the first Themis integration tests at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden are now almost certain to slip from late 2025 to 2026.

French startup tests a novel rocket engine. While Europe's large government-backed rocket initiatives face delays, the continent's space industry startups are moving forward on their own. One of these companies, a French startup named Alpha Impulsion, recently completed a short test-firing of an autophage rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. These aren't your normal rocket engines that burn conventional kerosene, methane, or hydrogen fuel. An autophage engine literally consumes itself as it burns, using heat from the combustion process to melt its plastic fuselage and feed the molten plastic into the combustion chamber in a controlled manner. Alpha Impulsion called the May 27 ground firing a successful test of the "largest autophage rocket engine in the world."

So, why hasn't this been done before? ... The concept of a self-consuming rocket engine sounds like an idea that's so crazy it just might work. But the idea remained conceptual from when it was first patented in 1938 until an autophage engine was fired in a controlled manner for the first time in 2018. The autophage design offers several advantages, including its relative simplicity compared to the complex plumbing of liquid and hybrid rockets. But there are serious challenges associated with autophage engines, including how to feed molten fuel into the combustion chamber and how to scale it up to be large enough to fly on a viable rocket. (submitted by trimeta and EllPeaTea)

Rocket trouble delays launch of private crew mission. A propellant leak in a Falcon 9 booster delayed the launch of a fourth Axiom Space private astronaut mission to the International Space Station this week, Space News reports. SpaceX announced the delay Tuesday, saying it needed more time to fix a liquid oxygen leak found in the Falcon 9 booster during inspections following a static-fire test Sunday. "Once complete–and pending Range availability–we will share a new launch date," the company stated. The Ax-4 mission will ferry four commercial astronauts, led by retired NASA commander Peggy Whitson, aboard a Dragon spacecraft to the ISS for an approximately 14-day stay. Whitson will be joined by crewmates from India, Poland, and Hungary.

Another problem, too ... While SpaceX engineers worked on resolving the propellant leak on the ground, a leak of another kind in orbit forced officials to order a longer delay to the Ax-4 mission. In a statement Thursday, NASA said it is working with the Russian space agency to understand a "new pressure signature" in the space station's Russian service module. For several years, ground teams have monitored a slow air leak in the aft part of the service module, and NASA officials have identified it as a safety risk. NASA's statement on the matter was vague, only saying that cosmonauts on the station recently inspected the module's interior surfaces and sealed additional "areas of interest." The segment is now holding pressure, according to NASA. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX tries something new with Falcon 9. With nearly 500 launches under its belt, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket isn't often up to new tricks. But the company tried something new following a launch on June 7 with a radio broadcasting satellite for SiriusXM. The Falcon 9's upper stage placed the SXM-10 satellite into an elongated, high-altitude transfer orbit, as is typical for payloads destined to operate in geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. When a rocket releases a satellite in this type of high-energy orbit, the upper stage has usually burned almost all of its propellant, leaving little fuel to steer itself back into Earth's atmosphere for a destructive reentry. This means these upper stages often remain in space for decades, becoming a piece of space junk that transits across the orbits of many other satellites.

Now, a solution ... SpaceX usually deorbits rockets after they deploy payloads like Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, but deorbiting a rocket from a much higher geosynchronous transfer orbit is a different matter. "Last week, SpaceX successfully completed a controlled deorbit of the SiriusXM-10 upper stage after GTO payload deployment," wrote Jon Edwards, SpaceX's vice president of Falcon and Dragon programs. "While we routinely do controlled deorbits for LEO stages (e.g., Starlink), deorbiting from GTO is extremely difficult due to the high energy needed to alter the orbit, making this a rare and remarkable first for us. This was only made possible due to the hard work and brilliance of the Falcon GNC (guidance, navigation, and control) team and exemplifies SpaceX's commitment to leading in both space exploration and public safety."

New Glenn gets a tentative launch date. Five months have passed since Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket made its mostly successful debut in January. At one point, the company targeted "late spring" for the second launch of the rocket. However, on Monday, Blue Origin's CEO, Dave Limp, acknowledged on social media that the rocket's next flight will now no longer take place until at least August 15, Ars reports. Although he did not say so, this may well be the only other New Glenn launch this year. The mission, with an undesignated payload, will be named "Never Tell Me the Odds," due to the attempt to land the booster. "One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster," Limp wrote. "This will take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution. We’re on track to produce eight GS2s [second stages] this year, and the one we’ll fly on this second mission was hot-fired in April."

Falling short ... Before 2025 began, Limp set expectations alongside Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos: New Glenn would launch eight times this year. That's not going to happen. It's common for launch companies to take a while ramping up the flight rate for a new rocket, but Bezos told Ars in January that his priority for Blue Origin this year was to hit a higher cadence with New Glenn. Elon Musk's rift with President Donald Trump could open a pathway for Blue Origin to capture more government business if the New Glenn rocket is able to establish a reliable track record. Meanwhile, Limp told Blue Origin employees last month that Jarrett Jones, the manager running the New Glenn program, is taking a sabbatical. Although it appears Jones' leave may have been planned, the timing is curious.

Making way for Starship at Cape Canaveral. The US Air Force is moving closer to authorizing SpaceX to move into one of the largest launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, with plans to use the facility for up to 76 launches of the company's Starship rocket each year, Ars reports. A draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) released by the Department of the Air Force, which includes the Space Force, found SpaceX's planned use of Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral would have no significant negative impacts on local environmental, historical, social, and cultural interests. The Air Force also found SpaceX's plans at SLC-37 will have no significant impact on the company's competitors in the launch industry.

Bringing the rumble ... SLC-37 was the previous home to United Launch Alliance's Delta IV rocket, which last flew from the site in April 2024, a couple of months after the military announced SpaceX was interested in using the launch pad. While it doesn't have a lease for full use of the launch site, SpaceX has secured a "right of limited entry" from the Space Force to begin preparatory work. This included the explosive demolition of the launch pad's Delta IV-era service towers and lightning masts Thursday, clearing the way for eventual construction of two Starship launch towers inside the perimeter of SLC-37. The new Starship launch towers at SLC-37 will join other properties in SpaceX's Starship empire, including nearby Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and SpaceX's privately owned facility at Starbase, Texas.

Preps continue for Starship Flight 10. Meanwhile, at Starbase, SpaceX is moving forward with preparations for the next Starship test flight, which could happen as soon as next month following three consecutive flights that fell short of expectations. This next launch will be the 10th full-scale test flight of Starship. Last Friday, June 6, SpaceX test-fired the massive Super Heavy booster designated to launch on Flight 10. All 33 of its Raptor engines ignited on the launch pad in South Texas. This is a new Super Heavy booster. On Flight 9 last month, SpaceX flew a reused Super Heavy booster that launched and was recovered on a flight in January.

FAA signs off on SpaceX investigation ... The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday it has closed the investigation into Starship Flight 8 in March, which spun out of control minutes after liftoff, showering debris along a corridor of ocean near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. "The FAA oversaw and accepted the findings of the SpaceX-led investigation," an agency spokesperson said. "The final mishap report cites the probable root cause for the loss of the Starship vehicle as a hardware failure in one of the Raptor engines that resulted in inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition. SpaceX identified eight corrective actions to prevent a reoccurrence of the event." SpaceX implemented the corrective actions prior to Flight 9 last month, when Starship progressed further into its mission before starting to tumble in space. It eventually reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. The FAA has mandated a fresh investigation into Flight 9, and that inquiry remains open.

Next three launches

June 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-26 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 15:21 UTC

June 14: Long March 2D | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 07:55 UTC

June 16: Atlas V | Project Kuiper KA-02| Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:25 UTC

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Human vision relies on photoreceptor cells in the retina that react to visible light and trigger neurons in the optic nerve to send signals to the brain. Degradation of these photoreceptors is the leading cause of vision impairments, including blindness.

However, a team of scientists at China’s Fudan University has recently built prototype retinal implants that can replace the failing photoreceptors and potentially provide infrared vision as a bonus. Sadly, they’ve only been tested in animals, so we’re still rather far away from making them work like Cyberpunk 2077-style eye augments.

Vision on chip

Earlier work on retinal implants that restored at least some degree of vision to the blind involved using electrode arrays that electrically stimulated neurons in the back of the retina, taking the place of the damaged photoreceptor cells. A patient had to wear a camera mounted on a pair of glasses that sent signals to the implant to activate this signaling. These implants required a power source to work, were unreliable, difficult to use, and had limited resolution, and the surgical procedure necessary to put them in the eye was extremely complicated.

For all these reasons and more, they were withdrawn from the market. What the Fudan team achieved was an implant that worked without the external camera and without a power source.

The development process started with extensive simulations aimed at pinpointing the right material. The ideal candidate was a photovoltaic material—it had to generate photocurrent without any external voltage in response to a broad spectrum of light. The primary material that emerged from these simulations was tellurium, a rare silver-white element that shares properties of both metals and nonmetals. The Fudan team fabricated prototype retinal implants using a mesh of tellurium nanowires.

Once the implants were ready, the scientists conducted a test campaign—first in mice, then with non-human primates.

Making blind mice see

For the experiments, the team selected genetically blind mice that lost their sight shortly after birth due to deteriorating photoreceptor cells. Tellurium mesh devices were implanted into a narrow space between the photoreceptor layer and the retinal pigment epithelium, a site where the implants could interface with the neurons. After ensuring the implants were biocompatible, weren’t rejected, and didn’t cause any excessive inflammation, the team started checking how well the mice performed visual tasks.

The first test was pretty simple and relied on shining the light into the mice’s eyes to see if this would trigger their pupils to contract. The results seemed promising—the pupils in blind mice constricted as they should in healthy animals. The second, somewhat more complex task was designed to check if the implant enabled the mice to consciously perceive light—in other words, whether the visual stimuli were properly converted into signals in the right areas of their brains.

The animals were put in a well-lit cage and were rewarded with water if they licked a surface within three seconds after the lights went out. Here, implanted mice had a success rate of over 85 percent compared to 98 percent scored by a control group of non-implanted mice with healthy vision (untreated blind mice scored between 25 and 26 percent, which is no better than random). The implanted mice could also localize an LED light source and even discern different shapes (triangles, squares, circles) almost as well as the mice.

And on top of that, they gained a superpower. Tellurium meshes respond to a wider range of the light spectrum than the normal human visual range. They’ll generate current when exposed to near-infrared wavelengths that a healthy human or rodent eye can’t see. Healthy mice excelled at the tasks the team threw at them when the lighting was kept in the standard visual range, but when lights were switched to infrared, they scored no better than chance. The implanted mice, on the other hand, scored very well—a bit worse than in the visual range, but not by much.

Finally, the tellurium meshes, especially the infrared vision capability they offered, were tested on healthy macaques, an animal model that’s much closer to humans than mice. It turned out implanted macaques could perceive infrared light, and their normal vision remained unchanged.

However, there are still a few roadblocks before we go all Cyberpunk with eye implants.

Sensitivity issues

Tellurium meshes, as the Fudan team admits in their paper, are far less sensitive to light than natural photoreceptors, and it’s hard to say if they really are a good candidate for retinal prostheses. The problem with using animal models in vision science is that it’s hard to ask a mouse or a macaque what they actually see with the implants and figure out how the electrical signals from their tellurium meshes are converted into perception in the brain.

Based on the Fudan experiments, we know the implanted animals reacted to light, albeit a bit less effectively than those with healthy vision. We also know they needed an adaptation period; the implanted mice didn’t score their impressive results on their first try. They needed to learn what the sudden signals coming from their eyes meant, just like humans who had used electrode arrays in the past. Finally, shapes in the shape recognition tests were projected with lasers, which makes it difficult to tell how the implant would perform in normal daylight.

There are also risks that come with the implantation procedure itself. The surgery involves making a local retina detachment, followed by a small retinal incision to insert the implant. According to Eduardo Fernández, a Spanish bioengineer who published a commentary to Fudan’s work in Science, doing this in fragile, diseased retinas poses a risk of fibrosis and scarring. Still, Fernández found the Chinese implants “promising.” The Fudan team is currently working on long-term safety assessments of their implants in non-human primates and on improving the coupling between the retina and the implant.

The Fudan team's work on tellurium retinal implants is published in Science.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.ady4439

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This coming weekend will see the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans take place in France. In total, 62 cars will compete, split into three different classes. At the front of the field are the very fastest hypercars—wickedly fast prototypes that are also all hybrids, with the exception of the V12 Aston Martin Valkyries. In the middle are the pro-am LMP2s, followed by 24 GT3 cars—modified versions of performance cars that include everything from Ford Mustangs to McLaren 720s. It is racing nirvana. But with so many different makes and models of cars in the Hypercar class, some two-wheel drive, others with all-wheel drive, how do they ensure it's a fair race?

Get ready for some acronyms

Sports car racing can be (needlessly) complicated at times. Take the Hypercar class at Le Mans. The 21 cars that will contest it are actually built to two separate rulebooks.

One, called LMH (for Le Mans Hypercar), was written by the organizers of Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship. These prototypes can be hybrids, with the electric motor on the front axle: Ferrari, Peugeot, and Toyota have all taken this route. But they don't have to be; the Aston Martin Valkyrie already had to lose a lot of power to meet the rules, so it just relies on its big V12 to do all the work. Most of the cars are purpose-built for the race, but Aston Martin went the other route and converted a road car for racing.

The other is called LMDh (Le Mans Daytona hybrid) and hails from the US, in the rulebook written for the International Motor Sports Association's GTP category. As the name suggests, these cars must be hybrids, and all must use the same specified motor, battery, and gearbox. LMDh cars also all need to start off using one of four approved carbon-fiber chassis (or spines), onto which automakers can style their own bodies and add their own engines. Alpine, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche all have LMDh cars entered in this year's Le Mans.

Ferrari's 499P is built to the LMH rules.

JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP via Getty Images

 

By contrast, the BMW V8 M Hybrid is built to the LMDh rules.

James Moy Photography/Getty Images

Convergence

In a parallel universe, the result would be two competing series, neither with many cars on the grid. But the people at IMSA get on pretty well with the organizers of Le Mans (the Automobile Club de l'Ouest or ACO) and the World Endurance Championship (the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, or FIA), and they decided to create a way to allow everyone to play together in the same sandbox.

"2021 [was] the first year with LMH, and at that time, the only big manufacturer involved was Toyota; Glickenhaus was there at the time, but there were not many manufacturers, let's say, interested in that kind of category," said Thierry Bouvet, competition director at the ACO.

"So together with IMSA, while the world was [isolating] during the pandemic, we basically wrote a set of technical regulations, LMDh which was, on paper, a little bit of a different car [with] more focus on avoiding cost escalation. After a couple of years of writing those regulations, we had an interesting process of convergence, we call it, to be able to have the LMH and LMDh racing together," he said.

It's not the first time that different cars have competed against each other at Le Mans. Before Hypercar, the top category was called LMP1h (Le Mans Prototype 1 hybrids), which burned brightly for a few short years but collapsed under the weight of F1-level budgets that proved too much for both Audi and Porsche, leaving just Toyota and some privateers. LMP1h used a complicated "Equivalence of Technology," but now the approach, first perfected with the slower GT3 cars, is called Balance of Performance, or BoP.

Obviously, none of the automakers behind the LMDh teams would have entered the race if they thought only LMH cars had a chance of winning overall.

"So it went through a couple of long and very interesting—in terms of technique, technically speaking—simulation working groups, where we involved all the manufacturers from both categories, and we believe we achieved... a nice working point in the middle, which allows both cars to be competitive, through the different restrictions, through BoP and so on. Now we feel that we've got a really fair and equitable working point," Bouvet said. As evidence, he pointed to the fact that last year Toyota took the World Endurance Championship for constructors, but Porsche's drivers cemented the WEC driver's title, with Ferrari winning Le Mans.

Imma hit you with the BoP gun

The rules limit both the amount of downforce and the amount of drag that the cars can generate from their bodywork, which have to be in the ratio of 4:1; this prevents any one manufacturer from having a massive advantage in terms of cornering grip or fuel efficiency. From there, the BoP gets more granular, setting maximum weight and power outputs (above and below 250 km/h), the maximum amount of energy allowed to be sent to the wheels between pit stops, as well as any extra time added to pit stops.

Weighing cars is easy, and timing them in pit stops is old hat, too. But the advance here is the torque sensors at each axle that feed back data to the race officials, letting them know exactly how much power each car is deploying to its wheels.

"We had to think of something which will work independently, whether it's hybrid power or internal combustion engine power. Should we think about fuel only? That will only be concerning, obviously, the internal combustion engine and not do the job for the hybrid system. So, power at the wheel is a nice and elegant solution," he said.

For the World Endurance Championship, BoP is calculated on a rolling average of the last three races, with some OEMs getting a little more weight or a little less power if necessary. While the 24 Hours of Le Mans counts as a round of the WEC, it's open to other entrants as well, and BoP works a bit differently. Instead, Bouvet and his team based this year's BoP on data from last year's 24-hour race, plus the simulations he mentioned. This is done to prevent teams from sandbagging in the races that lead up to their most important race of the year

As the newest and least competitive car, the Valkyrie gets the biggest break, with a minimum weight of just 2,271 lbs (1,030 kg) and a maximum power of 697 hp (520 kW). The Toyota GR010—which won the race in 2021 and 2022—can also deploy 697 hp but at a minimum weight of 2,321 lbs (1,052 kg), more than any other car in the class.

No process is perfect, and there is little that racing fans like to complain about more than BoP, which some feel makes racing too artificial, or even fixed. You're unlikely to hear complaints about it from competitors at Le Mans, though—criticizing BoP is not allowed in WEC, although both Porsche and Toyota have recently expressed their feelings about BoP within those strictures.

The first qualifying session for this weekend's race took place earlier today, sorting out the 15 fastest Hypercars that will compete later this week to see who leads the pack to the start line on Saturday.

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There may not yet be telescopes capable of unlocking all the secrets of supermassive black holes, but AI is now on the case. Recently, an international team of astronomers successfully trained a neural network with millions of black hole simulations to allow it to interpret fuzzy data captured from these enigmatic space objects in real life.

Of the various methods for investigating a black hole, the Event Horizon Telescope is the most famous. The EHT isn’t a single instrument but rather a number of radio telescopes around the world that work together like a single telescope. Thanks to the EHT, it’s been possible to obtain images of the supermassive black holes M87 and Sagittarius A*. These are not images in the traditional sense but instead are visualizations of radio waves coming from the black holes.

To create these images, supercomputers in different parts of the world processed the radio signals captured by the EHT. But in the process, they discarded much of the information gathered, as it was difficult to interpret. The new neural network, trained by experts at the Morgridge Research Institute in Wisconsin, aims to tap into that sea of data to improve the resolution of the EHT’s readings and make new discoveries.

According to a press release from the institute, the artificial intelligence successfully analyzed the once-discarded information and established new parameters of Sagittarius A*, which sits at the center of the Milky Way. An alternative image of the black hole’s structure was generated, with this revealing some new characteristics of the black hole.

“Researchers now suspect that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is spinning at almost top speed,” wrote the researchers in a press release. The new image also also indicates that the black hole’s rotation axis points to the Earth and gives clues as to the causes and characteristics of the disks of material that circulate around the black hole.

Astronomers had previously estimated that Sagittarius A* rotates at a moderate to fast speed. Knowing its actual rotational speed is important, since it allows us to infer how the radiation around the black hole behaves and provides clues about its stability.

“That we are defying the prevailing theory is of course exciting,” lead researcher Michael Janssen, of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, said in the press release. “However, I see our AI and machine learning approach primarily as a first step. Next, we will improve and extend the associated models and simulations.”

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

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This is a moment many are probably waiting for, though it comes with a heavy dose of skepticism. Musk has made grand promises about self-driving before. This robotaxi network brings to mind the bold claims from all the way back in 2019 when the company said a similar service would launch the following year. That evidently did not happen. Federal regulators also have their doubts. Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration criticized Tesla for making its "Full Self-Driving" feature sound more capable than it actually is, demanding the company align its marketing with reality.

Tesla is also driving into a field that is no longer empty. Waymo, Google's sibling company, is already a major player, offering hundreds of thousands of paid rides per week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even Austin. The company is so far ahead that it has begun testing in Tokyo. But being ahead means Waymo is also the first to face certain dangers. For example, on the evening of June 8, a group of protesters in downtown Los Angeles summoned Waymo vehicles during a demonstration. When the vehicles arrived, they slashed the tires, smashed the windows, and spray-painted the cars before setting three of them on fire.

Which raises a thorny question for Tesla: if you can summon a car with no one inside, can you summon it just to destroy it? It's one thing for protesters to stumble upon a robotaxi and vandalize it; it's another for someone to use the app to call a driverless car to a secluded spot for a planned attack. With public sentiment around Musk so divided, especially given his DOGE shenanigans and his recent face off with Donald Trump, that's not just a theoretical problem. We've already seen this hostility play out in attacks where people vandalize Teslas, carving swastikas into them and spray painting slogans like "Burn More Teslas" on walls.

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On Tuesday, IBM released its plans for building a system that should push quantum computing into entirely new territory: a system that can both perform useful calculations while catching and fixing errors and be utterly impossible to model using classical computing methods. The hardware, which will be called Starling, is expected to be able to perform 100 million operations without error on a collection of 200 logical qubits. And the company expects to have it available for use in 2029.

Perhaps just as significant, IBM is also committing to a detailed description of the intermediate steps to Starling. These include a number of processors that will be configured to host a collection of error-corrected qubits, essentially forming a functional compute unit. This marks a major transition for the company, as it involves moving away from talking about collections of individual hardware qubits and focusing instead on units of functional computational hardware. If all goes well, it should be possible to build Starling by chaining a sufficient number of these compute units together.

"We're updating [our roadmap] now with a series of deliverables that are very precise," IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars, "because we feel that we've now answered basically all the science questions associated with error correction and it's becoming more of a path towards an engineering problem."

New architectures

Error correction on quantum hardware involves entangling a group of qubits in a way that distributes one or more quantum bit values among them and includes additional qubits that can be used to check the state of the system. It can be helpful to think of these as data and measurement qubits. Performing weak quantum measurements on the measurement qubits produces what's called "syndrome data," which can be interpreted to determine whether anything about the data qubits has changed (indicating an error) and how to correct it.

There are lots of potential ways to arrange different combinations of data and measurement qubits for this to work, each referred to as a code. But, as a general rule, the more hardware qubits committed to the code, the more robust it will be to errors, and the more logical qubits that can be distributed among its hardware qubits.

Some quantum hardware, like that based on trapped ions or neutral atoms, is relatively flexible when it comes to hosting error-correction codes. The hardware qubits can be moved around so that any two can be entangled, so it's possible to adopt a huge range of configurations, albeit at the cost of the time spent moving atoms around. IBM's technology is quite different. It relies on qubits made of superconducting electronics laid out on a chip, with entanglement mediated by wiring that runs between qubits. The layout of this wiring is set during the chip's manufacture, and so the chip's design commits it to a limited number of potential error-correction codes.

Unfortunately, this wiring can also enable crosstalk between neighboring qubits, causing them to lose their state. To avoid this, existing IBM processors have their qubits wired in what they term a "heavy hex" configuration, named for its hexagonal arrangements of connections among its qubits. This has worked well to keep the error rate of its hardware down, but it also poses a challenge, since IBM has decided to go with an error-correction code that's incompatible with the heavy hex geometry.

A couple of years back, an IBM team described a compact error correction code called a low-density parity check (LDPC). This requires a square grid of nearest-neighbor connections among its qubits, as well as wiring to connect qubits that are relatively distant on the chip. To get its chips and error-correction scheme in sync, IBM has made two key advances. The first is in its chip packaging, which now uses several layers of wiring sitting above the hardware qubits to enable all of the connections needed for the LDPC code.

We'll see that first in a processor called Loon that's on the company's developmental roadmap. "We've already demonstrated these three things: high connectivity, long-range couplers, and couplers that break the plane [of the chip] and connect to other qubits," Gambetta said. "We have to combine them all as a single demonstration showing that all these parts of packaging can be done, and that's what I want to achieve with Loon." Loon will be made public later this year.

The second advance IBM has made is to eliminate the crosstalk that the heavy hex geometry was used to minimize, so heavy hex will be going away. "We are releasing this year a bird for near-term experiments that is a square array that has almost zero crosstalk," Gambetta said, "and that is Nighthawk." The more densely connected qubits cut the overhead needed to perform calculations by a factor of 15, Gambetta told Ars.

Nighthawk is a 2025 release on a parallel roadmap that you can think of as user-facing. Iterations on its basic design will be released annually through 2028, each enabling more operations without error (going from 5,000 gate operations this year to 15,000 in 2028). Each individual Nighthawk processor will host 120 hardware qubits, but 2026 will see three of them chained together and operating as a unit, providing 360 hardware qubits. That will be followed in 2027 by a machine with nine linked Nighthawk processors, boosting the hardware qubit number over 1,000.

Riding the bicycle

The real future of IBM's hardware, however, will be happening over on the developmental line of processors, where talk about hardware qubit counts will become increasingly irrelevant. In a technical document released today, IBM is describing the specific LDPC code it will be using, termed a bivariate bicycle code due to some cylindrical symmetries in its details that vaguely resemble bicycle wheels. The details of the connections matter less than the overall picture of what it takes to use this error code in practice.

IBM describes two implementations of this form of LDPC code. In the first, 144 hardware qubits are arranged so that they play host to 12 logical qubits and all of the measurement qubits needed to perform error checks. The standard measure of a code's ability to catch and correct errors is called its distance, and in this case, the distance is 12. As an alternative, they also describe a code that uses 288 hardware qubits to host the same 12 logical qubits but boost the distance to 18, meaning it's more resistant to errors. IBM will make one of these collections of logical qubits available as a Kookaburra processor in 2026, which will use them to enable stable quantum memory.

The follow-on will bundle these with a handful of additional qubits that can produce quantum states that are needed for some operations. Those, plus hardware needed for the quantum memory, form a single, functional computation unit, built on a single chip, that is capable of performing all the operations needed to implement any quantum algorithm.

That will appear with the Cockatoo chip, which will also enable multiple processing units to be linked on a single bus, allowing the logical qubit count to grow beyond 12. (The company says that one of the dozen logical qubits in each unit will be used to mediate entanglement with other units and so won't be available for computation.) That will be followed by the first test versions of Starling, which will allow universal computations on a limited number of logical qubits spread across multiple chips.

Separately, IBM is releasing a document that describes a key component of the system that will run on classical computing hardware. Full error correction requires evaluating the syndrome data derived from the state of all the measurement qubits in order to determine the state of the logical qubits and whether any corrections need to be made. As the complexity of the logical qubits grows, the computational burden of evaluating grows with it. If this evaluation can't be executed in real time, then it becomes impossible to perform error-corrected calculations.

To address this, IBM has developed a message-passing decoder that can perform parallel evaluations of the syndrome data. The system explores more of the solution space by a combination of randomizing the weight given to the memory of past solutions and by handing any seemingly non-optimal solutions on to new instances for additional evaluation. The key thing is that IBM estimates that this can be run in real time using FPGAs, ensuring that the system works.

A quantum architecture

There are a lot more details beyond those, as well. Gambetta described the linkage between each computational unit—IBM is calling it a Universal Bridge—which requires one microwave cable for each code distance of the logical qubits being linked. (In other words, a distance 12 code would need 12 microwave-carrying cables to connect each chip.) He also said that IBM is developing control hardware that can operate inside the refrigeration hardware, based on what they're calling "cold CMOS," which is capable of functioning at 4 Kelvin.

The company is also releasing renderings of what it expects Starling to look like: a series of dilution refrigerators, all connected by a single pipe that contains the Universal Bridge. "It's an architecture now," Gambetta said. "I have never put details in the roadmap that I didn't feel we could hit, and now we're putting a lot more details."

The striking thing to me about this is that it marks a shift away from a focus on individual qubits, their connectivity, and their error rates. The error hardware rates are now good enough (4 x 10^-4) for this to work, although Gambetta felt that a few more improvements should be expected. And connectivity will now be directed exclusively toward creating a functional computational unit.

That said, there's still a lot of space beyond Starling on IBM's roadmap. The 200 logical qubits it promises will be enough to handle some problems, but not enough to perform the complex algorithms needed to do things like break encryption. That will need to wait for something closer to Blue Jay, a 2033 system that IBM expects will have 2,000 logical qubits. And, as of right now, it's the only thing listed beyond Starling.

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A new Covid variant is being kept under surveillance by the World Health Organization (WHO) as its emergence has led to an increase in infections in several regions of the world. First identified at the end of January, the variant—called NB.1.8.1 but known informally as “Nimbus”—is a descendant of the Omicron family of Covid sublineages, and has become increasingly prevalent throughout the spring in Europe, the Americas, and the Western Pacific.

The virus has mutations that may increase its infectiousness and allow it to escape certain antibodies. Nevertheless, “considering the available evidence, the additional public health risk posed by NB.1.8.1 is evaluated as low at the global level,” the WHO wrote in its most recent risk evaluation for the variant.

Like other variants before it, Nimbus has specific mutations to its spike protein. These proteins coat the virus’s surface and are what it uses to gain entry into cells, where it reproduces. Nimbus’ spike protein modifications could increase its transmission capacity and partially reduce the neutralizing efficacy of certain antibodies generated by previous infections, both of which would contribute to its spread.

However, the WHO says that there is no evidence that this variant causes more severe disease compared to other strains currently circulating. Nor have increases in hospitalizations or deaths related to its emergence been observed.

Symptoms associated with NB.1.8.1 are similar to those caused by other SARS-CoV-2 variants: sore throat, cough, fatigue, fever, muscle aches, loss of taste or smell, respiratory distress, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

The WHO experts explain that, although this variant may partially evade some antibody responses, such “immune escape” is comparable to that observed in other Omicron sublineages. This suggests that the mutations present in NB.1.8.1 do not give the virus increased resistance to antivirals such as nirmatrelvir, and that current vaccines continue to be effective in preventing severe disease when infected with this version of the virus.

However, to those most vulnerable to Covid—such as the elderly, immunocompromised, or those with preexisting chronic conditions—Nimbus represents a new health threat, and these groups should stay up to date with booster vaccinations to ensure they are protected against Covid’s worst effects.

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

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Slow and steady. When it comes to autonomous vehicles on city roads, that’s been the approach in most of the world’s countries.

But on Tuesday, the UK announced it would put a cautious foot on the pedal, when the Department of Transport said it would accelerate plans to allow companies to operate self-driving cars on public roads in limited pilot programs starting spring of next year. The British government had initially planned to open up its roads for self-driving vehicles more than a year later, in the second half of 2027.

“We can see what a massive economic opportunity this technology presents,” Transport secretary Heidi Alexander tells WIRED in an interview. The department estimates the autonomous vehicle industry will create 38,000 jobs and generate 42 billion pounds ($57 million US) for the country by 2035. The secretary also cites better and more efficient travel options and road safety as motivators behind the country’s new timeline. “We know how hard companies are working on issues related to safety, and we don't want to sit around waiting for this technology to develop further,” she says.

The pilot phase of the country’s autonomous vehicle deployments will include a limited number of vehicles, says Transport Department spokesperson Marco Barbato, and the government will spend about a year studying the data those vehicles produce. The government aims to allow companies to fully launch autonomous taxi services in the second half of 2027.

Still, UK government officials say they will prioritize safety. “We won’t allow this technology to be deployed on our roads unless we are confident that really rigorous safety tests have been met,” Alexander says.

Major transportation players appeared poised to take advantage of the government’s announcement. The British autonomous vehicle developer Wayve and US ride-hail giant Uber said Tuesday that they would partner to take advantage of the government's new plan by launching autonomous vehicle trials on London roads.

London will be a tricky place to operate self-driving cars, Wayve CEO and cofounder Alex Kendall says. “This is not Phoenix, Arizona—it’s not a grid-like city in the desert where the sun always shines,” he says. (Waymo began its self-driving taxi service in Phoenix.) London, by contrast, “is a medieval, structured environment. It has seven times more jaywalkers than San Francisco.” Launching service in London will help Wayve prove how "scalable and trusted” its autonomous tech can be, he says. Kendall declined to say when Uber and Wayve might launch their service.

Wayve will become Uber’s latest partner in its all-of-the-above approach to autonomous vehicle tech. Customers can use the Uber app to order an autonomous vehicle from the Google subsidiary Waymo in Austin, Texas, and soon, Atlanta, Georgia. Volkswagen subsidiary Moia said it aims to have thousands of self-driving vehicles operating on the Uber network in the next decade. Uber is working with Hyundai-linked robotaxi company Motional to test autonomous technology in Las Vegas, and has inked a deal with WeRide to bring autonomous vehicles to the UAE. And Uber has a nearly 25 percent stake in the autonomous trucking tech firm Aurora, after selling its own self-driving unit to the company in 2020.

“Our vision is to make autonomy a safe and reliable option for riders everywhere, and this trial in London brings that future closer to reality,” Uber president and COO Andrew Macdonald said in a written statement.

Several other companies are developing and planning to test autonomous vehicles in the UK, even before the government announced its accelerated timeline. Autonomous vehicle software developer Oxa has trialed its tech in Oxford and London, though plans to apply its tech to transit and industrial contexts, including mining and ports. (“We’re everything but taxis and personal transport,” Oxa founder Paul Newman said recently.) The Israeli company Mobileye has tested collision avoidance technology on London buses. Another British firm, Birmingham-based Cognital, announced its liquidation due to “funding issues” earlier this year.

A handful of companies are experimenting with autonomous vehicle technologies in Europe, though none yet have the commercialized robotaxi services found in the US and China. But despite the UK’s push, Uber and Wayve may not be alone in Europe for long. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the Chinese company Baidu is in talks to launch a robotaxi service in Switzerland.

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Look, no one said building a large harvester to roam around the Moon and sift through hundreds of tons of regolith to retrieve small amounts of helium-3 would be easy. And that's to say nothing of the enormous challenge of processing and then launching any of this material from the lunar surface before finally landing it safely on Earth.

If we're being completely honest, doing all of this commercially is a pretty darn difficult row to hoe. Many commercial space experts dismiss it outright. So that's why it's gratifying to see that a company that is proposing to do this, Interlune, is taking some modest steps toward this goal.

Moreover, recent changes in the tides of space policy may also put some wind in the sails of Interlune and its considerable ambitions.

Sifting rock and selling helium isotopes

Let's start with the recent developments. Last Month Interlune announced that it had partnered with an industrial equipment manufacturer, Vermeer Corporation, to build and test an excavator that could ingest 100 metric tons of dirt (which was a decent facsimile of lunar regolith, but not a high-quality simulant) per hour. The machine is sized to produce about 20 kg of helium-3 a year. Of course, operating on Earth is vastly different from the lunar surface, but this nonetheless offers a reasonable proof of concept.

"We demonstrated that we could pull that much material through at a certain power output," said Rob Meyerson, chief executive officer of Interlune, of the excavator. "We gathered the data we needed for designing the next version of it, which we've already started on."

Vermeer is a significant partner. The company doesn't have the brand of public recognition of a John Deere, which makes consumer products, but it is a major player in agricultural machines and has 4,000 employees. The company's chief executive is a former engineer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Jason Andringa. He is joining Interlune's board.

Interlune also announced its first customers. A quantum infrastructure company, Maybell Quantum, has agreed to purchase thousands of liters of helium-3 between 2029 and 2035. The helium-3 will be used in Maybell's refrigerators, which cool quantum devices to near-absolute zero temperatures. Additionally, the US Department of Energy has agreed to purchase 3 liters of helium-3 harvested from the Moon, no later than April 2029.

As we wrote in 2024,

Helium-3 is a stable isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron. It is produced by fusion in the Sun and transported by the Solar wind. However, Earth's magnetosphere deflects this stream of particles away from the planet.

 

The material does not occur naturally on Earth, and it exists in only very limited quantities from nuclear weapons tests, nuclear reactors, and radioactive decay. A single liter costs a few thousand dollars, and there are efforts to recycle it by the US Department of Energy. Because there is no magnetosphere around the Moon, it's believed there are large quantities of helium-3 gas trapped in pockets of the lunar regolith.

When proponents of helium-3 have talked about the isotope in the past, they often have lauded its potential as a nuclear fuel. But Meyerson says a more realistic near-term application is for cryogenics. Helium-3 refrigerators can cool temperatures down to 0.2 kelvin, which is important for quantum computing.

The road ahead

Meyerson said the company's current plan is to fly a prospecting mission in 2027, a payload of less than 100 kg, likely on a commercial lander that is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Two years later, the company seeks to fly a pilot plant. Meyerson said the size of this plant will depend on the launch capability available (i.e., if Starship is flying to the Moon, they'll go big, and smaller if not).

Following this, Interlune is targeting 2032 for the launch of a solar-powered operating plant, which would include five mobile harvesters. The operation would also be able to return material mined to Earth. The total mass for this equipment would be about 40 metric tons, which could fly on a single Starship or two New Glenn Mk 2 landers. This would, understandably, be highly ambitious and capital-intensive. After raising $15 million last year, Meyerson said Interlune is planning a second fundraising round that should begin soon.

There are some outside factors that may be beneficial for Interlune. One is that China has a clear and demonstrated interest in sending humans to the Moon and has already sent rovers to explore for helium-3 resources. Moreover, with the exit of Jared Isaacman as a nominee to lead NASA, the Trump administration is likely to put someone in the position who is more focused on lunar activities. One candidate, a retired Air Force General named Steve Kwast, is a huge proponent of mining helium-3.

Interlune has a compelling story, as there are almost no other lunar businesses focused solely on commercial activities that will drive value from mining the lunar surface. In that sense, they could be a linchpin of a lunar economy. However, they have a long way to go, and a lot of lunar regolith to plow through, before they start delivering for customers.

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they?

Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.

A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics—the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.

In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter—living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function.

This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not “complete” in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution—biological or otherwise—introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. “I’m so glad they’ve done what they’ve done,” said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’ve made these questions legitimate.”

Others argue that extending evolutionary ideas about function to non-living systems is an overreach. The quantitative value that measures information in this new approach is not only relative—it changes depending on context—it’s impossible to calculate. For this and other reasons, critics have charged that the new theory cannot be tested, and therefore is of little use.

The work taps into an expanding debate about how biological evolution fits within the normal framework of science. The theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection helps us to understand how living things have changed in the past. But unlike most scientific theories, it can’t predict much about what is to come. Might embedding it within a meta-law of increasing complexity let us glimpse what the future holds?

Making Meaning

The story begins in 2003, when the biologist Jack Szostak published a short article in Nature proposing the concept of functional information. Szostak—who six years later would get a Nobel Prize for unrelated work—wanted to quantify the amount of information or complexity that biological molecules like proteins or DNA strands embody. Classical information theory, developed by the telecommunications researcher Claude Shannon in the 1940s and later elaborated by the Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, offers one answer. Per Kolmogorov, the complexity of a string of symbols (such as binary 1s and 0s) depends on how concisely one can specify that sequence uniquely.

For example, consider DNA, which is a chain of four different building blocks called nucleotides. Α strand composed only of one nucleotide, repeating again and again, has much less complexity—and, by extension, encodes less information—than one composed of all four nucleotides in which the sequence seems random (as is more typical in the genome).

But Szostak pointed out that Kolmogorov’s measure of complexity neglects an issue crucial to biology: how biological molecules function.

In biology, sometimes many different molecules can do the same job. Consider RNA molecules, some of which have biochemical functions that can easily be defined and measured. (Like DNA, RNA is made up of sequences of nucleotides.) In particular, short strands of RNA called aptamers securely bind to other molecules.

Let’s say you want to find an RNA aptamer that binds to a particular target molecule. Can lots of aptamers do it, or just one? If only a single aptamer can do the job, then it’s unique, just as a long, seemingly random sequence of letters is unique. Szostak said that this aptamer would have a lot of what he called “functional information.”

If many different aptamers can perform the same task, the functional information is much smaller. So we can calculate the functional information of a molecule by asking how many other molecules of the same size can do the same task just as well.

Szostak went on to show that in a case like this, functional information can be measured experimentally. He made a bunch of RNA aptamers and used chemical methods to identify and isolate the ones that would bind to a chosen target molecule. He then mutated the winners a little to seek even better binders and repeated the process. The better an aptamer gets at binding, the less likely it is that another RNA molecule chosen at random will do just as well: The functional information of the winners in each round should rise. Szostak found that the functional information of the best-performing aptamers got ever closer to the maximum value predicted theoretically.

Selected for Function

Hazen came across Szostak’s idea while thinking about the origin of life—an issue that drew him in as a mineralogist, because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. “I concluded that talking about life versus nonlife is a false dichotomy,” Hazen said. “I felt there had to be some kind of continuum—there has to be something that’s driving this process from simpler to more complex systems.” Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the “increasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems.”

In 2007 Hazen collaborated with Szostak to write a computer simulation involving algorithms that evolve via mutations. Their function, in this case, was not to bind to a target molecule, but to carry out computations. Again they found that the functional information increased spontaneously over time as the system evolved.

There the idea languished for years. Hazen could not see how to take it any further until Wong accepted a fellowship at the Carnegie Institution in 2021. Wong had a background in planetary atmospheres, but he and Hazen discovered they were thinking about the same questions. “From the very first moment that we sat down and talked about ideas, it was unbelievable,” Hazen said.

“I had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,” Wong said. “I thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory. So how do we abstract far enough away from life on Earth that we’d be able to notice life elsewhere even if it had different chemical specifics, but not so far that we’d be including all kinds of self-organizing structures like hurricanes?”

The pair soon realized that they needed expertise from a whole other set of disciplines. “We needed people who came at this problem from very different points of view, so that we all had checks and balances on each other’s prejudices,” Hazen said. “This is not a mineralogical problem; it’s not a physics problem, or a philosophical problem. It’s all of those things.”

They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evolutionary processes happening over time. “We all assumed the second law of thermodynamics supplies the arrow of time,” Hazen said. “But it seems like there’s a much more idiosyncratic pathway that the universe takes. We think it’s because of selection for function—a very orderly process that leads to ordered states. That’s not part of the second law, although it’s not inconsistent with it either.”

Looked at this way, the concept of functional information allowed the team to think about the development of complex systems that don’t seem related to life at all.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem a promising idea. In biology, function makes sense. But what does “function” mean for a rock?

All it really implies, Hazen said, is that some selective process favors one entity over lots of other potential combinations. A huge number of different minerals can form from silicon, oxygen, aluminum, calcium, and so on. But only a few are found in any given environment. The most stable minerals turn out to be the most common. But sometimes less stable minerals persist because there isn’t enough energy available to convert them to more stable phases.

This might seem trivial, like saying that some objects exist while other ones don’t, even if they could in theory. But Hazen and Wong have shown that, even for minerals, functional information has increased over the course of Earth’s history. Minerals evolve toward greater complexity (though not in the Darwinian sense). Hazen and colleagues speculate that complex forms of carbon such as graphene might form in the hydrocarbon-rich environment of Saturn’s moon Titan—another example of an increase in functional information that doesn’t involve life.

It’s the same with chemical elements. The first moments after the Big Bang were filled with undifferentiated energy. As things cooled, quarks formed and then condensed into protons and neutrons. These gathered into the nuclei of hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms. Only once stars formed and nuclear fusion happened within them did more complex elements like carbon and oxygen form. And only when some stars had exhausted their fusion fuel did their collapse and explosion in supernovas create heavier elements such as heavy metals. Steadily, the elements increased in nuclear complexity.

Wong said their work implies three main conclusions.

First, biology is just one example of evolution. “There is a more universal description that drives the evolution of complex systems.”

Second, he said, there might be “an arrow in time that describes this increasing complexity,” similar to the way the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the increase in entropy, is thought to create a preferred direction of time.

Finally, Wong said, “information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.”

In the work Hazen and Szostak conducted on evolution using artificial-life algorithms, the increase in functional information was not always gradual. Sometimes it would happen in sudden jumps. That echoes what is seen in biological evolution. Biologists have long recognized transitions where the complexity of organisms increases abruptly. One such transition was the appearance of organisms with cellular nuclei (around 1.8 billion to 2.7 billion years ago). Then there was the transition to multicellular organisms (around 2 billion to 1.6 billion years ago), the abrupt diversification of body forms in the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago), and the appearance of central nervous systems (around 600 million to 520 million years ago). The arrival of humans was arguably another major and rapid evolutionary transition.

Evolutionary biologists have tended to view each of these transitions as a contingent event. But within the functional-information framework, it seems possible that such jumps in evolutionary processes (whether biological or not) are inevitable.

In these jumps, Wong pictures the evolving objects as accessing an entirely new landscape of possibilities and ways to become organized, as if penetrating to the “next floor up.” Crucially, what matters—the criteria for selection, on which continued evolution depends—also changes, plotting a wholly novel course. On the next floor up, possibilities await that could not have been guessed before you reached it.

For example, during the origin of life it might initially have mattered that proto-biological molecules would persist for a long time—that they’d be stable. But once such molecules became organized into groups that could catalyze one another’s formation—what Kauffman has called autocatalytic cycles—the molecules themselves could be short-lived, so long as the cycles persisted. Now it was dynamical, not thermodynamic, stability that mattered. Ricard Solé of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. In other words, in this view there’s a kind of physics of evolution—and it’s a kind of physics we know about already.

The Biosphere Creates Its Own Possibilities

The tricky thing about functional information is that, unlike a measure such as size or mass, it is contextual: It depends on what we want the object to do, and what environment it is in. For instance, the functional information for an RNA aptamer binding to a particular molecule will generally be quite different from the information for binding to a different molecule.

Yet finding new uses for existing components is precisely what evolution does. Feathers did not evolve for flight, for example. This repurposing reflects how biological evolution is jerry-rigged, making use of what’s available.

Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged—this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations.

However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can’t be predicted—and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. “The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,” Kauffman said. “Not only do we not know what will happen, we don’t even know what can happen.” Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, “We need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.”

The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution “generates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.”

Mathematically, a “phase space” is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it’s as comparatively simple as an idealized pendulum or as complicated as all the atoms comprising the Earth. Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the “incompleteness theorems” devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that can’t be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms.

Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel’s theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isn’t the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential.

“An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,” said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, “goes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.”

Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix—once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments “in their heads”—the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. “Technological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,” he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind.

Back to the Bench

If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional information—in effect, complexity—does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is “utterly improbable.” After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life?

Mayr’s evolutionary point possibly vanishes in the jump to humanlike complexity and intelligence, whereupon the whole playing field is utterly transformed. Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot.

But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new “law of increasing functional information” is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesn’t have to rely on some highly improbable chance event.

What’s more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileo’s (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds.

Together with the chemist Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow, Sara Walker of Arizona State University has devised an alternative set of ideas to describe how complexity arises, called assembly theory. In place of functional information, assembly theory relies on a number called the assembly index, which measures the minimum number of steps required to make an object from its constituent ingredients.

“Laws for living systems must be somewhat different than what we have in physics now,” Walker said, “but that does not mean that there are no laws.” But she doubts that the putative law of functional information can be rigorously tested in the lab. “I am not sure how one could say [the theory] is right or wrong, since there is no way to test it objectively,” she said. “What would the experiment look for? How would it be controlled? I would love to see an example, but I remain skeptical until some metrology is done in this area.”

Hazen acknowledges that, for most physical objects, it is impossible to calculate functional information even in principle. Even for a single living cell, he admits, there’s no way of quantifying it. But he argues that this is not a sticking point, because we can still understand it conceptually and get an approximate quantitative sense of it. Similarly, we can’t calculate the exact dynamics of the asteroid belt because the gravitational problem is too complicated—but we can still describe it approximately enough to navigate spacecraft through it.

Wong sees a potential application of their ideas in astrobiology. One of the curious aspects of living organisms on Earth is that they tend to make a far smaller subset of organic molecules than they could make given the basic ingredients. That’s because natural selection has picked out some favored compounds. There’s much more glucose in living cells, for example, than you’d expect if molecules were simply being made either randomly or according to their thermodynamic stability. So one potential signature of lifelike entities on other worlds might be similar signs of selection outside what chemical thermodynamics or kinetics alone would generate. (Assembly theory similarly predicts complexity-based biosignatures.)

There might be other ways of putting the ideas to the test. Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational “artificial life.” Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist Frédéric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues.

Hazen’s team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. “People are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,” Hazen said.

But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It’s hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe.

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My first meeting with Bill Atkinson was unforgettable. It was November 1983, and reporting for Rolling Stone, I had gained access to the team building the Macintosh computer, scheduled to launch early the next year. Everyone kept telling me, “Wait till you meet Bill and Andy,” referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of the Mac’s software. Here’s what I wrote about the encounter in my book, Insanely Great:

I met Bill Atkinson first. A tall fellow with unruly hair, a Pancho Villa moustache, and blazing blue eyes, he had the unnerving intensity of Bruce Dern in one of his turns as an unhinged Vietnam vet. Like everyone else in the room, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. “Do you want to see a bug?” he asked me. He pulled me into his cubicle and pointed to his Macintosh. Filling the screen was an incredibly detailed drawing of an insect. It was beautiful, something you might see on an expensive workstation in a research lab, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then got very serious, talking in an intense near-whisper that gave his words a reverential weight. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “Until now the world of art has been a sacred club. Like fine china. Now it’s for daily use.”

Atkinson was right. His contributions to the Macintosh were critical to that breakthrough he’d whispered to me at the Apple office known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years later, he would singlehandedly make another giant contribution with a program called Hypercard, which presaged the World Wide Web. Through it all, he retained his energy and joie de vivre, and became an inspiration for all who would change the world through code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a long illness. He was 74.

Atkinson hadn’t planned on becoming a pioneer in personal computing. As a graduate student, he studied computer science and neurobiology at the University of Washington. But when he encountered an Apple II in 1977, he fell in love, and went to work for the company that built it a year later. He was employee number 51. In 1979, he was among the small group that Steve Jobs led to the Xerox PARC research lab and was blown away by the graphic computer interface he saw there. It became his job to translate that futuristic technology to the consumer, working on Apple’s Lisa project. In the process, he invented many of the conventions that still persist on today’s computers, like menu bars. Atkinson also created QuickDraw, a groundbreaking technology to efficiently draw objects on a screen. One of those objects was the “Round-Rect”—a box with rounded corners that would become part of everyone’s computing experience. Atkinson had resisted the idea until Jobs made him walk around the block and see all the traffic signs and other objects with rounded corners.

When Jobs took over the other Apple project inspired by PARC technology, the Macintosh, he poached Atkinson, whose work had already influenced that product. Hertzfeld, who was in charge of the Mac interface, once explained to me the Lisa features he’d appropriated for the Mac: “Anything Bill Atkinson did, I took, and nothing else.” he said. Atkinson, who had become disenchanted at the Lisa’s high price tag, embraced the idea of a more affordable version, and began writing MacPaint, the program that would empower users to create art on the Mac’s bit-mapped screen.

After the Mac launched, the team began to unravel. Atkinson had the title of Apple Fellow, which gave him the freedom to pursue passion projects. He began work on something he called Magic Slate—a device with a high-resolution screen that weighed under a pound and could be controlled by a stylus and swipes on a touch screen. Basically, he was designing the iPad 25 years early. But the technology wasn’t ready to create something so miniaturized and powerful at an affordable price (Atkinson hoped it would be so inexpensive you could afford to lose six in a year and not be bothered.) “I wanted Magic Slate so bad I could taste it,” he once told me.

After the failure of Magic Slate, Atkinson fell into a months-long depression, too disheartened to turn on his computer. One night, he took LSD and wandered out of his home in the Los Gatos hills. Staring into the vast collections of pixels that made up the night sky, he became reenergized, and decided to adopt some of the Magic Slate ideas into software that could run on the Mac.

He designed a program where information—text, video, audio—would be stored on virtual cards. These would link to each other. It was a vision that harkened back to a 1940s idea by scientist Vannevar Bush which had been sharpened by a technologist named Ted Nelson, who called the linking technique “hypertext.” But it was Atkinson who made the software work for a popular computer. When he showed the program, called HyperCard, to Apple CEO John Sculley, the executive was blown away, and asked Atkinson what he wanted for it. “I want it to ship,” Atkinson said. Sculley agreed to put it on every computer. HyperCard would become a forerunner of the World Wide Web, proof of the viability of the hyperlinking concept.

Atkinson left Apple in 1990. Soon after, he joined several of his Mac team colleagues, along with future technology stars like Tony Fadell (who would later help invent the iPod) and Megan Smith (who became CTO of the United States under Obama) to form General Magic, a brilliant effort to build a handheld device that basically did everything the iPhone would do 15 years later. Unfortunately, the company built its device just before the internet took off. Once more, it was too early.

In his later years, Atkinson became passionate about nature photography and produced several stunning collections of prints. I treasure a volume of photos he captured of stones that were cut open and polished to a gleam. The pictures looked like swirling, organic fractal abstractions, taunting us to solve their mysteries. I last saw him at the 40-year Mac team reunion in January 2024. He was as ebullient as he’d been on the day I met him and he participated in a joyful panel with fellow Mac team members at the Computer History Museum, in his trademark Hawaiian shirt.

Atkinson attended Burning Man last September. On October 1, 2024 as he explained in a Facebook post, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and asked friends and well-wishers to pray for him. “I have already led an amazing and wonderful life,” he wrote. Earlier this year, he shared a new version of his website that offered free downloads of his photography. He traveled as late as this year, including a two-week sailing trip to Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. He died in bed, surrounded by family. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, two stepchildren, and a dog named Poppy. Every link in this obituary owes a debt to Bill.

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With their quick-change camouflage and high level of intelligence, it’s not surprising that the public and scientific experts alike are fascinated by octopuses. Their abilities to recognize faces, solve puzzles, and learn behaviors from other octopuses make these animals a captivating study.

To perform these processes and others, like crawling or exploring, octopuses rely on their complex nervous system, one that has become a focus for neuroscientists. With about 500 million neurons—around the same number as dogs—octopuses’ nervous systems are the most complex of any invertebrate. But, unlike vertebrate organisms, the octopus’s nervous system is also decentralized, with around 350 million neurons, or 66 percent of it, located in its eight arms.

“This means each arm is capable of independently processing sensory input, initiating movement, and even executing complex behaviors—without direct instructions from the brain,” explains Galit Pelled, a professor of Mechanical Engineering, Radiology, and Neuroscience at Michigan State University who studies octopus neuroscience. “In essence, the arms have their own ‘mini-brains.’”

A decentralized nervous system is one factor that helps octopuses adapt to changes, such as injury or predation, as seen in the case of an Octopus vulgaris, or common octopus, that was observed with nine arms by researchers at the ECOBAR lab at the Institute of Marine Research in Spain between 2021 and 2022.

By studying outliers like this cephalopod, researchers can gain insight into how the animal’s detailed scaffolding of nerves changes and regrows over time, uncovering more about how octopuses have evolved over millennia in our oceans.

Brains, brains, and more brains

Because each arm of an octopus contains its own bundle of neurons, the limbs can operate semi-independently from the central brain, enabling faster responses since signals don’t always need to travel back and forth between the brain and the arms. In fact, Pelled and her team recently discovered that “neural signals recorded in the octopus arm can predict movement type within 100 milliseconds of stimulation, without central brain involvement.” She notes that “that level of localized autonomy is unprecedented in vertebrate systems.”

Though each limb moves on its own, the movements of the octopus’s body are smooth and conducted with a coordinated elegance that allows the animal to exhibit some of the broadest range of behaviors, adapting on the fly to changes in its surroundings.

“That means the octopus can react quickly to its environment, especially when exploring, hunting, or defending itself,” Pelled says. “For example, one arm can grab food while another is feeling around a rock, without needing permission from the brain. This setup also makes the octopus more resilient. If one arm is injured, the others still work just fine. And because so much decision-making happens at the arms, the central brain is freed up to focus on the bigger picture—like navigating or learning new tasks.”

As if each limb weren’t already buzzing with neural activity, things get even more intricate when researchers zoom in further—to the nerves within each individual sucker, a ring of muscular tissue, which octopuses use to sense and taste their surroundings.

“There is a sucker ganglion, or nerve center, located in the stalk of every sucker. For some species of octopuses, that’s over a thousand ganglia,” says Cassady Olson, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who works with Cliff Ragsdale, a leading expert in octopus neuroscience.

Given that each sucker has its own nerve centers—connected by a long axial nerve cord running down the limb—and each arm has hundreds of suckers, things get complicated very quickly, as researchers have historically struggled to study this peripheral nervous system, as it’s called, within the octopus’s body.

“The large size of the brain makes it both really exciting to study and really challenging,” says Z. Yan Wang, an assistant professor of biology and psychology at the University of Washington. “Many of the tools available for neuroscience have to be adjusted or customized specifically for octopuses and other cephalopods because of their unique body plans.”

While each limb acts independently, signals are transmitted back to the octopus’s central nervous system. The octopus’ brain sits between its eyes at the front of its mantle, or head, couched between its two optic lobes, large bean-shaped neural organs that help octopuses see the world around them. These optic lobes are just two of the over 30 lobes experts study within the animal’s centralized brain, as each lobe helps the octopus process its environment.

This elaborate neural architecture is critical given the octopus’s dual role in the ecosystem as both predator and prey. Without natural defenses like a hard shell, octopuses have evolved a highly adaptable nervous system that allows them to rapidly process information and adjust as needed, helping their chances of survival.

Some similarities remain

While the octopus’s decentralized nervous system makes it a unique evolutionary example, it does have some structures similar to or analogous to the human nervous system.

“The octopus has a central brain mass located between its eyes, and an axial nerve cord running down each arm (similar to a spinal cord),” says Wang. “The octopus has many sensory systems that we are familiar with, such as vision, touch (somatosensation), chemosensation, and gravity sensing.”

Neuroscientists have homed in on these similarities to understand how these structures may have evolved across the different branches in the tree of life. As the most recent common ancestor for humans and octopuses lived around 750 million years ago, experts believe that many similarities, from similar camera-like eyes to maps of neural activities, evolved separately in a process known as convergent evolution.

While these similarities shed light on evolution's independent paths, they also offer valuable insights for fields like soft robotics and regenerative medicine.

Occasionally, unique individuals—like an octopus with an unexpected number of limbs—can provide even deeper clues into how this remarkable nervous system functions and adapts.

Nine arms, no problem

In 2021, researchers from the Institute of Marine Research in Spain used an underwater camera to follow a male Octopus vulgaris, or common octopus. On its left side, three arms were intact, while the others were reduced to uneven, stumpy lengths, sharply bitten off at varying points. Although the researchers didn’t witness the injury itself, they observed that the front right arm—known as R1—was regenerating unusually, splitting into two separate limbs and giving the octopus a total of nine arms.

“In this individual, we believe this condition was a result of abnormal regeneration [a genetic mutation] after an encounter with a predator,” explains Sam Soule, one of the researchers and the first author on the corresponding paper recently published in Animals.

The researchers named the octopus Salvador due to its bifurcated arm coiling up on itself like the two upturned ends of Salvador Dali’s moustache. For two years, the team studied the cephalopod’s behavior and found that it used its bifurcated arm less when doing “riskier” movements such as exploring or grabbing food, which would force the animal to stretch its arm out and expose it to further injury.

“One of the conclusions of our research is that the octopus likely retains a long-term memory of the original injury, as it tends to use the bifurcated arms for less risky tasks compared to the others,” elaborates Jorge Hernández Urcera, a lead author of the study. “This idea of lasting memory brought to mind Dalí’s famous painting The Persistence of Memory, which ultimately became the title of the paper we published on monitoring this particular octopus.”

While the octopus acted more protective of its extra limb, its nervous system had adapted to using the extra appendage, as the octopus was observed, after some time recovering from its injuries, using its ninth arm for probing its environment.

“That nine-armed octopus is a perfect example of just how adaptable these animals are,” Pelled adds. “Most animals would struggle with an unusual body part, but not the octopus. In this case, the octopus had a bifurcated (split) arm and still used it effectively, just like any other arm. That tells us the nervous system didn’t treat it as a mistake—it figured out how to make it work.”

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry is the science communicator at JILA (a joint physics research institute between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder) and a freelance science journalist. Her main writing focuses are quantum physics, quantum technology, deep technology, social media, and the diversity of people in these fields, particularly women and people from minority ethnic and racial groups. Follow her on LinkedIn or visit her website.

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A new tool to quickly identify books that are poisonous to humans has been developed by the University of St Andrews.

Historically, publishers used arsenic mixed with copper to achieve a vivid emerald green colour for book covers.

While the risk to the public is “low”, handling arsenic-containing books regularly can lead to health issues including irritation of the eyes, nose and throat along with more serious side-effects. The toxic pigment in the book bindings can flake off, meaning small pieces can easily be inhaled.

St Andrews’ device in action. Photograph: University of St Andrews

In recent years, many libraries have prevented access to all suspect green books as a precaution, as testing has until now been costly and time-consuming. For example, the University of Bielefeld, along with several other German universities, isolated 60,000 books as a precautionary measure last year.

The new device can quickly and cheaply detect the presence of toxic pigment. “A device used in the School of Earth Sciences to detect minerals in rocks was the starting point,” said Pilar Gil, who led the research.

“The Eureka moment was discovering the unique reflectance pattern from emerald green pigment in the visible spectrum.

The idea was then to apply this discovery to an instrument which we could use and share with the sector.”

Two scientists from the university’s astronomy and physics school, Graham Bruce and Morgan Facchin, developed a portable tool. “Our device shines different colours of light on to the book,” said Facchin.

“The amount of light reflected at each colour is like a fingerprint of the pigment in the book,” he added. “Through extensive work using books from the university’s collections, our team have found a way to identify the fingerprint of emerald green on a book.”

At St Andrews, emerald green books are stored in Ziploc polythene bags. “When the books are used, we check first if there are any other copies available which are not bound in emerald green,” reads the university’s website.

“If not, the book is handled with special precautions such as the use of nitrile gloves.”

In the 19th century, arsenic and copper were often used to create a vivid green colour for clothing, wallpaper, paint and other products along with book bindings.

“The retention of green books from public view is not only a matter of safety, but it also restricts access to the information contained,” said conservator Erica Kotze, who instigated the project. “This means that the books which have been tested and found not to contain the pigment can remain available to users.”

A free exhibition exploring the project, Poisonous books – Dangers from the past, is running at the Wardlaw Museum in St Andrews until the end of July.

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A robotic lander developed by a Japanese company named ispace plummeted to the Moon's surface Thursday, destroying a small rover and several experiments intended to demonstrate how future missions could mine and harvest lunar resources.

Ground teams at ispace's mission control center in Tokyo lost contact with the Resilience lunar lander moments before it was supposed to touch down in a region called Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, a basaltic plain in the Moon's northern hemisphere.

A few hours later, ispace officials confirmed what many observers suspected. The mission was lost. It's the second time ispace has failed to land on the Moon in as many tries.

“We wanted to make Mission 2 a success, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to land," said Takeshi Hakamada, the company's founder and CEO.

Ryo Ujiie, ispace's chief technology officer, said the final data received from the Resilience lander—assuming it was correct—showed it at an altitude of approximately 630 feet (192 meters) and descending too fast for a safe landing. "The deceleration was not enough. That was a fact," Ujiie told reporters in a press conference. "We failed to land, and we have to analyze the reasons."

The company said in a press release that a laser rangefinder used to measure the lander's altitude "experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values." The downward-facing laser fires light pulses toward the Moon during descent, and clocks the time it takes to receive a reflection. This time delay at light speed tells the lander's guidance system how far it is above the lunar surface. But something went wrong in the altitude measurement system on Thursday.

"As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing," ispace said. "Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface."

Controllers sent a command to reboot the lander in hopes of reestablishing communication, but the Resilience spacecraft remained silent.

"Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyze the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause," Hakamada said in a statement. "We will strive to restore trust by providing a report of the findings to our shareholders, payload customers, Hakuto-R partners, government officials, and all supporters of ispace."

Overcoming obstacles

The Hakuto name harkens back to ispace's origin in 2010 as a contender for the Google Lunar X-Prize, a sweepstakes that offered a $20 million grand prize to the first privately funded team to put a lander on the Moon. Hakamada's group was called Hakuto, which means "white rabbit" in Japanese. The prize shut down in 2018 without a winner, leading some of the teams to dissolve or find new purpose. Hakamada stayed the course, raised more funding, and rebooted the program under the name Hakuto-R.

It's a story of resilience, hence the name of ispace's second lunar lander. The mission made it closer to the Moon than the ispace's first landing attempt in 2023, but Thursday's failure is a blow to Hakamada's project.

"As a fact, we tried twice and we haven’t been able to land on the Moon," Hakamada said through an interpreter. "So we have to say it’s hard to land on the Moon, technically. We know it’s not easy. It’s not something that everyone can do. We know it’s hard, but the important point is it’s not impossible. The US private companies have succeeded in landing, and also JAXA in Japan has succeeded in landing, so it’s not impossible. So how do we overcome our hurdles?"

In April 2023, ispace's first lander crashed on the Moon due to a similar altitude measurement problem. The spacecraft thought it was on the surface of the Moon, but was actually firing its engine to hover at an altitude of 3 miles (5 kilometers). The spacecraft ran out of fuel and went into a free fall before impacting the Moon.

Engineers blamed software as the most likely reason for the altitude-measurement problem. During descent, ispace's lander passed over a 10,000-foot-tall (3,000-meter) cliff, and the spacecraft's computer interpreted the sudden altitude change as erroneous.

Ujiie, who leads ispace's technical teams, said the failure mode Thursday was "similar" to that of the first mission two years ago. But at least in ispace's preliminary data reviews, engineers saw different behavior from the Resilience lander, which flew with a new type of laser rangefinder after ispace's previous supplier stopped producing the device.

"From Mission 1 to Mission 2, we improved the software," Ujiie said. "Also, we improved how to approach the landing site... We see different phenomena from Mission 1, so we have to do more analysis to give you any concrete answers."

If ispace landed smoothly on Thursday, the Resilience spacecraft would have deployed a small rover developed by ispace's European subsidiary. The rover was partially funded by the Luxembourg Space Agency with support from the European Space Agency. It carried a shovel to scoop up a small amount of lunar soil and a camera to take a photo of the sample. NASA had a contract with ispace to purchase the lunar soil in a symbolic proof of concept to show how the government might acquire material from commercial mining companies in the future.

The lander also carried a water electrolyzer experiment to demonstrate technologies that could split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, critical resources for a future Moon base. Other payloads aboard the Resilience spacecraft included cameras, a food production experiment, a radiation monitor, and a Swedish art project called "MoonHouse."

The spacecraft chassis used for ispace's first two landing attempts was about the size of a compact car, with a mass of about 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) when fully fueled. The company's third landing attempt is scheduled for 2027 with a larger lander. Next time, ispace will fly to the Moon in partnership between the company's US subsidiary and Draper Laboratory, which has a contract with NASA to deliver experiments to the lunar surface.

Track record

The Resilience lander launched in January on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, riding to space in tandem with a commercial Moon lander named Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace. Firefly's lander took a more direct journey to the Moon and achieved a soft landing on March 2. Blue Ghost operated on the lunar surface for two weeks and completed all of its objectives.

The trajectory of ispace's lander was slower, following a lower-energy, more fuel-efficient path to the Moon before entering lunar orbit last month. Once in orbit, the lander made a few more course corrections to line up with its landing site, then commenced its final descent on Thursday.

Thursday's landing attempt was the seventh time a privately developed Moon lander tried to conduct a controlled touchdown on the lunar surface.

Two Texas-based companies have had the most success. One of them, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the Moon in February 2024, marking the first time a commercial lander reached the lunar surface intact. But the lander tipped over after touchdown, cutting its mission short after achieving some limited objectives. A second Intuitive Machines lander reached the Moon in one piece in March of this year, but it also fell over and didn't last as long as the company's first mission.

Firefly's Blue Ghost operated for two weeks after reaching the lunar surface, accomplishing all of its objectives and becoming the first fully successful privately owned spacecraft to land and operate on the Moon.

Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and a third company—Astrobotic Technology—have launched their lunar missions under contract with a NASA program aimed at fostering a commercial marketplace for transportation to the Moon. Astrobotic's first lander failed soon after its departure from Earth. The first two missions launched by ispace were almost fully private ventures, with limited participation from the Japanese space agency, Luxembourg, and NASA.

Commercial travel to the Moon only began in 2019, so there's not much of a track record to judge the industry's prospects. When NASA started signing contracts for commercial lunar missions, the then-chief of the agency's science vision, Thomas Zurbuchen, estimated the initial landing attempts would have a 50-50 chance of success. On the whole, NASA's experience with Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and Astrobotic isn't too far off from Zurbuchen's estimate, with one full success and a couple of partial successes.

The commercial track record worsens if you include private missions from ispace and Israel's Beresheet lander.

But ispace and Hakamada haven't given up on the dream. The company's third mission will launch under the umbrella of the same NASA program that contracted with Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and Astrobotic. Hakamada cited the achievements of Firefly and Intuitive Machines as evidence that the commercial model for lunar missions is a valid one.

"The ones that have the landers, there are two companies I mentioned. Also, Blue Origin maybe coming up. Also, ispace is a possibility," Hakamada said. "So, very few companies. We would like to catch up as soon as possible."

It's too early to know how the failure on Thursday might impact ispace's next mission with Draper and NASA.

"I have to admit that we are behind," said Jumpei Nozaki, director and chief financial officer at ispace. "But we do not really think we are behind from the leading group yet. It’s too early to decide that. The players in the world that can send landers to the Moon are very few, so we still have some competitive edge."

"Honestly, there were some times I almost cried, but I need to lead this company, and I need to have a strong will to move forward, so it’s not time for me to cry," Hakamada said.

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Welcome to Edition 7.47 of the Rocket Report! Let's hope not, but the quarrel between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk may be remembered as "Black Thursday" for the US space program. A simmering disagreement over Trump's signature "One Big Beautiful Bill" coursing its way through Congress erupted into public view, with two of the most powerful Americans trading insults and threats on social media. Trump suggested the government should terminate "Elon's governmental contracts and subsidies." Musk responded with a post saying SpaceX will begin decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft used to transport crew and cargo to the International Space Station. This could go a number of ways, but it's hard to think anything good will come of it.

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

Blue Origin aces suborbital space shot. Blue Origin, the space company founded and owned by Jeff Bezos, launched six people to the edge of space Saturday, May 31, from Bezos' ranch in West Texas, CBS News reports. A hydrogen-fueled New Shepard booster propelled a crew capsule, equipped with the largest windows of any operational spaceship, to an altitude of nearly 65 miles (105 kilometers), just above the internationally recognized boundary between the discernible atmosphere and space, before beginning the descent to landing. The passengers included three Americans—Aymette Medina Jorge, Gretchen Green, and Paul Jeris—along with Canadian Jesse Williams, New Zealand's Mark Rocket, and Panamanian Jaime Alemán, who served as his country's ambassador to the United States.

If you missed it ... You wouldn't be alone. This was the 32nd flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, and the company's 12th human flight. From a technical perspective, these flights aren't breaking any new ground in human spaceflight or rocketry. However, each flight provides an opportunity for wealthy or well-connected passengers to view Earth from a perspective only about 700 people have seen before. That's really cool, but most of these launches are no longer newsworthy, and it takes a devoted fan of spaceflight to tune in to a New Shepard flight on a summertime Saturday morning. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Momentum for Amentum. The US Space Force awarded Jacobs Technology a contract worth up to $4 billion over 10 years to provide engineering and technical services at the nation’s primary space launch ranges, as the military seeks to modernize aging infrastructure and boost capacity amid a surge in commercial space activity, Space News reports. Jacobs Technology is now part of Amentum, a defense contractor based in Chantilly, Virginia. Amentum merged with Jacobs in September 2024. The so-called "Space Force Range Contract" covers maintenance, sustainment, systems engineering and integration services for the Eastern and Western ranges until 2035. The Eastern Range operates from Patrick Space Force Base in Florida, while the Western Range is based at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Picking from the menu ... The contract represents a significant shift in how space launch infrastructure is funded. Under the new arrangement, commercial launch service providers—which now account for the majority of launches at both ranges—can request services or upgrades and pay for them directly, rather than having the government bear the costs upfront. This arrangement would create a more market-driven approach to range operations and potentially accelerate modernization. "Historically, the government has fronted these costs," Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, Space Launch Delta 45 Commander and Eastern Range Director, said June 3 in a news release. "The ability of our commercial partners to directly fund their own task order will lessen the financial and administrative burden on the government and is in line with congressionally mandated financial improvement and audit readiness requirements."

Impulse Space rakes in more cash. This week, an in-space propulsion company, Impulse Space, announced that it had raised a significant amount of money, $300 million, Ars reports. This follows a fundraising round just last year in which the Southern California-based company raised $150 million. This is one of the largest capital raises in space in a while, especially for a non-launch company. Founded by Tom Mueller, a former propulsion guru at SpaceX, Impulse Space has test-flown an orbital maneuvering vehicle called Mira on two flights over the last couple of years. The company is developing a larger vehicle, named Helios, that could meaningfully improve the ability of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy to transport large payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations in the Solar System.

Reacting to the market ... The Mira vehicle was originally intended to provide "last-mile" services for spacecraft launched as part of rideshare missions. "The reality is the market for that is not very good," said Eric Romo, the company's CEO. Instead, Impulse Space found interest from the Space Force to use Mira as an agile platform for hosting electronic warfare payloads and other military instrumentation in orbit. "Mira wasn't necessarily designed out of the gate for that, but what we found out after we flew it successfully was, the Space Force said, 'Hey, we know what that thing's for,'" Romo said. Helios is a larger beast, with an engine capable of producing 15,000 pounds of thrust and the ability to move a multi-ton payload from low-Earth orbit to geostationary space in less than a day. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon rockets surpass 500 flights. SpaceX was back at the launch pad for a midweek flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This particular flight, designated Starlink 11-22, marked the company's 500th orbital launch attempt with a Falcon rocket, including Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy, Spaceflight Now reports. This milestone coincided with the 15th anniversary of the first Falcon 9 launch on June 4, 2010. The day before, SpaceX launched the 500th Falcon rocket overall, counting a single suborbital flight in 2020 that tested the Dragon spacecraft's abort system. The launch on Wednesday from California was the 68th Falcon 9 launch of the year.

Chasing Atlas ... The soon-to-be-retired Atlas rocket holds the record for the most-flown family of space launchers in the United States, with 684 launches to date, beginning with Atlas ICBMs in the Cold War to the Atlas V rocket flying today. In reality, however, the Atlas V shares virtually nothing in common with the Atlas ICBM, other than its name. The Atlas V has new engines, more modern computers, and a redesigned booster stage that ended the line of pressure-stabilized "balloon tanks" that flew on Atlas rockets from 1957 until 2005. The Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy share more heritage, all using variants of SpaceX's Merlin engine. If you consider the Atlas rocket as the US record-holder for most space launches, SpaceX's Falcon family is on pace to reach 684 flights before the end of 2026.

SpaceX delivers again for GPS. The Space Force successfully sent its latest GPS III satellite to orbit Friday, May 30, demonstrating the ability to prepare and launch a military spacecraft on condensed timelines, Defense News reports. The satellite flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida. GPS III, built by Lockheed Martin, is the latest version of the navigation and timing system and is designed to provide improved anti-jamming capabilities. It will broadcast additional military and civilian signals.

More anti-jamming capability ... The launch was the second in a series of Rapid Response Trailblazer missions the Space Force is running to test whether it can quickly launch high-value satellites in response to national security needs. The goal is to condense a process that can take up to two years down to a handful of months. The first mission, which flew in December, reduced the time between launch notification and lift off to around five months—and the May 30 mission shortened it even further, to around 90 days. In addition to demonstrating the launch could be done on an accelerated timeline, Space Force officials were motivated to swap this satellite from United Launch Alliance's long-delayed Vulcan rocket to SpaceX's Falcon 9 in order to add more tech to the GPS constellation to counter jamming and spoofing. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

An autopsy on Reaction Engines. An article published by the BBC this week recounts some of the backstory behind the bankruptcy of Reaction Engines, a British company that labored for 35 years to develop a revolutionary air-breathing rocket engine. According to the vision of the company's leaders, the new engine, called SABRE, could have powered a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane or hypersonic vehicles within the atmosphere. If an engine like SABRE could ever be mastered, it could usher in a new era of spaceplanes that can take off and land horizontally on a runway, instead of launching vertically like a rocket.

A little too quixotic ... But Reaction Engines started in an era too soon for true commercial spaceflight and couldn't convince enough venture capital investors that the idea could compete with the likes of SpaceX. Instead, the company secured a handful of investments from large aerospace companies like Boeing, BAE Systems, and Rolls-Royce. This money allowed Reaction Engines to grow to a staff of approximately 200 employees and kept it afloat until last October, when the company went into administration and laid off its workforce. "A few people were in tears," Richard Varvill, the company's chief engineer, told the BBC. "A lot of them were shocked and upset because they'd hoped we could pull it off right up to the end." It was galling for Varvill "because we were turning it around with an improved engine. Just as we were getting close to succeeding, we failed. That's a uniquely British characteristic." (submitted by ShuggyCoUk)

Draconian implications for Trump's budget. New details of the Trump administration's plans for NASA, released Friday, May 30, revealed the White House's desire to end the development of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket engine that could have shown a new way of exploring the Solar System, Ars reports. The budget proposal's impacts on human spaceflight and space science have been widely reported, but Trump's plan would cut NASA's space technology budget in half. One of the victims would be DRACO, a partnership with DARPA to develop and test the first nuclear thermal rocket engine in space.

But wait, there's more ... The budget proposal not only cancels DRACO, but it also zeros out funding for all of NASA's nuclear propulsion projects. Proponents of nuclear propulsion say it offers several key advantages for sending heavy cargo and humans to deep space destinations, like Mars. "This budget provides no funding for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion and Nuclear Electric Propulsion projects," officials wrote in the NASA budget request. "These efforts are costly investments, would take many years to develop, and have not been identified as the propulsion mode for deep space missions. The nuclear propulsion projects are terminated to achieve cost savings and because there are other nearer-term propulsion alternatives for Mars transit." Trump's budget request isn't final. Both Republican-controlled houses of Congress will write their own versions of the NASA budget, which must be reconciled before going to the White House for President Trump's signature.

Blue Origin CEO says government should get out of the launch business. Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin's chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together. First, the government should leave launching things into space to private industry. "I think commercial folks can worry about the infrastructure," he said. "We can do the launch. We can build the satellite buses that can get you to Mars much more frequently, that don't cost billions of dollars. We can take a zero, and over time, maybe two zeros off of that. And if the governments around the world leave that to the commercial side, then there are a lot more resources that are freed up for the science side, for the national prestige side, and those types of things."

Do the exotic ... While commercial companies should drive the proverbial bus into the Solar System, NASA should get back to its roots in research and exploration, Limp said. "I would say, and it might be a little provocative, let's have those smart brains look on the forward-thinking types of things, the really edge of science, planning the really exotic missions, figuring out how to get to planetary bodies we haven't gotten to before, and staying there." But Limp highlighted one area where he thinks government investment is needed: the Moon. He said there's currently no commercial business case for sending people to the Moon, and the government should continue backing those efforts.

Hurdles ahead for Rocket Cargo. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the military for details on a proposal to build a rocket test site in a remote wildlife refuge less than 900 miles from Hawaiʻi Island, Hawaiʻi Public Radio reports. The Air Force announced in March that it planned to prepare an environmental assessment for the construction and operation of two landing pads on Johnston Atoll to test the viability of using rockets to deliver military cargo loads. While the announcement didn't mention SpaceX, that company's Starship rocket is on contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory to work on delivering cargo anywhere in the world within an hour. Now, several conservationists have spoken out against the proposal, pointing out that Johnston is an important habitat for birds and marine species.

Scarred territory ... For nearly a century, Johnston Atoll has served dual roles as a wildlife refuge and a base for US military operations, including as a nuclear test site between 1958 and 1963. In March, the Air Force said it anticipated an environmental assessment for its plans on Johnston Atoll would be available for public review in early April. So far, it has not been released. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a Freedom of Information Act request about the project. They say a determination on their request was due by May 19, but they have not received a response. The center filed a lawsuit last week to compel the military to rule on their request and release information about the project.

Getting down to business at Starbase. SpaceX's rockets make a lot of noise at Starbase, but the machinations of setting up Texas' newest city are in motion, too. After months of planning, SpaceX launched the city of Starbase on May 29 with its first public meeting chaired by Mayor Robert Peden and the City Commission at The Hub, a building owned by SpaceX, ValleyCentral.com reports. During the meeting, which lasted about 80 minutes, they hired a city administrator, approved standard regulations for new construction, and created a committee to guide the community’s long-term development. Voters approved the creation of Starbase on May 3, incorporating territory around SpaceX's remote rocket factory and launch site near the US-Mexico border. SpaceX owns most of the land in Starbase and employs nearly everyone in the tiny town, including the mayor.

Property rights and zoning ... "The new city's leaders have told landowners they plan to introduce land use rules that could result in changes for some residents," KUT reports. In a letter, Starbase's first city administrator, Kent Myers, warned local landowners that they may lose the right to continue using their property for its current use under the city’s new zoning plan. "Our goal is to ensure that the zoning plan reflects the City’s vision for balanced growth, protecting critical economic drivers, ensuring public safety, and preserving green spaces," the letter, dated May 21, reads. This is a normal process when a city creates new zoning rules, and a new city is required by state law to notify landowners—most of which are SpaceX or its employees—of potential zoning changes so they can ask questions in a public setting. A public meeting to discuss the zoning ordinance at Starbase is scheduled for June 23.

Next three launches

June 7: Falcon 9 | SXM-10| Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 03:19 UTC

June 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-8 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13:34 UTC

June 10: Falcon 9 | Axiom Mission 4 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 12:22 UTC

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This research supports the idea that dentine wasn’t always used for chewing. Instead, millions of years ago, it helped fish detect changes in the water. The study also clears up confusion about Anatolepis heintzi, a fossil once thought to be the earliest known vertebrate because of its dentine-like structures.

For years, scientists debated whether Anatolepis was really an early vertebrate. The fossil had tiny tubules that some researchers believed were odontodes—small structures considered to be the ancestors of teeth. However, there wasn’t enough evidence to be sure.

To settle the debate, scientists used synchrotron scanning, a powerful imaging technique, to study different fossils and modern creatures. The scans revealed that Anatolepis didn’t have dentine. Instead, its tubules were sensory structures similar to those found in arthropods like crabs and shrimp. These structures, called sensilla, help animals detect their surroundings.

“This shows us that ‘teeth’ can also be sensory even when they’re not in the mouth,” said lead researcher Yara Haridy, PhD. “There’s sensitive armor in these fish. There’s sensitive armor in these arthropods. This explains the confusion with these early Cambrian animals.”

Although Anatolepis turned out to be an arthropod, researchers did find real dentine in another ancient fish. The Ordovician vertebrate Eriptychius, which lived about 465 million years ago, had large dentine-filled tubules in its armor. This confirms that dentine first evolved in vertebrates as a sensory tissue.

Further tests showed that modern fish, such as sharks and teleosts, still have nerve connections in their external dentine structures. This means early vertebrates may have used dentine to sense their environment before it became part of teeth.

Scientists have two main ideas about how teeth came to be. The “inside-out” theory suggests teeth evolved first and were later adapted for exoskeletons. The new research supports the “outside-in” theory, which argues that sensory structures appeared first in exoskeletons and later evolved into teeth.

While the team didn’t find the oldest vertebrate fish, study co-author Neil Shubin, PhD, believes the discovery is still important. “We didn’t find the earliest one, but in some ways, we found something way cooler,” he said.

Source: University of Chicago, Nature

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

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Over the years, scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls have analyzed the ancient parchments with various methods: for example, X-rays, multispectral imaging, "virtual unfolding," and paleography, i.e., studying elements in their writing styles. The scrolls are believed to date back to between the third century BCE and the first century CE, but those dates rely largely on paleography, since only a handful of the scrolls have calendar dates written on them.

However, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar's experience. A team of scientists has combined radiocarbon dating from 24 scroll samples and machine-learning-based handwriting analysis to create their own AI program—dubbed Enoch. The objective was to achieve more accurate date estimates, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Among the findings: Many of the scrolls are older than previously thought.

As reported earlier, these ancient Hebrew texts—roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars—were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran, just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946–1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock while searching for a lost member of his flock and accidentally shattered one of the clay jars, leading to the discovery.) Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, circa 73 CE, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia.

This isn't the first time that AI tools have been applied to analyzing the handwriting on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Back in 2020, we reported on an AI-aided handwriting analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll. Most scholars believed that the Isaiah Scroll was copied by a single scribe due to the seemingly uniform handwriting style. But others have suggested that it may be the work of two scribes writing in a similar style, each copying one of the scroll's two distinct halves. The 2020 analysis revealed that the text was indeed likely written by two scribes. It also showed that the second scribe's handwriting was more variable than the first's, although the two styles were quite similar, indicating a possible common training.

Enter Enoch

The authors of this latest paper wanted to find a better means than paleography alone for determining the chronology of the scrolls, with an eye toward reconstructing the evolution of ideas. They thought that given the small data set in the case of the scrolls, it was wisest not to rely on a pre-trained model and instead "let the available data speak."

By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction 

model Enoch is able to produce an accurate date for the manuscript.

University of Groningen/CC BY-SA

Mladen Popovic and Maruf Dhali working with Enoch to date a manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

University of Groningen/CC BY-SA

 

The development of Enoch grew out of the team's earlier deep neural network for ferreting out handwritten ink-trace patterns in digitized manuscripts, involving micro-level geometric shape analysis. "Enoch emphasizes shared characteristics and similarity matching between trained and test manuscripts, where traditional paleography focuses on subtle differences that are assumed to be indicative for style development," the authors wrote. "Combining dissimilarity matching and adaptive reinforcement learning can uncover hidden patterns."

They tested Enoch by having paleographic experts evaluate the AI program's age estimate for several scrolls. The results: About 79 percent of Enoch's estimates were deemed "realistic," while its age estimates for the remaining 21 percent were either too young, too old, or just indecisive.

This new model revealed that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previous estimates based solely on paleography. That should be relevant for the question of when two ancient Jewish script styles—"Hasmonean" and "Herodian"—developed, for example. The former script was thought to have emerged between 150–50 BCE, but the authors believe Hasmonean could have emerged much earlier; ditto for the Herodian script. So both scripts may have coexisted since the late second century, challenging the prevailing view that they preexisted by the mid-first century BCE.

Enoch may even be able to shed light on biblical authorship. For instance, the authors concluded that two of the scrolls are the first known fragments of the Book of Daniel, believed to have been finished by an anonymous author around 160 BCE. And Ecclesiastes was likely completed by an anonymous author in the third century BCE, rather than by King Solomon in the 10th century BCE.

“With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible, especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors,” the authors wrote. “It is very exciting to set a significant step into solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscript collections from history."

PLoS ONE, 2025. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0323185  (About DOIs).

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Whenever the keto diet is discussed, there’s going to be beef. But this time it’s different. A new research paper on the diet’s effects has whipped the nutrition field into a frenzy. Researchers behind the study say it supports keto’s health credentials; opponents claim the research shows the exact opposite. Cue public spats on social media, questions about the study’s rigor, and calls for it to be withdrawn. “It’s a collective mess,” says Kevin Klatt, an assistant research scientist and instructor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences and Toxicology at UC Berkeley.

Published on April 7 in JACC: Advances, the paper examines the relationship between cholesterol and the ketogenic diet—the practice of consuming low-carb, high-fat foods to try to push the body into “ketosis,” where cells burn fat instead of carbs for energy. Keto diets have become a popular strategy used by millions for losing weight, though detractors have questioned how healthy it is to consistently consume high amounts of fat.

The study, by getting to the heart of this question, has received a significant amount of attention. Altmetric, which measures the attention a publication receives in the press and on social media, puts it in the top 5 percent of the papers it tracks—more than 24 million pieces of research. The majority of attention has come from X.

According to some keto advocates, the paper’s findings are a step towards refuting the widely accepted theory that LDL cholesterol, also referred to as “low-density lipoprotein” or “bad” cholesterol, has a causal relationship with heart disease and other cardiovascular conditions. Overturning this hypothesis would undermine long-standing medical advice that people should keep their LDL cholesterol low, and potentially rewrite the rules on consuming fatty foods.

The trial recruited 100 subjects who were otherwise healthy but had been following a ketogenic diet for at least 2 years, and who as a result had unusually high cholesterol levels in their blood. Patients who exhibit these characteristics, but who show other signs of being in good cardiometabolic health—having lean physiques, low body fat, low blood pressure, and good insulin sensitivity—are sometimes called Lean Mass Hyper-Responders (LMHRs). The study set out to show if its cohort of LMHRs were developing fatty deposits known as plaque in their arteries, a known risk for people with high levels of LDL cholesterol in their blood. Participants were followed for one year, during which they continued with their keto diets, and their plaque levels were observed at the beginning and end of the study.

One of the study’s authors is Dave Feldman, a software engineer and entrepreneur without a medical license or training, who has devoted himself to all things keto and cholesterol. In an email to WIRED, Feldman claimed that it was he who coined the term Lean Mass Hyper-Responders, back in 2017. In the past he has organized his own experiments—without the guidance of an institutional board review, which in formal experiments are used to ensure ethical behavior and participant welfare—to try to get the attention of scientists and have them study LMHRs. Feldman’s charity, the Citizen Science Foundation, crowdfunded the recent study, which was run through the Californian research organization the Lundquist Institute, with an institutional review board.

In a video released on X the day the paper came out, Feldman claimed the study found no association between LDL cholesterol and plaque in the patients, and no association between apolipoprotein B (ApoB) and plaque. (ApoB helps carry fat molecules around the body, and higher levels of it are associated with cardiovascular disease.) These alleged findings run counter to large amounts of already-existing evidence suggesting both LDL and ApoB have a causal relationship with the development of plaque in the arteries. In Feldman’s view, the study shows that despite their high levels of LDL cholesterol, the patients’ keto diets weren’t raising their risk of plaque.

However, many doctors and researchers reached the opposite conclusion when looking at the work. On May 7, JACC: Advances published a pre-proof version of a Letter to the Editor, written by two researchers specializing in nutrition, Miguel López-Moreno and José Francisco López-Gil. They highlighted concerns with the study, including what they alleged to be “selective reporting” of data, the study’s lack of a comparator group, the validity of the statistical modeling used, and the weakness of using a one-year timeframe.

The study was also heavily criticized for seeming to mask its original focus. Originally, it was supposed to look at the percentage change in non-calcified plaque volume (NCPV)—soft plaque that had not yet hardened inside participants’ blood vessels—in the participants over the course of the study. A graph of NCPV change appeared in the paper, but measurements were not provided or mentioned. Instead, the paper ended up offering an exploratory analysis—that ApoB does not beget plaque—“that was implausible to do based on the data they had,” says Spencer Nadolsky, a Michigan-based physician specializing in obesity medicine and lipidology.

This means the paper “shouldn’t have made it through peer review in the first place,” Nadolsky believes. If researchers leave out the intended goal of a study, critics allege that they could then cobble together any data once the experiment has been done, without clarifying what they were initially looking for, and try to pass this off as evidence of something. Because the study wasn’t designed to investigate the alternative hypothesis of the explanatory analysis, there may be flaws in the data being used to support it—biases in how it was obtained, or not enough of it to reach a robust conclusion.

“This is the first thing you’re not supposed to do,” says Nadolsky of the decision to shift focus. “That’s why we’re hammering them.”

“Interpretative disagreements are far from rare in nutritional science,” wrote Adrian Soto-Mota, lead author of the study, in response to a request for comment from WIRED. He notes that all of the limitations of the study’s design were acknowledged in the paper, and says that when they used the alternative statistical model suggested by López-Moreno and López-Gil, this still corroborated the paper’s conclusions.

Soto-Mata also says the focus wasn’t switched. The changes in participants’ NCPV were shown in the graph, he says, and notes that these changes were used in “almost all the analyses in our paper.” Moreover, he says it’s wrong to describe the analysis that ApoB does not beget plaque as implausible based on the data gathered. “Our analysis was carried out by two experts in data analysis, and it was independently reviewed by an expert in statistics during the peer review process,” he says.

Nadolsky, though, has called for the paper to be retracted, and co-wrote a response to the research, which has been released as a preprint, which takes issue with the paper’s findings, interpretation, and statistical analysis, among other concerns. The response says the study’s conclusions—a “clear example of scientific spin”—are not supported by the data, and have the potential to misinform both doctors and patients about the risks of following a high-fat diet.

“Nothing was spun, and our conclusions remained unchanged after multiple sensitivity analyses and an independent expert data analysis review,” says Soto-Mota.

Problems from the Beginning

What sets Nadolsky’s criticism apart from others’ is that he had a part in designing the study. Feldman and Nadolsky had gone back-and-forth for years online about the risks of high cholesterol, with Feldman suggesting that the traditional consensus around its risks might be wrong, particularly for the LMHR population.

Instead, Feldman proposed a new alternative theory—the lipid energy model—which he and some of his coauthors on the current paper outlined in a study published in Metabolites in 2022. In this unproven theory, high LDL is thought to be unconcerning in LMHRs because their bodies have become more efficient in transporting cholesterol while running primarily on fat.

Nadolsky, though a believer in the consensus view on cholesterol, was still interested in getting some data on the effects of LDL cholesterol in LMHRs, and a study investigating Feldman’s theory was a way to reach across the aisle to get it.

But in putting together a study to test Feldman’s hypothesis they faced difficulty, Nadolsky explains. It would be shot down by an institutional review board, as it would require people with extremely high LDL cholesterol levels to go untreated, when this is known to be potentially dangerous. However, a workaround would be to observe plaque progression in people experiencing diet-induced hypercholesterolemia (high LDL cholesterol due to their keto diet) who were refusing lipid-lowering medications.

The recruitment and promotion of the study was done on X via the #LMHRstudy hashtag, in addition to Feldman’s LMHR Facebook group, which also called for fundraising contributions—and it was during this process that Nadolsky began to grow concerned. During recruitment, Feldman also presented some of the preliminary data at a low-carb conference, using it “to try to present that the [LMHR] phenotype was benign, because most of the individuals seemed to not have plaque at baseline,” Nadolsky says. He says that Feldman was doing this to recruit more subjects and donations for the research; but in essence, this was presenting supposed findings of the research before it had been properly conducted.

At this point, Nadolsky conferred with multiple scientists and researchers outside of the study, and was advised to wash his hands of the project. “It was clear there was going to be a spin, no matter what the data showed,” Nadolsky claims. Nadolsky filed a complaint with the institutional review board overseeing the study, for ethical concerns. The board, says Soto-Mata, “allowed the study to proceed after concluding that no ethical transgressions had been made.” The Lundquist Institute did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

While the study was still in the recruitment phase, Nadolsky left the team.

Entrenched Positions

Klatt, of UC Berkeley, is extremely well-versed in nutrition research and the current online debates around cholesterol. He’s written about this study and its fallout on his personal Substack, and calls Nadolsky a friend. Klatt discussed the study with Nadolsky while it was ongoing, and many aspects concerned him.

Klatt brought up issues of undisclosed biases to the Lundquist Institute, the host of the trial, along with Dave Feldman’s “strongly vested interest” in the results of the study that was not properly disclosed, claiming he was “a conflicted party with no training in the biomedical sciences.” His email to the Institute about these issues went unanswered. “I think this study has gotten to the point of being extremely unethical,” Klatt says.

“All authors adhered to the conflicts-of-interest disclosure guidelines the journal required,” Soto-Mata says. “Our study was independently reviewed, approved, and monitored by an expert Research Ethics committee, all its recommendations were followed, and all its standards were met.”

While some researchers and physicians are tearing the study apart, or using it to show that keto can have adverse effects, Klatt doesn’t draw any strong conclusions. “People are talking past each other,” he says. Generally speaking, there are two clear camps, with one thinking the traditional lipid hypothesis holds up, and another thinking the new lipid energy model might work. Klatt puts himself in a third camp, asking: “Why are we trying to interpret this study at all?”

“I’m an editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,” Klatt says, “and I would like to believe that we would have rejected this outright without even sending it out for peer review, because it has so many obvious issues.” He is worried about people using this flawed study as proof the consensus on the risks of LDL cholesterol has been “debunked,” which it has not.

One of the study’s coauthors, Matthew Budoff, a professor of medicine at UCLA as well as an investigator at the Lundquist Institute, acknowledged in an email to WIRED that there had been “incredible scrutiny of the data on social media, which is more than expected based on my prior publications.” He noted the research team is seeking to have the paper incorporate corrections, but that this is ultimately at the discretion of the journal. A response to the Letter to the Editor from the coauthors clarifies some of the issues, he wrote.

That reply to the Letter to the Editor has now been published—and reveals that the study’s data may support the conventional position on the risk of cholesterol after all. The study’s authors share that the “pooled median change” in NCPV in the participants—the rise in the type of plaque the study was set up to investigate, but which originally wasn’t explicitly quantified in the paper—was an alarming 42.8 percent. The reply goes on to state that the study’s findings were “compatible with a causal role of ApoB in atherosclerosis”—the build-up of fat in the arteries—which they’ve “acknowledged and supported in previous publications.” The letter says that not mentioning this percentage increase in NCPV “was a sincere oversight, not intentional selective reporting.”

But this concession comes after the horse has bolted. Feldman’s hypothesis is already appearing in laypeople’s research—with the keto diet having been among the most Googled diets in recent years, and keto products a growing multibillion-dollar industry. Answering the query “What is special about Lean Mass Hyper-Responders,” ChatGPT provides the lipid energy model, Feldman’s argument against the consensus on cholesterol, among the initial explanations for why there is so much controversy and interest. There is also a Cholesterol Code documentary in the works—which covers Feldman’s personal experience and his research, including this study—which Feldman predicts will be available on a major streaming service sometime this year.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk's big government adventure appears to be at an end. As promised in April, Musk has returned his attention to his car company, which is facing serious headwinds. In the first quarter of the year, Tesla sold tens of thousands fewer electric vehicles than it did the year before, despite a rise in worldwide EV sales. Data from April looked even worse, with substantial sales declines in Europe and China. May's numbers don't look much better.

Although Tesla only publishes its global production and sales numbers—and only at the end of each quarter—some countries provide monthly new car registration information, making it possible to track sales on a national level. And according to Germany's KBA, in May, Tesla sales fell by just over 36 percent year over year, even as overall EV registrations increased by 45 percent. At least that's a few hundred more cars than it managed in April.

Similar trends were seen in the UK and Italy. In the UK, Tesla sales decreased by 45 percent, even as overall EV sales increased by 28 percent. In Italy, EV sales increased by almost 41 percent, but Tesla's deliveries dropped by 20 percent.

The slide isn't quite as bad in China, where Tesla faces stiff competition from local brands that undercut it with low prices while providing a wealth of features that are either unavailable in Teslas or cost extra. According to Reuters, Tesla's Shanghai factory delivered 15 percent fewer vehicles in May than it did last year, a number that includes both exports to Europe and local sales.

A rare spot of good news is that Norway—which has one of the highest adoption rates of EVs in the world—has seen a huge 213 percent increase year over year.

Turning around shrinking sales is just one of Musk's challenges at Tesla. Even though much of the company's production is vertically integrated, its US factories are still exposed to increased costs due to the Trump tariffs on imported auto parts, which make up about 20 percent of a Tesla's content. Allegedly, Musk was unaware of this impact on a recent visit to Tesla HQ.

The industry-wide shift from CCS1 to Tesla-style NACS charging plugs is progressing so slowly that the New Jersey Turnpike is replacing Superchargers with machines that can service both types. Will others follow suit?

Now that we're into June, the clock is ticking on the rollout of Tesla's autonomous taxi service in Austin, Texas, which suffered a branding setback when the company was denied a trademark on the word "robotaxi."

And finally, the CEO appears to be at odds with his political allies, taking to social media to express his hostility toward the proposed Republican budget and promising to "fire all politicians who betrayed the American people."

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byVirginia Glaze

Published: Jun 02, 2025, 17:23

A $1.5 billion AI company backed by Microsoft has shuttered after its ‘neural network’ was discovered to actually be hundreds of computer engineers based in India.

AI is all the rage right now as companies laser in on language-learning models like ChatGPT, Gemini, LLaMA and more.

However, one of these AI brands has been exposed as a total sham in a wild scam that’s going viral on social media.

‘Natasha,’ an AI app-building service from London-based Builder.ai, claimed it had the ability to use artificial intelligence to create applications. From coming up with app designs to writing code, Natasha promised to pump out programs in record time.

Microsoft reportedly backed the ‘neural network’ with a $455 million investment, leading to a valuation of $1.5 billion… but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.

AI app-building company exposed as hundreds of human workers

As reported by Binance, employees said the majority of labor at Builder.ai was produced by humans, with some clerical work being done using general software.

The farce lasted for eight years, getting exposed in May 2025. Builder announced bankruptcy shortly thereafter, writing in a statement on LinkedIn that it would be “entering into insolvency proceedings.”

“Despite the tireless efforts of our current team and exploring every possible option, the business has been unable to recover from historic challenges and past decisions that placed significant strain on its financial position,” the company wrote.

Documents reviewed by Bloomberg showed that Builder also worked with VerSe, an India-based social media startup, to falsely increase its sales numbers, regularly billing each other for similar amounts between 2021 – 2024.

Sources close to the situation told Bloomberg that services weren’t actually rendered from either company for these payments — claims that VerSe has vehemently denied.

We’re not the kind of company that is in the business of inflating revenues,” VerSe co-founder Umang Bedi said to Bloomberg, calling the accusations “baseless and false.”

Despite VerSe’s denials, the story has gone viral across social media… so much so, that another software brand with a similar name is taking heat over the incident.

Builder.io is also a software company that uses AI tools and visual editors to create programs for clients. However, due to their similar name, Builder.io’s co-founder and CEO felt the need to clarify that they aren’t related in any

way in a post that’s getting tons of laughs online.

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A study published in Nature Communications by researchers from Brown University and the University of Bern suggests that ferrihydrite (Fe5O8H · nH2O) is the dominant iron-containing mineral in Martian dust. Their findings—based on orbital observations, rover data, and lab experiments—challenge previous ideas about Mars' surface composition.

“The fundamental question of why Mars is red has been thought of for hundreds if not thousands of years,” said Adomas Valantinas, a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University. “From our analysis, we believe ferrihydrite is everywhere in the dust and also probably in the rock formations, as well.”

Ferrihydrite is formed when iron reacts with oxygen and water. On Earth, it’s commonly found in volcanic rock and ash. Its presence on Mars suggests that the planet was once much wetter, with conditions that could have supported liquid water. This contrasts with hematite, which forms in drier environments.

To test their theory, the researchers recreated Martian conditions in a lab. They ground minerals into tiny particles—about 1/100th the width of a human hair—matching the size of real Martian dust. They then studied how light reflected off these particles. The results showed that ferrihydrite remains stable in Mars’ current dry, cold climate, but its structure still holds signs that it formed when the planet had water.

“What we know from this study is the evidence points to ferrihydrite forming, and for that to happen there must have been conditions where oxygen and water could react with iron,” Valantinas explained. “Those conditions were very different from today’s dry, cold environment.”

To confirm ferrihydrite’s presence, the team studied data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter. They also used spectral readings from rovers like Curiosity, Pathfinder, and Opportunity. Combining all of these sources, they found that the mineral appears widespread on the Martian surface.

This discovery challenges previous theories that Mars gradually oxidized in dry conditions. Instead, it suggests that ancient Mars went through a wetter phase before drying out. That shift from a water-rich past to the dry, dusty planet we see today is key to understanding Mars’ climate history—and possibly its ability to support life.

“The study is a door-opening opportunity,” said Jack Mustard, senior author of the study. “It gives us a better chance to apply principles of mineral formation and conditions to tap back in time.”

While the findings provide strong evidence for ferrihydrite’s role in Mars’ red dust, definitive proof will have to wait until Mars samples—currently being collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover—are brought back to Earth. Scientists hope these samples will confirm the theory and shed more light on the planet’s environmental history.

Source: Brown University, University of Bren, Nature | Image via Depositphotos

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

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Using data from NASA satellites, researchers from Tongji University in Shanghai tracked changes in Antarctica's ice sheet over more than two decades. The overall trend is one of substantial ice loss on the continent, but from 2021 to 2023, Antarctica gained some of that lost ice back.

However, this isn't a sign that global warming and climate change have miraculously reversed. Picture a long ski slope with a small jump at the end. That's what a line through the Antarctic ice sheet data looks like when plotted on a graph. While there have been some recent ice gains, they don't even begin to make up for almost 20 years of losses.

Most of the gains have already been attributed to an anomaly that saw increased precipitation (snow and some rain) fall over Antarctica, which caused more ice to form. Antarctica's ice levels fluctuate from year to year, and the gains appear to have slowed since the study period ended at the beginning of 2024. The levels reported by NASA thus far in 2025 look similar to what they were back in 2020, just before the abrupt gain.

The ice sheet covering Antarctica is the largest mass of ice on Earth. Bigger than the whole of the U.S., the sheet holds 90% of the world's fresh water, according to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, an environmental non-governmental organization. Antarctica is also surrounded by sea ice (frozen ocean water), which expands in the winter and retreats to the Antarctic coastline in the summer.

This latest study, published March 19 in the journal Science China Earth Sciences, analyzed data from NASA's Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On satellites that have been monitoring this ice sheet since 2002. Studying changes to the sheet is important because any melt releases water into the ocean, which is a major driver of rising sea levels.

The satellite data revealed that the sheet experienced a sustained period of ice loss between 2002 and 2020. The ice loss accelerated in the latter half of that period, increasing from an average loss of about 81 billion tons (74 billion metric tons) per year between 2002 and 2010, to a loss of about 157 billion tons (142 billion metric tons) between 2011 and 2020, according to the study. However, the trend then shifted.

The ice sheet gained mass from 2021 to 2023 at an average rate of about 119 billion tons (108 metric tons) per year. Four glaciers in eastern Antarctica also flipped from accelerated ice loss to significant mass gain.

The recent Antarctic ice sheet gain doesn't make up for the continent experiencing a sustained period of accelerated ice loss. (Image credit: ©Science China Press)

"This isn't particularly strange," said Tom Slater, a research fellow in environmental science at Northumbria University in the U.K. who wasn't involved in the study. "In a warmer climate the atmosphere can hold more moisture — this raises the likelihood of extreme weather such as the heavy snowfall which caused the recent mass gain in East Antarctica," he told Live Science in an email.

A 2023 study documented Antarctica's unprecedented mass gain between 2021 and 2022. That study, written by many of the same authors behind the new study, found that a high precipitation anomaly was responsible for the gain in ice. The latest study suggests that the trend continued until at least 2023.

Slater noted that researchers expect the ice gains to be temporary.

"Almost all of Antarctica's grounded ice losses come from glaciers elsewhere which are speeding up and flowing into the warming ocean," Slater said. "This is still happening — while the recent snowfall has temporarily offset these losses, they haven't stopped so it's not expected this is a long-term change in Antarctica's behaviour."

A warming world

Climate change doesn't mean that everywhere on Earth will get hotter at the same rate, so a single region will never tell the whole story of our warming world. Historically, temperatures over much of Antarctica have remained relatively stable, particularly compared to the Arctic, which has cooked four times faster than the rest of the globe. Antarctica's sea ice has also been much more stable relative to the Arctic, but that's been changing in recent years.

In 2023, Antarctic sea ice hit record lows, which researchers concluded was extremely unlikely to happen without climate change. Meanwhile, global sea ice cover is consistently dropping to record lows or near-record lows, while global temperatures are consistently at record or near-record highs.

In 2015, world leaders signed the Paris Agreement, an international treaty promising to limit global warming to preferably below 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) and well below 3.6 F (2 C). However, that first promise is on the line: April 2025 was the 21st out of the last 22 months to breach the 2.7 F limit, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

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I knew it: if ice cap decreases, it's cuz of global warming  for sure. But if ice cap increases, it's still caused by global warming :-)

The Gates Foundation has played an active role in improving public health and education in Africa over the past decades. Bill Gates aims to double down on that effort by donating most of his fortune to Africa. Last month, he also said that 99% of his fortune, which could exceed $200 billion, will go to African countries by 2045.

Speaking at the African Union (AU) headquarters in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, Gates said, "By unleashing human potential through health and education, every country in Africa should be on a path to prosperity."

"I recently made a commitment that my wealth will be given away over the next 20 years. The majority of that funding will be spent on helping you address challenges here in Africa,"

The tech billionaire also told young African innovators to start relying on AI to improve health and education in their countries and use the technology to benefit the entire continent. He introduced Rwanda as a successful example of using AI in healthcare to identify high-risk pregnancies.

"Africa largely skipped traditional banking and now you have a chance, as you build your next generation healthcare systems, to think about how AI is built into that," Gates added.

By donating 99 percent of his personal fortune by 2045, Bill Gates can still maintain his position as one of the richest people on earth. According to Bloomberg, Gates's current net worth is around $175 billion.

Gates's decision to donate 99 percent of his wealth to Africa came after the US administration cut USAID funding to African countries following the DOGE investigations. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Bill Gates called out Elon Musk for cutting the USAID budget, saying Musk has a role in the death of the poorest children on earth.

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Meta’s data centres lie at the heart of its global operations, powering everything from social media platforms to artificial intelligence technologies. As demand for AI accelerates, these facilities require vast and consistent amounts of electricity to maintain performance, reliability, and uptime. Meta currently matches its electricity consumption with 100% clean and renewable energy. As energy demands increase, particularly due to the growth of AI workloads, the company is incorporating additional energy sources such as nuclear power to maintain a consistent supply.

Under the agreement, which begins in 2027, Meta will purchase 1,121 megawatts of emissions-free nuclear electricity from the Clinton plant in Illinois. The deal includes an additional 30 megawatts of capacity to the local grid and will help maintain the long-term operation of the facility without relying on state subsidies. It also supports over 1,100 local jobs and contributes $13.5 million annually in tax revenue.

In parallel with the Constellation agreement, Meta is progressing its previously announced Request for Proposals (RFP) for new nuclear capacity. Since the RFP was launched early this year, the company has received more than 50 qualified submissions from utilities, developers, and nuclear-technology manufacturers spanning over 20 states. Meta has shortlisted several projects with the aim of developing between 1 and 4 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity. These projects are intended to accelerate development where execution is feasible and timelines are clear.

Through both the Constellation agreement and its ongoing RFP process, Meta is positioning nuclear energy as a key component of its long-term energy strategy. This approach forms part of the company's "Tripling Nuclear Pledge," through which it aims to amplify the market for nuclear power in the United States.

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100,000 computer simulations reveal Milky Way's fate—and it might not be what we thought.

It's been textbook knowledge for over a century that our Milky Way galaxy is doomed to collide with another large spiral galaxy, Andromeda, in the next 5 billion years and merge into one even bigger galaxy. But a fresh analysis published in the journal Nature Astronomy is casting that longstanding narrative in a more uncertain light. The authors conclude that the likelihood of this collision and merger is closer to the odds of a coin flip, with a roughly 50 percent probability that the two galaxies will avoid such an event during the next 10 billion years.

Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies (M31) are part of what's known as the Local Group (LG), which also hosts other smaller galaxies (some not yet discovered) as well as dark matter (per the prevailing standard cosmological model). Both already have remnants of past mergers and interactions with other galaxies, according to the authors.

"Predicting future mergers requires knowledge about the present coordinates, velocities, and masses of the systems partaking in the interaction," the authors wrote. That involves not just the gravitational force between them but also dynamical friction. It's the latter that dominates when galaxies are headed toward a merger, since it causes galactic orbits to decay.

This latest analysis is the result of combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia space telescope to perform 100,000 Monte Carlo computer simulations, taking into account not just the Milky Way and Andromeda but the full LG system. Those simulations yielded a very different prediction: There is approximately a 50/50 chance of the galaxies colliding within the next 10 billion years. There is still a 2 percent chance that they will collide in the next 4 to 5 billion years. "Based on the best available data, the fate of our galaxy is still completely open," the authors concluded.

One confounding factor comes from two other LG galaxies: M33, a satellite galaxy, and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The simulations revealed that the former increases the likelihood of a collision, but this is countered by the fact that the LMC's orbit runs perpendicular to the Milky Way/Andromeda orbit.

"The Milky Way and Andromeda alone would remain in the same plane as they orbit each other, but this doesn't mean they need to crash. They could still go past each other,” said co-author Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki in Finland. “The extra mass of Andromeda’s satellite galaxy M33 pulls the Milky Way a little bit more towards it. However, we also show that the LMC pulls the Milky Way off the orbital plane and away from Andromeda. It doesn't mean that the LMC will save us from that merger, but it makes it a bit less likely.”

So is it time to rewrite the textbooks? Not quite yet. More data and even more analysis is needed to confirm these latest findings. “It's somewhat ironic that, despite the addition of more precise Hubble data taken in recent years, we are now less certain about the outcome of a potential collision," said Sawala. "That’s because of the more complex analysis and because we consider it a more complete system. But the only way to get to a new prediction about the eventual fate of the Milky Way will be with even better data.”

DOI: Nature Astronomy, 2025. 10.1038/s41550-025-02563-1  (About DOIs).

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