Brain-computer-interface startup Paradromics today announced that surgeons successfully inserted the company’s brain implant into a patient and safely removed it after about 10 minutes.

It’s a step toward longer trials of the device, dubbed Connexus. It’s also the latest commercial development in a growing field of companies—including Elon Musk’s Neuralink—aiming to connect people’s brains directly to computers.

With the Connexus, Austin-based Paradromics is looking to restore speech and communication in people with spinal cord injury, stroke, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS. The device is designed to translate neural signals into synthesized speech, text, and cursor control. Paradromics, which was founded in 2015, has been testing its implant in sheep for the past few years. This is the first time it has used the device in a human patient.

The procedure took place on May 14 at the University of Michigan and was conducted in a person who was undergoing brain surgery to treat their epilepsy. The patient gave their consent for the Connexus device to be temporarily inserted into their temporal lobe, which processes auditory information and encodes memory. To implant the device, surgeons used an EpiPen-like instrument developed by Paradromics. Researchers were then able to verify that the device was able to record electrical signals from the patient’s brain.

“There's a very unique opportunity when someone is undergoing a major neurosurgical procedure,” says Matt Angle, CEO of Paradromics. “They're going to have their skull opened up, and there's going to be a piece of brain that will be imminently removed. Under these conditions, the marginal risk of testing out a brain implant is actually very low.”

Paradromics’ implant is smaller than the size of a dime and has 420 tiny protruding needles that are pushed into the brain tissue. These needles are electrodes that record from individual neurons. Similarly, Neuralink’s implant also sits in the brain tissue. (By comparison, it has more than 1,000 electrodes distributed across 64 thin, flexible threads.) Other BCI companies are taking less invasive approaches. Precision Neuroscience, for instance, is testing an implant that rests on the surface of the brain, and Synchron has developed a device that goes in a blood vessel and rests against the brain. Both of these devices collect signals from groups of neurons, rather than individual ones.

“By having proximity to the individual neurons, you can get the highest-quality signal,” Angle says. Getting a high-resolution signal from the brain is important for accurately decoding a person’s intended speech.

BCIs do not directly “read” a person’s private thoughts. Instead, they work by interpreting the neural signals associated with movement intention. A BCI like the one Paradromics is developing would, for instance, decode the facial movements involved in talking. A person with paralysis who cannot move their mouth can still attempt to make that movement, which produces unique neural signals in the brain. Those signals are then decoded into speech.

In 2023, groups from Stanford University and UC San Francisco reported major advances in speech decoding using BCIs. In two women with paralysis, brain implants were able to decode intended speech at rates of 62 and 78 words per minute. For comparison, people speak at around 130 words per minute.

Paradromics is hoping to achieve similar results. The company plans to launch a clinical trial by the end of the year in patients with paralysis. Those participants would have the device implanted long-term.

“Bringing a new medical device to the market is really tough, and especially with a fully implantable brain device like they are designing,” says Justin Sanchez, a neurotechnology researcher at Battelle, an Ohio-based nonprofit focusing on tech. “When you're at that early stage in the regulatory process, you want to put it in a human brain, and you want to make sure that it receives the signals it should be receiving.”

For the past 20 years, an implant called the Utah array was the mainstay of BCI research. Resembling a miniature hairbrush with 100 spikelike electrodes, it has allowed people with paralysis to control robotic arms, move a computer cursor with their thoughts, and produce synthesized speech. But that device requires a pedestal on top of the head to connect to outside devices. It can also degrade over time and damage brain tissue. Paradromics, Neuralink, and others are all trying to improve upon that early array with longer-lasting materials, less obtrusive designs, and more electrodes to capture more data.

Matt Willsey, the University of Michigan neurosurgeon who led the procedure, says more electrodes could allow BCIs to have better performance and more functionality.

Eventually, Angle says, the company plans to study the feasibility of implanting up to four of its devices in the brain, which would mean even more recording ability. But first, it has to establish that one Connexus device is safe in a longer study. That comes next.

“This is really just a test of getting everything to the operating room, figuring out the procedure for the implant, making sure it stays operational and making sure they can remove it,” says Jennifer Collinger, a BCI researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s a nice dress rehearsal.”

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. May's list includes a nifty experiment to make a predicted effect of special relativity visible; a ping-pong playing robot that can return hits with 88 percent accuracy; and the discovery of the rare genetic mutation that makes orange cats orange, among other highlights.

Special relativity made visible

Perhaps the most well-known feature of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity is time dilation and length contraction. In 1959, two physicists predicted another feature of relativistic motion: an object moving near the speed of light should also appear to be rotated. It's not been possible to demonstrate this experimentally, however—until now. Physicists at the Vienna University of Technology figured out how to reproduce this rotational effect in the lab using laser pulses and precision cameras, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Physics.

They found their inspiration in art, specifically an earlier collaboration with an artist named Enar de Dios Rodriguez, who collaborated with VUT and the University of Vienna on a project involving ultra-fast photography and slow light. For this latest research, they used objects shaped like a cube and a sphere and moved them around the lab while zapping them with ultrashort laser pulses, recording the flashes with a high-speed camera.

Getting the timing just right effectively yields similar results to a light speed of 2 m/s. After photographing the objects many times using this method, the team then combined the still images into a single image. The results: the cube looked twisted and the sphere's North Pole was in a different location—a demonstration of the rotational effect predicted back in 1959.

DOI: Communications Physics, 2025. 10.1038/s42005-025-02003-6  (About DOIs).

Drumming chimpanzees

Chimpanzees are known to "drum" on the roots of trees as a means of communication, often combining that action with what are known as "pant-hoot" vocalizations (see above video). Scientists have found that the chimps' drumming exhibits key elements of musical rhythm much like humans, according to  a paper published in the journal Current Biology—specifically non-random timing and isochrony. And chimps from different geographical regions have different drumming rhythms.

Back in 2022, the same team observed that individual chimps had unique styles of "buttress drumming," which served as a kind of communication, letting others in the same group know their identity, location, and activity. This time around they wanted to know if this was also true of chimps living in different groups and whether their drumming was rhythmic in nature. So they collected video footage of the drumming behavior among 11 chimpanzee communities across six populations in East Africa (Uganda) and West Africa (Ivory Coast), amounting to 371 drumming bouts.

Their analysis of the drum patterns confirmed their hypothesis. The western chimps drummed in regularly spaced hits, used faster tempos, and started drumming earlier during their pant-hoot vocalizations. Eastern chimps would alternate between shorter and longer spaced hits. Since this kind of rhythmic percussion is one of the earliest evolved forms of human musical expression and is ubiquitous across cultures, findings such as this could shed light on how our love of rhythm evolved.

DOI: Current Biology, 2025. 10.1016/j.cub.2025.04.019  (About DOIs).

Distinctive styles of two jazz greats

Jazz lovers likely need no introduction to Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery, 20th century guitarists who influenced generations of jazz musicians with their innovative techniques. Montgomery, for instance, didn't use a pick, preferring to pluck the strings with his thumb—a method he developed because he practiced at night after working all day as a machinist and didn't want to wake his children or neighbors. Pass developed his own range of picking techniques, including fingerpicking, hybrid picking, and "flat picking."

Chirag Gokani and Preston Wilson, both with Applied Research Laboratories and the University of Texas, Austin, greatly admired both Pass and Montgomery and decided to explore the underlying the acoustics of their distinctive playing, modeling the interactions of the thumb, fingers, and pick with a guitar string. They described their research during a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans, LA.

Among their findings: Montgomery achieved his warm tone by playing closer to the bridge and mostly plucking at the string. Pass's rich tone arose from a combination of using a pick and playing closer to the guitar neck. There were also differences in how much a thumb, finger, and pick slip off the string:  use of the thumb (Montgomery) produced more of a "pluck" compared to the pick (Pass), which produced more of a "strike." Gokani and Wilson think their model could be used to synthesize digital guitars with a more realistic sound, as well as helping guitarists better emulate Pass and Montgomery.

Sounds of an ancient underground city

Turkey is home to the underground city Derinkuyu, originally carved out inside soft volcanic rock around the 8th century BCE. It was later expanded to include four main ventilation channels (and some 50,000 smaller shafts) serving seven levels, which could be closed off from the inside with a large rolling stone. The city could hold up to 20,000 people and it  was connected to another underground city, Kaymakli, via tunnels. Derinkuyu helped protect Arab Muslims during the Arab-Byzantine wars, served as a refuge from the Ottomans in the 14th century, and as a haven for Armenians escaping persecution in the early 20th century, among other functions.

The tunnels were rediscovered in the 1960s and about half of the city has been open to visitors since 2016. The site is naturally of great archaeological interest, but there has been little to no research on the acoustics of the site, particularly the ventilation channels—one of Derinkuyu's most unique features, according to Sezin Nas, an architectural acoustician at Istanbul Galata University in Turkey.  She gave a talk at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans, LA, about her work on the site's acoustic environment.

Nas analyzed a church, a living area, and a kitchen, measuring sound sources and reverberation patterns, among other factors, to create a 3D virtual soundscape. The hope is that a better understanding of this aspect of Derinkuyu could improve the design of future underground urban spaces—as well as one day using her virtual soundscape to enable visitors to experience the sounds of the city themselves.

MIT's latest ping-pong robot

Robots playing ping-pong have been a thing since the 1980s, of particular interest to scientists because it requires the robot to combine the slow, precise ability to grasp and pick up objects with dynamic, adaptable locomotion. Such robots need high-speed machine vision, fast motors and actuators, precise control, and the ability to make accurate predictions in real time, not to mention being able to develop a game strategy. More recent designs use AI techniques to allow the robots to "learn" from prior data to improve their performance.

MIT researchers have built their own version of a ping-pong playing robot, incorporating a lightweight design and the ability to precisely return shots. They built on prior work developing the Humanoid, a small bipedal two-armed robot—specifically, modifying the Humanoid's arm by adding an extra degree of freedom to the wrist so the robot could control a ping-pong paddle. They tested their robot by mounting it on a ping-pong table and lobbing 150 balls at it from the other side of the table, capturing the action with high-speed cameras.

The new bot can execute three different swing types (loop, drive, and chip) and during the trial runs it returned the ball with impressive accuracy across all three types: 88.4 percent, 89.2 percent, and 87.5 percent, respectively. Subsequent tweaks to theirrystem brought the robot's strike speed up to 19 meters per second (about 42 MPH), close to the 12 to 25 meters per second of advanced human players. The addition of control algorithms gave the robot the ability to aim. The robot still has limited mobility and reach because it has to be fixed to the ping-pong table but the MIT researchers plan to rig it to a gantry or wheeled platform in the future to address that shortcoming.

Why orange cats are orange

Cat lovers know orange cats are special for more than their unique coloring, but that's the quality that has intrigued scientists for almost a century. Sure, lots of animals have orange, ginger, or yellow hues, like tigers, orangutans, and golden retrievers. But in domestic cats that color is specifically linked to sex. Almost all orange cats are male. Scientists have now identified the genetic mutation responsible and it appears to be unique to cats, according to a paper published in the journal Current Biology.

Prior work had narrowed down the region on the X chromosome most likely to contain the relevant mutation. The scientists knew that females usually have just one copy of the mutation and in that case have tortoiseshell (partially orange) coloring, although in rare cases, a female cat will be orange if both X chromosomes have the mutation. Over the last five to ten years, there has been an explosion in genome resources (including complete sequenced genomes) for cats which greatly aided the team's research, along with taking additional DNA samples from cats at spay and neuter clinics.

From an initial pool of 51 candidate variants, the scientists narrowed it down to three genes, only one of which was likely to play any role in gene regulation: Arhgap36. It wasn't known to play any role in pigment cells in humans, mice, or non-orange cats. But orange cats are special; their mutation (sex-linked orange) turns on Arhgap36 expression in pigment cells (and only pigment cells), thereby interfering with the molecular pathway that controls coat color in other orange-shaded mammals. The scientists suggest that this is an example of how genes can acquire new functions, thereby enabling species to better adapt and evolve.

DOI: Current Biology, 2025. 10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.075  (About DOIs).

Not a Roman "massacre" after all

In 1936, archaeologists excavating the Iron Age hill fort Maiden Castle in the UK unearthed dozens of human skeletons, all showing signs of lethal injuries to the head and upper body—likely inflicted with weaponry. At the time, this was interpreted as evidence of a pitched battle between the Britons of the local Durotriges tribe and invading Romans. The Romans slaughtered the native inhabitants, thereby bringing a sudden violent end to the Iron Age. At least that's the popular narrative that has prevailed ever since in countless popular articles, books, and documentaries.

But a paper published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology calls that narrative into question. Archaeologists at Bournemouth University have re-analyzed those burials, incorporating radiocarbon dating into their efforts. They concluded that those individuals didn't die in a single brutal battle. Rather, it was Britons killing other Britons over multiple generations between the first century BCE and the first century CE—most likely in periodic localized outbursts of violence in the lead-up to the Roman conquest of Britain. It's possible there are still many human remains waiting to be discovered at the site, which could shed further light on what happened at Maiden Castle.

DOI: Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 2025. 10.1111/ojoa.12324  (About DOIs).

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will be especially unique: it was shot entirely on iPhone, including with a rig that held 20 iPhones at once.

Special camera rigs held up to 20 iPhones at a time

Danny Boyle’s 2002 hit zombie thriller, 28 Days Later, is getting a sequel this summer.

The new film, 28 Years Later, was shot entirely using the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Well, more accurately it was shot using a lot of iPhone 15 Pro Max models.

In a new article at IGN by Scott Collura, fresh details on the production and its challenges have been shared.

For example, there were three special iPhone rigs used for certain sequences:

“One for eight cameras, which can be carried very easily by one person, one for 10 cameras, and one for 20,” explains the director of the iPhone rigs. “I never say this, but there is an incredible shot in the second half [of the film] where we use the 20-rig camera, and you’ll know it when you see it. … It’s quite graphic but it’s a wonderful shot that uses that technique, and in a startling way that kind of kicks you into a new world rather than thinking you’ve seen it before.”

 

Boyle equates the 20-camera rig to “basically a poor man’s bullet time.” It allows flexibility for the filmmakers in terms of light and ease of use on location shoots, and it can be attached to cranes or a camera dolly or built into a location even.

 

“Wherever, it gives you 180 degrees of vision of an action, and in the editing you can select any choice from it, either a conventional one-camera perspective or make your way instantly around reality, time-slicing the subject, jumping forward or backward for emphasis,” he says. “As it’s a horror movie, we use it for the violent scenes to emphasise their impact.”

Danny Boyle mentions in the article that using the iPhone was not just some random challenge, it was a very strategic decision.

As Collura puts it, summarizing Boyle’s reasoning, “if an apocalypse did happen there would be low-fi recordings of the horrors laying around everywhere. Taking that idea 28 years later, the iPhone was of course the now-ubiquitous version of 2002’s camcorder.”

28 Years Later arrives in theaters on June 20, and you can watch the trailer here.

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Europa and Enceladus are two ocean moons that scientists have concluded have liquid water oceans underneath their outer icy shells. The Europa Clipper mission should reach Europa around April of 2030. If it collects data hinting at the moon’s potential habitability, robotic lander missions could be the only way to confirm if there’s really life in there or not.

To make these lander missions happen, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team has been working on a robot that could handle the search for life and already tested it on the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. “At this point this is a pretty mature concept,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at JPL who led this effort.

Into the unknown

There are only a few things we know for sure about conditions on the surface of Europa, and nearly all of them don’t bode well for lander missions. First, Europa is exposed to very harsh radiation, which is a problem for electronics. The window of visibility—when a potential robotic lander could contact Earth—lasts less than half of the 85 hours it takes for the moon to complete its day-night cycle due to the Europa-Jupiter orbit. So, for more than half the mission, the robot would need to fend for itself, with no human ground teams to get it out of trouble. The lander would also need to run on non-rechargeable batteries, because the vast distance to the Sun would make solar panels prohibitively massive.

And that’s just the beginning. Unlike on Mars, we don’t have any permanent orbiters around Europa that could provide a communication infrastructure, and we don’t have high-resolution imagery of the surface, which would make the landing particularly tricky. “We don't know what Europa's surface looks like at the centimeter to meter scale. Even with the Europa Clipper imagery, the highest resolution will be about half a meter per pixel across a few select regions,” Hand explains.

Because Europa has an extremely thin atmosphere that doesn’t provide any insulation, the temperatures on top of its ice shell are estimated to vary between minus-160° Celsius during the daytime maximum and minus-220° C during the night, which means the ice the lander would be there to sample is most likely hard as concrete. Hand’s team, building their robot, had to figure out a design that could deal with all these issues.

The work on the robotic system for the Europa lander mission began more than 10 years ago. Back then, the 2013–2022 decadal strategy for planetary science cited the Europa Clipper as the second-highest priority large-scale planetary mission, so a lander seemed like a natural follow-up.

Autonomy and ice drilling

The robot developed by Hand’s team has legs that enable it to stabilize itself on various types of surfaces, from rock-hard ice to loose, soft snow. To orient itself in the environment, it uses a stereoscopic camera with an LED light source for illumination hooked to computer-vision algorithms—a system similar to the one currently used by the Perseverance rover on Mars. “Stereoscopic cameras can triangulate points in an image and build a digital surface topography model,” explains Joseph Bowkett, a JPL researcher and engineer who worked on the robot’s design.

The team built an entirely new robotic arm with seven degrees of freedom. Force torque sensors installed in most of its joints act a bit like a nervous system, informing the robot when key components sustain excessive loads to prevent it from damaging the arm or the drill. “As we press down on the surface [and] conduct drilling and sampling, we can measure the forces and react accordingly,” Bowkett says. The finishing touch was the ICEPICK, a drilling and sampling tool the robot uses to excavate samples from the ice up to 20 centimeters deep.

Because of long periods the lander would need operate without any human supervision, the team also gave it a wide range of autonomous systems, which operate at two different levels. High-level autonomy is responsible for scheduling and prioritizing tasks within a limited energy budget. The robot can drill into a sampling site, analyze samples with onboard instruments, and decide whether it makes sense to keep drilling at the same spot or choose a different sampling site. The high-level system is also tasked with choosing the most important results for downlink back to Earth.

Low-level autonomy breaks all these high-level tasks down into step-by-step decisions on how to operate the drill and how to move the arm in the safest and most energy-efficient way.

The robot was tested in simulation software first, then indoors at JPL’s facilities, and finally at the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska, where it was lowered from a helicopter that acted as a proxy for a landing vehicle. It was tested at three different sites, ranked from the easiest to the most challenging. It completed all the baseline activities as well as all of the extras. The latter included a task like drilling 27 centimeters deep into ice at the most difficult site, where it was awkwardly positioned on an eight-to-12-degree slope. The robot passed all the tests with flying colors.

And then it got shelved.

Switching the ocean worlds

Hand’s team put their Europa landing robot through the Alaskan field test campaign between July and August 2022. But when the new decadal strategy for planetary science came out in 2023, it turned out that the Europa lander was not among the missions selected. The National Academies committee responsible for formulating these decadal strategies did not recommend giving it a go, mainly because they believed harsh radiation in the Jovian system would make detecting biosignatures “challenging” for a lander.

An Enceladus lander, on the other hand, remained firmly on the table. “I was also on the team developing EELS, a robot intended for a potential Enceladus mission, so thankfully I can speak about both. The radiation challenges are indeed far greater for Europa,” Bowkett says.

Another argument for changing our go-to ocean world is that water plumes containing salts along with carbon- and nitrogen-bearing molecules have already been observed on Enceladus, which means there is a slight chance biosignatures could be detected by a flyby mission. The surface of Enceladus, according to the decadal strategy document, should be capable of preserving biogenic evidence for a long time and seems more conducive to a lander mission. “Luckily, many of the lessons on how to conduct autonomous sampling on Europa, we believe, will transfer to Enceladus, with the benefit of a less damaging radiation environment,” Bowkett told Ars.

The dream of a Europa landing is not completely dead, though. “I would love to get into the Europa’s ocean with a submersible and further down to the seafloor. I would love for that to happen,” Hand says. “But technologically it’s quite a big leap, and you always have to balance your dream missions with the number of technological miracles that need to be solved to make these missions possible.”

Science Robotics, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adi5582

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Welcome to Edition 7.46 of the Rocket Report! As I write this, the date is May 29. From a meteorological standpoint, "spring" ends in fewer than three days. Summer lasts from June 1 through August 31. Consider this a public service announcement for launch companies targeting "spring" and "summer" launches for various missions.

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

Xodiac rocket makes its final flight. Originally built by Masten Space Systems, the suborbital Xodiac rocket had flown 175 successful missions before a flight from Mojave, California, on Wednesday. But now, it will fly no more. "While the vehicle remained within its planned flight envelope, it detected an anomalous condition and commanded a flight termination," said Astrobotic, which acquired Masten a couple of years ago. "This resulted in a rapid descent and caused a loss of the vehicle upon impact with its launch pad."

Now entering the Xogdor waiting room ... There were no injuries or significant damage to the company's infrastructure in Mojave. The vehicle is essentially a hopper and has been used in recent years by various customers, including companies building commercial lunar landers, to test their hazard-detection systems. Astrobotic has been working on a larger version of Xodiac, which it is calling Xogdor.

Chinese firm tests Grasshopper-like rocket. Chinese private rocket firm Space Epoch said Thursday it had successfully run a flight recovery test, Reuters reports. Beijing-based Space Epoch, or SEPOCH, said its Yuanxingzhe-1 verification rocket was launched at 4:40 am from a sea-based platform off the waters of the eastern province of Shandong. The rocket soared upward, its engines briefly shutting down after the peak of its trajectory, then reigniting as it began its vertical descent to enter the Yellow Sea in a circle of fire, a video posted on Space Epoch's WeChat account showed.

Chasing the Falcon 9 ... The flight lasted 125 seconds, reaching a height of about 2.5 km (1.6 miles), the company said. Last year, another Chinese launch company, LandSpace, completed a 10-km (6.2-mile) VTVL test, marking China's first in-flight engine reignition in descent. Both companies are pushing to make debut tests of their reusable rockets later this year.

Florida company aims to acquire F-4 Phantoms for launch. Starfighters International, a company best known for doing air shows, is now seeking to move into air launch. Based at Kennedy Space Center, the company is in the process of acquiring a dozen F-4 Phantoms, a Cold War-era fighter jet, TWZ reports. Starfighters International is seeking to acquire the F-4 aircraft from South Korea.

Press F-4 to doubt? ... Based upon the information in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company is considering both a suborbital and orbital launch capability for small satellites, which would fly to space on a small rocket deployed from the F-4 Phantom. In my experience, air-based launch systems always seem like a better idea on paper than in reality. Perhaps there is some potential for hypersonics here, but I would be shocked to ever see a satellite launched into orbit from a fighter jet. (submitted by Biokleen)

Rocket Lab acquires Geost. Rocket Lab is expanding deeper into the defense sector with the acquisition of Geost, a supplier of electro-optical and infrared sensor payloads used in US military satellites, Space News reports. In a deal announced Tuesday, Rocket Lab will acquire Geost from the private equity firm ATL Partners for $125 million in cash and $150 million in stock, with an additional $50 million in potential cash payments tied to revenue targets in 2026 and 2027.

Seeking mil money ... The acquisition gives Rocket Lab access to satellite sensor technology used by the US Department of Defense for missile-warning systems and space surveillance—capabilities that could help it win lucrative Pentagon contracts. "The acquisition of Geost will bring on board critical technology and payloads that are relied upon by the Department of Defense," said Rocket Lab’s chief executive, Peter Beck. Rocket Lab has been seeking to expand its military contracts in recent years, and this move is consistent with that.

Northrop names rocket, invests in Firefly. Northrop Grumman announced Thursday that it is investing $50 million into Firefly Aerospace to further development of a medium-lift rocket. The company also revealed that the rocket will be named "Eclipse." The rocket will be capable of launching up to 16,300 kg of cargo to low-Earth orbit or 3,200 kg of cargo to geosynchronous transfer orbit, and initially it will likely be used for Cygnus cargo missions to the International Space Station.

A match made in heaven? ... Eclipse will use the same first stage Firefly is developing for the Northrop Grumman Antares 330 rocket. Both launch vehicles will use seven of Firefly’s Miranda engines. The new rocket is expected to make its debut no earlier than 2026 (and, if history is any guide, probably later). "Eclipse gives customers the right balance of payload capacity and affordability," Northrop Vice President Wendy Williams said in a statement. "Our partnership with Firefly builds on our capacity to provide crucial space-based communication, observation, and exploration for civil and national security customers."

China launches asteroid mission. A Chinese spacecraft built to collect specimens from an unexplored asteroid and return them to Earth launched Wednesday from a military-run spaceport in the country's mountainous interior, Ars reports. The liftoff aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base kicked off the second mission in a series of Chinese probes to explore the Solar System. This mission, designated Tianwen-2, follows the Tianwen-1 mission, which became the first Chinese spacecraft to land on Mars in 2021.

Sending samples home ... China has two objectives for Tianwen-2. First, Tianwen-2 will fly to a near-Earth asteroid designated 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, or 2016 HO3. Once there, the spacecraft will retrieve a rocky sample from the asteroid's surface and bring the material back to Earth in late 2027 for analysis in labs. After the spacecraft releases its sample carrier to land on Earth, Tianwen-2 will change course and head to a mysterious comet-like object found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Next Kuiper launch gets a June date. United Launch Alliance said Thursday that an Atlas V rocket will launch its second batch of Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites next month. The Atlas V 551 rocket launch is planned for 2:29 pm ET on June 13 from Space Launch Complex-41, pending range approval.

A speedy turnaround ... Amazon also confirmed that it has finished processing the Kuiper satellites for the launch, saying all 27 spacecraft have been integrated onto the rocket. Getting to space in June with this mission will mark an impressive turnaround from Amazon, given that its KA-01 mission, also with 27 Internet satellites, launched on April 28.

SpaceX set to launch another GPS satellite. SpaceX is gearing up to launch a Global Positioning System satellite for the US military on Friday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, marking another high-profile national security mission that shifted from United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan to the Falcon 9 rocket, Space News reports. The launch of GPS III SV-08—the eighth satellite in the GPS III constellation—was originally assigned to United Launch Alliance but was switched to SpaceX as the military prioritizes getting advanced anti-jamming capabilities into orbit as quickly as possible.

Gotta go fast ... This marks the second consecutive GPS III satellite to be switched from ULA to SpaceX, following December’s launch of GPS III SV-07. ULA’s Vulcan, which received certification to launch national security missions, continues to face delays and has accumulated a backlog of military launches. In a press call this week, Space Force officials said the mission was executed on an unusually accelerated timeline. Launch planning for GPS III SV-08 kicked off in February, with Lockheed Martin receiving a formal request on February 21 and SpaceX following on March 7, just under three months ahead of liftoff. That’s an extraordinary pace for a national security launch, they said, which typically takes 18 to 24 months from contract award.

Another Starship launch, another second-stage issue. SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world's most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program's two previous launches, Ars reports. But minutes into the mission, SpaceX's Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border. During the rocket's two previous test flights—each using an upgraded "Block 2" Starship design—problems in the ship's propulsion system led to leaks during launch, eventually triggering an early shutdown of the rocket's main engines.

Not great, not terrible ... On both flights, the vehicle spun out of control and broke apart, spreading debris over an area near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The good news is that that didn't happen on Tuesday. The ship's main engines fired for their full duration, putting the vehicle on its expected trajectory toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. For a short time, it appeared the ship was on track for a successful flight. The bad news is that Tuesday's test flight revealed more problems, preventing SpaceX from achieving the most important goals Musk outlined going into the launch, including testing Starship's reentry tiles.

Elon Musk talks Starship version 3. In an interview with Ars Technica, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he expects that an upgraded version of Starship—essentially Block 3 of the vehicle with upgraded Raptor engines—should fly before the end of the year. The business end of the rocket will have a sleek look: "The upgraded Raptors have a complete redesign of the aft end of the booster and the ship," Musk said. "So, because we don't need the heat shield around the upper portion of the engine, it greatly simplifies the base of the booster and the ship. It'll look a little, frankly, naked, especially on the booster side, because the engines will just be there, like, not with stuff around them."

A difficult upgrade to work through ... "This is a design change that I really had to push the team very hard to do, to get rid of any secondary structure, and any parts that could get burned off because there will be no heat shield," Musk added. "So it'll be very clear when we have a Raptor 3. Version 3 of the Ship and Booster has quite a radical redesign." Given the challenges that version 2 of Starship has faced with its recent flights, an upgrade in the overall design appears to be much-needed.

Next three launches

May 30: Falcon 9 | GPS III SV-08 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:23 UTC

May 31: New Shepard | NS-32 | Launch Site One, West Texas | 13:30 UTC

May 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-18 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20:01 UTC

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The ability to study ancient DNA has revolutionized our ability to understand our own species' past. It has clarified our relationship with Neanderthals and revealed the existence of Denisovans. But even in the most favorable environments, DNA degrades over time, setting a limit on how far back we can hope to resolve questions about our ancestors. And most of the species we've had trouble understanding lived in Africa, where the conditions are far less favorable for DNA's survival.

But a large international team has now found another way to get some information about the genetics out of far older remains. They've extracted fragments of enamel proteins from the teeth of fossils of the species Paranthropus robustus and used them to test whether the remains truly belonged to one species, despite dramatic differences in size. Because one of the proteins is male-specific, they also found the size of the individual wasn't necessarily related to its sex.

A complicated species

Remains that have been classified as Paranthropus show up in the fossil record nearly 3 million years ago and persist for roughly a million years. That means it overlapped both with australopithecines and early members of the Homo genus. Four different species have been assigned to this genus, but the situation is complicated. It shares a lot of similarities with some species of Australopithecus, raising the possibility of interbreeding. There's also a lot of variation within remains identified as Paranthropus, notably in the size of individuals. Some have suggested that this might be due to male/female differences in this species (termed "sexual dimorphism"), but that has been difficult to test.

Unfortunately, no remains have been found outside of Africa, and no DNA older than 20,000 years has been recovered from that continent—well after Paranthropus went extinct. So, for Paranthropus remains that date from roughly 2 million years ago, the team turned to proteins found in teeth. These inevitably get damaged over time—broken down into smaller fragments, with some amino acids chemically altered. But the robust nature of tooth enamel should prevent their wholesale destruction.

And the technique known as mass spectrometry is sensitive enough to identify individual isotopes of atoms incorporated into larger molecules. Using this, the researchers could identify the likely composition of individual fragments of proteins and match those to known tooth enamel proteins.

After testing their techniques on animal remains found with the hominins, the researchers turned to samples from the Paranthropus teeth, all found at the same site within South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind World Heri­tage Site. While the proteins identified varied from sample to sample, they found six different proteins that were present in all four of the teeth studied, though again, only as fragments. Collectively, those fragments covered 425 amino acids of the six proteins.

To confirm that the results, generated in a lab in Copenhagen, were real, they repeated the process at a lab in Cape Town. The successful replication was bolstered by the fact that some of the amino acids showed signs of chemical damage, indicating that they really were pieces of 2 million-year-old proteins.

Reading amino acids

So, what could small bits of ancient proteins tell us? In this case, more than you might expect. That's because one of the enamel proteins, AMELY, comes from a gene that's located on the Y chromosome (there's also an AMELX gene on the X chromosome). And some of the protein fragments identified in a subset of the four remain clearly included pieces of AMELY, indicating that the tooth had come from a male individual.

That turns out to be critical to testing the idea that body size is an indication of sex differences in Paranthropus. One of the samples was a small tooth that had been suggested to be from a female individual, but the presence of AMELY unambiguously identifies it as male. That's an important result because, as the researchers put it, "it enables us to exclude sexual dimorphism as one of the multiple variables affecting the range of anatomical variation," in this species.

The absence of AMELY suggests that a sample is female, but it isn't definitive. That's both because it's impossible to rule out some problem with identifying the protein in samples this old, and in part because some rare males (including at least one Neanderthal) carry deletions that eliminate the gene entirely.

Another key aspect is that some of the 425 amino acid locations differ between hominin species, and even individual members of Paranthropus. Thus, they can potentially serve as a diagnostic of the relationships between and within species and help address some of the confusion about how many species of Paranthropus there were and their relationship with other hominins. While it's difficult to say too much with only four samples, the researchers found some suggestive evidence.

For example, they tested whether you might see the sort of amino acid variation found among these samples if they all belonged to the same species. This was done by randomly choosing four human genomes and examining whether they had a similar level of variation. They concluded that it was "plausible" that you'd see this level of variation among any four individuals that were chosen at random, but the population of modern humans is likely to be larger than that of Paranthropus, so the test wasn't definitive.

Among the 425 different amino acids were 16 that had species-specific variations among hominins. Somewhat surprisingly, Paranthropus robustus is the most closely related species to our own genus, Homo, based on a tree built from these variations. Again, however, they conclude that there simply isn't enough data available to feel confident in this conclusion.

But that should really be an "isn't enough data yet." We heard about this paper from regular Ars reader Enrico Cappellini, who happens to be its senior author and faculty at the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute. And a quick look over his faculty profile indicates that developing the techniques used here is his major research focus, so hopefully we'll be able to expand the data available on extinct hominin species with time. The challenge, as noted in the paper, is that the technique destroys a small part of the sample, and these samples are one-of-a-kind pieces of the collective history of all of humanity.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt9539  (About DOIs).

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It looks like some kind of seed pod or pine cone caught mid-explosion. At the center, there’s a jumble of trumpets-turned-terraria—conical containers for space-going plants—and from this central core extend more than two dozen curved and spindly arms, each with a heavy-looking disc at its end.

This is a Space Garden. Well, a one-third-scale model of one that was exhibited last week at the Venice Biennale exhibition in Italy. The people who came up with Space Garden want to send a full-size version, stocked with real plants and seeds, to low Earth orbit within the next five to seven years.

It is, in part, an effort to reimagine what life in space could be like. “People will commute to space for work,” asserts Ariel Ekblaw, CEO of Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space architecture design lab. And they’re going to appreciate having some greenery around when they get up there, she adds. “If we start with nature, we might go on a more fruitful pathway to a life worth living in space,” explains Stuart Wood, executive partner at Heatherwick Studio, a London-based design and architecture firm that is collaborating with Aurelia Institute on the Space Garden project.

For decades, astronauts have dabbled in space gardening. Russian cosmonauts were the first to grow plants in space during the 1970s—their crops included onions, some of which were later eaten by residents aboard the Salyut 1 space station. Other orbital adventurers have grown thale cress, tomatoes, zinnias—and a Chinese probe even carried cotton seeds to the far side of the moon in 2019. Two weeks post-landing, the seeds had sprouted (but, ahem, they soon froze to death during the outrageously cold lunar night).

While off-world agriculture has long seemed nascent and experimental, that could soon change. Researchers are currently pushing plants and seeds to extraordinary limits, to test their space-hardiness—often with encouraging results. Space-travelling vegetation must battle cosmic radiation, uneven temperatures, air that isn’t quite like the air on Earth, and many other challenges.

Intrepid flora could help otherwise artificial and sterile environments—space stations, pods, and capsules—seem more like home, though. The designers of Space Garden say it’s time orbital horticulture took a quantum leap, something like the giant interstellar greenhouses of the film Silent Running. They want to include “hero” species at the center of their cosmic garden, chosen for their aesthetic or cultural significance, in order to connect rocket men and women with the beautiful Earth below. Perhaps a small fig or pomegranate tree, for example. “It’s not all watercress and lettuce,” says Wood.

But the journey, invariably, begins with seeds. People who want to boldly sow where no-one has sown before already have a wealth of studies to pore over. And quite a few of them have been carried out by Mike Dixon at the University of Guelph in Canada, and colleagues. Dixon has sent literally millions of seeds into space over the years. Generally, once back on Earth, they germinate without problems.

In 2021, he and others sent seeds to the International Space Station (ISS). While in space, they were contained within a contraption positioned outside the cocoon-like environment of the space station itself, a suitcase-shaped enclosure called the Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE). “Quite frankly, I didn’t expect the ones outside the space station to survive,” says Dixon. But they did. The seeds were exposed to some cosmic radiation, but being in a shaded position aboard MISSE, they were spared the worst of the rays, and their temperature never exceeded 50 degrees Celsius. Truly direct sunlight in the vacuum of space can be incredibly intense.

Research also suggests that, once plants sprout in space, they might cope with a fair amount of interstellar abuse. They don’t mind reduced pressure and oxygen levels, says Dixon. And while temperatures must be kept within a reasonable threshold—consider those short-lived cotton plants on the moon—plants are more tolerant of such variation than mammals, including humans, says Dixon: “Plants won’t be the limitation in our exploration of space—it’s us. We’re kind of wimpy in many respects.”

But space gardeners will still need to be conscientious growers. Ye Zhang of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center has carried out extensive research on space-going seeds and has noticed differences in the hardiness of certain species. “Tomatoes and lettuces are sensitive to the space environment, especially,” she says, referring to previous work. In 2021, she and colleagues also sent seeds to MISSE, which after eight months returned to Earth. They were held in little foil-lined packets, just like the seed packets you buy at garden centers. All of the seeds, for various different plants including kale, radish, and carrot, germinated reliably, suggesting that their position within the MISSE device was protective enough to ensure seed survival.

As for actually cultivating large numbers of plants in orbit in the future, a key challenge will be water management, suggests Zhang, noting that plants’ uptake of water might vary in space: “Overwatering will stress the plants, and then the plants will be more susceptible to microbial or other problems.” Separately, seeds can clearly survive the powerful vibrations of a rocket launch, but certain established plants might not. Plus, it remains an open question as to how certain plants will fare on really long space voyages that last, say, multiple years.

Zhang adds that further research will help us understand how space travel changes the genes in seeds and plants, since that could significantly affect how they grow. There are already hints that genes related to plants’ immune systems turn on or off in space—which might influence their resistance to infections, for example.

A concept such as Space Garden, however, peers past these details to a future where the intricacies of off-world horticulture are largely solved. For Ekblaw and her colleagues, the vision depends partly on spaceflight becoming far more accessible than it is today. Launching things into orbit is going to have to get a lot cheaper and fall from thousands of dollars per kilogram at present to perhaps as little as $100–200 per kilogram, which some analysts predict will happen. “That’s like Fedex, that’s like DHL,” says Ekblaw.

She imagines industrial activity in space, freeing up land on Earth. Hollywood directors shooting films in orbit. And botanists traveling back and forth to check on their Space Gardens. She and her colleagues are currently seeking funding to help make their concept a space-going reality. The model, made by London-based design firm Millimetre, is for display only. A real version, if it ever flies, would also be uninhabited by humans, at least initially. I ask why her team was so desperate to come up with an aesthetically pleasing design, in that case. It’s “something that can recapture the public’s imagination,” she explains.

Space Garden with its appendages closed.

Photograph: Raquel Diniz

 

These can be opened to give the garden’s plants access to light.

Photograph: Raquel Diniz

 

But is it practical? The thin, lobe-bearing arms that protrude from Space Garden look very fragile. Ekblaw says these telescopic appendages will typically be retracted. “Most of the time, the structure looks a little more like a berry—without those spindly arms,” she adds. When closed, the lobes will shield plants at the center, behind their thick windows, from light—but the structure can open up in order to let light reach the plants. It’s a mechanically controlled alternative to Earth’s day-night cycle.

Eventually, Ekblaw suggests, astronauts might occasionally stop by Space Garden to collect samples from it. Open-source data tracking the environmental conditions on board, and plant growth rates, would also add to our understanding of how to cultivate food successfully in space, she says.

When I show Space Garden to Dixon, he says it looks “fancy” and immediately opines that there might not be much need to grow food in space anytime soon: “We can arm ourselves with enough supplies to manage that.” He says he cannot see “large-scale” gardens floating around in space, but he does say that the psychological benefit of having familiar plants alongside astronauts is “a good idea.”

Alistair Griffiths, director of science at the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society, was involved in a project that sent rocket seeds—an apt choice—to the ISS with British astronaut Tim Peake in 2015. Of the Space Garden idea, given its complicated shape, he says there could be some practical challenges when transporting such a design, but he praises the overall approach: “I think it should be beautiful and linked in to nature.”

Gardens here on Earth are incredibly diverse. They contain plants and design features that represent the personalities of the people behind them. Space gardens might be no different. Given the chance, green-fingered astronauts will surely bring their preferences with them.

Dixon, for one, has long experimented with barley seeds, sending many to orbit and back to Earth, with much of his research supported by the Glenlivet whiskey distillery in Scotland. “It’s my bucket list. I’m going to grow barley on the moon,” he says.

For Griffiths, another option comes to mind. “I would grow a strawberry plant,” he says after a moment considering the many possibilities. “But a strawberry plant that also has bright red petals.” Fragaria x ananassa is the cultivar he selects. If it’s going all the way to space, it’s got to be extra pretty as well as edible, he argues.

Someone’s going to have to come up with a Space Dairy, though, if anyone up there wants fresh cream with their cosmic strawbs.

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Some species of hummingbird are adapting to urban life by undergoing evolutionary changes in their anatomy, influenced by the proliferation of artificial drinking fountains. According to some biologists, this might show that these birds are on their way to becoming commensal with humans—benefiting from living closely alongside them—like pigeons have in urban areas.

A recent study found that the size and shape of the beaks of Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna), a species native to North America, have changed. A hummingbird’s beak is naturally long and slender in order to access nectar located in deep inside flowers. However, in recent decades, the beaks of urban Anna’s hummingbirds have evolved to be significantly longer and larger to better access sugar-laced drinking fountains installed outside of homes, which have proliferated in urban areas. This adaptation suggests that these feeders offer hummingbirds more food than nectar-filled flowers.

The study, which looked at reported sightings of the birds as well museum specimens from the past 160 years, also found that males are developing sharper, more pointed beaks, possibly to compete with other hummingbirds for access to these sugar-filled fountains.

Populations of these hummingbirds expanded northward in California at the same time as the establishment of urban centers where feeding could take place. The researchers discovered that the population density of Calypte anna has also increased over time, and found that this appears to be linked to the proliferation of feeding fountains and nectar-producing eucalyptus trees, both of which were introduced to the region by humans.

These morphological changes to the hummingbirds have occurred rapidly. According to the study, Calypte anna populations in 1930 were very different from those in 1950, when the birds’ bills had already begun to grow. In just 20 years, equivalent to about 10 generations of these birds, evolution left its mark, the authors note.

To conduct the research, the team used sighting data for the species in all 58 Californian counties between 1938 and 2019, in addition to analyzing specimens preserved in museums. They also turned to old newspaper advertisements to estimate the number of feeders in use during the last century. Finally, they developed a computational model to predict hummingbird expansion, taking into account assisted feeding and the presence of eucalyptus trees.

“They seem to be moving where we are going and changing quite rapidly to succeed in their new environments. We can think of the Anna’s hummingbird as a commensal species, similar to pigeons,” says Nicolas Alexandre, coauthor of the study and a geneticist at Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and de-extinction company based in Dallas, Texas.

Hummingbird feeders or drinkers use sugar water to attract hummingbirds and provide food during seasons when flower nectar is scarce. According to the journal Science, one of the oldest records of these devices dates back to 1928, although they were probably in use much earlier. In general, they do not pose a risk to the species, as long as they are cleaned regularly to avoid the proliferation of bacteria and fungi that can affect hummingbirds.

Another species of bird, the common pigeon (Columba livia) has also adapted to living in cities. Pigeons can be found in urban spaces around the world, taking advantage of the plentiful nesting sites and food that cities have to offer. They exist in urban environments without having a significant impact on human activities, this being a clear example of commensalism, where one species gains advantages by linking with another without directly harming it.

Columba livia originally inhabited rocky areas of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. However, it was domesticated more than 5,000 years ago as a source of food and due to its excellent sense of direction, which meant the birds could be used for carrying written messages. As a result, many were released into new habitats, with some choosing to live in cities, becoming part of the urban fauna. Today, they are one of the most common birds in the world.

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

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A Chinese spacecraft built to collect specimens from an unexplored asteroid and return them to Earth successfully launched Wednesday from a military-run spaceport in the country's mountainous interior.

Liftoff aboard a Long March 3B rocket at 1:31 pm EDT (17:31 UTC) from the Xichang launch base kicked off the second mission in a series of Chinese probes to explore the Solar System. This mission, designated Tianwen-2, follows the Tianwen-1 mission, which became the first Chinese spacecraft to land on Mars in 2021.

Chinese officials confirmed the 2.1-metric ton Tianwen-2 spacecraft unfurled its fan-shaped solar arrays shortly after launch, marking an auspicious start to a decade-long tour of the Solar System.

China's objectives for Tianwen-2 are two-fold. First, Tianwen-2 will fly to a near-Earth asteroid designated 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, or 2016 HO3. Once there, the spacecraft will retrieve a rocky sample from the asteroid's surface and bring the material back to Earth in late 2027 for analysis in labs. After the spacecraft releases its sample carrier to land on Earth, Tianwen-2 will change course and head to a mysterious comet-like object found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Tianwen-2 will become the first Chinese spacecraft to bring home celestial material from beyond the Moon, where China has landed two previous sample retrieval missions. China's exploits at the Moon have made its space program the world leader in 21st century lunar exploration, at least for now.

Two in one

But the Chinese space program lags behind the United States in exploring the Solar System. NASA and Japan's space agency have returned samples from asteroids before, while the European Space Agency has orbited a comet. Tianwen-2 will attempt to do both on a single mission.

Scientists believe the asteroid selected for Tianwen-2 is less than 60 meters, or 200 feet, in diameter, and could be made of material thrown off the Moon some time in its ancient past. Results from Tianwen-2 may confirm that hypothesis.

Asteroid Kamoʻoalewa is a unique target for a sample return mission. The asteroid is a "quasi-satellite" of the Earth, meaning its orbit around the Sun closely matches that of our own planet. This keeps Kamoʻoalewa relatively close to Earth throughout the year, making it an attractive candidate for a sample return mission.

That's one reason why Tianwen-2's roundtrip journey to asteroid Kamoʻoalewa will last just two-and-a-half years. Japan's Hayabusa 2 asteroid sample return mission lasted six years from launch through its return to Earth, while NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission made the trip to an asteroid back in seven years. Both visited near-Earth asteroids more distant than Kamoʻoalewa, where Tianwen-2 will arrive in July 2026 and start searching for a location to retrieve samples.

Tianwen-2 will try to collect samples in several ways. One method will involve maneuvering the spacecraft close to the surface and matching the asteroid's rotation, and extending a robotic arm to gather specimens. The spacecraft will also descend to the asteroid's surface for a "touch-and-go" similar to the way Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft and NASA's OSIRIS-REx sampled their asteroids.

Scientists also hope to try another sampling method known as "anchor-and-attach," where the spacecraft will secure itself to the asteroid's surface using four arms with drills at the ends of them. Chinese officials have not said how much material they hope to bring back to Earth, but Tianwen-2 is reportedly designed to collect at least 100 grams of rocks and dust from the asteroid.

Mission planners know little about the shape of Kamoʻoalewa, but long-range measurements suggest it spins once every 28 minutes, relatively fast for an asteroid. This spin rate, coupled with the object's tenuous gravity, will complicate Tianwen-2's maneuvers near the asteroid.

Once it has the samples in hand, Tianwen-2 will depart the asteroid in early 2027 and head for Earth, where it will release a reentry module containing bits of Kamoʻoalewa for landing in late 2027. Researchers will study the specimens to determine their basic physical properties, chemical, mineral, and isotopic compositions, textures, and structures, according to a paper published in the research journal Earth and Planetary Physics.

In the paper, four Chinese scientists write that results from the sample return will not only improve knowledge of asteroids, but could tell us about the Earth and the Moon.

"Confirming the origin of Kamo’oalewa, from its prevailing provenance as debris of the Moon, could be a promising start to inferring the evolutionary history of the Moon," the scientists write in the journal. "This history would probably include a more comprehensive view of the lunar far side and the origin of the asymmetry between the two sides of the Moon."

Tianwen-2's mothership, with 11 scientific instruments, will commence the second phase of its mission after dropping off the asteroid specimens at Earth. The probe's next journey will bring it near an enigma in the asteroid belt named 311P/PanSTARRS in the mid-2030s. This object is one in a rare class of objects known as active asteroids or main-belt comets, small worlds that have tails and comas like comets but loiter in orbits most commonly associated with asteroids. Tianwen-2 will be the first mission to see such an object up close.

Stepping into the Solar System

Until the last few years, China's space program has primarily centered on the Moon as a destination for scientific exploration. The Moon remains the main target for China's ambitions in space, with the goal of accomplishing a human lunar landing by 2030. But the country is looking farther afield, too.

With the Tianwen-1 mission in 2021, China became the second country to achieve a soft landing on Mars. After Tianwen-2, China will again go to Mars with the Tianwen-3 sample return mission slated for launch in 2028.

Tianwen, which means "questions to heaven," is the name given to China's program of robotic Solar System exploration. Tianwen-3 has a chance to become the first mission to return pristine samples from Mars to Earth. At the same time, NASA's plans for a Mars Sample Return mission are faltering.

China is looking at launching Tianwen-4 around 2029 to travel to Jupiter and enter orbit around Callisto, one of its four largest moons. In the 2030s, China's roadmap includes a mission to return atmospheric samples from Venus to Earth, a Mars research station, and a probe to Neptune.

Meanwhile, NASA has sent spacecraft to study ever planet in the Solar System, and currently has spacecraft at or on the way to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, a metal asteroid, and in interstellar space. Another US science mission, Dragonfly, is scheduled for launch in 2028 on a daring expedition to Saturn's moon Titan.

But NASA's science division is bracing for severe budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump. In planetary science, the White House's budget blueprint calls for canceling a joint US-European Mars Sample Return mission and several other projects, including the DAVINCI mission to Venus.

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Uranus, the seventh planet in the Solar System, located between Saturn and Neptune, has long been a mystery. But by analyzing observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope over a 20-year period, a research team from the University of Arizona and other institutions has provided new insights into the composition and dynamics of the planet’s atmosphere.

Information about Uranus is limited. What we know is that the planet is composed mainly of water and ammonia ice, its diameter is about 51,000 kilometers, about four times that of the Earth, and its mass is about 15 times greater than Earth’s. Uranus also has 13 rings and 28 satellites.

In January 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe successfully completed what has been, to date, the only exploration of the planet, conducting a flyby as part of its mission to study the outer planets of the Solar System.

This image of Uranus was taken by NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe in January 1986.

Credit: NASA/JPL

But thanks to this new research, we now know a little more about this icy giant. According to the research, which assessed Hubble images taken between 2002 and 2022, the main components of Uranus’ atmosphere are hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane and very small amounts of water and ammonia. Uranus appears pale blue-green because methane absorbs the red component of sunlight.

This image of Uranus, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows nine of the planet’s 28 satellites and its rings.

Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI

The research has also shed light on the planet’s seasons.

Unlike all of the other planets in the Solar System, Uranus’ axis of rotation is almost parallel to its orbital plane. For this reason, Uranus is said to be orbiting in an “overturned” position, as shown in the picture below. It is hypothesized that this may be due to a collision with an Earth-sized object in the past.

Uranus orbiting the Sun. It can be seen that Uranus’ axis of rotation is almost parallel to its orbital plane.

Credit: NASA/ESA/J. Feild (STSCI)

The planet’s orbital period is about 84 years, which means that, for a specific point on the surface, the period when the sun shines (some of spring, summer, and some of fall) lasts about 42 years, and the period when the sun does not shine (some of fall, winter, and some of spring) lasts for about 42 years as well. In this study, the research team spent 20 years observing the seasons.

Over that period, the research team watched as the south polar region darkened going into winter and the north polar region brightened as summer approached. By observing the planet at four different points in time, years apart, they could see how the gradual shifting of the seasons affected the planet. The top row shows how the planet appeared when viewing it with just visible light.

These images of Uranus were taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope using its Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS).

Credit: NASA/ESA/Erich Karkoschka (LPL)

The second row from the top is a pseudo-color image based on visible-light and near-infrared observations. Green indicates less methane in the atmosphere than blue, and red indicates the absence of methane. The lower levels of atmospheric methane at the poles (which, remember, are on the planet’s sides rather than its top and bottom) indicate that there is little seasonal variation in methane levels. In the left-most image on this row, the green-colored south pole is moving into darkness. In the other three images, the green, lower-methane region of the north pole can be seen coming into view. (The fourth row shows the same lack of methane variation, but without coloration.)

But what about the third row? This shows estimates of aerosol abundance, using visible light and infrared images that haven’t been colored. The light areas are cloudy with high aerosol abundance, and the dark areas are clear with low aerosol abundance. What is noteworthy in these images is that there is seasonal variation. The arctic region was clear at the beginning of spring (in 2002), but became cloudy as summer progressed (2012 through 2022). Conversely, the antarctic region appears to have cleared as fall progressed into winter. The team hypothesizes that these seasonal changes are evidence that sunlight changes levels of aerosol mist on the planet.

Although the results of this study cover a long 20-year period, this still only reflects one period of seasonal change in Uranus’ atmosphere. The research team will continue to observe Uranus as the polar regions move into new seasons to gather more data.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

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SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world's most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program's two previous launches.

But minutes into the mission, SpaceX's Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX's next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.

During the rocket's two previous test flights—each using an upgraded "Block 2" Starship design—problems in the ship's propulsion system led to leaks during launch, eventually triggering an early shutdown of the rocket's main engines. On both flights, the vehicle spun out of control and broke apart, spreading debris over an area near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The good news is that that didn't happen on Tuesday. The ship's main engines fired for their full duration, putting the vehicle on its expected trajectory toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. For a short time, it appeared the ship was on track for a successful flight.

"Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent," wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, on X.

The bad news is that Tuesday's test flight revealed more problems, preventing SpaceX from achieving the most important goals Musk outlined going into the launch.

"Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and reentry phase," Musk posted on X. "Lot of good data to review."

With the loss of tank pressure, the rocket started slowly spinning as it coasted through the blackness of space more than 100 miles above the Earth. This loss of control spelled another premature end to a Starship test flight. Most notable among the flight's unmet objectives was SpaceX's desire to study the performance of the ship's heat shield, which includes improved heat-absorbing tiles to better withstand the scorching temperatures of reentry back into the atmosphere.

"The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design, so it's basically data during the high heating, reentry phase in order to improve the tiles for the next iteration," Musk told Ars Technica before Tuesday's flight. "So we've got like a dozen or more tile experiments. We're trying different coatings on tiles. We're trying different fabrication techniques, different attachment techniques. We're varying the gap filler for the tiles."

Engineers are hungry for data on the changes to the heat shield, which can't be fully tested on the ground. SpaceX officials hope the new tiles will be more robust than the ones flown on the first-generation, or Block 1, version of Starship, allowing future ships to land and quickly launch again, without the need for time-consuming inspections, refurbishment, and in some cases, tile replacements. This is a core tenet of SpaceX's plans for Starship, which include delivering astronauts to the surface of the Moon, proliferating low-Earth orbit with refueling tankers, and eventually helping establish a settlement on Mars, all of which are predicated on rapid reusability of Starship and its Super Heavy booster.

Last year, SpaceX successfully landed three Starships in the Indian Ocean after they survived hellish reentries, but they came down with damaged heat shields. After an early end to Tuesday's test flight, SpaceX's heat shield engineers will have to wait a while longer to satiate their appetites. And the longer they have to wait, the longer the wait for other important Starship developmental tests, such as a full orbital flight, in-space refueling, and recovery and reuse of the ship itself, replicating what SpaceX has now accomplished with the Super Heavy booster.

Failing forward or falling short?

The ninth flight of Starship began with a booming departure from SpaceX's Starbase launch site at 6:35 pm CDT (7:35 pm EDT; 23:35 UTC) on Tuesday.

After a brief hold to resolve last-minute technical glitches, SpaceX resumed the countdown clock to tick away the final seconds before liftoff. A gush of water poured over the deck of the launch pad just before 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines ignited on the rocket's massive Super Heavy first-stage booster. Once all 33 engines lit, the enormous stainless steel rocket—towering more than 400 feet (123 meters)—began to climb away from Starbase.

Heading east, the Super Heavy booster produced more than twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket, an icon of the Apollo Moon program, as it soared over the Gulf of Mexico. After two-and-a-half minutes, the Raptor engines switched off and the Super Heavy booster separated from Starship's upper stage.

Six Raptor engines fired on the ship to continue pushing it into space. As the booster started maneuvering for an attempt to target an intact splashdown in the sea, the ship burned its engines for more than six minutes, reaching a top speed of 16,462 mph (26,493 kilometers per hour), right in line with preflight predictions.

A member of SpaceX's launch team declared "nominal orbit insertion" a little more than nine minutes into the flight, indicating the rocket reached its planned trajectory, just shy of the velocity required to enter a stable orbit around the Earth.

The flight profile was supposed to take Starship halfway around the world, with the mission culminating in a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. But a few minutes after engine shutdown, the ship started to diverge from SpaceX's flight plan.

First, SpaceX aborted an attempt to release eight simulated Starlink Internet satellites in the first test of the Starship's payload deployer. The cargo bay door would not fully open, and engineers called off the demonstration, according to Dan Huot, a member of SpaceX's communications team who hosted the company's live launch broadcast Tuesday.

That alone would not have been a big deal. However, a few minutes later, Huot made a more troubling announcement.

"We are in a little bit of a spin," he said. "We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside of Starship, which a lot of those are used for attitude control. So, at this point, we’ve essentially lost our attitude control with Starship."

This eliminated any chance for a controlled reentry and an opportunity to thoroughly scrutinize the performance of Starship's heat shield. The spin also prevented a brief restart of one of the ship's Raptor engines in space.

"Not looking great for a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today," Huot said.

SpaceX continued streaming live video from Starship as it soared over the Atlantic Ocean and Africa. Then, a blanket of superheated plasma enveloped the vehicle as it plunged into the atmosphere. Still in a slow tumble, the ship started shedding scorched chunks of its skin before the screen went black. SpaceX lost contact with the vehicle around 46 minutes into the flight. The ship likely broke apart over the Indian Ocean, dropping debris into a remote swath of sea within its expected flight corridor.

Victories where you find them

Although the flight did not end as well as SpaceX officials hoped, the company made some tangible progress Tuesday. Most importantly, it broke the streak of back-to-back launch failures on Starship's two most recent test flights in January and March.

SpaceX's investigation earlier this year into a January 16 launch failure concluded that vibrations likely triggered fuel leaks and fires in the ship's engine compartment, causing an early shutdown of the rocket's engines. Engineers said the vibrations were likely in resonance with the vehicle's natural frequency, intensifying the shaking beyond the levels SpaceX predicted.

Engineers made fixes and launched the next Starship test flight on March 6, but it again encountered trouble midway through the ship's main engine burn. SpaceX said earlier this month that the inquiry into the March 6 failure found its most probable root cause was a hardware failure in one of the upper stage's center engines, resulting in "inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition."

In its official statement, the company was silent on the nature of the hardware failure but said engines for future test flights will receive additional preload on key joints, a new nitrogen purge system, and improvements to the propellant drain system. A new generation of Raptor engines, known as Raptor 3, should begin flying around the end of this year with additional improvements to address the failure mechanism, SpaceX said.

Another bright spot in Tuesday's test flight was that it marked the first time SpaceX reused a Super Heavy booster from a prior launch. The booster used Tuesday previously launched on Starship's seventh test flight in January before it was caught back at the launch pad and refurbished for another space shot.

After releasing the Starship upper stage to continue its journey into space, the Super Heavy booster flipped around to fly tail-first and reignited 13 of its engines to begin boosting itself back toward the South Texas coast. On this test flight, SpaceX aimed the booster for a hard splashdown in the ocean just offshore from Starbase, rather than a mid-air catch back at the launch pad, which SpaceX accomplished on three of its four most recent test flights.

SpaceX made the change for a few reasons. First, engineers programmed the booster to fly at a higher angle of attack during its descent, increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the vehicle compared to past flights. This change should reduce propellant usage on the booster's landing burn, which occurs just before the rocket is caught by the launch pad's mechanical arms, or "chopsticks," on a recovery flight.

During the landing burn itself, engineers wanted to demonstrate the booster's ability to respond to an engine failure on descent by using just two of the rocket's 33 engines for the end of the burn, rather than the usual three. Instead, the rocket appeared to explode around the beginning of the landing burn before it could complete the final landing maneuver.

Before the explosion at the end of its flight, the booster appeared to fly as designed. Data displayed on SpaceX's live broadcast of the launch showed all 33 of the rocket's engines fired normally during its initial ascent from Texas, a reassuring sign for the reliability of the Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX kicked off the year with the ambition to launch as many as 25 Starship test flights in 2025, a goal that now seems to be unattainable. However, an X post by Musk on Tuesday night suggested a faster cadence of launches in the coming months. He said the next three Starships could launch at intervals of about once every three to four weeks. After that, SpaceX is expected to transition to a third-generation, or Block 3, Starship design with more changes.

It wasn't immediately clear how long it might take SpaceX to correct whatever problems caused Tuesday's test flight woes. The Starship vehicle for the next flight is already built and completed cryogenic prooftesting on April 27. For the last few ships, SpaceX has completed this cryogenic testing milestone around one-and-a-half to three months prior to launch.

A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the agency is "actively working" with SpaceX in the aftermath of Tuesday's test flight but did not say if the FAA will require SpaceX to conduct a formal mishap investigation.

Shana Diez, director of Starship engineering at SpaceX, chimed in with her own post on X. Based on preliminary data from Tuesday's flight, she is optimistic the next test flight will fly soon. She said engineers still need to examine data to confirm none of the problems from Starship's previous flight recurred on this launch but added that "all evidence points to a new failure mode" on Tuesday's test flight.

SpaceX will also study what caused the Super Heavy booster to explode on descent before moving forward with another booster catch attempt at Starbase, she said.

"Feeling both relieved and a bit disappointed," Diez wrote. "Could have gone better today but also could have gone much worse."

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

PASADENA, Calif.—Nicole Byrne watched anxiously from across the small kitchen in her home as Parham Azimi, a Harvard University researcher, lined up sample bottles next to the running tap.

As his phone timer chimed, indicating the water pipes had been flushed for the required five minutes, Azimi began filling collection bottles and packing them to be mailed to a lab in San Diego later that day.

Byrne knew it would take weeks to get results back for most of the samples, but she was finally one step closer to answers.

Although her home is nearly two miles from Altadena, one of two communities devastated by the wildfires that broke out in Los Angeles on January 7, the rented bungalow on Loma Vista Street in Pasadena was located downwind of the burn zone.

Byrne, a therapist and mother of two preschoolers, and her husband, Jonathan Hull, a Ph.D. chemist, knew “too much for comfort” about toxic environmental exposure, said Byrne, “but without a good way to get answers.”

Azimi was there gathering water samples as part of an unprecedented academic collaboration led by health, environmental, data, and wildfire risk assessment researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Texas at Austin.

With support from the Spiegel Family Fund, the universities formed the LA Fire Health Study Consortium in late January after the fires killed 29 people, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, primarily in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, and exposed millions to particulate matter, gases, chemicals, heavy metals, asbestos, PFAS, microplastics and other toxic pollutants.

The consortium pledged a 10-year study but also committed to providing Los Angeles with health information in real time, which became critically important after the US Army Corps of Engineers said in early February that it wouldn’t conduct soil sampling after the fires.

Azimi was among scientists studying toxic harms in the burn zone to 50 undamaged homes’ soil, air, drinking water and dust. Others would perform mobile air and surface water testing, monitor firefighters’ health, assess combustible “fuel stocks”—everything from trees and brush to homes, vehicles, fencing, decks and especially anything plastic, in urban and woodland areas—and employ a computer model to estimate how much smoke entered 14 million homes in Southern California.

Joseph Allen, director of the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program at the Chan School and a consortium leader, said university scientists immediately descended on LA even before funding for the consortium emerged. “In these national emergencies, I think all of us in this field feel compelled to do what we can to help,” he said.

Chris Olivares Martinez, an aquatic pollution researcher down Interstate 5 at the University of California Irvine who also became part of the 50-home study, hopes the consortium will serve as a model for academic institutions to build a more collaborative framework for scientific research.

“These disasters are happening so quickly, and they wreak havoc in so many domains,” he said.

Azimi, working in Nicole Byrne’s Pasadena kitchen, labeled and packed his last water sample for shipping back to Harvard. Then he carefully removed two sets of indicator strips from a test kit and dunked them in and out of the final specimen container for 20 seconds before moving on to run a second set of test strips under the tap for another 20 seconds.

When Byrne asked how long the family would have to wait to start getting results back, she was startled when Azimi said the first two of the several hundred water quality tests would be ready in less than a minute.

“The H2S was basically zero, which we’ve seen in lots of homes,” a good sign, said Azimi, referring to a test of hydrogen sulfide that’s intended to detect bacteria of fecal origin.

But among the houses tested so far, Byrne’s had among the highest levels of both free and total chlorine, which typically come from water treatment efforts aimed at disinfecting organic carbon, ash and sediment deposited by the fires.

Although the news was bad—the level was above the 4 parts per million threshold set by the Environmental Protection Agency—Azimi had provided Byrne with her first bit of knowledge to keep her family safe.

From measles in Brooklyn to wildfires on Maui

As an indoor air quality researcher, Azimi, 37, never could have predicted he would be responsible for water sampling here in Los Angeles when he took a research position at the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program back in 2019.

At the time, Azimi’s research was focused on infectious disease transmission models, and he had every expectation it would remain in the lab. But then, just months after starting at Harvard, news broke of a measles outbreak spreading in Brooklyn.

“‘Hey, Parham, just stop everything, clear your table and just focus on measles outbreaks in schools,’” he recalled Joe Allen, head of the Healthy Buildings Program, telling him. “So that was my first response to a crisis, and then quickly after that, COVID happened.”

Azimi was still a little sheepish thinking back on the media circus that ensued in July 2020 when his team published the first credible mathematical model illustrating that COVID-19 was airborne based on data from the Diamond Princess cruise. “Then it was in the New York Times and suddenly it was everywhere,” said Azimi.

And so he has spent the last six years searching for answers in the wake of disasters—after COVID came Hurricane Ida, then Hurricane Ian and then the Lahaina wildfire on Maui.

“All of a sudden, all of these crises happened, and they were all related to indoor air quality,” Azimi said. “It’s kind of defined my research.”

He’s been accompanied throughout these travels by his wife, 37-year-old Iranian-American engineer Zahra Keshavarz, who also works in the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program indoor air quality lab. The couple met as second-year university students in Iran, and have been together ever since, even making it through a five-year long distance relationship when Azimi left Iran in 2012 to pursue his Ph.D. at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The couple were married in 2017, when Keshavarz joined Azimi in Chicago, where he had accepted a two-year postdoctoral position.

Keshavarz spent the next two years working as an indoor air quality consultant at an environmental services company in Chicago. Her experience both testing and analyzing indoor air quality would prove invaluable as she transitioned to the Harvard team.

In January 2022, Azimi and Keshavarz got a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research grant to inspect the mold growth after flooding and hurricanes, less than six months after Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans and then made its way north before deluging Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City with massive rainfall.

Azimi and Keshavarz did their testing a few months after the hurricane, “so everything was open and dry and clean,” Azimi said. “But in that project, our research focus was on the longer terms of the impacts of these hurricanes. We wanted to show the homes that were affected, even a few months after, still have mold problems.” In total, the couple visited and took samples at 60 homes, spending three weeks in New Orleans and another two in New York and New Jersey.

The winter of 2022-23 saw the couple on the road again, this time in Florida, a few months behind the devastation of Hurricane Ian. With their NSF grant funding expanded by 20 percent, they were able to add an additional 60 test sites in Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale to see the lingering effects of mold growth in Florida’s tropical climate.

Though always cautious, Keshavarz was extra careful during this field excursion, using even higher levels of personal protective equipment than the situation would normally require: she was pregnant with their first child, a daughter they named Alyssa.

Their baby wasn’t even three months old in August 2023 when wildfire swept through Lahaina, devastating the picturesque Maui town and killing more than 100 residents, making it the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Over the course of the next four months, Keshavarz and Azimi juggled their roles as exhausted new parents and scientists whose research hinged on timely response in a crisis.

The couple arrived in Maui on Jan. 1, 2024, along with several trunks of equipment and their 6-month-old daughter. Keshavarz’s parents came along to care for their infant granddaughter when Azimi and Keshavarz were in the field.

On the ground in LA

The fires were still burning in Altadena and Pacific Palisades when the Spiegel Family Fund invited Allen and Azimi to LA on January 11 to discuss the funding and logistics of the consortium, which was formally announced January 30.

When Harvard’s Chan School issued the press release, an environmental chemistry postdoc was giving Azimi a crash course in water sampling at the utility sink in the garage of his Boston home.

The couple left 18 hours later for LA, arriving on January 31, the day the fires were finally contained. The consortium’s cross-institutional and interdisciplinary design meant Azimi and Keshavarz would have to take soil, air, water, residue, and ash samples at any of the 50 houses enrolled in the environmental exposure study on undamaged houses in the vicinity of the burn zone.

At times they were responsible for sampling for as many as six different labs at four separate universities around the country. Some required multiple types of samples, such as both ash and water, or multiple samples of the same kind collected in different ways or kept in different containers. Altogether, each house required dozens of samples, each taken following the exact methodology required by the lab it would be sent to, which would in turn be subjected to hundreds of tests.

Three weeks into their work, the consortium released its first public data brief, announcing that particulate matter air pollution in Altadena and the Palisades was generally within EPA limits but could vary significantly based on the time of day, direction of the wind, and other atmospheric conditions.

Olivares, the UC Irvine water pollution researcher who often worked side by side with Azimi gathering samples in homes, said in early March that he had been finding much lower levels of benzene and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) than he had expected—and feared—based on the levels found after the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California.

This is partially thanks to the hard-won lessons in Paradise, where residents complained for months about the foul odor of the tap water before the water company finally agreed to test and found toxic levels of benzene throughout the water system, Olivares said.

In both the Palisades and Altadena, as soon as the fires were contained, the water companies spent a full week flushing the water lines in an effort to prevent any contaminants from the fires from settling on the bottom of pipes or penetrating into chemically permeable PVC, Olivares said. Only after a full week of intensely flushing the system did the water companies then begin testing at hydrants throughout the burn zone.

But the preliminary results weren’t all so positive. In its second data brief on March 5, the consortium reported that indoor air quality in homes that suffered fire damage can be diminished for weeks. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) inside damaged homes were four to five times higher than levels outside, and spikes in VOCs and particle pollution could result from cleaning and other indoor activity.

In mid-March, the consortium reported in its third data brief that during the fires, particulate matter (PM) air pollution was elevated in homes that were located more than two miles from the burn area. The scientists recommended monitoring indoor air quality, wearing masks and using air filters.

A bubble in West Altadena

Driving down E. Mendocino Street in Altadena on April 1, Azimi and Keshavarz saw scant visual evidence of the conflagration that came tearing down from Eaton Canyon in January.

They parked their rented Volkswagen Atlas in front of Timothy Bartlett and Tamara Mnoian’s house but struggled to introduce themselves over the deafening clang of heavy machinery as the Army Corps of Engineers worked to clear burned lots a block and a half away.

Bartlett and Mnoian’s home was nestled deep in the burn zone but through a stroke of luck remained standing. The two-story Spanish-style home from the 1920s sits at the edge of a bubble of more than 50 homes that were unburned by the flames that encircled their West Altadena neighborhood.

Bartlett, a film editor in his late 40s, has spent the last four years making the house at the corner of Mendocino and Catherine the perfect home for himself and Mnoian. Late last fall, the couple welcomed a daughter.

Now, in the midst of juggling busy careers and life as new parents, they are having to contend with a highly contaminated house and prolonged displacement to protect themselves.

Bartlett is especially concerned about the exposure risks for their daughter. Before she was born, he spent much of his more than 20-year career in Hollywood alternating between high-paying reality TV editing jobs and science-focused documentaries.

“I’d work the [reality TV] job until I had enough of a cushion that I could say yes the next time someone told me, ‘Look, I have this project. There’s no money, but it means something.’”

Since his daughter’s birth, Bartlett has been prioritizing the relative stability of his reality TV editing jobs, especially since the Eaton Fire has thrown yet another layer of chaos into the mix.

Keshavarz understood his desire for stability. She and Azimi were counting down the days until they could go home to Boston. The family changed hotels six times during their stay in LA, alternating between Santa Monica and Pasadena so they would always be close to one set of test sites.

As Azimi set up the air sampler that would run inside the Bartlett-Mnoian home for the next week, Keshavarz took a turn in the cramped back seat of the Atlas with Alyssa.

Squished between boxes of equipment for the field research team and Alyssa’s car seat, Keshavarz tried to entice her daughter with fruit snacks and goldfish crackers.

“People deserve to know”

Emma Landskroner pulled up to the house on Mendocino just as Azimi and Keshavarz were tucking the last box of water samples into the large cooler in the SUV’s overstuffed trunk.

The couple stripped off respirators and tucked soiled boot covers and gloves into sealed bags to be tossed out later. They had to dash off to the post office before it closed to get the water samples they had taken that day to both the San Diego and Harvard labs by the next morning. The trip out of the burn zone also meant Alyssa would have a few minutes to run around outside without risking exposure.

As Azimi and Keshavarz drove off, Landskroner made her way over to introduce herself to Bartlett and Mnoian. Landskroner, 26, a Ph.D candidate at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, works in the lab of Candice Tsai, whose nanoparticle research relies on the use of a sampler she invented that must run for a full week to collect reliable results.

For Landskroner, exposure science is personal. When, despite no family history of the disease, Landskroner’s father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in her senior year of college, it motivated her to look more deeply at a future in public health and preventive medicine research.

Between working on experiments for her dissertation and the other research Landskroner does as part of the Tsai Lab, she barely got six hours of sleep a night even before the LA fires forced the evacuation of UCLA. Since the fires, she calls it a win when she gets four hours a night.

Landskroner does a good job of hiding her exhaustion, the only sign a quickly stifled yawn as she zips up her Bruins hoodie. Tall and athletic with her thick dark hair pulled up in a high ponytail to avoid snagging it on the respirator straps, she offered a quick yet warm smile as she double-checked her mask before heading into the house.

“People deserve to know what they are being exposed to, and I have the tools to help them find out,” she said. “We saw after 9/11, even those who weren’t immediately exposed during the building collapse, but months after, the people who just lived in the area during the cleanup, there was heightened cancer mortality among them… Now there’s some interesting studies that everything we’re seeing here is likely comparable to the same particulates and exposures that happened during the World Trade Center.”

Bartlett and Mnoian are similarly serious about the health implications not just for themselves, but for their infant daughter should they return to the house on Mendocino Street.

The couple still doesn’t have a timeline for returning home. They finally got an appointment with an adjuster on their insurance company’s approved vendor list earlier the day Landskroner visited. They still had no idea of how big a gap there would be between what their insurance offered, and the actual price to have their property fully remediated. In the meantime they hoped the consortium could provide some answers, if not about the cleanup, then at least about just how toxic their home was in the wake of the fires.

Landskroner finished setting up the device for measuring nanoparticles, and let the couple know Azimi and Keshavarz would be back to collect the equipment in a week.

“Why?”

Early in April, the consortium released its fifth databrief, which explained that air pollution levels remained higher indoors than outdoors in the days and weeks after the fires, likely due to smoke absorbed by porous surfaces like drywall and soft goods. Scientists recommended that residents run high efficiency particulate air filters and activated charcoal air purifiers before reoccupying fire-affected residences.

“Why wouldn’t a university in Boston try to help out when LA has a crisis?” asked Allen, of the Chan School, regarding Harvard’s involvement in the consortium. “Certainly, we know when Boston has a crisis, our colleagues around the country help us. When New York has a crisis, everyone mobilizes to help New York. If Texas has a crisis, we all mobilize to help Texas.”

“I’m in the field of public health,” he added. “That’s everybody everywhere. So I think it’s natural that we run towards people who need help.”

To Azimi, it is no surprise that a disaster this strange and on this scale in one of the major cultural capitals of the United States sparked such a sprawling and diverse scientific collaboration. Of course everyone felt called to take part.

“LA is the second-largest city in the United States, and this affected millions of people,” said Azimi, who arrived back in Boston with his wife and daughter on April 15. “More recently, we are getting urban fires. And unfortunately, we saw two large ones back to back in the same city.”

The true test of the collaboration will be if it can continue, and if future, more predictable disasters like hurricanes, can generate the same kind of scientific momentum. “The first thing we have to do is put aside our egos and say, ‘No, we are still vulnerable to nature and the power of nature, and we have to consider it seriously,’” Azimi said. “I already have seen this in academia; having all these teams sharing data and resources gives you credibility.”

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The Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California, serves military space launch missions as well as launches for NASA and commercial entities like SpaceX. But how do all those launches affect residents living along the Central Coast? People might marvel at the spectacular visual display, but as launch activity at the base has ramped up, so have the noise complaints, particularly about the sonic booms produced by Falcon 9 launches, which can reach as far south as Ventura County. The booms rattle windows, frighten pets, and have raised concerns about threats to the structural integrity of private homes.

There have been rockets launching from Vandenberg for decades, so why are the Falcon 9 launches of such concern? "Because of the Starlink satellites, the orbital mechanics for where they're trying to place these in orbit is bringing [the trajectories] closer to the coast," said Brigham Young University's Kent Gee, who described his research into sonic boom effects on neighboring communities in a press briefing at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans. And the launches are occurring much more frequently, from two to three launches per year in the 1980s to between five and seven launches each month today. There were 46 Falcon 9 launches out of the Vandenberg base in 2024 alone, per Gee.

Gee joined a project called ECOBOOM (Environmental and Community Observation of Sonic Booms) to study the factors that can impact just how jarring those sonic booms might be, conducted jointly by BYU and California State University, Bakersfield, with cooperation from the Space Force. "Space Force is interested in this because they feel a sense of stewardship," said Gee. "These rockets from SpaceX and other providers are launched from the base for a variety of missions and they want to understand the effects both on and off base, trying to understand how they can complete the mission while minimizing [negative] impacts."

Gee and his cohorts monitored 132 separate sonic booms last summer, relying on data gathered via a network of 25 or so acoustic monitoring stations located along 500 square miles, including the beaches of Isla Vista and further inland to the hills of Ojai. "The measurements were made in parks, people's backyards, parking lots, wastewater plants, and all sorts of different locations," said Gee.

More bang than boom

There has been a great deal of research on supersonic aircraft, but the sonic booms produced by rockets like the Falcon 9 are acoustically distinct, according to Gee. For instance, most sonic booms have two shock waves, but the Falcon 9 booster produces a boom with three shocks as it descends through the atmosphere after launch. Gee co-authored a paper earlier this year analyzing the acoustic signatures of three Falcon 9 flyback sonic booms.

While the first and third shocks were what one might typically expect, the second central shock "is formed by a combination of the grid fins and the lower portions of the booster, including the folded landing legs," Gee and BYU colleague Mark C. Anderson wrote. "These lower portions of the booster produce a rarefaction wave that tends to migrate toward the back of the shock system while the grid fins produce a shock wave that tends to migrate toward the front of the shock system." Those shock waves merge, and their relative strengths determine where this second shock appears in the full sonic boom acoustic signature.

Sonic booms from rockets are also lower frequency, with peaks of less than 1 Hz—below the range of human hearing. The result is less of a "boom" and more of a "bang," according to Gee, that can last a few seconds, compared to milliseconds for a typical acoustic wave. It's more akin to a seismic wave, particularly if one is indoors when it hits. "Sometimes you get a very low amplitude rumble, but it comes on suddenly, and it's there for a few seconds and disappears," he said. It's also one reason why the sonic booms can travel so far afield of the Vandenberg base.

Could the similarities confuse California residents who might mistake a sonic boom for an earthquake? Perhaps, at least until residents learn otherwise. "Since we're often setting up in people's backyard, they text us the results of what they heard," said Gee. "It's fantastic citizen science. They'll tell us the difference is that the walls shake but the floors don't. They're starting to be able to tell the difference between an earthquake or a sonic boom from a launch."

A rocket's trajectory also plays an important role. "Everyone sees the same thing, but what you hear depends on where you're at and the rocket's path or trajectory," said Gee, adding that even the same flight path can nonetheless produce markedly different noise levels. "There's a focal region in Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo where the booms are more impactful," he said. "Where that focus occurs changes from launch to launch, even for the same trajectory." That points to meteorology also being a factor: Certain times of year could potentially have more impact than others as weather conditions shift, with wind shears, temperature gradients, and topography, for instance, potentially affecting the propagation of sonic booms.

In short, "If you can change your trajectory even a little under the right meteorological conditions, you can have a big impact on the sonic booms in this region of the country," said Gee. And it's only the beginning of the project; the team is still gathering data. "No two launches look the same right now," said Gee. "It's like trying to catch lightning."

As our understanding improves, he sees the conversation shifting to more subjective social questions, possibly leading to the development of science-based local regulations, such as noise ordinances, to address any negative launch impacts. The next step is to model sonic booms under different weather conditions, which will be challenging due to coastal California's microclimates. "If you've ever driven along the California coast, the weather changes dramatically," said Gee. "You go from complete fog at Vandenberg to complete sun in Ventura County just 60 miles from the base."

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The principality of Monaco is perhaps the least suitable place on the Formula 1 calendar to hold a Grand Prix. A pirate cove turned tax haven nestled between France and Italy at the foot of the Alps-Maritimes, it has also been home to Grand Prix racing since 1929, predating the actual Formula 1 world championship by two decades. The track is short, tight, and perhaps best described as riding a bicycle around your living room. It doesn’t even race well, for the barrier-lined streets are too narrow for the too-big, too-heavy cars of the 21st century. And yet, it’s F1’s crown jewel.

Despite the location's many drawbacks, there’s something magical about racing in Monaco that almost defies explanation. The real magic happens on Saturday, when the drivers compete against each other to set the fastest lap. With overtaking as difficult as it is here, qualifying is everything, determining the order everyone lines up in, and more than likely, finishes.

Coverage of the Monaco Grand Prix is now filmed in vivid 4k, and it has never looked better. I’m a real fan of the static top-down camera that’s like a real-time Apple TV screensaver.

Although native-Monegasque Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc tried to temper expectations for the weekend, the Ferraris were in a good place in Monaco. With no fast corners, the team could run the car low to the ground without risking a penalty, and this year's car is very good at low-speed corners, of which Monaco has plenty.

A 10th of a second separated comfortably being in Q2 from being relegated to the last couple of rows in the grid, and a very long Sunday. Mercedes' new teenage protegé, Kimi Antonelli, failed to progress from Q1, spinning in the swimming pool chicane. Unlike Michael Schumacher in 2006, Antonelli didn't do it on purpose, but he did bring out a red flag. His teammate George Russell similarly brought a halt to Q2 when he coasted a third of the way around the circuit before coming to a stop in the middle of the tunnel, requiring marshals to push him all the way down to turn 10.

The gaps at the front were much bigger for Q3, and the lap times much quicker. Three drivers broke the existing track record set by Lewis Hamilton during qualifying in 2021, with McLaren's Lando Norris the fastest at 1:09.954—the fastest time ever for this configuration of the circuit.

The race

In order to try to spice up the race this year, the sport's organizers mandated every driver perform two tire-changing pit stops during the race. This opened up a lot of potential strategies, but in the end no one went for the “stop twice early in quick succession” that was so talked about by the pundits in the leadup to the race.

On lap 2, a virtual safety car opened up early stops for people at the back half of the grid, but with the current supersized cars, there was very little interesting during the race. Aston Martin's Fernando Alonso was set to score his best result of the year with a sixth place, but his engine blew on lap 39.

Teams that had both cars running together on track could use the second car to hold up everyone behind and give their teammate a hassle-free pit stop, but none of the teams able to employ this strategy were set to score points. Lewis Hamilton managed to make up a couple of places, but most everyone finished where they started.

The race was dominated by pole-sitter Norris, although Verstappen took the lead for much of the last third of the race, and only by dint of not having made his second pit stop. Hoping for a red flag or safety car that would give him that stop for free, Verstappen was left unsatisfied and had to come in under green flag conditions for a tire change just before the end, leaving him in fourth place.

McLaren's Oscar Piastri took third, looking a little behind Norris all weekend. Leclerc took second, with Norris the victor.

Next week, Barcelona!

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Statistically, men are more likely than women to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, with about 18 million more men living with the condition worldwide. This doesn’t tell the whole story. When women do get a diagnosis, they’re often older and have a higher body fat mass. They’re also more likely to die from diabetes-related causes, especially heart disease. And some researchers think underdiagnosis might explain part of the gap—perhaps more cases are being missed in women.

To address this disparity, researchers are trying to understand more about the biological and social differences that contribute to later diagnoses and worse outcomes in women, with some suggesting it’s time health care providers change the way they test for diabetes in order to catch at-risk women earlier, when treatments and lifestyle changes can have more impact.

There are several potential reasons behind the differences in diagnosis for men and women. While many risk factors for type 2 diabetes are universal, they tend to show up later in women. The disease may also present differently in women, which could lead current diagnostic tools to overlook them. Using some tests but not others is a “major reason for underdiagnosis of diabetes in women,” says Michael Leutner, a professor in endocrinology and metabolism and a member of the Gender Medicine Unit at the Medical University of Vienna.

We know there are biological differences between the sexes that affect type 2 diabetes—particularly the impact of hormones. Major hormonal shifts throughout a person’s lifetime can influence how their bodies manage blood sugar, with life events such as pregnancy and menopause affecting how type 2 diabetes develops and progresses.

Gestational diabetes during pregnancy “is one of the most powerful harbingers of things to come,” says Judith Regensteiner, a professor of medicine and director of the Ludeman Family Center for Women’s Health Research at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. In fact, a gestational diabetes diagnosis is the single biggest risk factor for type 2 diabetes in women, with some studies suggesting women who experience gestational diabetes are up to eight times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes later in life.

Other hormonal shifts over a woman’s lifetime can influence type 2 diabetes risk and progression. How and where fat is stored in the body, for instance, is a key risk factor for type 2 diabetes in everybody, but not all fat is created equal. At younger ages, men are more likely than women to store visceral fat. “That’s the deep belly fat that sits deep around the organs,” explains Peter Goulden, associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine and chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolic Bone Disease at Mount Sinai in New York.

Visceral fat is particularly harmful because it releases free fatty acids which increase resistance to insulin—the hormone which regulates blood sugar. Insulin “is the key that unlocks the cells, so the glucose can go into the cells,” Goulden says. With insulin resistance, the body’s cells stop responding to insulin as effectively, and glucose builds up in the blood.

Before menopause, women tend to store fat around the hips and thighs, “which is actually less harmful metabolically,” says Goulden. But the hormonal changes during menopause, especially the decline in estrogen, mean the body stores more visceral fat. This accumulation of deep belly fat is actually worse for women than for men: Each kilogram of visceral fat increases a woman’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes by about seven times—around triple the risk seen in men, according to a 2019 study.

The role of menopause on visceral fat might help explain why women tend to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at an older age. This type of fat can also build up without necessarily pushing someone into the obese weight category, so common tools such as body mass index (BMI) can miss early risks. One study found that BMI was more strongly associated with type 2 diabetes in men than women; measurements related to waist size were a stronger predictor for women. Last year, the American Diabetes Association updated its guide on diabetes management to recommend measurements such as waist circumference be taken into account in addition to BMI when assessing obesity.

Menopause may influence diabetes in other ways, too. Estrogen is thought to play a protective role in blood sugar regulation. When the hormone binds to its receptor, it helps cells respond to insulin better and protects pancreatic beta cells—responsible for producing and releasing insulin—from damage. But as estrogen levels drop with the onset of menopause, so does the body’s ability to manage blood sugar as effectively. That drop is believed to be another big reason why the risk of developing type 2 diabetes rises for women during midlife. “I think the message from this is that really there should be lifelong screening,” says Goulden.

While these hormonal factors explain why many women may develop type 2 diabetes later than men, there are also concerns that diagnostic tools might not catch the early signs of the disease in younger women as well as they do in men. A common diagnostic procedure is the hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) blood test, which is often used because it’s convenient and doesn’t require fasting. The test measures the amount of hemoglobin in the blood that is coated with sugar; this acts as an indicator of average blood glucose levels over a few months, since the lifespan of red blood cells is around three months. But recent evidence suggests it might not pick up diabetes risk in some younger women.

Before menopause, women typically have lower levels of HbA1c than men of the same age. Researchers in Taiwan therefore suggest that “the HbA1c cut-off point for the diagnosis of diabetes should vary by age and gender.” A 2023 study from the UK, which analyzed data from more than a million people, similarly found that women had slightly lower average HbA1c levels than men. The researchers estimated that if the diagnostic threshold was reduced, 35,000 more women in England and Wales could be diagnosed.

But for now, cutoffs remain the same for men and women, and experts say there isn’t yet enough evidence to warrant a change. “I wouldn’t say there’s enough data there to support saying that there should be different cutoffs,” Goulden says.

“We need more prospective clinical studies to investigate it,” says Leutner. He argues that, rather than adjusting HbA1c thresholds, clinicians should make greater use of the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), a more sensitive tool for detecting diabetes in its early stages but one that involves fasting before having blood glucose levels measured before and after drinking a sugary drink. Men are more likely to have elevated glucose levels caught during routine blood work, says Leutner. “Females on the other hand more often have impaired glucose tolerance, which can only be measured with the more complex OGTT,” he says.

Catching type 2 diabetes early is essential in reducing some of its greatest associated harms. One aspect is limiting the risk of cardiovascular disease. While men are more likely to develop heart disease in general, type 2 diabetes tips this balance: fatal heart disease associated with diabetes is 50 percent more common in women than men. Even so, says Regensteiner, “heart disease may go undetected for longer in women.”

Social differences can also play a role in the different outcomes between women and men, says Regensteiner. In her experience, some women can be dismissive of the condition. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I’ve got a little bit of diabetes,’ and that’s like being ‘a little bit pregnant,’” she says. “It’s not a little bit. It’s a serious disease.” Clinicians can underestimate the risks too: Women with type 2 diabetes are less likely to be prescribed certain cardioprotective medications than men.

As research continues, it’s important that sex differences are taken into account. Historically, women were left out of many early studies that shaped risk guidelines for diseases, including type 2 diabetes. When they were included, it was often in smaller numbers, and their data wasn’t separated out, Regensteiner says. “That hurts both sexes, because the results are muddied,” she says. “There are sex differences, and ignoring them will not help.”

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If you look at the Milky Way through a powerful telescope, you’ll notice that close to the center of the galaxy there are elongated filaments that seem to outline its spiral shape. Scientists have a nickname for these structures: “galactic bones.” Recently, astronomers found that one of the Milky Way’s bones is “fractured,” and they believe they’ve now found a possible culprit: a neutron star that may have collided with it.

According to NASA, these bones are huge elongated formations of energized particles that spiral along magnetic fields running through the galaxy. The particles release radio waves, and so are detectable using radio telescopes.

Scientists have found several such bones in the galaxy, but one of the most striking is called G359.13142-0.20005, also known as “the Snake.” It is a 230-light-year-long filament that appears to have a fracture. It is also one of the brightest. One of the first explanations was that some as yet undetected body had disturbed the filament.

A study by Harvard University, published in the journal Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, set out to test this hypothesis. The research team involved found signs of a pulsar, a neutron star spinning at high speed, in the same region as the broken bone. These stars are extremely dense, and are the small remnants left after the explosion of a supermassive star.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which orbits Earth, along with the MeerKAT telescope array in South Africa and the Very Large Array in New Mexico—two systems that detect radio waves—scientists found what appear to be traces of a pulsar in the filament. Based on data from these observatories, they estimate that this pulsar impacted the bone at a speed of between 1,609,000 and 3,218,000 kilometers per hour. The suspected collision is thought to have distorted the magnetic field of the bone, causing its radio signal to deform.

In the above image provided by NASA, the Snake can be seen, and there is a body that appears to be interacting with the structure, in the middle of its length. It is possibly the aforementioned neutron star.

Pulsars are alternative versions of a neutron star where, in addition to being compact objects, they rotate at high velocities and produce strong magnetic fields. At the moment there is no instrument that can see them directly due to their size and distance, but radio telescopes can detect the electromagnetic waves they emit and hear them by converting these into sound.

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

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James Gentz has seen birds aplenty on his East Texas rice-and-crawfish farm: snow geese and pintails, spoonbills and teal. The whooping crane couple, though, he found “magnificent.” These endangered, long-necked behemoths arrived in 2021 and set to building a nest amid his flooded fields. “I just loved to see them,” Gentz says.

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Before a volcanic eruption, magma rising underground releases gases like carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. Trees absorb the carbon dioxide, making their leaves greener and thicker. Scientists are using satellite images from NASA’s Landsat 8 to detect this greening, along with data from airborne instruments in the Airborne Validation Unified Experiment: Land to Ocean (AVUELO).

“Volcano early warning systems exist,” said Florian Schwandner, chief of the Earth Science Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “The aim here is to make them better and make them earlier.”

Volcanic eruptions are dangerous and unpredictable. About ten percent of the world’s population lives in areas that could be affected. People living close to volcanoes face risks like flying rock, ash clouds, and toxic gases. Even those farther away can experience mudslides or tsunamis caused by eruptions. Since eruptions can't be stopped, finding ways to predict them early is important for safety.

Spotting volcanic activity from space isn’t easy. Scientists can track sulfur dioxide because it’s easier to detect, but volcanic carbon dioxide—the earliest sign of magma rising—is harder to measure. "A volcano emitting the modest amounts of carbon dioxide that might presage an eruption isn’t going to show up in satellite imagery," said volcanologist Robert Bogue of McGill University.

Traditionally, researchers have had to travel to volcanoes to measure carbon dioxide directly. But with over 1,300 potentially active volcanoes worldwide, many are in remote, difficult-to-reach locations. Checking tree responses instead offers a simpler way to monitor volcanic activity. "The whole idea is to find something that we could measure instead of carbon dioxide directly," said Bogue.

Nicole Guinn, a volcanologist at the University of Houston, used satellite images from Landsat 8, NASA’s Terra satellite, and ESA’s Sentinel-2 to study trees near Mount Etna in Sicily. Her research found a clear link between tree leaf color and volcanic carbon dioxide.

To confirm the accuracy of satellite images, climate scientist Josh Fisher led a ground study in March 2025. His team measured carbon dioxide and collected leaf samples from trees near the Rincon de la Vieja volcano in Costa Rica. “Our research is a two-way interdisciplinary intersection between ecology and volcanology,” Fisher said.

Tracking trees as volcano indicators has some limitations. Some volcanoes don’t have enough trees nearby, and environmental factors like weather and plant diseases can affect tree growth. But past success has shown the potential of this approach.

In 2017, scientists upgraded sensors at Mayon volcano in the Philippines, detecting signs of an impending eruption. They recommended evacuations, and over 56,000 people were safely moved before the volcano erupted in January 2018. “There’s not one signal from volcanoes that’s a silver bullet," said Schwandner. "But it will be something that could change the game.”

Source: NASA

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor.

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Golf balls fly farther than smooth ones because their dimples cut down on pressure drag—basically, the force that slows things down when moving through air or water. The researchers applied this concept to a new spherical prototype with dimples that can be adjusted. They tested its performance in a wind tunnel.

“A dynamically programmable outer skin on an underwater vehicle could drastically reduce drag while eliminating the need for protruding appendages like fins or rudders for maneuvering,” said Anchal Sareen, an assistant professor at U-M. “By actively adjusting its surface texture, the vehicle could achieve precise maneuverability with enhanced efficiency and control.”

This could be useful for things like ocean exploration, mapping, and gathering environmental data. The prototype is made by stretching a thin latex layer over a hollow sphere filled with tiny holes. When a vacuum pump is turned on, the latex gets pulled in, forming dimples. Turning off the pump makes the sphere smooth again.

To measure how well the dimples reduced drag, researchers placed the sphere inside a three-meter-long wind tunnel, holding it in place with a thin rod. They changed the wind speed and adjusted the depth of the dimples. A load cell recorded the aerodynamic forces, while high-speed cameras tracked airflow patterns.

The results showed that shallow dimples worked better at high wind speeds, while deeper dimples were more effective at lower speeds. Adjusting dimple depth helped cut drag by up to 50% compared to a smooth sphere.

“The adaptive skin setup is able to notice changes in the speed of the incoming air and adjust dimples accordingly to maintain drag reductions,” said Rodrigo Vilumbrales-Garcia, a postdoctoral research fellow at U-M. “Applying this concept to underwater vehicles would reduce both drag and fuel consumption.”

The researchers also discovered that the textured surface could generate lift, a force that helps steer the sphere. By activating dimples on only one side, they caused the air to flow differently, creating a force that pushed the sphere in a specific direction.

Tests showed that, with the right dimple depth, the sphere could generate lift forces up to 80% of the drag force. This effect was similar to the Magnus effect, which typically requires constant rotation.

“I was surprised that such a simple approach could produce results comparable to the Magnus effect,” said Putu Brahmanda Sudarsana, a graduate student at U-M.

Looking ahead, Sareen hopes to collaborate with other experts to improve this technology. “This smart dynamic skin technology could be a game-changer for unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, offering a lightweight, energy-efficient, and highly responsive alternative to traditional jointed control surfaces,” she said.

Source: University of Michigan, AIP Publishing

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This coming weekend is a special one for most motorsport fans. There are Formula 1 races in Monaco and NASCAR races in Charlotte. And arguably towering over them both is the Indianapolis 500, being held this year for the 109th time. America's oldest race is also one of its toughest: The track may have just four turns, but the cars negotiate them going three times faster than you drive on the highway, inches from the wall. For hours. At least at Le Mans, you have more than one driver per car.

This year's race promises to be an exciting one. The track is sold out for the first time since the centenary race in 2016. A rookie driver and a team new to the series took pole position. Two very fast cars are starting at the back thanks to another conflict-of-interest scandal involving Team Penske, the second in two years for a team whose owner also owns the track and the series. And the cars are trickier to drive than they have been for many years, thanks to a new supercapacitor-based hybrid system that has added more than 100 lbs to the rear of the car, shifting the weight distribution further back.

Ahead of Sunday's race, I spoke with a couple of IndyCar drivers and some engineers to get a better sense of how they prepare and what to expect.

Concentrate

It all comes "from months of preparation," said Marcus Ericsson, winner of the race in 2022 and one of Andretti Global's drivers in this year's event. "When we get here to the month of May, it's just such a busy month. So you've got to be prepared mentally—and basically before you get to the month of May because if you start doing it now, it's too late," he told me.

The drivers spend all month at the track, with a race on the road course earlier this month. Then there's testing on the historic oval, followed by qualifying last weekend and the race this coming Sunday. "So all those hours you put in in the winter, really, and leading up here to the month of May—it's what pays off now," Ericsson said. That work involved multiple sessions of physical training each week, and Ericsson says he also does weekly mental coaching sessions.

"This is a mental challenge," Ericsson told me. "Doing those speeds with our cars, you can't really afford to have a split second of loss of concentration because then you might be in the wall and your day is over and you might hurt yourself."

When drivers get tired or their focus slips, that's when mistakes happen, and a mistake at Indy often has consequences.

Simulate

Being mentally and physically prepared is part of it. It also helps if you can roll the race car off the transporter and onto the track with a setup that works rather than spending the month chasing the right combination of dampers, springs, wing angles, and so on. And these days, that means a lot of simulation testing.

The multi-axis driver in the loop simulators might look like just a very expensive video game, but these multimillion-dollar setups aren't about having fun. "Everything that you are feeling or changing in the sim is ultimately going to reflect directly to what happens on track," explained Kyle Kirkwood, teammate to Ericsson at Andretti Global and one of only two drivers to have won an Indycar race in 2025.

Andretti, like the other teams using Honda engines, uses the new HRC simulator in Indiana. "And yes, it's a very expensive asset, but it's also likely cheaper than going to the track and doing the real thing," Kirkwood said. "And it's a much more controlled environment than being at the track because temperature changes or track conditions or wind direction play a huge factor with our car."

A high degree of correlation between the simulation and the track is what makes it a powerful tool. "We run through a sim, and you only get so many opportunities, especially at a place like Indianapolis, where you go from one day to the next and the temperature swings, or the wind conditions, or whatever might change drastically," Kirkwood said. "You have to be able to sim it and be confident with the sim that you're running to go out there and have a similar balance or a similar performance."

"So you have to make adjustments, whether it's a spring rate, whether it's keel ballast or just overall, maybe center of pressure, something like that," Kirkwood said. "You have to be able to adjust to it. And that's where the sim tool comes in play. You move the weight balance back, and you're like, OK, now what happens with the balance? How do I tune that back in? And you run that all through the sim, and for us, it's been mirror-perfect going to the track when we do that."

More impressively, a lot of that work was done months ago. "I would say most of it, we got through it before the start of this season," Kirkwood said. "Once we get into the season, we only get a select few days because every Honda team has to run on the same simulator. Of course, it's different with the engineering sim; those are running nonstop."

Sims are for engineers, too

An IndyCar team is more than just its drivers—"the spacer between the seat and the wheel," according to Kirkwood—and the engineers rely heavily on sim work now that real-world testing is so highly restricted. And they use a lot more than just driver-in-the-loop (DiL).

"Digital simulation probably goes to a higher level," explained Scott Graves, engineering manager at Andretti Global. "A lot of the models we develop work in the DiL as well as our other digital tools. We try to develop universal models, whether that's tire models, engine models, or transmission models."

"Once you get into to a fully digital model, then I think your optimization process starts kicking in," Graves said. "You're not just changing the setting and running a pretend lap with a driver holding a wheel. You're able to run through numerous settings and optimization routines and step through a massive number of permutations on a car. Obviously, you're looking for better lap times, but you're also looking for fuel efficiency and a lot of other parameters that go into crossing the finish line first."

As an example, Graves points to the dampers. "The shock absorber is a perfect example where that's a highly sophisticated piece of equipment on the car and it's very open for team development. So our cars have fully customized designs there that are optimized for how we run the car, and they may not be good on another team's car because we're so honed in on what we're doing with the car," he said.

"The more accurate a digital twin is, the more we are able to use that digital twin to predict the performance of the car," said David Taylor, VP of industry strategy at Siemens DISW, which has partnered with Andretti for some years now. "It will never be as complete and accurate as we want it to be. So it's a continuous pursuit, and we keep adding technology to our portfolio and acquiring companies to try to provide more and more tools to people like Scott so they can more accurately predict that performance."

What to expect on Sunday?

Kirkwood was bullish about his chances despite starting relatively deep in the field, qualifying in 23rd place. "We've been phenomenal in race trim and qualifying," he said. "We had a bit of a head-scratcher if I'm being honest—I thought we would definitely be a top-six contender, if not a front row contender, and it just didn't pan out that way on Saturday qualifying."

"But we rolled back out on Monday—the car was phenomenal. Once again, we feel very, very racy in traffic, which is a completely different animal than running qualifying," Kirkwood said. "So I'm happy with it. I think our chances are good. We're starting deep in the field, but so are a lot of other drivers. So you can expect a handful of us to move forward."

The more nervous hybrid IndyCars with their more rearward weight bias will probably result in more cautions, according to Ericsson, who will line up sixth for the start of the race on Sunday.

"Whereas in previous years you could have a bit of a moment and it would scare you, you usually get away with it," he said. "This year, if you have a moment, it usually ends up with you being in the fence. I think that's why we've seen so many crashes this year—because a pendulum effect from the rear of the car that when you start losing it, this is very, very difficult or almost impossible to catch."

"I think it's going to mean that the race is going to be quite a few incidents with people making mistakes," Ericsson said. "In practice, if your car is not behaving well, you bring it to the pit lane, right? You can do adjustments, whereas in the race, you have to just tough it out until the next pit stop and then make some small adjustments. So if you have a bad car at the start a race, it's going to be a tough one. So I think it's going to be a very dramatic and entertaining race."

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

New research shows that penguin guano in Antarctica is an important source of ammonia aerosol particles that help drive the formation and persistence of low clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting some incoming sunlight back to space.

The findings reinforce the growing awareness that Earth’s intricate web of life plays a significant role in shaping the planetary climate. Even at the small levels measured, the ammonia particles from the guano interact with sulfur-based aerosols from ocean algae to start a chemical chain reaction that forms billions of tiny particles that serve as nuclei for water vapor droplets.

The low marine clouds that often cover big tracts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica are a wild card in the climate system because scientists don’t fully understand how they will react to human-caused heating of the atmosphere and oceans. One recent study suggested that the big increase in the annual global temperature during 2023 and 2024 that has continued into this year was caused in part by a reduction of that cloud cover.

“I’m constantly surprised at the depth of how one small change affects everything else,” said Matthew Boyer, a coauthor of the new study and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research. “This really does show that there is a deep connection between ecosystem processes and the climate. And really, it’s the synergy between what’s coming from the oceans, from the sulfur-producing species, and then the ammonia coming from the penguins.”

Climate survivors

Aquatic penguins evolved from flying birds about 60 million years ago, shortly after the age of dinosaurs, and have persisted through multiple, slow, natural cycles of ice ages and warmer interglacial eras, surviving climate extremes by migrating to and from pockets of suitable habitat, called climate refugia, said Rose Foster-Dyer, a marine and polar ecologist with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

A 2018 study that analyzed the remains of an ancient “super colony” of the birds suggests there may have been a “penguin optimum” climate window between about 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, at least for some species in some parts of Antarctica, she said. Various penguin species have adapted to different habitat niches and this will face different impacts caused by human-caused warming, she said.

Foster-Dyer has recently done penguin research around the Ross Sea, and said that climate change could open more areas for land-breeding Adélie penguins, which don’t breed on ice like some other species.

“There’s evidence that this whole area used to have many more colonies … which could possibly be repopulated in the future,” she said. She is also more optimistic than some scientists about the future for emperor penguins, the largest species of the group, she added.

“They breed on fast ice, and there’s a lot of publications coming out about how the populations might be declining and their habitat is hugely threatened,” she said. “But they’ve lived through so many different cycles of the climate, so I think they’re more adaptable than people currently give them credit for.”

In total, about 20 million breeding pairs of penguins nest in vast colonies all around the frozen continent. Some of the largest colonies, with up to 1 million breeding pairs, can cover several square miles.There aren’t any solid estimates for the total amount of guano produced by the flightless birds annually, but some studies have found that individual colonies can produce several hundred tons. Several new penguin colonies were discovered recently when their droppings were spotted in detailed satellite images.

A few penguin colonies have grown recently while others appear to be shrinking, but in general, their habitat is considered threatened by warming and changing ice conditions, which affects their food supplies. The speed of human-caused warming, for which there is no precedent in paleoclimate records, may exacerbate the threat to penguins, which evolve slowly compared to many other species, Foster-Dyer said.

“Everything’s changing at such a fast rate, it’s really hard to say much about anything,” she said.

Recent research has shown how other types of marine life are also important to the global climate system. Nutrients from bird droppings help fertilize blooms of oxygen-producing plankton, and huge swarms of fish that live in the middle layers of the ocean cycle carbon vertically through the water, ultimately depositing it in a generally stable sediment layer on the seafloor.

Tricky measurements

Boyer said the new research started as a follow-up project to other studies of atmospheric chemistry in the same area, near the Argentine Marambio Base on an island along the Antarctic Peninsula. Observations by other teams suggested it could be worth specifically trying to look at ammonia, he said.

Boyer and the other scientists set up specialized equipment to measure the concentration of ammonia in the air from January to March 2023. They found that, when the wind blew from the direction of a colony of about 60,000 Adélie penguins about 5 miles away, the ammonia concentration increased to as high as 13.5 parts per billion—more than 1,000 times higher than the background reading. Even after the penguins migrated from the area toward the end of February, the ammonia concentration was still more than 100 times as high as the background level.

“We have one instrument that we use in the study to give us the chemistry of gases as they’re actually clustering together,” he said.

“In general, ammonia in the atmosphere is not well-measured because it’s really difficult to measure, especially if you want to measure at a very high sensitivity, if you have low concentrations like in Antarctica,” he said.

Penguin-scented winds

The goal was to determine where the ammonia is coming from, including testing a previous hypothesis that the ocean surface could be the source, he said.

But the size of the penguin colonies made them the most likely source.

“It’s well known that sea birds give off ammonia. You can smell them. The birds stink,” he said. “But we didn’t know how much there was. So what we did with this study was to quantify ammonia and to quantify its impact on the cloud formation process.”

The scientists had to wait until the wind blew from the penguin colony toward the research station.

“If we’re lucky, the wind blows from that direction and not from the direction of the power generator,” he said. “And we were lucky enough that we had one specific event where the winds from the penguin colony persisted long enough that we were actually able to track the growth of the particles. You could be there for a year, and it might not happen.”

The ammonia from the guano does not form the particles but supercharges the process that does, Boyer said.

“It’s really the dimethyl sulfide from phytoplankton that gives off the sulfur,” he said. “The ammonia enhances the formation rate of particles. Without ammonia, sulfuric acid can form new particles, but with ammonia, it’s 1,000 times faster, and sometimes even more, so we’re talking up to four orders of magnitude faster because of the guano.”

This is important in Antarctica specifically because there are not many other sources of particles, such as pollution or emissions from trees, he added.

“So the strength of the source matters in terms of its climate effect over time,” he said. “And if the source changes, it’s going to change the climate effect.”

It will take more research to determine if penguin guano has a net cooling effect on the climate. But in general, he said, if the particles transport out to sea and contribute to cloud formation, they will have a cooling effect.

“What’s also interesting,” he said, “is if the clouds are over ice surfaces, it could actually lead to warming because the clouds are less reflective than the ice beneath.” In that case, the clouds could actually reduce the amount of heat that brighter ice would otherwise reflect away from the planet. The study did not try to measure that effect, but it could be an important subject for future research, he added.

The guano effect lingers even after the birds leave the breeding areas. A month after they were gone, Boyer said ammonia levels in the air were still 1,000 times higher than the baseline.

“The emission of ammonia is a temperature-dependent process, so it’s likely that once wintertime comes, the ammonia gets frozen in,” he said. “But even before the penguins come back, I would hypothesize that as the temperature warms, the guano starts to emit ammonia again. And the penguins move all around the coast, so it’s possible they’re just fertilizing an entire coast with ammonia.”

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NASA's Apollo missions brought back moon rock samples for scientists to study. We've learned a great deal over the ensuing decades, but one enduring mystery remains. Many of those lunar samples show signs of exposure to strong magnetic fields comparable to Earth's, yet the Moon doesn't have such a field today. So, how did the moon rocks get their magnetism?

There have been many attempts to explain this anomaly. The latest comes from MIT scientists, who argue in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances that a large asteroid impact briefly boosted the Moon's early weak magnetic field—and that this spike is what is recorded in some lunar samples.

Evidence gleaned from orbiting spacecraft observations, as well as results announced earlier this year from China's Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6 missions, is largely consistent with the existence of at least a weak magnetic field on the early Moon. But where did this field come from? These usually form in planetary bodies as a result of a dynamo, in which molten metals in the core start to convect thanks to slowly dissipating heat. The problem is that the early Moon's small core had a mantle that wasn't much cooler than its core, so there would not have been significant convection to produce a sufficiently strong dynamo.

There have been proposed hypotheses as to how the Moon could have developed a core dynamo. For instance, a 2022 analysis suggested that in the first billion years, when the Moon was covered in molten rock, giant rocks formed as the magma cooled and solidified. Denser minerals sank to the core while lighter ones formed a crust.

Over time, the authors argued, a titanium layer crystallized just beneath the surface, and because it was denser than lighter minerals just beneath, that layer eventually broke into small blobs and sank through the mantle (gravitational overturn). The temperature difference between the cooler sinking rocks and the hotter core generated convection, creating intermittently strong magnetic fields—thus explaining why some rocks have that magnetic signature and others don't.

Or perhaps there is no need for the presence of a dynamo-driven magnetic field at all. For instance, the authors of a 2021 study thought earlier analyses of lunar samples may have been altered during the process. They re-examined samples from the 1972 Apollo 16 mission using CO₂ lasers to heat them, thus avoiding any alteration of the magnetic carriers. They concluded that any magnetic signatures in those samples could be explained by the impact of meteorites or comets hitting the Moon.

Bracing for impact

In 2020, two of the current paper's authors, MIT's Benjamin Weiss and Rona Oran, ran simulations to test whether a giant impact could generate a plasma that, in turn, would amplify the Moon's existing weak solar-generated magnetic field sufficiently to account for the levels of magnetism measured in the moon rocks. Those results seemed to rule out the possibility. This time around, they have come up with a new hypothesis that essentially combines elements of the dynamo and the plasma-generating impact hypotheses—taking into account an impact's resulting shockwave for good measure.

They tested their hypothesis by running impact simulations, focusing on the level of impact that created the Moon's Imbrium basin, as well as plasma cloud simulations. Their starting assumption was that the early Moon had a dynamo that generated a weak magnetic field 50 times weaker than Earth's. The results confirmed that a large asteroid impact, for example, could have kicked up a plasma cloud, part of which spread outward into space. The remaining plasma streamed around to the other side of the Moon, amplifying the existing weak magnetic field for around 40 minutes.

A key factor is the shock wave created by the initial impact, similar to seismic waves, which would have rattled surrounding rocks enough to reorient their subatomic spins in line with the newly amplified magnetic field. Weiss has likened the effect to tossing a deck of 52 playing cards into the air within a magnetic field. If each card had its own compass needle, its magnetism would be in a new orientation once each card hit the ground.

It's a complicated scenario that admittedly calls for a degree of serendipity. But we might not have to wait too long for confirmation one way or the other. The answer could lie in analyzing fresh lunar samples and looking for telltale signatures not just of high magnetism but also shock. (Early lunar samples were often discarded if they showed signs of shock.) Scientists are looking to NASA's planned Artemis crewed missions for this, since sample returns are among the objectives. Much will depend on NASA's future funding, which is currently facing substantial cuts, although thus far, Artemis II and III remain on track.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr7401  (About DOIs).

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In the US, many newly constructed generating facilities are brought online at the end of the year to qualify for tax incentives. Since much of the US's new generating capacity is solar power, that has led to a boom in solar production to start the year in recent years. With the first three months of data in for 2025, it's clear this year is no exception: Solar power is up a staggering 44 percent compared to the prior year.

That's the good news. The bad news is that, in contrast to China, solar's growth hasn't been enough to offset rising demand. Instead, the US also saw significant growth in coal use, which rose by 23 percent compared to the year prior, after years of steady decline.

Short-term fluctuations in demand are normal, generally driven by weather-induced demand for heating or cooling. Despite those changes, demand for electricity in the US has been largely flat for over a decade, largely thanks to gains in efficiency. But 2024 saw demand go up by nearly three percent, and the first quarter of 2025 saw another rise, this time of nearly five percent. It's a bit too early to say that we're seeing a shift to a period of rising demand, but one has been predicted for some time due to rising data center use and the increased electrification of transportation and appliances.

Ideally, we'd be in a place where the increased demand is offset by growth in non-polluting sources of power like wind and solar. Unfortunately, we're short of that at the moment. The first three months of 2025 saw production from wind increase by 12 percent while production from solar grew by 44 percent, compared to the same quarter last year. In absolute terms, wind and solar combined to produce an additional 28 Terawatt-hours in 2025 compared to the same time the year before. Unfortunately, demand rose by nearly 50 TW-hr over the same period.

Under those circumstances, the rest of the difference will be made up for with fossil fuels. Running counter to recent trends, the use of natural gas dropped during the first three months of 2025. This means that the use of coal rose nearly as quickly as demand, up by 23 percent compared to the same time period in 2024.

Despite the rise in coal use, the fraction of carbon-free electricity held steady year-over-year, with wind/solar/hydro/nuclear accounting for 43 percent of all power put on the US grid. That occurred despite small drops in nuclear and hydro production.

Solar outproduced hydro, but a significant amount of that production never made it onto the grid.

John Timmer

 

Once again, the productivity of solar power is shooting rapidly upward.

JOHN TIMMER

 

Solar power also passed a key milestone in 2025, although it requires digging through the statistics to realize it. In terms of power on the grid, there was less solar than hydro. But the Energy Information Agency also estimates the production from small-scale solar, like the kind you'd find on people's roofs. Some of this never enters the grid and instead simply offsets demand locally (in that it gets used by the house that sits beneath the panels). If you combine the TW-hr produced by small- and grid-scale solar, however, they surpass the production from hydropower by a significant margin.

This surge in solar comes on top of a 30 percent increase in production the year prior. The growth curve is clearly not slowing down.

That dynamic is also not likely to change immediately in response to cuts to tax breaks for renewable power that were part of the budget package passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday, and not only because it's possible that some Republican Senators might object to budget changes that will harm their states. Solar power in most areas is now cheaper than alternatives, even without subsidies, and any power plant (renewable or otherwise) will likely see its costs rise due to the tariff environment. Finally, the tax breaks don't expire immediately, and most power plant construction requires significant advanced planning.

All of those factors should continue the solar boom for at least a couple more years before all of the expected changes apply the brakes.

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Welcome to Edition 7.45 of the Rocket Report! Let's talk about spaceplanes. Since the Space Shuttle, spaceplanes have, at best, been a niche part of the space transportation business. The US Air Force's uncrewed X-37B and a similar vehicle operated by China's military are the only spaceplanes to reach orbit since the last shuttle flight in 2011, and both require a lift from a conventional rocket. Virgin Galactic's suborbital space tourism platform is also a spaceplane of sorts. A generation or two ago, one of the chief arguments in favor of spaceplanes was that they were easier to recover and reuse. Today, SpaceX routinely reuses capsules and rockets that look much more like conventional space vehicles than the winged designs of yesteryear. Spaceplanes are undeniably alluring in appearance, but they have the drawback of carrying extra weight (wings) into space that won't be used until the final minutes of a mission. So, do they have a future?

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.

One of China's commercial rockets returns to flight. The Kinetica-1 rocket launched Wednesday for the first time since a failure doomed its previous attempt to reach orbit in December, according to the vehicle's developer and operator, CAS Space. The Kinetica-1 is one of several small Chinese solid-fueled launch vehicles managed by a commercial company, although with strict government oversight and support. CAS Space, a spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said its Kinetica-1 rocket deployed multiple payloads with "excellent orbit insertion accuracy." This was the seventh flight of a Kinetica-1 rocket since its debut in 2022.

Back in action ... "Kinetica-1 is back!" CAS Space posted on X. "Mission Y7 has just successfully sent six satellites into designated orbits, making a total of 63 satellites or 6 tons of payloads since its debut. Lots of missions are planned for the coming months. 2025 is going to be awesome." The Kinetica-1 is designed to place up to 2 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit. A larger liquid-fueled rocket, Kinetica-2, is scheduled to debut later this year.

French government backs a spaceplane startup. French spaceplane startup AndroMach announced May 15 that it received a contract from CNES, the French space agency, to begin testing an early prototype of its Banger v1 rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. Founded in 2023, AndroMach is developing a pair of spaceplanes that will be used to perform suborbital and orbital missions to space. A suborbital spaceplane will utilize turbojet engines for horizontal takeoff and landing, and a pressure-fed biopropane/liquid oxygen rocket engine to reach space. Test flights of this smaller vehicle will begin in early 2027.

A risky proposition ... A larger ÉTOILE "orbital shuttle" is designed to be launched by various small launch vehicles and will be capable of carrying payloads of up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds). According to the company, initial test flights of ÉTOILE are expected to begin at the beginning of the next decade. It's unclear how much CNES is committing to AndroMach through this contract, but the company says the funding will support testing of an early demonstrator for its propane-fueled engine, with a focus on evaluating its thermodynamic performance. It's good to see European governments supporting developments in commercial space, but the path to a small commercial orbital spaceplane is rife with risk. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Dawn Aerospace is taking orders. Another spaceplane company in a more advanced stage of development says it is now taking customer orders for flights to the edge of space. New Zealand-based Dawn Aerospace said it is beginning to take orders for its remotely piloted, rocket-powered suborbital spaceplane, known as Aurora, with first deliveries expected in 2027, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. "This marks a historic milestone: the first time a space-capable vehicle—designed to fly beyond the Kármán line (100 kilometers or 328,000 feet)—has been offered for direct sale to customers," Dawn Aerospace said in a statement. While it hasn't yet reached space, Dawn's Aurora spaceplane flew to supersonic speed for the first time last year and climbed to an altitude of 82,500 feet (25.1 kilometers), setting a record for the fastest climb from a runway to 20 kilometers.

Further along ... Aurora is small in stature, measuring just 15.7 feet (4.8 meters) long. It's designed to loft a payload of up to 22 pounds (10 kilograms) above the Kármán line for up to three minutes of microgravity, before returning to a runway landing. Eventually, Dawn wants to reduce the turnaround time between Aurora flights to less than four hours. "Aurora is set to become the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever to take off from a conventional runway, blending the extreme performance of rocket propulsion with the reusability and operational simplicity of traditional aviation," Dawn said. The company's business model is akin to commercial airlines, where operators can purchase an aircraft directly from a manufacturer and manage their own operations. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

India's workhorse rocket falls short of orbit. In a rare setback, Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) launch vehicle PSLV-C61 malfunctioned and failed to place a surveillance satellite into the intended orbit last weekend, the Times of India reported. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off from a launch pad on the southeastern coast of India early Sunday, local time, with a radar reconnaissance satellite named EOS-09, or RISAT-1B. The satellite was likely intended to gather intelligence for the Indian military. "The country's military space capabilities, already hindered by developmental challenges, have suffered another setback with the loss of a potential strategic asset," the Times of India wrote.

What happened? ... V. Narayanan, ISRO's chairman, later said that the rocket’s performance was normal until the third stage. The PSLV's third stage, powered by a solid rocket motor, suffered a "fall in chamber pressure" and the mission could not be accomplished, Narayanan said. Investigators are probing the root cause of the failure. Telemetry data indicated the rocket deviated from its planned flight path around six minutes after launch, when it was traveling more than 12,600 mph (5.66 kilometers per second), well short of the speed it needed to reach orbital velocity. The rocket and its payload fell into the Indian Ocean south of the launch site. This was the first PSLV launch failure in eight years, ending a streak of 21 consecutive successful flights. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SES makes a booking with Impulse Space. SES, owner of the world's largest fleet of geostationary satellites, plans to use Impulse Space’s Helios kick stage to take advantage of lower-cost, low-Earth-orbit (LEO) launch vehicles and get its satellites quickly into higher orbits, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. SES hopes the combination will break a traditional launch conundrum for operators of medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO). These operators often must make a trade-off between a lower-cost launch that puts them farther from their satellite's final orbit, or a more expensive launch that can expedite their satellite's entry into service.

A matter of hours ... On Thursday, SES and Impulse Space announced a multi-launch agreement to use the methane-fueled Helios kick stage. "The first mission, currently planned for 2027, will feature a dedicated deployment from a medium-lift launcher in LEO, followed by Helios transferring the 4-ton-class payload directly to GEO within eight hours of launch," Impulse said in a statement. Typically, this transit to GEO takes several weeks to several months, depending on the satellite's propulsion system. "Today, we’re not only partnering with Impulse to bring our satellites faster to orbit, but this will also allow us to extend their lifetime and accelerate service delivery to our customers," said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of SES. "We're proud to become Helios' first dedicated commercial mission."

Unpacking China's spaceflight patches. There's a fascinating set of new patches Chinese officials released for a series of launches with top-secret satellites over the last two months, Ars reports. These four patches depict Buddhist gods with a sense of artistry and sharp colors that stand apart from China's previous spaceflight emblems, and perhaps—or perhaps not—they can tell us something about the nature of the missions they represent. The missions launched so-called TJS satellites toward geostationary orbit, where they most likely will perform missions in surveillance, signals intelligence, or missile warning. 

Making connections ... It's not difficult to start making connections between the Four Heavenly Gods and the missions that China's TJS satellites likely carry out in space. A protector with an umbrella? An all-seeing entity? This sounds like a possible link to spy craft or missile warning, but there's a chance Chinese officials approved the patches to misdirect outside observers, or there's no connection at all.

China aims for an asteroid. China is set to launch its second Tianwen deep space exploration mission late May, targeting both a near-Earth asteroid and a main belt comet, Space News reports. The robotic Tianwen-2 spacecraft is being integrated with a Long March 3B rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China, the country's top state-owned aerospace contractor said. Airspace closure notices indicate a four-hour-long launch window opening at noon EDT (16:00–20:00 UTC) on May 28. Backup launch windows are scheduled for May 29 and 30.

New frontiers ... Tianwen-2's first goal is to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid designated 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, or 2016 HO3, and return them to Earth in late 2027 with a reentry module. The Tianwen-2 mothership will then set a course toward a comet for a secondary mission. This will be China's first sample return mission from beyond the Moon. The asteroid selected as the target for Tianwen-2 is believed by scientists to be less than 100 meters, or 330 feet, in diameter, and may be made of material thrown off the Moon some time in its ancient past. Results from Tianwen-2 may confirm that hypothesis. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Upgraded methalox rocket flies from Jiuquan. Another one of China's privately funded launch companies achieved a milestone this week. Landspace launched an upgraded version of its Zhuque-2E rocket Saturday from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, Space News reports. The rocket delivered six satellites to orbit for a range of remote sensing, Earth observation, and technology demonstration missions. The Zhuque-2E is an improved version of the Zhuque-2, which became the first liquid methane-fueled rocket in the world to reach orbit in 2023.

Larger envelope ... This was the second flight of the Zhuque-2E rocket design, but the first to utilize a wider payload fairing to provide more volume for satellites on their ride into space. The Zhuque-2E is a stepping stone toward a much larger rocket Landspace is developing called the Zhuque-3, a stainless steel launcher with a reusable first stage booster that, at least outwardly, bears some similarities to SpaceX's Falcon 9. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

FAA clears SpaceX for Starship Flight 9. The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year, Ars reports. The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program.

Targeting Tuesday, for now ... In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements." SpaceX has not confirmed a target launch date for the next launch of Starship, but warning notices for pilots and mariners to steer clear of hazard areas in the Gulf of Mexico suggest the flight might happen as soon as the evening of Tuesday, May 27. The rocket will lift off from Starbase, Texas, SpaceX's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border. The FAA's approval comes with some stipulations, including that the launch must occur during "non-peak" times for air traffic and a larger closure of airspace downrange from Starbase.

Space Force is fed up with Vulcan delays. In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country's two primary rocket providers, Ars reports. The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket. "The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year," Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date.

Repairing trust ... "Major issues with the Vulcan have overshadowed its successful certification resulting in delays to the launch of four national security missions," Purdy wrote. "Despite the retirement of highly successful Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, the transition to Vulcan has been slow and continues to impact the completion of Space Force mission objectives." It has widely been known in the space community that military officials, who supported Vulcan with development contracts for the rocket and its engines that exceeded $1 billion, have been unhappy with the pace of the rocket's development. It was originally due to launch in 2020. At the end of his written testimony, Purdy emphasized that he expected ULA to do better. As part of his job as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space (SAE), Purdy noted that he has been tasked to transform space acquisition and to become more innovative. "For these programs, the prime contractors must re-establish baselines, establish a culture of accountability, and repair trust deficit to prove to the SAE that they are adopting the acquisition principles necessary to deliver capabilities at speed, on cost and on schedule."

SpaceX's growth on the West Coast. SpaceX is moving ahead with expansion plans at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, that will double its West Coast launch cadence and enable Falcon Heavy rockets to fly from California, Spaceflight Now reports. Last week, the Department of the Air Force issued its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which considers proposed modifications from SpaceX to Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg. These modifications will include changes to support launches of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, the construction of two new landing pads for Falcon boosters adjacent to SLC-6, the demolition of unneeded structures at SLC-6, and increasing SpaceX’s permitted launch cadence from Vandenberg from 50 launches to 100.

Doubling the fun ... The transformation of SLC-6 would include quite a bit of overhaul. Its most recent tenant, United Launch Alliance, previously used it for Delta IV rockets from 2006 through its final launch in September 2022. The following year, the Space Force handed over the launch pad to SpaceX, which lacked a pad at Vandenberg capable of supporting Falcon Heavy missions. The estimated launch cadence between SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 pad at Vandenberg, known as SLC-4E, and SLC-6 would be a 70-11 split for Falcon 9 rockets in 2026, with one Falcon Heavy at SLC-6, for a total of 82 launches. That would increase to a 70-25 Falcon 9 split in 2027 and 2028, with an estimated five Falcon Heavy launches in each of those years. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

May 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-16 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20:36 UTC

May 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-22 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:19 UTC

May 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-1 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 16:14 UTC

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Do you miss the feel of tactile buttons on your kitchen appliances or lament car manufacturers' insistence on touchscreens? Have you ever found yourself clumsily fumbling with the door handles of a vehicle or distracted by the bright blue light beaming from your vacuum or Wi-Fi router?

If so, you're not alone. The way technology gadgets are designed largely relies on things like blue, often LED, lights, flat resistive or capacitive touch input, and software. Some, like Amber Case, founder of the Calm Tech Institute, believe that these design choices distract from devices' purpose and functionality and are calling for a new approach to product design.

"Calm Tech Institute is kind of a consumer advocacy body that's collecting stories and research from neuroscientists that says, look at how the mind wants texture, and look at how it wants physical buttons, and there's a part of your mind that needs [those]," Case told Ars Technica. "When we don't have it and we replace it with glass, we're not only losing something about human experience, but we're actually causing the mind stress.”

The Calm Tech Institute, founded in May 2024, provides workshops, speaking engagements, and certification for products that "enhance human life without causing stress or distraction," its website says.

Speaking to Ars, Case pointed to user frustrations, such as software updates hindering car usage and "Why is there no button on the back of the television when I go into the hotel room late at night, and I have to turn on my flashlight on my iPhone to find the button to turn it off?" These experiences are the antithesis of the Calm Tech philosophy, Case explained:

Once we learn [how to ride a bike], we never have to learn it again. Whereas, with how a lot of software ... and physical objects are made now, you have to relearn it. It gets changed or the buttons aren't in the right place, and you can feel your mind wanting the button to be in a certain place. And it's not.

What makes a gadget calm?

The Calm Tech Institute takes inspiration from papers that Mark D. Weiser wrote while CTO at Xerox Palo Alto Research Company (PARC), an R&D firm now known as SRI International’s PARC. Weiser is often remembered as the father of ubiquitous computing, which starkly differs from technology approaches that submerge people in technology, like the metaverse. By contrast, ubiquitous computing products blend more discreetly into user environments. Per a quote from Weiser on Calm Tech Institute's website: "Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people."

That mentality helped Case settle on the Calm Tech Institute's principles for product design:

1.  Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention.
2. Technology should inform and create calm.
3. Technology should make use of the periphery.
4. Technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity.
5. Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak.
6. Technology should work even when it fails.
7. The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem.
8. Technology should respect social norms.

Further explaining the reasoning behind the principles, Case said:

When we say we're going to do something based on look and not touch, we forget the beauty of a lot of really well-designed tools, which is the tool dissolves when you use it and you focus on the task and not the tool. With a really well-designed hammer, you focus on the nail, not the hammer.

Coming up with those principles required a lot of interviews.

“I think I've sat with hundreds of people in cars, from self-driving cars to just riding around with friends, and saying, what in this car is annoying? What in this car is good? What in this technology is good or bad? I've gone to all sorts of giant tech companies all over the world, and they've had me test out their products," Case said.

Calm Tech’s certification process

One of Calm Tech Institute's primary functions is certifying gadgets as calm tech. Currently, six products are Calm Tech-certified: ReMarkable's Paper Pro tablet; Airthings' View Plus air quality monitor; a visual timer called Time Timer; the Daylight Computer, an e-paper computer; the Mui Board Gen 2, a wooden smart home controller currently available for preorder via Kickstarter; and Unpluq, which locks specified phone apps until you open them with an NFC keychain.

"In a market flooded with distraction, we wanted Unpluq to stand out as a product that actually reduces it, and this certification gave us a trusted way to signal that," Caroline Cadwell, who was CEO of Unpluq when it got Calm Tech-certified and now serves as an advisor, told Ars.

Unpluq's keychain and app.

Credit: Unpluq

In order for a gadget to be Calm Tech-certified, it's scored against an 81-point criteria across six categories as shown below:

One of the hardest categories for companies to adhere to, Case said, is periphery, which may rely on a product including physical buttons, which also touches on the materials category. With headphones, for example, users shouldn't have to look at the product or memorize where the buttons are to control it.

"Just put a series of raised dots: a raised dot for the down volume, two dots for the up volume, and then an obvious power button. … With the flattening of everything, we've forgotten this," she said.

The other top challenge for companies is light, which includes examining the lights' color-rendering index and prioritizing low flickering and warm colors.

"Blue light's a really, really energetic spectrum, and so it keeps us up at night,” Case said, pointing to the benefits of alternatives, like E-ink.

Overall, the criteria forces companies to think about product design in a way that has become less common among modern gadgets and deeply considers products' impact on the human senses.

“How you design the beep is important," Case said.

A new type of certification

Offering a new and voluntary type of certification program, the Calm Tech Institute is challenged to drum up interest in its program and financial security. As some tech companies already have to pay associated costs for more essential certifications, such as UL and Bluetooth certification, Calm Tech doesn't directly charge for certifications.

Instead, companies can pay Calm Tech for a review to see if their product is likely to get certified. A company could also pay for a pre-certification, where Calm Tech looks at a product before it's launched and helps with ideation so that the product ends up certifiable. Calm Tech is currently reviewing eight products for certification and has three products in the pre-certification phase.

Calm Tech Institute has also certified products that the team has worked with and tested without the product's vendors submitting for certification.

“It's better if we award the companies that are doing an excellent job, and then in the future, if there are companies that need a little bit of help, then we can work with them. But that's more of a consulting, higher overhead thing, and then that's going to cost more money," Case explained.

Case believes Calm Tech Institute's business model will be sustainable, noting her disinterest in Calm Tech going public and goals of running the firm without being forced to scale or monetize "in a way that would make us less [of a] service to customers." In fact, she has already reckoned with the idea of Calm Tech Institute no longer being needed one day.

"[Maybe] product examples very slowly get to a point in which maybe we're not needed anymore. ... Or maybe we're just the place you go to get the good design. But I hope we dissolve into the background as something useful that people use to get their product out,” she said.

Meanwhile, there's optimism that the certification will eventually help drive product sales. Unpluq's Cadwell said:

We've incorporated the Calm Tech certification into our product listings and marketing materials and plan to feature it on our physical packaging moving forward. Since we were part of the very first batch of certified products, I view this as a strategic bet more than an instant sales driver, but I expect that will change for companies getting certified in the future.

Source

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