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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.

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Tired of using bulky night vision goggles for your clandestine nocturnal activities? An interdisciplinary team of Chinese neuroscientists and materials scientists has developed near-infrared contact lenses that enabled both mice and humans to see in the dark, even with their eyes closed, according to a new paper published in the journal Cell.

Humans and other mammals can only perceive a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum (light), usually in the 400–700 nm range. There are creatures that can see in infrared (snakes, mosquitoes, bullfrogs) or ultraviolet (bees, birds), and goldfish can perceive both. But humans must augment themselves with technology in order to expand our range of vision.

Night vision goggles and similar devices have been around since the 1930s, including infrared-visible converters, but these require external energy sources, and the converters have a multilayer structure that makes them opaque and hence challenging to integrate with a human eye. The authors previously were able to confer near-infrared vision to mice by injecting nanoparticles that bind to photoreceptors into their eyes—basically creating a near-infrared nanoantenna—but realized that most people would be averse to the prospect of sticking needles in their eyes. So they looked for a better alternative. Contact lenses seemed the obvious choice.

The team screened various biocompatible polymeric materials (used to make commercial contact lenses) to find just the right refractive index and optical and mechanical properties, and integrated them with the aforementioned nanoparticles to make upconversion contact lenses (UCLs). Then they tested their lenses on mice, giving them a choice between a dark box and a box illuminated with infrared light. Mice wearing the contacts chose the dark box; those without augmented vision showed no preference. And the pupils of the contact-wearing mice constricted in response to infrared light, while brain imaging showed the visual processing centers reacting to it as well.

A new perspective

The team tested their lenses on humans by asking subjects to detect flashing signals, akin to Morse code, in the infrared, and to identify the direction of incoming infrared light. The subjects could only perform those tasks while wearing the special contact lenses.

The authors were intrigued to find that both mice and humans were better able to discriminate infrared light compared to visible light when their eyes were closed, which they attribute to the fact that infrared light can penetrate the eyelid more effectively than visible light. They also tweaked the nanoparticles so that they could color-code different infrared wavelengths, thereby enabling wearers to perceive more details in the infrared, an adaptation that could help color-blind people perceive more wavelengths.

There are some limitations. The contact lenses are so close to the retina that they can't really capture fine details very well, because the converted light particles tend to scatter. The team made a wearable glass version of their nanoparticle technology so wearers could get higher resolution in the infrared. And right now the lenses can only detect infrared light projected from an LED; increasing the sensitivity of the nanoparticles to pick up lower levels of infrared would address this issue.

Still, it's a significant step. “Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” said co-author Tian Xue, a neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China. “There are many potential applications right away for this material. For example, flickering infrared light could be used to transmit information in security, rescue, encryption, or anti-counterfeiting settings. In the future, by working together with materials scientists and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity.”

Cell, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.04.019  (About DOIs).

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While our Sun prefers to go solo, many other stars are parts of binary systems, with a pair of stars gravitationally bound to each other. In some cases, the stars are far enough apart that planets can form around each of them. But there are also plenty of tight binary systems, where the stars orbit each other at a radius that would place them both comfortably inside our Solar System. In these systems, exoplanets tend to be found at greater distances, in orbits that have them circling both stars.

On Wednesday, scientists described a system that seems to be neither of the above. It is a tight binary system, with a heavy central star that's orbited by a white dwarf at a distance two to three times larger than Earth's orbit. The lone planet confirmed to be in the system is squeezed in between the two, orbiting at a distance similar to Earth's distance from the Sun. And, as an added bonus, the planet is orbiting backward relative to the white dwarf.

Orbiting ν Octantis

The exosolar system is termed ν Octantis (or Nu Octantis), and its primary star is just a bit heavier than our Sun (1.6 solar masses). It's orbited by a far dimmer companion that's roughly half of our Sun's mass, but which hasn't been characterized in detail until now. The companion's orbit relative to the central star is a bit lopsided, ranging from about two astronomical units (AU, the typical Earth-Sun distance) at its closest approach to roughly three AU at its farthest. And, until yesterday, the exact nature of the companion star was not clear.

The latter question was relatively easy to answer. Detailed imaging of the system in the near infrared should be able to resolve the two stars but was unable to pick up a second object with sufficient brightness. That eliminates any main sequence stars, leaving a white dwarf as the only likely answer. But that's not the only thing that's orbiting the central star of ν Octantis.

Earlier studies of the system had suggested that there was also an exoplanet present in the system. But the properties of its orbit made little sense, in that nobody could seem to figure out a stable orbit that would be consistent with the observations. The only thing that was clear was that the most stable orbits appeared to require that the planet have a retrograde motion, meaning orbiting in the opposite direction to the companion star. ν Octantis definitely fell into the vast category of "more data is needed" questions.

And more data is exactly what a small international team of scientists got, with nearly two years of additional observations using the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) instrument in Chile. The data clearly confirmed the existence of a planet in a retrograde orbit and suggested that the plane of its orbit was 17 degrees off from the plane formed by the orbits of the two stars. Unfortunately, modeling variations on this orbit through time indicated that 98 percent of them were unstable within 50 million years.

So, the researchers tested a range of orbital properties that would keep everything in a single plane. This provided a solution where modeling variations on it led to 75 percent of the orbits being stable out past 50 million years. So, the researchers settle on this as the most likely description of the system.

These orbits do have the planet in ν Octantis in a retrograde orbit, meaning it's moving in the opposite direction from the smaller star in the system. The orbit is roughly one AU, meaning its typical distance to the central star is similar to that of the Earth's distance to the Sun. But the orbit is somewhat squished, with one half of the orbit being significantly closer to the central star than the other.

And, critically, the entire orbit is within the orbit of the smaller companion star. The gravitational forces of a tight binary should prevent any planets from forming within this space early in the system's history. So, how did the planet end up in such an unusual configuration?

A confused past

The fact that one of the stars present in ν Octantis is a white dwarf suggests some possible explanations. White dwarfs are formed by Sun-like stars that have advanced through a late helium-burning period that causes them to swell considerably, leaving the outer surface of the star weakly bound to the rest of its mass. At the distances within ν Octantis, that would allow considerable material to be drawn off the outer companion and pulled onto the surface of what's now the central star. The net result is a considerable mass transfer.

This could have done one of two things to place a planet in the interior of the system. One is that the transferred material isn't likely to make an immediate dive onto the surface of the nearby star. If the process is slow enough, it could have produced a planet-forming disk for a brief period—long enough to produce a planet on the interior of the system.

Alternatively, if there were planets orbiting exterior to both stars, the change in the mass distribution of the system could have potentially destabilized their orbits. That might be enough to cause interactions among the planets to send one of them spiraling inward, where it was eventually captured in the stable retrograde orbit we now find it.

Either case, the authors emphasize, should be pretty rare, meaning we're unlikely to have imaged many other systems like this at this stage of our study of exoplanets. They do point to another tight binary, HD 59686, that appears to have a planet in a retrograde orbit. But, as with ν Octantis, the data isn't clear enough to rule out alternative configurations yet. So, once again, more data is needed.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09006-x  (About DOIs).

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AI’s energy use already represents as much as 20 percent of global data-center power demand, research published Thursday in the journal Joule shows. That demand from AI, the research states, could double by the end of this year, comprising nearly half of all total data-center electricity consumption worldwide, excluding the electricity used for bitcoin mining.

The new research is published in a commentary by Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company that evaluates the environmental impact of technology. De Vries-Gao started Digiconomist in the late 2010s to explore the impact of bitcoin mining, another extremely energy-intensive activity, would have on the environment. Looking at AI, he says, has grown more urgent over the past few years because of the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other large language models that use massive amounts of energy. According to his research, worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year.

“The money that bitcoin miners had to get to where they are today is peanuts compared to the money that Google and Microsoft and all these big tech companies are pouring in [to AI],” he says. “This is just escalating a lot faster, and it’s a much bigger threat.”

The development of AI is already having an impact on Big Tech’s climate goals. Tech giants have acknowledged in recent sustainability reports that AI is largely responsible for driving up their energy use. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, have increased 48 percent since 2019, complicating the company’s goals of reaching net zero by 2030.

“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute,” Google’s 2024 sustainability report reads.

Last month, the International Energy Agency released a report finding that data centers made up 1.5 percent of global energy use in 2024—around 415 terrawatt-hours, a little less than the yearly energy demand of Saudi Arabia. This number is only set to get bigger: Data centers’ electricity consumption has grown four times faster than overall consumption in recent years, while the amount of investment in data centers has nearly doubled since 2022, driven largely by massive expansions to account for new AI capacity. Overall, the IEA predicted that data center electricity consumption will grow to more than 900 TWh by the end of the decade.

But there’s still a lot of unknowns about the share that AI, specifically, takes up in that current configuration of electricity use by data centers. Data centers power a variety of services—like hosting cloud services and providing online infrastructure—that aren’t necessarily linked to the energy-intensive activities of AI. Tech companies, meanwhile, largely keep the energy expenditure of their software and hardware private.

Some attempts to quantify AI’s energy consumption have started from the user side: calculating the amount of electricity that goes into a single ChatGPT search, for instance. De Vries-Gao decided to look, instead, at the supply chain, starting from the production side to get a more global picture.

The high computing demands of AI, De Vries-Gao says, creates a natural “bottleneck” in the current global supply chain around AI hardware, particularly around the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the undisputed leader in producing key hardware that can handle these needs. Companies like Nvidia outsource the production of their chips to TSMC, which also produces chips for other companies like Google and AMD. (Both TSMC and Nvidia declined to comment for this article.)

De Vries-Gao used analyst estimates, earnings call transcripts, and device details to put together an approximate estimate of TSMC’s production capacity. He then looked at publicly available electricity consumption profiles of AI hardware and estimates on utilization rates of that hardware—which can vary based on what it’s being used for—to arrive at a rough figure of just how much of global data-center demand is taken up by AI. De Vries-Gao calculates that without increased production, AI will consume up to 82 terrawatt-hours of electricity this year—roughly around the same as the annual electricity consumption of a country like Switzerland. If production capacity for AI hardware doubles this year, as analysts have projected it will, demand could increase at a similar rate, representing almost half of all data center demand by the end of the year.

Despite the amount of publicly available information used in the paper, a lot of what De Vries-Gao is doing is peering into a black box: We simply don’t know certain factors that affect AI’s energy consumption, like the utilization rates of every piece of AI hardware in the world or what machine learning activities they’re being used for, let alone how the industry might develop in the future.

Sasha Luccioni, an AI and energy researcher and the climate lead at open-source machine-learning platform Hugging Face, cautioned about leaning too hard on some of the conclusions of the new paper, given the amount of unknowns at play. Luccioni, who was not involved in this research, says that when it comes to truly calculating AI’s energy use, disclosure from tech giants is crucial.

“It’s because we don’t have the information that [researchers] have to do this,” she says. “That’s why the error bar is so huge.”

And tech companies do keep this information. In 2022, Google published a paper on machine learning and electricity use, noting that machine learning was “10%–15% of Google’s total energy use” from 2019 to 2021, and predicted that with best practices, “by 2030 total carbon emissions from training will reduce.” However, since that paper—which was released before Google Gemini’s debut in 2023—Google has not provided any more detailed information about how much electricity ML uses. (Google declined to comment for this story.)

“You really have to deep-dive into the semiconductor supply chain to be able to make any sensible statement about the energy demand of AI,” De Vries-Gao says. “If these big tech companies were just publishing the same information that Google was publishing three years ago, we would have a pretty good indicator” of AI’s energy use.

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The extent of Tesla's meteoric decline in popularity is on vivid display in the latest new car registration numbers coming out of Europe. New car sales were essentially flat in the region last month, with just under 1,400 more cars sold this year than last. But the market is far from static; plug-in sales are booming, with battery electric vehicle registrations up by 28 percent according to the analysts at JATO Dynamics, and plug-in hybrid EV sales increased by 31 percent. Almost every automaker has capitalized on this growth, with a few exceptions—Tesla being the most significant.

As the first mainstream BEV-only brand, Tesla led the way in European EV sales and made much of the fact that its Model Y crossover was the best-selling car in Europe for some time. Those days are long gone. Model Y registrations fell by 53 percent last month to just 4,495 units, dropping it to 9th on the list of most-registered BEVs. First place went to the Skoda Elroq, followed by VW's ID.3, ID.7, ID.4, and the new Kia EV3.

When you look at sales at the brand level, things get a little worse for the American automaker. Volkswagen sold more EVs than anyone else in Europe last month, increasing by 61 percent to 23,514 units. As for Tesla? It fell to 11th place, with just 7,165 sales in total, a 49 percent decrease year on year.

Beating it to 10th place was China's BYD. Barred from the US market by protectionist laws and now heavy new tariffs, BYD has focused instead on Europe. Its PHEVs have been selling strongly there, unaffected by tariffs aimed at BEVs, but even its BEV sales have now eclipsed Tesla, with 7,231 registrations last month.

"Although the difference between the two brands' monthly sales totals may be small, the implications are enormous," said Felipe Munoz, global analyst at JATO Dynamics. "This is a watershed moment for Europe's car market, particularly when you consider that Tesla has led the European BEV market for years, while BYD only officially began operations beyond Norway and the Netherlands in late 2022."

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Over the past year, veteran software engineer Jay Prakash Thakur has spent his nights and weekends prototyping AI agents that could, in the near future, order meals and engineer mobile apps almost entirely on their own. His agents, while surprisingly capable, have also exposed new legal questions that await companies trying to capitalize on Silicon Valley’s hottest new technology.

Agents are AI programs that can act mostly independently, allowing companies to automate tasks such as answering customer questions or paying invoices. While ChatGPT and similar chatbots can draft emails or analyze bills upon request, Microsoft and other tech giants expect that agents will tackle more complex functions—and most importantly, do it with little human oversight.

The tech industry’s most ambitious plans involve multi-agent systems, with dozens of agents someday teaming up to replace entire workforces. For companies, the benefit is clear: saving on time and labor costs. Already, demand for the technology is rising. Tech market researcher Gartner estimates that agentic AI will resolve 80 percent of common customer service queries by 2029. Fiverr, a service where businesses can book freelance coders, reports that searches for “ai agent” have surged 18,347 percent in recent months.

Thakur, a mostly self-taught coder living in California, wanted to be at the forefront of the emerging field. His day job at Microsoft isn’t related to agents, but he has been tinkering with AutoGen, Microsoft's open source software for building agents, since he worked at Amazon back in 2024. Thakur says he has developed multi-agent prototypes using AutoGen with just a dash of programming. Last week, Amazon rolled out a similar agent development tool called Strands; Google offers what it calls an Agent Development Kit.

Because agents are meant to act autonomously, the question of who bears responsibility when their errors cause financial damage has been Thakur’s biggest concern. Assigning blame when agents from different companies miscommunicate within a single, large system could become contentious, he believes. He compared the challenge of reviewing error logs from various agents to reconstructing a conversation based on different people's notes. “It's often impossible to pinpoint responsibility,” Thakur says.

Joseph Fireman, senior legal counsel at OpenAI, said on stage at a recent legal conference hosted by the Media Law Resource Center in San Francisco that aggrieved parties tend to go after those with the deepest pockets. That means companies like his will need to be prepared to take some responsibility when agents cause harm—even when a kid messing around with an agent might be to blame. (If that person were at fault, they likely wouldn’t be a worthwhile target moneywise, the thinking goes). “I don’t think anybody is hoping to get through to the consumer sitting in their mom’s basement on the computer,” Fireman said. The insurance industry has begun rolling out coverage for AI chatbot issues to help companies cover the costs of mishaps.

Onion Rings

Thakur’s experiments have involved him stringing together agents in systems that require as little human intervention as possible. One project he pursued was replacing fellow software developers with two agents. One was trained to search for specialized tools needed for making apps, and the other summarized their usage policies. In the future, a third agent could use the identified tools and follow the summarized policies to develop an entirely new app, Thakur says.

When Thakur put his prototype to the test, a search agent found a tool that, according to the website, “supports unlimited requests per minute for enterprise users" (meaning high-paying clients can rely on it as much as they want). But in trying to distill the key information, the summarization agent dropped the crucial qualification of "per minute for enterprise users.” It erroneously told the coding agent, which did not qualify as an enterprise user, that it could write a program that made unlimited requests to the outside service. Because this was a test, there was no harm done. If it had happened in real life, the truncated guidance could have led to the entire system unexpectedly breaking down.

Thakur also pursued a more complicated project. He developed an ordering system for a futuristic restaurant that could accept custom orders across cuisines. Users could type out their desires—“burgers and fries”—to a chatbot. An AI agent could then research an appropriate price and translate the order into a recipe. It could then pass off the instructions to a cast of robots with differing culinary expertise. Thakur doesn’t actually have a commercial kitchen, let alone a single robot, but he developed a simulation to identify pitfalls.

Nine out of 10 times, all went well. Then, there were the cases where “I want onion rings” became “extra onions.” Or requests such as “extra naan” were ignored. Errors tended to appear most often when Thakur tried to jam through orders with more than five items. A worst-case scenario, if this happened in real life, would be misserving someone with a food allergy.

In another prototype Thakur has tried, a shopping comparison agent meant to help users find the best deal came back with a bargain offer from one ecommerce website but incorrectly linked to a product page on a different website, which had a higher price. If the agent were designed to automatically make purchases, a customer would have ended up overspending, Thakur says.

More familiar AI programs such as ChatGPT already make costly errors. Last year, a coupon inadvertently invented by an airline AI chatbot was held to be legally binding. This month, chatbot developer Anthropic had to apologize to a judge for a sloppy AI-generated citation in a court filing. Single-agent systems can also go wrong. Naveen Chatlapalli, a software developer helping companies with agents, says he’s seen an HR agent approve leave requests it should have denied and a notetaker agent send sensitive information from meetings to the wrong department. With relatively straightforward programs like these, it’s easy to diagnose what went wrong and introduce more human oversight.

Even Thakur’s more complex restaurant snafus could be resolved by simply having the customer confirm that the cooking agent has the order correct. But that undermines the principle of limiting human involvement. “We want to save time for our customers,” Thakur says. “That’s where it’s still making mistakes.” And as far as identifying the origin of any issues that arise, an agent that interprets an order wrong can be as much at fault as a cooking agent that fails to recognize flaws in the request, Thakur says.

A leading hope among developers is that a “judge” agent can start to reign over these systems and identify and remedy errors before they snowball. They are meant to act as the manager that figures out the customer meant onion rings, not extra onions. Mark Kashef, a freelancer on Fiverr who runs an AI strategy company called Prompt Advisers, worries that companies are starting to overengineer early systems with an unnecessary number of agents—no different than bloating inside a human bureaucracy. This month, Kashef told an African government seeking his advice to focus on developing a single agent that could save it the most time.

But as the tech industry pursues more elaborate AI systems, someone will have to settle who pays when a customer demands a refund for a botched food order or sues over a more significant misfire. During the recent legal conference in San Francisco, OpenAI’s Fireman and other attorneys said existing laws would hold users who issue orders to agents somewhat responsible for the actions of those agents—especially when the users were warned of the agents’ actions and limitations.

Legal experts have suggested that people who wish to use agentic systems sign contracts that push responsibility onto the companies supplying the technology. Of course, ordinary consumers can’t force giant companies to agree to these terms. If anything, some users may rely on agents to review legalese for them. “There will be interesting questions about whether agents can bypass privacy policies and terms of service” on behalf of users, Rebecca Jacobs, associate general counsel at Anthropic, said at the conference.

Dazza Greenwood, an attorney who has been researching the legal risks of agents, encourages caution. “If you have a 10 percent error rate with ‘add onions,’ that to me is nowhere near release,” he says. “Work your systems out so that you're not inflicting harm on people to start with.”

The reality is that users can’t kick up their feet and leave it all to the agents just yet.

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If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet Archive uploads all the physical documents on its site, now you can get a behind-the-scenes look at the process. The Internet Archive launched a new YouTube livestream that shows the digitization of microfiche in real time — complete with some relaxing, lo-fi beats.

Microfiche is a sheet of film that contains multiple images of miniaturized documents. It’s an old form of storing newspapers, court documents, government records, and other important documents. The Internet Archive uses these microfiche cards to digitize and upload documents to its online library.

The livestream shows a close-up look at one of the five microfiche digitization stations at the organization’s Richmond, California location, along with a look at the document that it’s working on. App maker Sophia Tung, who created a LoFi music livestream showing Waymo’s robotaxis returning to their parking lot, also set up the microfiche livestream for the Internet Archive.

“Operators feed microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera, which captures multiple detailed images of each sheet,” Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive’s director of library services, writes in a post on the site. “Software stitches these images together, after which other team members use automated tools to identify and crop up to 100 individual pages per card.”

From there, the Internet Archive processes the pages, makes them text-searchable, and then uploads them to its public collections.

The livestream runs from Monday through Friday from 10:30AM ET to 6:30PM ET. “During the day, you’ll see scanners working on custom machines to digitize all the microfiche in the world,” Tung says. “During the off hours, you can also see everything else that the Archive has to offer, like silent films in the public domain or historical pictures from NASA.”

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Whenever something bad happens to us, brain systems responsible for mediating emotions kick in to prevent it from happening again. When we get stung by a wasp, the association between pain and wasps is encoded in the region of the brain called the amygdala, which connects simple stimuli with basic emotions.

But the brain does more than simple associations; it also encodes lots of other stimuli that are less directly connected with the harmful event—things like the place where we got stung or the wasps’ nest in a nearby tree. These are combined into complex emotional models of potentially threatening circumstances.

Till now, we didn’t know exactly how these models are built. But we’re beginning to understand how it’s done.

Emotional complexity

“Decades of work has revealed how simple forms of emotional learning occurs—how sensory stimuli are paired with aversive events,” says Joshua Johansen, a team director at the Neural Circuitry of Learning and Memory at RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Tokyo. But Johansen says that these decades didn’t bring much progress in treating psychiatric conditions like anxiety and trauma-related disorders. “We thought if we could get a handle of more complex emotional processes and understand their mechanisms, we may be able to provide relief for patients with conditions like that,” Johansen claims.

To make it happen, his team performed experiments designed to trigger complex emotional processes in rats while closely monitoring their brains.

Johansen and Xiaowei Gu, his co-author and colleague at RIKEN, started by dividing the rats into two groups. The first “paired” group of rats was conditioned to associate an image with a sound. The second “unpaired” group watched the same image and listened to the same sound, but not at the same time. This prevented the rats from making an association.

Then, one day later, the rats were shown the same image and treated with an electric shock until they learned to connect the image with pain. Finally, the team tested if the rats would freeze in fear in response to the sound. The “unpaired” group didn’t. The rats in the “paired” group did—it turned out human-like complex emotional models were present in rats as well.

Once Johansen and Gu confirmed the capacity was there, they got busy figuring out how it worked exactly.

Playing tag

“Behaviorally, we measured freezing responses to the directly paired stimulus, which was the image, and inferred stimulus which was the sound,” Johansen says. “But we also performed something we called miniscope calcium imaging.” The trick relied on injecting rats with a virus that forced their cells to produce proteins that fluoresce in response to increased levels of calcium in the cells. Increased levels of calcium are the telltale sign of activity in neurons, meaning the team could see in real time which neurons in rats’ brains lit up during the experiments.

It turned out that the region crucial for building these complex emotional models was not the amygdala, but the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which had a rather specialized role. “The dmPFC does not form the sensory model of the world. It only cares about things when they have emotional relevance,” Johansen explains. He said there wasn’t much change in neuronal activity during the sensory learning phase, when the animals were watching the image and listening to the sound. The neurons became significantly more active when the rats received the electric shock.

In the “unpaired” group, the active neurons that held the representations of the electric shock and the image started to overlap. In the “paired” group, this overlap also included the neuronal representation of the sound. “There was a kind of an associative bundle that formed,” Johansen says.

After Johansen and Gu pinpointed the neurons that formed those associative bundles, they started looking at how each of these components works.

Detraumatizing rodents

In the first step, the team identified the dmPFC neurons that sent output to the amygdala. Then they selectively inhibited those neurons and exposed the rats from the “paired” group to the image and the sound again. The result of disconnecting the dmPFC neurons from the amygdala was that rats exhibited a fear response to the image but no longer feared the sound. “It seems like the amygdala can form the simple representations on its own but requires input from the dmPFC to express more complex, inferred emotions,” Johansen says.

But there are still a lot of unanswered questions left.

The next thing the team wants to take a closer look at is the process that enables the brain to tie an aversive stimulus, like the shock, to one that was not active during the aversive event. In the “paired” group of rats, some multi-sensory neurons responding to both auditory and visual stimuli apparently got recruited. “We haven’t worked that out yet,” Johansen says. "This is a very novel type of mechanism.”

Another thing is that the emotional model Johansen and Gu induced in rats was relatively simple. In the real world, especially in humans, we can have many different aversive outcomes tied to the same triggers. A single location could be where you got stung by a wasp, attacked by a dog, robbed of your wallet, and dumped by your significant other—all different aversive representations with myriad inferred, indirect stimuli to go along with them. “Does the dmPFC combine all those representations into sort of a single, overlapping representation? Or is it a really rich environment that bundles different aversive experiences with the individual aspects of these experiences?” Johansen asked. “This is something we want to test more.”

Nature, 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09001-2

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Cheese connoisseurs are no doubt familiar with a particular kind of semi-hard Swiss cheese called "Tête de Moine." Rather than spreading or slicing the cheese, Tête de Moine is usually served by scraping the top of the cheese wheel in a circular motion using a specialized tool called a Girolle. This produces elegant thin shavings known as rosettes, since they resemble a frilly flower.

The method is both aesthetically pleasing and serves to enhance the aromas and mouth feel of the cheese, according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters (PRL). This group of physicists based in Paris noted a marked similarity between the frilly edges of those cheese flowers and certain leaves, fungi, corals, and even torn plastic sheets—all formed by different mechanisms. So naturally the physicists decided to conduct their own research to determine the underlying mechanism(s) for the delicate frills of Tête de Moine shavings.

Tête de Moine translates as "monk's head," and the name dates back to the 1790s, although the actual cheese originates back to a 12th-century Bellelay monastery in Switzerland. It's made from raw unpasteurized cow's milk and is matured for a minimum of 75 days on spruce boards and boasts a firm reddish-brown crust. The Girolle (named after the French word for chanterelles, which have a similar rosette shape) is a more recent innovation, invented in 1982 specifically for Tête de Moine by a man named Nicolas Crevoisier. It's just a round wooden plate with a pin stuck vertically in the middle—the better to skewer one's cheese wheel—and a crank handle to control the slicing blade.

a) Layer of the cheese Tête de Moine with wrinkly edge, after being scraped using the cheese slicer “la Girolle.”

(b) Edge wrinkling of a torn plastic sheet. (c) Wavy edge of a BlueStar Fern leaf.

J. Zhang et al., 2025

 

Schematic illustration of the experimental setup.

J. Zhang et al., 2025

 

For their experiments, the authors of the PRL paper selected samples of Monk's head cheese wheels from the Fromagerie de Bellelay brand that had been aged between three and six months. They cut each cheese wheel in half and mounted each half on a Girolle, motorizing the base to ensure a constant speed of rotation and making sure the blade was in a fixed position. Their measurements of how the cheese deformed during scraping enabled them to build a model based on metal dynamics on a two-dimensional surface that had "cheese-like properties."

The results showed that there was a variable friction between the core and the edge of the cheese wheel, because the core stayed fresher during the ripening process. Because the harder outer edge had lower friction with the blade, the edges of the cheese shavings were uneven in thickness—hence the resemblance to frilly rosettes.

This essentially amounts to a new shaping mechanism with the possibility of being able to one day program complex shaping from "a simple scraping process," per the authors. "Our analysis provides the tools for a better control of flower chip morphogenesis through plasticity in the shaping of other delicacies, but also in metal cutting," they concluded. Granted, "flower-shaped chips have never been reported in metal cutting. But even in such uniform materials, the fact that friction properties control the metric change is particularly interesting for material shaping."

Physical Review Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.208201  (About DOIs).

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It is microscopic and rod-shaped, can create spores, and may have evolved to survive hundreds of miles above our planet's surface. This bacterium, never before seen on Earth, was detected on China's Tiangong space station. It has been named Niallia tiangongensis, and it inhabited the cockpit controls on the station, living in microgravity conditions.

According to China Central Television, the country's national broadcaster, taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) collected swab samples from the space station in May 2023, which were then frozen and sent back to Earth for study. The aim of this work was to investigate the behavior of microorganisms, gathered from a completely sealed environment with a human crew, during space travel, as part of the China Space Station Habitation Area Microbiome Program (CHAMP).

A paper published in the Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology describes how analysis of samples from the space station revealed this previously unseen bacterial species, which belongs to the genus Niallia. Genomic sequencing showed that its closest terrestrial relative is the bacterium Niallia circulans, although the Tiangong species has substantial genetic differences.

Niallia tiangongensis exhibits structural and functional variations that mean it is well-adapted to existing in a space station. It possesses the ability to hydrolyze gelatin (break down this protein into smaller components) in a unique way, allowing the protein to be consumed for survival in nutrient-poor environments. In addition, these bacteria are able to form a protective biofilm, activate oxidative stress responses, and promote repair in the face of radiation damage. “This aids their survival in the space environment,” the paper explains.

Bacteria of the genus Niallia are characterized by their rod-like shape, a thick cell wall, absence of an outer membrane, and their ability to form endospores that ensure their survival in adverse conditions. Niallia circulans, for example, encapsulates its genetic material in a highly protected cell, which remains inactive until the environment becomes favorable again.

It is unclear whether the newly discovered microbe evolved on the space station or whether it is part of the vast sea of as yet unidentified microorganisms on Earth. To date, tens of thousands of bacterial species have been cataloged, although there are estimated to be billions more unclassified species on Earth.

The discovery of Niallia tiangongensis will provide a better understanding of the microscopic hazards that the next generation of space travelers will face and help design sanitation protocols for extended missions. It is still too early to determine whether the space bacterium poses any danger to taikonauts aboard Tiangong, although it is known that its terrestrial relative, Niallia circulans, can cause sepsis, especially in immunocompromised people.

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

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Pixar's Finding Nemo immortalized the colorful clownfish, with its distinctive orange body and white stripes, in the popular imagination. Clownfish, like many other species, are feeling the stress of rising temperatures and other environmental stressors. Fortunately, they have a superpower to cope: They can shrink their body size during dangerous heat waves to substantially boost their odds of survival, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

“This is not just about getting skinnier under stressful conditions; these fish are actually getting shorter," said co-author Melissa Versteeg, a graduate student at Newcastle University. "We don’t know yet exactly how they do it, but we do know that a few other animals can do this too."

Many vertebrates have shown growth decline in response to environmental stressors, especially higher temperatures. Marine iguanas, for example, reabsorb some of their bone material to shrink when their watery habitat gets warmer, while young salmon have been known to shrink at winter's onset. This can also happen when there is less food available. And social factors can also influence growth. When female meerkats, for example, are dominant, they have growth spurts, while a disruption in their social status can cause stunted growth in male cichlids

What has been lacking in prior research is an investigation into how environmental and social factors interact to influence growth rates, according to Versteeg et al. They thought clownfish were the best species to study to fill that gap, since they've been extensively studied and are well understood. The fish live on Indo-Pacific coral reefs where heat stress has been increasing and has become more severe—an environment that is close to the thermal tolerance limits of clownfish.

Clownfish also live in social groups: They form breeding pairs with a dominant female and subdominant male, sometimes adding subordinate non-breeding fish. The dominants tend to grow to match the size of the host anemone, while the subordinates only grow to a size that ensures there are sufficient resources—otherwise they risk being evicted and likely dying.

Let’s get small

The team observed 67 breeding pairs of wild clownfish—briefly caught and photographed for distinctive markings and measured before being returned to the water—living on single anemones in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea, between February and August 2023. This happened to coincide with the world's fourth global bleaching event. They measured the body size of the fish once a month and measured the temperature around the individual anemones every four to six days. Then the team analyzed the collected data.

The results: Over the course of those months, 101 of the 134 clownfish shrank at least once in response to heat stress, and doing so boosted their likelihood of survival up to 78 percent compared to the 33 fish that did not shrink. And between breeding pairs, there were distinctive growth ratios between the dominant and subordinate fish; those pairs that shrank together were also more likely to survive the heat waves.

“We were so surprised to see shrinking in these fish that, to be sure, we measured each fish individual repeatedly over a period of five months," said Versteeg. "In the end, we discovered it was very common in this population. It was a surprise to see how rapidly clownfish can adapt to a changing environment, and we witnessed how flexibly they regulated their size, as individuals and as breeding pairs, in response to heat stress as a successful technique to help them survive.”

Versteeg et al. have not yet identified a possible mechanism for the shrinkage, but suggest the triggering of neuroendocrine pathways via thyroid hormones might play a role, since those hormones regulate growth. The adaptive strategy could also be a means of adjusting to changing metabolic needs. But there are trade-offs: While shrinking in response to heat waves ensures greater survivability, there can also be a corresponding decrease in birth rates.

"Our findings show that individual fish can shrink in response to heat stress, which is further impacted by social conflict, and that shrinking can lead to improving their chances of survival," said senior author Theresa Rueger, also of Newcastle University. "If individual shrinking were widespread and happening among different species of fish, it could provide a plausible alternative hypothesis for why the size of many fish species is declining, and further studies are needed in this area.”

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adt7079  (About DOIs).

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The group is co-led by Dr Meredith Hawkins, founder of the Global Diabetes Institute at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Dr Nihal Thomas, professor of endocrinology at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India. Their goal is to bring attention to this lesser-known type of diabetes, which affects 20 to 25 million people worldwide, mostly in Asia and Africa.

Diabetes is becoming more common worldwide. According to the latest IDF Diabetes Atlas (2025), 1 in 9 adults (ages 20-79) has diabetes, and more than 40% of them don’t even know they have it. By 2050, the IDF estimates that 1 in 8 adults—around 853 million people—will be living with diabetes, a 46% increase from today’s numbers. Over 90% of all cases are type 2 diabetes, which is mainly linked to poor diet and lifestyle.

While type 2 diabetes is the most widespread, type 5 diabetes is a growing concern in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where undernutrition plays a bigger role. This type of diabetes has often been misunderstood, but experts are now pushing for better recognition and care.

Unlike type 1 or type 2 diabetes, type 5 diabetes—also called malnutrition-related diabetes—is triggered by long-term undernutrition, especially during childhood or adolescence. Scientists believe that a lack of proper nutrients can stop the pancreas from developing properly, leading to severe insulin-deficient diabetes (SIDD).

Speaking at the IDF Congress, Professor Schwarz highlighted the importance of recognizing type 5 diabetes: “The recognition of type 5 diabetes marks a historic shift in how we approach diabetes globally. For too long, this condition has gone unrecognised, affecting millions of people and depriving them of access to adapted care. With the launch of the Type 5 Diabetes Working Group, we are taking decisive steps to correct this. This is about equity, science, and saving lives.”

For many years, doctors incorrectly thought this condition was similar to type 2 diabetes, linking it to insulin resistance. Because of this misunderstanding, treatments often didn’t work. However, Dr Hawkins and her team have shown that type 5 diabetes has a unique metabolic profile, meaning it needs a different approach.

A key discovery is that people with type 5 diabetes are insulin deficient but not insulin resistant. This means they may not always need insulin injections—many can manage their condition with oral medication instead. This is especially important in low-resource settings, where insulin can be expensive or hard to access.

With the new guidelines, doctors will have a clearer understanding of how to diagnose and treat this condition properly. A global research registry will also help track cases and improve scientific knowledge. The working group hopes to push research forward and shape global healthcare policies to ensure those affected by type 5 diabetes get the care they need.

Source: International Diabetes Federation (link1, link2)

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

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Three-dimensional printing is transforming medical care, letting the health care field shift from mass-produced solutions to customized treatments tailored to each patient’s needs. For instance, researchers are developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands specifically designed for children, made with lightweight materials and adaptable control systems.

These continuing advancements in 3D-printed prosthetics demonstrate their increasing affordability and accessibility. Success stories like this one in personalized prosthetics highlight the benefits of 3D printing, in which a model of an object produced with computer-aided design software is transferred to a 3D printer and constructed layer by layer.

We are a biomedical engineer and a chemist who work with 3D printing. We study how this rapidly evolving technology provides new options not just for prosthetics but for implants, surgical planning, drug manufacturing, and other health care needs. The ability of 3D printing to make precisely shaped objects in a wide range of materials has led to, for example, custom replacement joints and custom-dosage, multidrug pills.

Better body parts

Three-dimensional printing in health care started in the 1980s with scientists using technologies such as stereolithography to create prototypes layer by layer. Stereolithography uses a computer-controlled laser beam to solidify a liquid material into specific 3D shapes. The medical field quickly saw the potential of this technology to create implants and prosthetics designed specifically for each patient.

One of the first applications was creating tissue scaffolds, which are structures that support cell growth. Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital combined these scaffolds with patients’ own cells to build replacement bladders. The patients remained healthy for years after receiving their implants, demonstrating that 3D-printed structures could become durable body parts.

As technology progressed, the focus shifted to bioprinting, which uses living cells to create working anatomical structures. In 2013, Organovo created the world’s first 3D-bioprinted liver tissue, opening up exciting possibilities for creating organs and tissues for transplantation. But while significant advances have been made in bioprinting, creating full, functional organs such as livers for transplantation remains experimental. Current research focuses on developing smaller, simpler tissues and refining bioprinting techniques to improve cell viability and functionality. These efforts aim to bridge the gap between laboratory success and clinical application, with the ultimate goal of providing viable organ replacements for patients in need.

Three-dimensional printing already has revolutionized the creation of prosthetics. It allows prosthetics makers to produce affordable custom-made devices that fit the patient perfectly. They can tailor prosthetic hands and limbs to each individual and easily replace them as a child grows.

Three-dimensionally printed implants, such as hip replacements and spine implants, offer a more precise fit, which can improve how well they integrate with the body. Traditional implants often come only in standard shapes and sizes.

Some patients have received custom titanium facial implants after accidents. Others had portions of their skulls replaced with 3D-printed implants.

Additionally, 3D printing is making significant strides in dentistry. Companies such as Invisalign use 3D printing to create custom-fit aligners for teeth straightening, demonstrating the ability to personalize dental care.

Scientists are also exploring new materials for 3D printing, such as self-healing bioglass that might replace damaged cartilage. Moreover, researchers are developing 4D printing, which creates objects that can change shape over time, potentially leading to medical devices that can adapt to the body’s needs.

For example, researchers are working on 3D-printed stents that can respond to changes in blood flow. These stents are designed to expand or contract as needed, reducing the risk of blockage and improving long-term patient outcomes.

Simulating surgeries

Three-dimensionally printed anatomical models often help surgeons understand complex cases and improve surgical outcomes. These models, created from medical images such as X-rays and CT scans, allow surgeons to practice procedures before operating.

For instance, a 3D-printed model of a child’s heart enables surgeons to simulate complex surgeries. This approach can lead to shorter operating times, fewer complications, and lower costs.

Personalized pharmaceuticals

In the pharmaceutical industry, drugmakers can three-dimensionally print personalized drug dosages and delivery systems. The ability to precisely layer each component of a drug means that they can make medicines with the exact dose needed for each patient. The 3D-printed anti-epileptic drug Spritam was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015 to deliver very high dosages of its active ingredient.

Drug production systems that use 3D printing are finding homes outside pharmaceutical factories. The drugs potentially can be made and delivered by community pharmacies. Hospitals are starting to use 3D printing to make medicine on-site, allowing for personalized treatment plans based on factors such as the patient’s age and health.

However, it’s important to note that regulations for 3D-printed drugs are still being developed. One concern is that postprinting processing may affect the stability of drug ingredients. It’s also important to establish clear guidelines and decide where 3D printing should take place – whether in pharmacies, hospitals or even at home. Additionally, pharmacists will need rigorous training in these new systems.

Printing for the future

Despite the extraordinarily rapid progress overall in 3D printing for health care, major challenges and opportunities remain. Among them is the need to develop better ways to ensure the quality and safety of 3D-printed medical products. Affordability and accessibility also remain significant concerns. Long-term safety concerns regarding implant materials, such as potential biocompatibility issues and the release of nanoparticles, require rigorous testing and validation.

While 3D printing has the potential to reduce manufacturing costs, the initial investment in equipment and materials can be a barrier for many health care providers and patients, especially in underserved communities. Furthermore, the lack of standardized workflows and trained personnel can limit the widespread adoption of 3D printing in clinical settings, hindering access for those who could benefit most.

On the bright side, artificial intelligence techniques that can effectively leverage vast amounts of highly detailed medical data are likely to prove critical in developing improved 3D-printed medical products. Specifically, AI algorithms can analyze patient-specific data to optimize the design and fabrication of 3D-printed implants and prosthetics. For instance, implant makers can use AI-driven image analysis to create highly accurate 3D models from CT scans and MRIs that they can use to design customized implants.

Furthermore, machine learning algorithms can predict the long-term performance and potential failure points of 3D-printed prosthetics, allowing prosthetics designers to optimize for improved durability and patient safety.

Three-dimensional printing continues to break boundaries, including the boundary of the body itself. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a technique that uses ultrasound to turn a liquid injected into the body into a gel in 3D shapes. The method could be used one day for delivering drugs or replacing tissue.

Overall, the field is moving quickly toward personalized treatment plans that are closely adapted to each patient’s unique needs and preferences, made possible by the precision and flexibility of 3D printing.

Anne Schmitz, Associate Professor of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Stout and Daniel Freedman, Dean of the College of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics & Management, University of Wisconsin-Stout. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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If you gaze up at the night sky, there's a good chance you’ll spot a trail of fast-moving, bright dots—newly launched Starlink satellites. But you might soon also see something else: spacecraft from Chinese projects building their own Starlink-like low Earth orbit satellite internet networks. More than 100 satellites have been launched from China since August—the first batches of two mega-constellations that are aiming to have about 28,000 satellites combined when they’re completed.

The two Chinese projects are officially called Guowang and Qianfan, but they each have a confusing set of alternative names in English due to their corporate structures and language differences. The former, which is also known as Xingwang or SatNet, is primarily focused on domestic telecommunications and national security use cases. The latter, which is also known as Spacesail or SSST, is more oriented toward providing service to foreign telecom companies. So far, Qianfan has signed deals with Brazil, Malaysia, and Thailand and has said it’s eyeing dozens of other markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Compared to Starlink, which operates more than 7,000 satellites, China is clearly still playing catch-up. But Guowang and Qianfan are joining a group of Starlink competitors around the world accelerating their operations, and they could give the market leader a run for its money in the end. The newcomers also stand to benefit as CEO Elon Musk’s deepening entanglements in US politics raises reputational and security risks for SpaceX (Starlink’s parent company) globally.

“2023 and 2024 were the years of Starlink deployment. 2025 is the year of other actors getting into the game,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory who has been tracking satellite constellations globally. “In the West, we severely underreport the commercial side of the Chinese space industry.”

But as Guowang and Qianfan launch their first batches of satellites, they are also running into troubles, including higher numbers of faulty satellites than SpaceX, bureaucratic hurdles, and limited rocket launch capacity. And if they don’t launch enough satellites into space soon, they could be asked by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations body that coordinates space launches, to scale down the size of their planned constellations.

Guowang and Qianfan couldn’t be reached for comment. SpaceX didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Faulty Satellites

As of last month, Qianfan has launched 90 satellites that will provide broadband internet service for ground users, while Guowang has launched 29. The latter has also launched around a dozen experimental satellites since 2023, but it hasn’t been transparent about their purpose, and it seemingly doesn’t count them toward the numbers in its official constellation.

While Qianfan is slightly ahead, it is also grappling with a significant issue: a concerningly high rate of possible faulty satellites compared to other, similar projects. Unlike Starlink, which publishes GPS information of its satellites in orbit, the Chinese companies have disclosed little about how their satellites are doing. Instead, researchers have relied on data collected by the US Space Force, which tracks all space objects by radar and releases public data about them.

Jonathan McDowell, a researcher who maintains a website that analyzes information collected about low Earth orbit satellite networks, says that, of the 90 satellites that Qianfan has launched, 13 seem to have exhibited irregular behavior, namely they didn’t rise up to their target orbit height along with their peers. Qianfan’s second batch, which it launched in October 2024, contained only five satellites that reached their planned height out of 18, according to McDowell.

McDowell says these satellites are not necessarily dead—some could be dormant, waiting for better positioning opportunities—but overall, Qianfan’s satellites clearly underperform compared to others. While Starlink started with about a 3 percent failure rate, it has since gone down to less than 0.5 percent, according to McDowell’s data. OneWeb, the British mega-constellation with over 600 satellites, contains only two failed ones that are stuck in space.

According to the Shanghai local government, Qianfan’s second batch of satellites are made by a different manufacturing supplier, Genesat, which could be related to why it performed worse than other batches. It was the first time Genesat delivered mass-produced satellites, a press release at launch time said.

Another problem is that Qianfan and Guowang are literally aiming higher. Both projects have opted to put their satellites in higher orbits than Starlink, making their failed satellites harder to deorbit and more likely to become long-term space debris. Given the planned sizes of these mega-constellations, their higher failure rates could mean that space will be crowded with even more dead satellites.

“What can happen is that you will have so many satellites operating in the same orbital shell that you're constantly having to move your satellite out of concerns of close approach,” says

Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit organization focusing on outer space sustainability.

That will create logistical burdens and extra costs for other satellite operators, and Samson says there’s an urgent need to establish coordination mechanisms between nations to avoid space collisions as mega-constellation projects pick up their pace. “Right now, there's no real space traffic control system,” she explains.

The Clock Is Ticking

While the Chinese projects are ahead of some competitors—Amazon, for instance, launched its first batch of 27 Project Kuiper internet satellites in April—they are very far behind Starlink as well as their own ambitious goals.

Before companies can send a satellite into space, they need to register their road map with the ITU and reserve the radio frequency spectrum for their spacecraft to communicate with the ground. According to ITU filings, Guowang wants to have nearly 13,000 satellites in total, while Qianfan plans to have more than 15,000.

It’s not unusual for companies to make overly aspirational satellite plans but never achieve them, but the ITU requires firms to launch their first satellite within seven years of reserving the spectrum, then steadily make progress toward completing their launches within seven years after that. If they don’t, they may have to scale back their intentions.

Those requirements could soon become a serious problem for both Guowang and Qianfan. Since they began launching their non-experimental satellites last year, the clock is now ticking, and the ITU rules state they will need to have sent 10 percent of their spacecraft into the sky by 2026.

Compared to Starlink, both constellations appear to be slow in making progress. Starlink launched its first batch of satellites in May 2019, and the company got into a steady rhythm the following year, reaching almost 2,000 satellites in about two years, says McDowell.

Guowang in particular has been moving slower than many observers expected since it first registered with the ITU in 2020. “Everybody, myself included, was expecting there to be a pretty quick ramp up, because they had a lot of money, they had a lot of support, and they had this government mandate” to become the Chinese Starlink, says Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, a market research firm that focuses on the Chinese space industry.

Guowang, or SatNet, as some have come to call it, was one of the first satellite companies that made a high-profile move into Xiong’an, a development near Beijing that the Chinese government has been promoting as a high-tech city of the future. But its ties to the government may have also led to bureaucratic hurdles, Curcio says. The company is led by executives from large state-owned enterprises, who likely bring with them a more traditional, top-down style of management. “They're just not going to move fast and break things,” he explains.

Although Qianfan also has state backing from Shanghai’s municipal government, experts say it operates more like a modern business and has hired experienced executives from the finance and business sectors, which may be why it’s been moving faster than Guowang.

But there’s one serious bottleneck that’s plaguing both projects right now: rocket availability. While China launches a large number of rockets annually, they have to be shared among various projects, including satellites for navigation and remote sensing. More importantly, China still doesn’t have any operable reusable rockets yet, which have been essential for Starlink to maintain its fast and economical launch cadence.

Qianfan has put out two public procurement requests this year for rocket suppliers but declared them both failures because they didn’t receive enough bidders. While there are several Chinese commercial companies working on developing reusable rockets, none are ready for prime time. “It's possible that in the next couple of years we'll start to see that that bottleneck get resolved, but it's also possible that it remains a pretty substantial bottleneck,” Curcios says.

Starlink Alternative

Guowang and Qianfan appear to have avoided directly competing with one another so far by targeting different markets. Guowang, which has more central government support, could be tasked with use cases that have a national security element. Taiwan has reportedly received intelligence that China’s military drills around the island have been seeking to validate whether Guowang works in the area and can direct Chinese missiles for potential strikes in the West Pacific, according to a report published by The Atlantic Council last month.

Qianfan, on the other hand, is positioning itself as a competitor to Starlink for the international market. A map Qianfan representatives presented at a space industry conference in China last year showed it’s already working in six markets: Brazil, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. The map also says it’s planning to go into two dozen more in 2025, including countries like India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Argentina, and many across Africa.

Qianfan may have an easier time winning over international markets as some countries become increasingly wary of Musk’s political activities and influence over Starlink. In 2023, for instance, Musk made the decision to restrict Starlink service to Ukraine amid its war with Russia. Starlink’s newer satellites are equipped with the ability to provide service to users without their data passing through any local internet gateways, which could also deter some countries who want more control of local internet data. “As I understand, Qianfan has chosen to not do this, as a way of giving countries more peace of mind with regard to landing traffic locally,” Curcio says.

Many telecom firms have also been frustrated with Starlink’s decision to work with multiple competing local resellers at the same time. Measat, the Malaysia satellite communications company that signed a preliminary deal with Qianfan in February, was also one of Starlink’s first resellers in the country, Curcio says. But Starlink later onboarded more of its competitors and also began offering its products to customers directly, which could have cut into Measat’s profits.

Qianfan has not announced any direct-to-customer services and is instead providing only local telecom companies with satellite internet capabilities. “From a commercial angle, if you make a deal with Starlink, it’s like making a deal with the devil. Eventually Starlink is going to go behind your back and try to take your customers from you and sell to them directly,” Curcio says.

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One of the longest-standing mysteries about Mars has been the presence of dark and light streaks on the rolling hills surrounding Olympus Mons. This week's image, from the European Space Agency, shows some of these streaks captured last October.

This massive mountain rises about 22 km above the surface of Mars, more than twice as high as Mount Everest on Earth. It is bordered by hummocky deposits, called aureoles, that were formed by landslides from the mountain. A striking feature of these aureoles is the periodic appearance of bright and dark streaks—sometimes for days and sometimes for years.

For decades, scientists have wondered what they might be.

The streaks look remarkably like flowing water. Initially, scientists believed these features might be flows of salty water or brine, which remained liquid long enough to travel down the aureole. This offered the tantalizing possibility that life might yet exist on the surface of Mars in these oases.

However, it now appears that this is not the case. According to new research published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, these slopes are dry, likely due to layers of fine dust suddenly sliding off steep terrain. To reach this conclusion, the researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to scan and catalog streaks across 86,000 satellite images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They created a map of 500,000 streaks across the surface of Mars. In doing so, the researchers found no evidence of water.

The image in today's post comes from the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and it has been slightly modified to enhance the appearance of the streaks. It looks like art.

Source: European Space Agency

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The Magna Carta has played a huge role in shaping laws and rights, influencing major legal documents like the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It has been a symbol of freedom and justice for centuries.

Harvard Law School bought HLS MS 172 in 1946 for just $27.50, according to its records. Before that, a Royal Air Force war veteran sold it at an auction in London for £42, thinking it was an old, damaged copy from 1327.

Professor David Carpenter, a medieval history expert at King’s College London, called the discovery incredible. “Harvard’s Magna Carta deserves celebration, not as some mere copy, stained and faded, but as an original of one of the most significant documents in world constitutional history,” he said.

Carpenter came across HLS MS 172 while studying unofficial copies of Magna Carta. After spotting key similarities between this document and verified originals, he teamed up with Professor Nicholas Vincent of UEA to investigate further.

Vincent stressed the document’s importance, calling Magna Carta “a totem of liberty, central to our sense of who we are.” He noted that it remains one of the most famous and influential legal texts in history.

To confirm its authenticity, researchers used special imaging techniques, such as ultraviolet light and spectral analysis. Their results showed that HLS MS 172 perfectly matched the text of other verified originals. They also traced its origins, suggesting it was once issued to Appleby, a former parliamentary borough in Westmorland, England.

Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School’s Vice Dean for Library and Information Services, spoke about the value of historical artifacts like this. “A physical artifact like this one offers a special and profound reminder of the ways in which the rule of law has grown and strengthened over centuries,” he said.

Amanda Watson, Assistant Dean for Library and Information Services, praised the teamwork involved in the discovery. “Behind every scholarly revelation stands the essential work of librarians who not only collect and preserve materials but create pathways that otherwise would remain hidden,” she said.

This finding confirms Magna Carta’s lasting impact on legal history and offers scholars new insights into its journey from England to the U.S. Researchers believe it may have once belonged to Air Vice-Marshal Forster Maynard, a World War I flying ace, and may have passed through the hands of abolitionist campaigners Thomas and John Clarkson.

Now officially recognized as an original Magna Carta, HLS MS 172 is considered one of the most valuable historical documents in the world. Harvard Law School continues to study it, adding to the understanding of its legacy in constitutional history.

Source: Harvard Law School (link1, link2), University of East Anglia, King's College London

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

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A generation ago, when former NASA administrator Dan Goldin promoted the mantra of a "faster, better, cheaper" approach to the agency's science missions, critics often joked that NASA could only pick two.

That's no longer the case. NASA is finding success in its partnerships with commercial space companies, especially SpaceX, with lower costs, quicker results, and improved performance.

The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency, are also capitalizing on new products and services from commercial industry. In many cases, these new capabilities come from venture-backed startups already developing and operating satellites for commercial use.

The idea is to focus the Space Force and the NRO on missions that only they can do, according to Chris Scolese, director of the NRO. Military and intelligence agencies are already buying launch services, communications services, and satellite surveillance imagery on a commercial basis. These missions also have commercial applications, so the government is purchasing products and services with rockets and satellites that already exist.

Now, the military is starting to use a commercial model for missions that, at least today, lack any meaningful commercial market. In these cases, the Space Force and the NRO must go out and pay a company to build an entire fleet of satellites that will exclusively serve the government. But rather than dictating stringent requirements and micromanaging every phase of the program, as the Space Force and NRO have typically done, they're going with a more hands-off approach.

This change in procurement strategy is yielding results, officials said last week in a hearing convened by the House Armed Services Committee. Numerous companies are now manufacturing satellite buses, the basic chassis that hosts instruments, sensors, and payloads tailored for a range of missions. Most of them come from SpaceX, which mass-produces satellites for its Starlink broadband network. But there are others, and the market is richer than many US officials thought.

"We're finding that commercial buses are not only available, but they're also capable of doing a lot of what our missions require, and they're available at a much lower cost than going off and developing a brand new bus," Scolese said.

A case study in procurement

The Space Force and the NRO kicked off several initiatives over the last few years to look at ways to exploit these commercial technologies. Some of these programs are already producing results.

The Space Force's Space Development Agency has launched the first 27 prototypes for a future network of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) to detect and monitor missile launches, and relay tracking data to the ground. The National Reconnaissance Office, which owns the government's spy satellites, awarded contracts in 2022 worth $4 billion to buy commercial imagery from three companies—newcomers BlackSky, Planet, and incumbent provider Maxar—with their privately owned spacecraft.

The NRO also started launching its own fleet of commercially built spy satellites last year to more rapidly gather imagery of places around the world. Nearly 200 of these satellites, based on SpaceX's Starlink design, have launched in the last year.

Most recently, the Space Force rejigged how it plans to buy a series of new space surveillance satellites for the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP.

These satellites are designed to fly near and inspect other objects near geosynchronous orbit, a ring around the equator more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) above Earth. In that orbit, a spacecraft moves in synchronicity with Earth's rotation, giving satellites a constant view of the same region of the planet. This makes geosynchronous orbit a popular location for satellites designed for communications, early-warning, and eavesdropping missions.

The Space Force has launched six GSSAP satellites built by Northrop Grumman, one of America's largest traditional defense contractors. Five of them are still operational, and the military wants to buy more. But this time, the Space Force will procure the satellites through a commercial arrangement. Instead of dictating stringent requirements to contractors and purchasing the satellites outright, the Space Force will levy fewer requirements and select a commercial company to develop the next generation of GSSAP satellites.

Last year, the Pentagon canvassed the commercial satellite industry to see what might be available. Military officials soon hit a roadblock. The Space Force—and particularly US Space Command—closely guards details of the GSSAP program. The program's most exquisite capabilities are classified, and the Space Force defined requirements for the next-generation GSSAP satellites that would be subject to similar levels of secrecy.

Leaders at Space Command, which actually uses the GSSAP satellites, agreed to relax their requirements, according to Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.

The decision allowed the Space Force to move forward with a commercial procurement strategy that Purdy said will cut the cost of the system in half and reduce its development timeline by a third.

"So, we're off working now with that program office to go start off a more commercial line," Purdy said. "And when I say commercial in this particular aspect, just to clarify, this is accomplishing the same GSSAP mission. Our operators will fly the GSSAP system using the same ground systems and data they do now, but these would be using faster, commercial build times... and cheaper, less expensive parts in order to bring that together in a faster sense."

The next-gen GSSAP spacecraft may not meet the same standards as the Space Force's existing inspector satellites, but the change comes with benefits beyond lower costs and faster timelines. It will be unclassified and will be open to multiple vendors to build and launch space surveillance satellites, injecting some level of competition into the program. It will also be eligible for sales to other countries.

More for less with GPS

There's another area where Purdy said the Space Force was surprised by what commercial satellite builders were offering. Last year, the Pentagon used a new "Quick Start" procurement model authorized by Congress to establish a program to bolster the GPS navigation network, which is run by the Space Force but relied upon by commercial users and private citizens around the world.

The Space Force has more than 30 GPS satellites in medium-Earth orbit (MEO) at an altitude of roughly 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers). Purdy said the network is "vulnerable" because the constellation has a relatively small number of satellites, at least relative to the Space Force's newest programs. In MEO, the satellites are within range of direct ascent anti-satellite weapons. Many of the GPS satellites are aging, and the newer ones, built by Lockheed Martin, cost about $250 million apiece. With the Resilient GPS program, the Space Force aims to reduce the cost to $50 million to $80 million per satellite.

The satellites will be smaller than the GPS satellites flying today and will transmit a core set of signals. "We're looking to add more resiliency and more numbers," Purdy said.

"We actually didn't think that we were going to get much, to be honest with you, and it was a surprise to us, and a major learning [opportunity] for us, learning last year that satellite prices had—they were low in LEO already, but they were lowering in MEO," Purdy said. "So, that convinced us that we should proceed with it. The results have actually been more surprising and encouraging than we thought.

"The [satellite] buses actually bring a higher power level than our current program of record does, which allows us to punch through jamming in a better sense. We can achieve better results, we think, over time, going after these commercial buses," Purdy said. "So that's caused me to think, for our mainline GPS system, we’re actually looking at that for alternative ways to get after that."

In September, the Space Force awarded four agreements to Astranis, Axient, L3Harris, and Sierra Space to produce design concepts for new Resilient GPS satellites. Astranis and Axient are relatively new to satellite manufacturing. Astranis is a pioneer in low-mass Internet satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and a non-traditional defense contractor. Axient, acquired by a company named Astrion last year, has focused on producing small CubeSats.

The military will later select one or more of these companies to move forward with producing up to eight Resilient GPS satellites for launch as soon as 2028. Early planning is already underway for a follow-on set of Resilient GPS satellites with additional capabilities, according to the Space Force.

The experience with the R-GPS program inspired the Space Force to look at other mission areas that might be well-served with a similar procurement approach. They settled on GSSAP as the next frontier.

Scolese, director of the NRO, said his agency is examining how to use commercial satellite constellations for other purposes beyond Earth imaging. This might include a program to employ commercially procured satellites for signals intelligence (SIGINT) missions, he said.

"It's not just the commercial imagery," Scolese said. "It's also commercial RF (Radio Frequency, or SIGINT) and newer phenomenologies as where we're working with that industry to go off and help advance those."

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Thanks to our new global tariff war, the wild world of importing and exporting has been thrust into the forefront. There's a lot of logistics involved in keeping your local Walmart stocked and your Amazon Prime deliveries happening, and you might be surprised at how much of that world has already been automated.

While cars from autonomy providers like Waymo are still extremely rare in most stretches of the open road, the process of loading and unloading cargo has become almost entirely automated at some major ports around the world. Likewise, there's an increasing shift to electrify the various vehicles involved along the way, eliminating a significant source of global emissions.

But there's been one sticking point in this automated, electrified logistical dream: plugging in. The humble act of charging still happens via human hands, but that's changing. At a testing facility in Sweden, a company called Rocsys has demonstrated an automated charger that works with self-driving electric trucks from Einride in a hands-free and emissions-free partnership that could save time, money, and even lives.

People-free ports

Shipping ports are pretty intimidating places. Towering cranes stand 500 feet above the ground, swinging 30-ton cargo crates into the air and endlessly moving them from giant ships to holding pens and then turning around and sending off the next set of shipments.

That cargo is then loaded onto container handlers that operate exclusively within the confines of the port, bringing the crates closer to the roads or rail lines that will take them further. They're stacked again until the arrival of their next ride, semi-trucks for cargo about to hit the highway or empty rail cars for anything train-bound.

Believe it or not, that entire process happens autonomously at some of the most advanced ports in the world. "The APM terminal in Rotterdam port is, I would say, in the top three of the most advanced terminals in the world. It's completely automated. There are hardly any people," Crijn Bouman, the CEO and co-founder of Rocsys, said.

Eliminating the human factor at facilities like ports reduces cost and increases safety at a workplace that is, according to the CDC, five times more dangerous than average. But the one link in the chain that hasn't been automated is recharging.

Those cargo haulers may be able to drive themselves to the charger, but they still can't plug themselves in. They need a little help, and that's where Rocsys comes in.

The person-free plug

The genesis of Rocsys came in 2017, when cofounder Bouman visited a fledgling robotaxi operator in the Bay Area.

"The vehicles were driving themselves, but after a couple of test laps, they would park themselves in the corner, and a person would walk over and plug them in," Bouman said.

Bouman wouldn't tell me which autonomy provider was operating the place, but he was surprised to see that the company was focused only on the wildly complex task of shuttling people from place to place on open roads. Meanwhile, the seemingly simple act of plugging and unplugging was handled exclusively by human operators.

Fast-forward eight years, and The Netherlands-based Rocsys now has more than 50 automated chargers deployed globally, with a goal to install thousands more. While the company is targeting robotaxi operators for its automated charging solution, initial interest is primarily in port and fleet operators as those businesses become increasingly electrified.

Bouman calls Rocsys' roboticized charger a "robotic steward," a charming moniker for an arm that sticks a plug in a hole. But it's all more complicated than that, of course.

The steward relies on an AI- and vision-based system to move an arm holding the charger plug. That arm offers six degrees of freedom and, thanks to the wonders of machine learning, largely trains itself to interface with new cars and new chargers.

It can reach high and low enough and at enough angles to cover everything from consumer cars to commercial trucks. It even works with plugs of all shapes and sizes.

The biggest complication? Manual charging flaps on some consumer cars. This has necessitated a little digital extension to the steward's robotic arm. "We'll have sort of a finger assembly to open the charge port cover, connect the plug, and also the system can close it. So no change to the vehicle," Bouman said.

That said, Bouman hopes manufacturers will ditch manual charge port covers and switch to powered, automatic ones in future vehicles.

Automating the autonomous trucks

Plenty of companies around the globe are promising to electrify trucking, from medium-duty players like Harbinger to the world's largest piece of rolling vaporware, the Tesla Semi. Few are actually operating the things, though.

Stockholm-based Einride is one of those companies. Its electric trucks are making deliveries every day, taking things a step further by removing the driver from the equation.

The wild-looking cab-less autonomous electric transport (AET) vehicles, which would not look out of place thundering down the highway in any science-fiction movie, are self-driving in most situations. But they do have a human backup in the form of operators at what Einride's general manager of autonomous technology, Henrik Green, calls control towers.

Here, operators can oversee multiple trucks, ensuring safe operation and handling any unexpected happenings on the road. In this way, a single person can operate multiple trucks from afar, only connecting when it requires manual intervention.

"The more vehicles we can use with the same workforce of people, the higher the efficiency," he said.

Green said Einride has multiple remote control towers overseeing the company's pilot deployments. Here in the US, Einride has been running a route at GE Appliance's Selmer, Tennessee, facility, where autonomous forklifts load cargo onto the autonomous trucks for hands-off hauling of your next refrigerator.

Right now, the AETs must be manually plugged in by an on-site operator. It's a minor task, but Green said that automating this process could be game-changing.

"There are, surprisingly, a lot of trucks today that are standing still or running empty," Green said. Part of this comes down to poor logistical planning, but a lot is due to the human factor. "With automated electric trucks, we can make the transportation system more sustainable, more efficient, more resilient, and absolutely more safe."

Getting humans out of the loop could result in Einride's machines operating 24/7, only pausing to top off their batteries.

Self-charging, self-driving trucks could also help open the door to longer-distance deliveries without having to saddle them with giant batteries. Even with regular charging stops, these trucks could operate at a higher utilization than human-driven machines, which can only run for as long as their operators are legally or physically able to.

That could result in significant cost savings for businesses, and, since everything is electric, the environmental potential is strong, too.

"Around 7 percent of the world's global CO₂ footprint today comes from land transportation, which is what we are addressing with electric heavy-duty transportation," Green said.

Integrations and future potential

This first joining of a Rocsys robotic steward and an Einride AET took place at the AstaZero proving ground in Sandhult, Sweden, an automation test facility that has been a safe playground for driverless vehicles of all shapes and sizes for over a decade.

This physical connection between Rocsys and Einride is a small step, with one automated charger connected to one automated truck, compared to the nearly 3 million diesel-powered semis droning around our highways in the United States alone. But you have to start somewhere, and while bringing this technology to more open roads is the goal, closed logistics centers and ports are a great first step.

"The use case is simpler," Bouman said. "There are no cats and dogs jumping, or children, or people on bicycles."

And how complicated was it to connect Einride's systems to those of the Rocsys robotic steward? Green said the software integration with the Rocsys system was straightforward but that "some adaptations" were required to make Einride's machine compatible. "We had to make a 'duct tape solution' for this particular demo," Green said.

Applying duct tape, at least, seems like a safe job for humans for some time to come.

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There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms.

Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe.

A shipping container for antimatter

The problem facing CERN comes from its own hardware. The antimatter it captures is produced by smashing a particle beam into a stationary target. As a result, all the anti-particles that come out of the debris carry a lot of energy. If you want to hold on to any of them, you have to slow them down, which is done using electromagnetic fields that can act on the charged antimatter particles. Unfortunately, as the team behind the new work notes, many of the measurements we'd like to do with the antimatter are "extremely sensitive to external magnetic field noise."

In short, the hardware that slows the antimatter down limits the precision of the measurements you can take.

The obvious solution is to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. But that gets tricky very fast. The antimatter containment device has to be maintained as an extreme vacuum and needs superconducting materials to produce the electromagnetic fields that keep the antimatter from bumping into the walls of the container. All of that means a significant power supply, along with a cache of liquid helium to keep the superconductors working. A standard shipping container just won't do.

So the team at CERN built a two-meter-long portable containment device. On one end is a junction that allows it to be plugged into the beam of particles produced by the existing facility. That junction leads to the containment area, which is blanketed by a superconducting magnet. Elsewhere on the device are batteries to ensure an uninterrupted power supply, along with the electronics to run it all. The whole setup is encased in a metal frame that includes lifting points that can be used to attach it to a crane for moving around.

To confirm it all works, the team loaded it up with some protons (which are notably easier to produce). Two internal cranes in the facility, along with a heavy-duty four-wheeled cart, moved the container to a loading dock, where it was transferred to a truck and taken for a spin around the CERN campus at Meyrin. Based on the map included in the paper describing the work, it appears that the protons started out in France but briefly crossed the border into Switzerland. All told, they traveled just under 4 kilometers and reached speeds of over 40 km/hour.

Hitting the road

Overall, the hardware stayed cold, generally at a bit over 5 Kelvin. The exception was when the system was reconnected to the antimatter source hardware and the system reconnected to the electrical system at CERN. While those actions show up as temperature spikes, the superconducting magnets remained well under 7 Kelvin.

An accelerometer was in place to track the forces experienced by the hardware while the truck was moving. This showed that changes in the truck's speed produced turbulence in the liquid helium, making measurements of its presence unreliable. Levels had dropped from about 75 percent of maximum to 30 percent by the time the system was reconnected, suggesting that liquid helium presents the key limiting factor in shipping.

Measurements made while the system was in transit suggest that the whole process occurred losslessly, meaning that not a single proton escaped during the entire transport.

All that's missing now is another experiment at CERN that the antimatter can be delivered to. Presumably, the team is looking for lab space in a building with little in the way of stray electromagnetic fields. But the team has bigger goals in mind. There's a facility being built in Düsseldorf, Germany, for antiproton experiments, nearly 800 kilometers and eight hours away by road. If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08926-y  (About DOIs).

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How did reptilian things that looked something like crocodiles get to the Caribbean islands from South America millions of years ago? They probably walked.

The existence of any prehistoric apex predators in the islands of the Caribbean used to be doubted. While their absence would have probably made it even more of a paradise for prey animals, fossils unearthed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic have revealed that these islands were crawling with monster crocodyliform species called sebecids, ancient relatives of crocodiles.

While sebecids first emerged during the Cretaceous, this is the first evidence of them lurking outside South America during the Cenozoic epoch, which began 66 million years ago. An international team of researchers has found that these creatures would stalk and hunt in the Caribbean islands millions of years after similar predators went extinct on the South American mainland. Lower sea levels back then could have exposed enough land to walk across.

“Adaptations to a terrestrial lifestyle documented for sebecids and the chronology of West Indian fossils strongly suggest that they reached the islands in the Eocene-Oligocene through transient land connections with South America or island hopping,” researchers said in a study recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Origin story

During the late Eocene to early Oligocene periods of the mid-Cenozoic, about 34 million years ago, many terrestrial carnivores already roamed South America. Along with crocodyliform sebecids, these included enormous snakes, terror birds, and metatherians, which were monster marsupials. At this time, the sea levels were low, and the islands of the Eastern Caribbean are thought to have been connected to South America via a land bridge called GAARlandia (Greater Antilles and Aves Ridge). This is not the first land bridge to potentially provide a migration opportunity.

Fragments of a single tooth unearthed in Seven Rivers, Jamaica, in 1999 are the oldest fossil evidence of a ziphodont crocodyliform (a group that includes sebecids) in the Caribbean. It was dated to about 47 million years ago, when Jamaica was connected to an extension of the North American continent known as the Nicaragua Rise. While the tooth from Seven Rivers is thought to have belonged to a ziphodont other than a sebacid, that and other vertebrate fossils found in Jamaica suggest parallels with ecosystems excavated from sites in the American South.

The fossils found in areas like the US South that the ocean would otherwise separate suggest more than just related life forms. It's possible that the Nicaragua Rise provided a pathway for migration similar to the one sebecids probably used when they arrived in the Caribbean islands.

Walking the walk

So how did sebecids get from one land mass to the other on foot? They were made for it.

Sebecids evolutionarily diverged from crocodiles during the Jurassic period. They had skulls similar to those of theropod dinosaurs, with a high rostrum (which holds the teeth along with the palate and nasal cavity) that was long and narrow. Their mouths were full of ziphodont teeth, which are compressed along the sides and have a serrated edge made for tearing flesh. Most important among the adaptations that made sebecids terrestrial animals were legs longer than their crocodilian brethren—legs made for walking on land.

“Considering their terrestrial adaptations, their dispersal may have been either facilitated by some ephemeral terrestrial connection or string of large and closely spaced islands or occurred on a natural raft,” the research team said in the same study.

Though they have been found across South America, earlier specimens of sebecids are best documented in the south of the continent, while later specimens surfaced in the north and tropical zones. Both the ziphodont teeth and concave vertebrae are found among the fossils found in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, giving them away as sebecids. The locations of the fossils are consistent with the types of environments these carnivores were thought to inhabit as the Eocene gave way to the Oligocene.

After they ended up in the Caribbean, the original population of sebecids eventually became isolated as sea levels rose, leaving the sub-populations on islands surrounded by water.

The sebecids were apex predators in South America and are thought to have stayed at the top of the food chain in their new hunting grounds. Some sebecid remains have been found with fossils of terrestrial and semiaquatic vertebrates, such as sloths and turtles, that supposedly were their prey.

Not only did sebecids get around, but they also lasted 5 million years longer in the Caribbean than they did in South America. This might have been because certain plant and animal species that died out on the mainland continued to survive on the islands. Crocodiles and predatory birds took over as apex predators after the sebecids died out. Even with a mouth full of knives, you can’t be at the top forever.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2025.  DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2891

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Welcome to Edition 7.44 of the Rocket Report! We had some interesting news on Thursday afternoon from Down Under. As Gilmour Space was preparing for the second launch attempt of its Eris vehicle, as part of the pre-launch preparations, something triggered the payload fairing to deploy. We would love to see some video of that. Please.

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.

Rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight. On Wednesday, US-based propulsion company Venus Aerospace completed a short flight test of its rotating detonation rocket engine at Spaceport America in New Mexico, Ars reports. It is believed to be the first US-based flight test of an idea that has been discussed academically for decades. The concept has previously been tested in a handful of other countries, but never with a high-thrust engine.

Hypersonics on the horizon... The company has only released limited information about the test. The small rocket, powered by the company's 2,000-pound-thrust engine, launched from a rail in New Mexico. The vehicle flew for about half a minute and, as planned, did not break the sound barrier. Governments around the world have been interested in rotating detonation engine technology for a long time because it has the potential to significantly increase fuel efficiency in a variety of applications, from Navy carriers to rocket engines. In the near term, Venus' engine could be used for hypersonic missions.

Gilmour Space has a payload fairing mishap. Gilmour Space, a venture-backed startup based in Australia, said this week it was ready to launch a small rocket from its privately owned spaceport on a remote stretch of the country's northeastern coastline, Ars reports. Gilmour's three-stage rocket, named Eris, was prepped for a launch as early as Wednesday, but a ground systems issue delayed an attempt until Thursday US time. And then on Thursday, something odd happened: "Last night, during final checks, an unexpected issue triggered the rocket’s payload fairing," the company said Thursday afternoon, US time.

Always more problems to solve... Gilmour, based in Gold Coast, Australia, was founded in 2012 by two brothers, Adam and James Gilmour, who came to the space industry after careers in banking and marketing. Today, Gilmour employs more than 200 people, mostly engineers and technicians. The debut launch of Gilmour's Eris rocket is purely a test flight. Gilmour has tested the rocket's engines and rehearsed the countdown last year, loading propellant and getting within 10 seconds of launch. But Gilmour cautioned in a post on LinkedIn early Wednesday that "test launches are complex." And it confirmed that on Thursday. Now the company will need to source a replacement fairing, which will probably take a while.

Is an orbital launch from Argentina imminent? We don't know much about the Argentinian launch company TLON Space, which is developing a (very) small-lift orbital rocket called Aventura 1. According to the company's website, this launch vehicle will be capable of lofting 25 kg to low-Earth orbit. Some sort of flight test took place two years ago, but the video cuts off after a minute, suggesting that the end of the flight was less than nominal.

Maybe, maybe not... Now, a publication called Urgente24 reports that an orbital launch attempt is underway. It is not clear exactly what this means, and details about what is actually happening at the Malacara Spaceport in Argentina are unclear. I could find no other outlets reporting on an imminent launch attempt. So my guess is that nothing will happen soon, but it is something we'll keep an eye on regardless. (Submitted by fedeng.)

Poland launches suborbital rocket. Poland has successfully launched a single-stage rocket demonstrator at the Central Air Force Training Ground in Ustka, European Spaceflight reports. The flight was part of a project to develop a three-stage solid-fuel rocket for research payloads. In 2020, the Polish government selected Wojskowe Zakłady Lotnicze No. 1 to lead a consortium developing a three-stage suborbital launch system.

Military uses eyed... The Trójstopniowa Rakieta Suborbitalna (TRS) project involves the Military Institute of Armament Technology and Zakład Produkcji Specjalnej Gamrat and is co-financed by the National Center for Research and Development. The goal of the TRS project is to develop a three-stage rocket capable of carrying a 40-kilogram payload to an altitude exceeding 100 kilometres. While the rocket will initially be used to carry research payloads into space, Poland’s Military Institute of Armament Technology has stated that the technology could also be used for the development of anti-aircraft and tactical missiles.

Latitude signs MoU to launch microsats. On Wednesday, the French launch firm Latitude announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding for the launch of a microsatellite constellation dedicated to storing and processing data directly in orbit. In an emailed news release, Latitude said the "strategic partnership" represents a major step forward in strengthening collaborations between UAE and French space companies.

That's a lot of launches... Madari Space is developing a constellation of microsatellites (50 to 100 kg), designed as true orbital data centers. Their mission is to store and process data generated on Earth or by other satellites. Latitude plans its first commercial launch with its small-lift Zephyr rocket as early as 2026, with the ambition of reaching a rate of 50 launches per year from 2030. An MoU represents an agreement but not a firm launch contract.

China begins launching AI constellation. China launched 12 satellites early Wednesday for an on-orbit computing project led by startup ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab, Space News reports. A Long March 2D rocket lifted off at 12:12 am Eastern on Wednesday from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. Commercial company ADA Space released further details, stating that the 12 satellites form the “Three-Body Computing Constellation,” which will directly process data in space rather than on the ground, reducing reliance on ground-based computing infrastructure.

Putting the intelligence in space... ADA Space claims the 12 satellites represent the world’s first dedicated orbital computing constellation. This marks a shift from satellites focused solely on sensing or communication to ones that also serve as data processors and AI platforms. The constellation is part of a wider “Star-Compute Program,” a collaboration between ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab, which aims to build a huge on-orbit network of 2,800 satellites. (Submitted by EllPeaTea.)

SpaceX pushes booster reuse record further. SpaceX succeeded with launching 28 more Starlink satellites from Florida early Tuesday morning following an overnight scrub the previous night. The Falcon 9 booster, 1067, made a record-breaking 28th flight, Spaceflight Now reports.

Booster landings have truly become routine... A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, SpaceX landed B1067 on its drone ship, Just Read the Instructions, which was positioned in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of the Bahamas. This marked the 120th successful landing for this drone ship and the 446th booster landing to date for SpaceX. (Submitted by EllPeaTea.)

What happens if Congress actually cancels the SLS rocket? The White House Office of Management and Budget dropped its "skinny" budget proposal for the federal government earlier this month, and the headline news for the US space program was the cancellation of three major programs: the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and the Lunar Gateway. In a report, Ars answers the question of what happens to Artemis and NASA's deep space exploration plans if that happens. The most likely answer is that NASA turns to an old but successful playbook: COTS.

A market price for the Moon... This stands for Commercial Orbital Transportation System and was created by NASA two decades ago to develop cargo transport systems (eventually, this became SpaceX's Dragon and Northrop's Cygnus spacecraft) for the International Space Station. Since then, NASA has adopted this same model for crew services as well as other commercial programs. Under the COTS model, NASA provides funding and guidance to private companies to develop their own spacecraft, rockets, and services and then buys those at a "market" rate. Sources indicate that NASA would go to industry and seek an "end-to-end" solution for lunar missions—that is, an integrated plan to launch astronauts from Earth, land them on the Moon, and return them to Earth.

Starship nearing its next test flight. SpaceX fired six Raptor engines on the company's next Starship rocket Monday, clearing a major hurdle on the path to launch later this month on a high-stakes test flight to get the private rocket program back on track. SpaceX hasn't officially announced a target launch date, but sources indicate a launch could take place toward the end of next week, prior to Memorial Day weekend, Ars reports. The launch window would open at 6:30 pm local time (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC).

Getting back on track... If everything goes according to plan, Starship is expected to soar into space and fly halfway around the world, targeting a reentry and controlled splashdown into the Indian Ocean. While reusing the first stage is a noteworthy milestone, the next flight is important for another reason. SpaceX's last two Starship test flights ended prematurely when the rocket's upper stage lost power and spun out of control, dropping debris into the sea near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Next three launches

May 16: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-5 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13:43 UTC

May 17: Electron | The Sea God Sees | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 08:15 UTC

May 18: PSLV-XL | RISAT-1B | Satish Dhawan Space Centre, India | 00:29 UTC

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of April): 1,811

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend