Using satellite data, researchers examined eight ice streams in the Pope, Smith, and Kohler (PSK) region of West Antarctica between 2005 and 2022. They found that seven of the streams had sped up, with Smith West Glacier showing the biggest increase at 87%. But Kohler West Glacier, in contrast, had slowed by 10%. The reason? Kohler West’s ice flow had shifted toward Kohler East Glacier, which was thinning and moving faster. Over time, this caused the ice divide between the Dotson and Crosson Ice Shelves to shift eastward, changing how much ice reaches these floating ice platforms.

Dr. Heather Selley, the study's lead author, explained what's happening. “We think that the observed slowdown on Kohler West Glacier is due to the redirection of ice flow towards its neighbor—Kohler East. This is due to the large change in Kohler West’s surface slope, likely caused by the vastly different thinning rates on its neighboring glaciers.” Kohler East’s rapid movement pulls in ice from Kohler West, a process Selley described as "ice piracy." “We didn’t know ice streams could ‘steal’ ice from each over such a short period, so this is a fascinating discovery,” she said.

The team used satellite tracking techniques to measure how fast the glaciers were moving by monitoring surface features like crevasses and rifts. They also studied ice thinning rates with data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) CryoSat mission. The study was done in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM), with additional data from ESA, NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.

Co-author Pierre Dutrieux, a climate researcher at BAS, explained why this matters. “This study provides an interesting demonstration of ice piracy, where flow into one glacier gradually switches to flow into another glacier, as the ocean melts the grounding zone and re-configures ice flow.”

The shifting ice flow is affecting Dotson and Crosson Ice Shelves, two floating platforms that help stabilize Antarctica’s ice sheet. Dotson Ice Shelf is about 30 miles wide, roughly the distance from Leeds to York, while Crosson Ice Shelf spans about 40 miles—the distance from Leeds to Manchester. Both shelves have already lost a lot of ice in recent decades, and this new change could impact their stability even further.

Professor Anna Hogg, a study co-author, described the consequences. “The changes in flow direction have substantially altered the ice mass flux into Dotson and Crosson Ice Shelves, likely playing an important role in maintaining Dotson and accelerating the deterioration of Crosson.”

Sea levels are already rising, and Antarctica’s ice plays a key role in that process. Scientists estimate that more than 410 million people worldwide could be at risk from sea-level rise by 2100. Data shows that global sea levels have increased by more than 10 cm over the last decade, and shifting ice flow could make the situation worse.

Dr. Martin Wearing, an ESA scientist, emphasized how critical satellite technology is for tracking polar changes. “This new study highlights the unique ability of satellites to provide both the temporal and spatial coverage required to assess change in the polar regions. Using data from Copernicus Sentinel-1 and ESA's Earth Explorer CryoSat, the team has revealed the complex evolution of ice flow in part of West Antarctica over the past few decades. Understanding these changing dynamics and what drives them is crucial for improved projections of future ice-sheet change and contributions to sea-level rise.”

This research adds to growing concerns about Antarctica’s changing ice flow patterns and how they are influenced by ocean warming, changes in air temperature, and snowfall variations. By showing that glaciers can redirect their ice flow much faster than expected, scientists are gaining new insights into how Antarctica’s ice sheet might continue changing—and what that could mean for the rest of the planet.

Source: University of Leeds, The Cryosphere

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

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Last August, KJ Muldoon was born with a potentially fatal genetic disorder. Just six months later, he received a Crispr treatment designed just for him.

Muldoon has a rare disorder known as CPS1 deficiency, which causes a dangerous amount of ammonia to build up in the blood. About half of babies born with it will die early in life. Current treatment options—a highly restrictive diet and liver transplantation—aren’t ideal. But a team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine was able to bypass the standard years-long drug development timeline and use Cripsr to create a personalized medicine for KJ in a matter of months.

“We had a patient who was facing a very, very devastating outcome,” says Kiran Musunuru, professor for translational research at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who was part of the team that made KJ’s treatment.

When KJ was born, his muscles were rigid, he was lethargic, and he wouldn’t eat. After three doses of his custom treatment, KJ is starting to hit developmental milestones his parents never thought they’d see him reach. He’s now able to eat certain foods and sit upright by himself. “He really has made tremendous strides,” his father Kyle Muldoon says.

The case is detailed today in a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine and was presented at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy annual meeting in New Orleans. It could provide a blueprint for making customized gene-editing treatments for other patients with rare diseases that have few or no medical treatments available.

When the body digests protein, ammonia is made in the process. An important enzyme called CPS1 helps clear this toxic byproduct, but people with CPS1 deficiency lack this enzyme. Too much ammonia in the system can lead to organ damage, and even brain damage and death.

Since KJ’s birth, he has been on special ammonia-reducing medicines and a low-protein diet. After receiving the bespoke Crispr drug, though, KJ was able to go on a lower dose of the medication and start eating more protein without any serious side effects. He’s still in the hospital, but his doctors hope to send him home in the next month or so.

Both KJ’s parents and his medical team stop short of calling the Crispr therapy a cure, but they say it’s promising to see his improvement. “It's still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, director of the Gene Therapy for Inherited Metabolic Disorders Frontier Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Penn Medicine, who led the effort with Musunuru. She says the Crispr treatment probably turned KJ’s severe deficiency into a milder form of the disease, but he may still need to be on medication in the future.

Ahrens-Nicklas and Musunuru teamed up in 2023 to explore the feasibility of creating customized gene-editing therapies for individual patients. They decided to focus on urea cycle disorders, a group of genetic metabolic conditions that affect the body’s ability to process ammonia that includes CPS1 deficiency. Often, patients require a liver transplant. While the procedure is possible in infants, it’s medically complex. Ahrens-Nicklas and Musunuru saw an opportunity to find another path.

When KJ was born, the researchers used genome sequencing to determine the specific genetic mutation driving his disease. It turns out KJ had actually inherited two different mutations in the CPS1 gene—one from each parent. The team decided to target the mutation that had been reported before in an unrelated patient known to have severe CPS1 deficiency; the other hadn’t been seen before.

KJ’s team turned to Crispr, the Nobel Prize-winning technology that can precisely edit DNA. So far, only one Crispr-based medicine is commercially available. Approved in late 2023, it treats sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. Other Crispr-based therapies are in development for more common diseases that affect tens or hundreds of thousands of patients.

The allure of Crispr is its potential to directly address the underlying genetic cause of a disease rather than simply treat symptoms, as the vast majority of current medicine does. The approved Crispr therapy, Casgevy, is given as a one-time treatment. But the Philadelphia-led team specifically designed KJ’s therapy to be redosable out of safety concerns, starting with a low dose to ensure there were no adverse effects. Terry Horgan, a 27-year-old with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, passed away in 2022 shortly after receiving the first known custom Crispr treatment. His death was likely due to a reaction to the virus used to deliver the Crispr molecules.

For KJ’s treatment, researchers used a version of Crispr called base editing that can change one “letter” in a DNA sequence to another. They packaged the base-editing components in tiny bubbles called lipid nanoparticles, which were then delivered via an IV infusion.

Before it could be given to KJ though, it was tested for safety in mice and monkeys. Since the drug was unapproved, the team needed permission from the Food and Drug Administration to use the experimental treatment in an individual patient. The researchers applied to the FDA on February 14 and received approval on February 21. They gave KJ his first dose on February 25.

“The clinical responses described are impressive,” says Timothy Yu, a neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital who wasn’t involved in making KJ’s treatment. He says the Philadelphia team’s approach was a “very thoughtful and comprehensive end-to-end process.”

Yu’s lab has been working on customized genetic medicines based on antisense oligonucleotides, or ASOs—short molecules that block the production of proteins. Yu developed a personalized ASO in 10 months for a young girl with Batten disease, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. The treatment was dubbed milasen, after the patient, Mila. It was the first medicine that was tailor-made to treat a single patient’s genetic mutation. The treatment temporarily improved Mila’s condition and quality of life, but ultimately, she died in February 2021 at 10 years old.

“The superpower of Crispr base editing is its broad applicability to many types of genetic mutations. Its kryptonite is that we are in the very early days of demonstrating efficient and safe Crispr delivery to many different organs,” Yu says. ASOs, meanwhile, are well vetted for use in the brain, spinal cord, and eye, which are more difficult to address with Crispr.

Crispr could potentially address a variety of genetic diseases and types of cancer, but getting it to the right place in the body remains a challenge. The approved Crispr medicine, Casgevy, involves removing a patient’s cells and editing them outside the body, an arduous and expensive process. A drug given directly to the body would be much more practical. The liver is an easy first target because lipid nanoparticles naturally gravitate there, but only some diseases can be treated in this way.

Since urea cycle disorders primarily originate in the liver, they could be a prime target for custom Crispr medicines. “We’ve just written a new playbook,” says Fyodor Urnov, scientific director at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, who collaborated on the paper.

Urnov says KJ’s case demonstrates that bespoke genetic treatments can be made quickly and used successfully to treat critically ill patients. “This could have failed in so many ways,” he says. “Nothing was a given.” Every day, he worried that KJ would pass away before they could finish making the therapy.

The team did not say exactly how much the therapy cost to produce, but Musunuru says it was comparable to the cost of a liver transplant, around $800,000. The companies involved in manufacturing—Aldevron, Danaher, and Integrated DNA Technologies—made in-kind contributions.

“Though it will take a lot of work to get there, my hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we'll be able to correct them,” Musunuru says.

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You've probably heard of the infamous "marshmallow test," in which young children are asked to wait to eat a yummy marshmallow placed in front of them while left alone in a room for 10 to 15 minutes. If they successfully do so, they get a second marshmallow; if not, they don't. The test has become a useful paradigm for scientists interested in studying the various factors that might influence one's ability to delay gratification, thereby promoting social cooperation. According to a paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, one factor is trust: If children are paired in a marshmallow test and one promises not to eat their treat for the specified time, the other is much more likely to also refrain from eating it.

As previously reported, psychologist Walter Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and give them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next.

Some kids just ate the marshmallow right away. Others found a handy distraction: covering their eyes, kicking the desk, or poking at the marshmallow with their fingers. Some smelled it, licked it, or took tiny nibbles around the edges. Roughly one-third of the kids held out long enough to earn a second marshmallow. Several years later, Mischel noticed a strong correlation between the success of some of those kids later in life (better grades, higher self-confidence) and their ability to delay gratification in nursery school. Mischel's follow-up study confirmed the correlation.

Mischel himself cautioned against over-interpreting the results, emphasizing that children who simply can't hold out for that second marshmallow are not necessarily doomed to a life of failure. A more nuanced picture was offered in a 2018 study that replicated the marshmallow test with preschoolers. It found the same correlation between later achievement and the ability to resist temptation in preschool, but that correlation was much less significant after the researchers factored in such aspects as family background, home environment, and so forth. Attentiveness might be yet another contributing factor, according to a 2019 paper.

There have also been several studies examining the effects of social interdependence and similar social contexts on children's ability to delay gratification, using variations of the marshmallow test paradigm. For instance, in 2020, a team of German researchers adapted the classic experimental setup using Oreos and vanilla cookies with German and Kenyan schoolchildren, respectively. If both children waited to eat their treat, they received a second cookie as a reward; if one did not wait, neither child received a second cookie. They found that the kids were more likely to delay gratification when they depended on each other, compared to the standard marshmallow test.

An online paradigm

Rebecca Koomen, a psychologist now at the University of Manchester, co-authored the 2020 study as well as this latest one, which sought to build on those findings. Koomen et al. structured their experiments similarly, this time recruiting 66 UK children, ages 5 to 6, as subjects. They focused on how promising a partner not to eat a favorite treat could inspire sufficient trust to delay gratification, compared to the social risk of one or both partners breaking that promise. Any parent could tell you that children of this age are really big on the importance of promises, and science largely concurs; a promise has been shown to enhance interdependent cooperation in this age group.

Koomen and her Manchester colleagues added an extra twist: They conducted their version of the marshmallow test online to test the effectiveness compared to lab-based versions of the experiment. (Prior results from similar online studies have been mixed.) "Given face-to-face testing restrictions during the COVID pandemic, this, to our knowledge, represents the first cooperative marshmallow study to be conducted online, thereby adding to the growing body of literature concerning the validity of remote testing methods," they wrote.

The type of treat was chosen by each child's parents, ensuring it was a favorite: chocolate, candy, biscuits, and marshmallows, mostly, although three kids loved potato chips, fruit, and nuts, respectively. Parents were asked to set up the experiment in a quiet room with minimal potential distractions, outfitted with a webcam to monitor the experiment. Each child was shown a video of a "confederate child" who either clearly promised not to eat the treat or more ambiguously suggested they might succumb and eat their treat. (The confederate child refrained from eating the treat in both conditions, although the participant child did not know that.)

Then the scientist running the experiment would leave the Zoom meeting for an undisclosed period of time, after telling the child that if both of them resisted eating the treat (including licking or nibbling at it), they would each receive a second one; if one of them failed, neither would be rewarded. Children could not see or communicate with their paired confederates for the duration of the experiment. The scientist returned after 10 minutes to see if the child had managed to delay gratification. Once the experiment had ended, the team actually did reward the participant child regardless of the outcome, "to end the study on a positive note."

The results were controlled for unavoidable accidental distractions, so the paper includes the results from both the full dataset of all 68 participants and a subset of 48 children, excluding those who experienced some type of disruption during the 10-minute experiment. In both cases, children whose confederate clearly promised not to eat their treat waited longer to eat their treat compared to the more ambiguous "social risk" condition. And younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children, although this result was not statistically significant. The authors suggest this small difference may be due to the fact that older children are more likely to have experienced broken promises, thereby learning "that commitments are not always fulfilled."

Of course, there are always caveats. For instance, while specific demographic data was not collected, all the children had predominantly white middle-class backgrounds, so the results reflect how typical children in northern England behave in such situations. The authors would like to see their online experiment repeated cross-culturally in the future. And the limitation of one-way communication "likely prevented partners from establishing common ground, namely their mutual commitment to fulfilling their respective roles, which is thought to be a key principle of interdependence," the authors wrote.

DOI: Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.250392  (About DOIs).

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A US-based propulsion company, Venus Aerospace, said Wednesday it had completed a short flight test of its rotating detonation rocket engine at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The company's chief executive and co-founder, Sassie Duggleby, characterized the flight as "historic." It is believed to be the first US-based flight test of an idea that has been discussed academically for decades, a rotating detonation rocket engine. The concept has previously been tested in a handful of other countries, but never with a high-thrust engine.

"By proving this engine works beyond the lab, Venus brings the world closer to a future where hypersonic travel—traversing the globe in under two hours—becomes possible," Duggleby told Ars.

A quick flight

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 contrast to a traditional rocket engine, in which a highly pressurized propellant and an oxidizer are injected into a combustion chamber where they burn and produce an energetic exhaust plume, a rotating detonation engine is different in that a wave of detonation travels around a circular channel. This is sustained by the injection of fuel and oxidizer and produces a shockwave that travels outward at supersonic speed.

Sassie Duggleby and her husband, Andrew Duggleby, founded Venus Aerospace nearly five years ago with the long-term goal of developing powerful rotating detonation engines and building a hypersonic aircraft that could carry perhaps a dozen passengers and travel at astonishingly fast speeds worldwide.

Aiming for hypersonics in the near term

Such a prospect is many years into the future, however. In the meantime, Venus is looking at more near-term opportunities and revenue sources. The company is seeking to position itself as a leader in affordable hypersonic flight for commercial and defense applications.

"It is vital for US interests that the government continues to fund efforts to maintain America’s economic competitiveness and national security," Sassie Duggleby said. "Hypersonics is one of the critical technologies to remain ahead of our national competitors. We’re fortunate to have robust interest from both government and commercial sectors."

Sassie Duggleby said Venus cannot disclose specific customers yet.

"We're actively engaged with US defense and national security agencies as well as commercial partners exploring hypersonic applications in logistics, aerospace, and future mobility—including large primes," she said. "The enthusiasm we’re seeing reflects a broad recognition that Venus’s technology can unlock new operational and economic possibilities across multiple markets."

Venus has a long way to go to reach its ultimate goal of highly efficient, hypersonic commercial flight. But the engine that flew this week is a good start toward proving that such a future, at least, is possible.

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Since 2017, a particularly dangerous strain of E. coli O157:H7 has emerged across the country to spark outbreaks, severe disease, and deaths. It spreads in various ways: via leafy greens and contaminated beef, like its relatives, but also recreational waters. Hundreds of people across 46 states have been infected, and health officials have documented at least nine separate outbreaks. One in 2018, linked to lettuce, caused over 200 infections across 37 states, killing five people and causing a severe kidney condition in 26.

Now, a sweeping genetic analysis by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests a tiny mutation in one of the bacteria's molecular weapons may be behind the strain's rise. The finding, published recently in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, provides insights into this clinically significant plague and its rise to prominence. It also highlights the role of the bacteria's sophisticated military tactics.

The mutated weapon is part of a complex system that E. coli and other harmful bacteria sometimes use called a Type 3 Secretion System (T3SS). This involves molecular machinery that basically functions like a syringe, complete with a long needle that is poked into the cells of its victims. The T3SS then directly injects a fleet of hostile proteins. Those proteins—called effectors—attack specific targets that collectively disable the host's defense responses and make the host more hospitable for its bacterial conqueror.

The mutation the CDC researchers found was in one of these T3SS effectors, a protein called EspW. Previous research suggests that this effector is responsible for buttressing a host cell's structure during an invasion, keeping the cell from contracting while enabling the bacteria to become attached to it. A related protein in the plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae, called HopW1, also disrupts normal cellular structure and processes that would otherwise restrict the ability of P. syringae to cause an infection.

Small change

The CDC researchers identified the EspW mutation by comparing the genetic sequences of 729 isolates of the new E. coli strain—dubbed REPEXH01—to genetic sequences of 2,027 other E. coli O157:H7 isolates. Of the 729 REPEXH01 strains, all but two had a single nucleotide deletion in EspW (the remaining two had ambiguous sequences), while the deletion was present in less than 4 percent of the non-REPEXH01 E. coli strains. The finding suggests the tiny change could be a genetic signature of the strain, and its persistence in a key disease protein may offer the strain an advantage.

For now, it's unclear what that advantage might be. The deletion of a single DNA base (an adenine) shifts the frame of the three-sequence protein code for the rest of EspW. This could result in a shorter protein. It could also cause the molecular machinery that translates the genetic code to slip, leading to proteins of various lengths. In any case, the deletion is likely to result in a less fully functional EspW protein.

The CDC researchers suggest this could help E. coli when it's on lettuce and other produce. For example, EspW might spur an immune response from an infected plant that causes stomata—pores on the surfaces of leaves—to close, blocking the bacteria's ability to invade. Thus, cutting back EspW may help E. coli sneak in—an adaptation in the ongoing arms race between the bacteria and its host. Another possibility is that EspW could function like HopW1, leading to more severe infection in plant tissues, which could lower the chances that those infected leaves are harvested and make it to grocery stores and atop burgers. Thus, cutting back on EspW could help E. coli move to its human victims.

Ultimately, additional research will be needed to understand what's going on. As the CDC researchers conclude: "the role of the single base pair mutation in this strain’s colonization and survival on leafy vegetables could yield valuable insights."

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Around 3.7 billion years ago, the first self-replicating molecules set the stage for life on Earth. Over time, small genetic changes led to the incredible variety of plants and animals seen today. Charles Darwin famously explained that if two groups of the same species stay separated for long enough—thousands to millions of years—they can eventually become distinct species.

While evolution is usually a slow process, some natural shortcuts exist. Hybridization can speed things up, though it's often messy due to gene mixing, which is called introgression. Another quicker path is autopolyploidy, where an organism duplicates its chromosomes, instantly creating genetic diversity.

For those not familiar, polyploidy is a genetic characteristic where an organism has more than two full sets of chromosomes. This condition is widespread in plants and also occurs in certain types of fish and amphibians.

Autopolyploidy happens when a plant’s reproductive cells mistakenly copy their DNA, passing two sets of chromosomes to the offspring instead of one. Previously, scientists thought these autopolyploids were rare and not very successful in nature. Later studies proved otherwise—they’re quite common and can survive well.

There was also a belief that autopolyploids couldn’t live side-by-side with their original diploid relatives because they would compete for the same resources. However, Gaynor’s study suggests that this assumption might be wrong.

“Through my fieldwork, I discovered that a single population could have a mishmash of cytotypes, which fascinated me,” said Gaynor. “With this study, I set out to understand if these populations could persist over time. Would one cytotype eventually outcompete the others, or could all three cytotypes persist?”

To understand how these different chromosome types interact, the researchers built a new mathematical model. It includes demographic and environmental randomness, factors that can make a big difference in population survival. Their model tracks how diploids, triploids, and autotetraploids form, establish themselves, and continue to exist, even when gene flow occurs between them.

The results show that higher rates of self-fertilization and strong reproductive barriers help multiple cytotypes survive together. When environmental conditions become stressful or when competition is intense, autotetraploids seem to have an edge over their diploid ancestors.

This finding challenges the old idea that autopolyploids must live in separate habitats to avoid competing with their original species. Instead, the study suggests that genetic and ecological factors can allow them to thrive side by side.

By applying a more complex model to these biological processes, the study sheds light on how genetic diversity is maintained in nature. The findings could help scientists better understand plant evolution, adaptation, and biodiversity, opening doors for further research into species coexistence.

This work adds to growing evidence that evolution doesn’t always follow a straightforward path. Sometimes, genetic changes happen in unexpected ways, shaping the diversity of life faster than previously thought.

Source: University of Florida, University of Chicago Press Journals | Image via Depositphotos

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Recent evidence indicates that Europe’s worst blackout, occurring in the Iberian Peninsula, originated from an unstable power grid. This instability likely triggered the cascading chain of events that followed.

In the half-hour leading up to the blackout, two episodes of power and frequency oscillations were observed in the Continental European synchronous area. Grid operators took actions to mitigate these oscillations.

The likely root cause of these undamped “inter-area oscillations” was the inherently low inertia of the Spanish power grid at midday, with approximately 70% of generation provided by inverter-based solar and wind. Such renewable sources lack the spinning reserve needed to effectively resist frequency oscillations.

Due to these unstable grid conditions, exceptionally high rates of change of frequency (RoCoF) occurred, which became the final nail in the coffin. As a result, low-frequency load shedding (UFLS) were not able kick in to save the day.

The critical tipping point came with the first generation loss at 12:32:57, involving roughly 2.2 GW, likely from solar PV generation in southwest Spain—a region dominated by solar power.

This generation loss, occurring under already unstable conditions (likely owing to overvoltages, which is the hypothesis of Luis Badesa) accelerated a rapid frequency collapse within the inertia-deficient system. Officials from Red Eléctrica (REE) noted a “strong oscillation” precisely at this point, leading to protective disconnections cascading across the grid due to high RoCoF.

Could the reliability of the Iberian Peninsula grid be ensured by introducing new technical solutions? Technically, yes—but economically, the feasibility is more challenging.

Notably, REE had already installed synchronous condensers and leveraged existing synchronous generation (nuclear, hydro, solar thermal) to bolster inertia and voltage stability. Unfortunately, these measures proved insufficient.

Nonetheless, deploying additional synchronous condensers or procuring fast frequency reserves (FFR) to provide virtual inertia through balancing markets significantly increases system costs.

Currently, FFR is typically procured only during short intervals of low inertia. Operating a consistently low-inertia grid would demand permanent, costly frequency support mechanisms, potentially making such a solution economically challenging.

https://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/image-4.png

Sources:
[1] 𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒𝐎-𝐄 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐥: https://lnkd.in/dajvNZ3f
[2] 𝐞𝐥𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚.𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞: https://lnkd.in/dmRHp5Zz
[3] 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫-𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: https://lnkd.in/dCEVR549
[4] 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: https://lnkd.in/d8YXEumZ
[5] 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞-𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐬: https://lnkd.in/ghMYqhsq

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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.

Starship ignited its Raptor engines Monday morning on a test stand near SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas. The engine ran for approximately 60 seconds, and SpaceX confirmed the test-firing in a post on X: "Starship completed a long duration six-engine static fire and is undergoing final preparations for the ninth flight test."

SpaceX hasn't officially announced a target launch date, but maritime warnings along Starship's flight path over the Gulf of Mexico suggest the launch might happen as soon as next Wednesday, May 21. The launch window would open at 6:30 pm local time (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC). 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.

After Monday's successful static fire test, SpaceX is in the final stretch of preparations for Starship's ninth full-scale test flight. Last month, SpaceX test-fired the rocket's massive booster stage, known as Super Heavy. The Super Heavy booster assigned to the next Starship launch will become the first that SpaceX will reuse from a previous test flight.

This, alone, is a significant step for the Starship program. SpaceX wants the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage to become rapidly reusable, eventually operating more like an airplane than a legacy rocket. The booster slated to launch on Flight 9 made its first flight in January, when it soared to the edge of space, released SpaceX's Starship upper stage, and returned to the launch pad, where it was caught in mid-air by heavy-duty mechanical arms.

SpaceX will again try to catch the Super Heavy booster on Flight 9.

Righting the ship

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.

With Flight 9, SpaceX hopes to get the Starship program back on track. The company aimed for as many as 25 Starship test flights this year, but will now likely fall short of that number. Near-term goals beyond Flight 9 include returning Starship from low-Earth orbit to the launch site, with a tower catch similar to the one SpaceX used to recover the Super Heavy booster.

Then, SpaceX will begin flight experiments with an in-space refueling system to transfer super-cold liquid propellants between two Starships in orbit. This is an important milestone for NASA, which has a contract with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a version of Starship for landing humans on the Moon. To do that, SpaceX must launch around 10 Starship refueling tankers—the exact number remains unclear—to gas up the Moon-bound Starship lander before it can depart low-Earth orbit.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk also wants Starship to fly to Mars, which will, likewise, require a mastery of in-space refueling. NASA may also soon rely on Starship and other massive commercial rockets to launch astronauts from Earth. The Trump administration has proposed canceling NASA's Space Launch System rocket after two more flights in favor of lower-cost commercial options.

Before any of this becomes possible, SpaceX must prove it has overcome the setbacks encountered on the two previous test flights. Both flights failed at roughly the same time—approximately eight minutes after liftoff—near the end of the ship's engine firing. SpaceX investigators, working under the oversight of the Federal Aviation Administration, determined the Starship test flight in January failed after propellant leaks led to fires in the rocket's aft compartment, or attic. This led to the early shutdown of the rocket's engines and eventual breakup.

Engineers concluded the leaks were most likely caused by vibrations during the ship's climb into space. The vibrations were in resonance with the vehicle's natural frequency, intensifying the shaking beyond the levels SpaceX predicted. For the next test flight on March 6, SpaceX made changes to the ship's feed lines routing fuel to its Raptor engines, made adjustments to propellant temperatures, and flew the engines at a new throttle setting.

But that didn't solve the problem. Once again, Starship's engines cut off too early, and the rocket broke apart before falling to Earth. SpaceX said "an energetic event" in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines, followed by a loss of attitude control and a loss of communications with the ship.

The similarities between the two failures suggest a likely design issue with the upgraded "Block 2" version of Starship, which debuted in January and flew again in March. Starship Block 2 is slightly taller than the ship SpaceX used on the rocket's first six flights, with redesigned flaps, improved batteries and avionics, and notably, a new fuel feed line system for the ship's Raptor vacuum engines.

SpaceX has not released the results of the investigation into the Flight 8 failure, and the FAA hasn't yet issued a launch license for Flight 9. Likewise, SpaceX hasn't released any information on the changes it made to Starship for next week's flight.

What we do know about the Starship vehicle for Flight 9—designated Ship 35—is that it took a few tries to complete a full-duration test-firing. SpaceX completed a single-engine static fire on April 30, simulating the restart of a Raptor engine in space. Then, on May 1, SpaceX aborted a six-engine test-firing before reaching its planned 60-second duration. Videos captured by media observing the test showed a flash in the engine plume, and at least one piece of debris was seen careening out of the flame trench below the ship.

SpaceX ground crews returned Ship 35 to the production site a couple of miles away, perhaps to replace a damaged engine, before rolling Starship back to the test stand over the weekend for Monday's successful engine firing.

Now, the ship will head back to the Starbase build site, where technicians will make final preparations for Flight 9. These final tasks may include loading mock-up Starlink broadband satellites into the ship's payload bay and touchups to the rocket's heat shield.

These are two elements of Starship that SpaceX engineers are eager to demonstrate on Flight 9, beyond just fixing the problems from the last two missions. Those failures prevented Starship from testing its satellite deployer and an upgraded heat shield designed to better withstand scorching temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) during reentry.

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General Motors is bringing in potentially groundbreaking new battery tech that not only has 30 percent more energy density at the existing production cost for cells but also would circumvent China's stranglehold on intellectual property for EV batteries. The company even claims this new type of battery pack could lower the cost of its electric SUVs so they're comparable to their gasoline counterparts.

The news came today as GM has announced it will use lithium manganese-rich (LMR) battery cells in its largest electric vehicles, the full-size trucks and SUVs sold by Chevrolet, GMC, and Cadillac. They are to be produced by Ultium Cells, its joint-venture battery company with LG Energy Solutions. The first such cells will come from a pilot line in 2027, with full volume production in 2028 at a plant it hasn’t disclosed.

The new cells are in the prismatic format, versus Ultium’s current pouch cells, which use a nickel-cobalt-manganese-aluminum chemistry. Those cells, in large standardized modules, power GM’s entire current EV lineup, from the compact Chevrolet Equinox EV up to the GMC Hummer EV.

The new prismatic cells appear even larger than Ultium’s pouch cells, though GM did not provide dimensions. They will be housed in modules that, overall, have 50 percent fewer parts than their predecessors. That may prevent delays like those that delayed volume production of its Ultium modules by 12 to 18 months, pushing deliveries of several models from late 2022 to early 2024.

Lower Cost, Higher Energy Density

Crucially, GM claims its Ultium battery engineers have created a chemistry that provides one-third greater energy density than comparable lithium iron-phosphate (LFP)—at a comparable cell cost. China owns virtually all the intellectual property around LFP chemistry, which costs less in materials than NMCA because it uses none of those metals. The trade-off for lower cost is lower energy density by volume.

The earliest NMC cells used roughly equal thirds of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. GM’s current “high-nickel” Ultium cells swapped out much of that cobalt for nickel while adding aluminum. They use roughly 5 percent cobalt and 10 percent manganese, said GM battery engineer Andy Oury, with the rest being nickel and aluminum.

The LMR cells, however, substitute manganese—which is cheaper and more globally plentiful—for some of the pricier nickel and virtually all of the cobalt. They are, Oury said, 60 to 70 percent manganese, 30 to 40 percent nickel, and only up to 2 percent cobalt.

The new chemistry, in a second type of cell, will also use a new module format. Standardized Ultium NMCA modules for every vehicle were the right solution for GM to launch its current lineup of 12 different EV models, its execs said. Going forward, the company envisions using different chemistries for different purposes: NMCA for high-performance and its most capable models, now LMR for long range at lower cost, and LFP for its least expensive models.

Cheap Long-Range Electric SUVs and Trucks

If LMR chemistry actually produces a cell that costs as little to make as LFP with greater energy density, that could be a game changer—including for North American competitiveness against China in the critical sphere of battery development and production.

“LMR will complement our high-nickel and iron-phosphate solutions to expand customer choice in the truck and full-size SUV markets,” said Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery, propulsion, and sustainability. It will, he said, “advance American battery innovation and create jobs well into the future.”

Specifically, LMR packs will lower the cost of some full-size EV truck and SUV models to bring their prices closer to those of their gasoline counterparts. That’s crucial to boosting sales of the full-size EV models, which have not reached the same volumes and market penetrations as those of GM’s compact and midsize EV crossovers.

GM has said little about its plans for cells using the third chemistry, lithium-iron phosphate. However, the upcoming 2026 Chevrolet Bolt EV—a reboot of the compact hatchback that was its first and only battery-electric model from 2017 through 2022—has long been expected to use LFP cells to keep its price close to the $30,000 level of earlier models. Expect more details within weeks or months.

Tesla’s Ex-Battery Chief at Work

Hiring Kelty was a coup for GM, given his previous 11-year tenure as Tesla’s battery czar—and 15 years before that with Japanese cell maker Panasonic. He told WIRED he arrived at GM with “some preconceptions” about what directions the company should take for its cells going forward. He was, he said, initially resistant to the idea of using LMR cell chemistry, but GM’s battery engineers had worked on developing the chemistry since 2015—and persisted in their advocacy.

LMR’s clear advantages, Kelty said, ultimately brought him around. Its cell partner LG Energy Solutions brought its own portfolio of more than 200 LMR patents dating back to 2010 to the table, and this week’s announcement is the result.

LMR is not yet an industry-standard term for the battery chemistry; following the formats of the other two, it should really be LMN, for lithium-manganese-nickel. Regardless of name, GM hopes to be the first to bring it to market in volume. Ford used the same term and beat GM to the punch on the PR front when Charles Poon, its global director of electrified propulsion engineering, published a LinkedIn post in late April.

That post said Ford had developed “a game-changing battery chemistry that will lead to enhanced safety, lower cost, and industry-leading energy density” it was working to integrate into Ford electric vehicles “within this decade.” GM’s LMR announcement, while later, specified the year 2028.

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Most robots rely on complex control systems, AI-powered or otherwise, that govern their movement. These centralized electronic brains need time to react to changes in their environment and produce movements that are often awkwardly, well, robotic.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A team of Dutch scientists at the FOM Institute for Molecular and Atomic Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam built a new kind of robot that can run, go over obstacles, and even swim, all driven only by the flow of air. And it does all that with no brain at all.

Sky-dancing physics

“I was in a lab, working on another project, and had to bend a tube to stop air from going through it. The tube started oscillating at very high frequency, making a very loud noise,” says Alberto Comoretto, a roboticist at AMOLF and lead author of the study. To see what was going on with the tube, Comoretto set up a high-speed camera and recorded the movement. He found that the movement resulted from the interplay between the air pressure inside the tube and the state of the tube itself.

When there was a kink in the tube, the increasing pressure pushed that kink along the tube’s length. That caused the pressure to decrease, which enabled a new kink to appear and the cycle to repeat. “We were super excited because we saw this self-sustaining, periodic, asymmetric motion,” Comoretto told Ars.

The first reason for Comoretto’s excitement was that the flapping tube in his lab was driven by the kind of airflow physics that Peter Marshall, Doron Gazit, and Aireh Dranger harnessed to build their famous dancing “Fly Guys” for the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996. The second reason was that asymmetry and periodicity he saw in the tube’s movement pattern were also present in the way all living things moved, from single-celled organisms to humans.

Comoretto’s team decided to build a robot that harnessed the Fly Guys’ physics to achieve natural, almost lifelike movement. But it was harder than it seemed.

Tubular legs

“The movements of these dancing Fly Guys are designed to be random to make them dance in a compelling way,” Comoretto explains. “In our robot, we control the motion through constraining the geometry in very specific ways.” The design comprised a 3D-printed body with four attached tubes bent at the bottom to form the robot’s legs. The frequency of oscillations in the tubes, and therefore the robot’s speed, was regulated by adjusting the amount of air pumped into each tube.

In a standard multi-limbed robot, the remaining challenge would be to synchronize the limbs to achieve different gaits. Surprisingly, though, limb synchronization in Comoretto’s robot appeared as an emergent property of its design.

“Imagine the experiment with metronomes that start to synchronize when you put them on a movable plate—it’s exactly that,” says Johannes Overvelde, AMOLF researcher and co-author of the study. The metronomes synchronize because the moving plate they’re on works as a coupling, connecting them together. In the robot, the same kind of coupling was achieved by connecting all tubes to the same input airflow, which enabled them to communicate through variations in pressure. And it worked wonders.

The robot could adjust its gait to the environment it was in. On the ground, all limbs autonomously activated in synchrony, and the robot ran a bit like a stotting gazelle. In the water, where the tubes met less resistance than on the ground, the limbs moved in antiphase to enable swimming like a dog.

There are still issues to iron out before robots relying on this kind of seamless body-environment dynamics make it out of the early research phase, though.

Into the wild

The first problem with Comoretto’s robot was power consumption. The initial design that his team tested in their lab was tethered, and the air was pumped to the limbs through a thin hose. Fifteen standard liters of air per minute enabled the robot to move quickly and perform all its amazing tricks, but the pump that supplied it used 85 watts. That was too much to even start thinking about dropping the tether and using onboard power sources.

To solve this, the team started by reducing the number of moving limbs from four to two and changing their design to decrease the pressure necessary to form kinks and move them along the tubes. This led to cutting the required power to just 0.06 watts per limb, which enabled a new, untethered robot to move using its own air pump, powered by a small lithium-ion battery. This version used two simple light sensors as its “eyes,” connected to a system that could selectively activate each of the oscillating limbs. It could autonomously go from a dark room to a brighter one or follow an operator carrying a light source.

The most important remaining challenge, though, is to figure out how to control the robot’s behavior. “Now when it hits a wall, it starts to turn left. If it lands in water, it starts to swim backwards. We didn’t come up with that—it just happens,” Overvelde says. “We understand the system but need a better grasp of how to design specific functionalities.” And this grasp will be needed for any applications that require something more than tiny robots that can run, swim, or both.

The goal for the team is to build robotic systems that adjust to the environment using just physics, which would require less computing power (or no computing power at all) to work. “In another project, we are working on a soft, artificial heart—a nice example of a system that interacts with our bloodstream, our blood pressure, and adapts automatically. And when you have an artificial heart, you just want it to work. You don’t want to get software updates,” Overvelde says.

Science, 2025: 10.1126/science.adr3661

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For centuries, mathematicians have been able to solve lower-degree polynomials, such as quadratics, cubics, and quartics. But in 1832, Évariste Galois showed that the usual methods fail for polynomials of degree five and above, and no general formula could be found.

Now, in 2025, nearly 200 years later, UNSW Honorary Professor Norman Wildberger believes he has cracked the problem with an entirely different approach—one that doesn’t rely on radicals (roots of numbers like square and cube roots). He argues that irrational numbers, which never end and never repeat, make calculations impossible to complete.

His method, developed alongside computer scientist Dr. Dean Rubine, uses power series—polynomials with an infinite number of terms—to approximate solutions, sidestepping the need for irrational numbers entirely.

At the heart of the discovery are Catalan numbers (𝐶𝑚)—a sequence that counts how many ways a polygon can be split into triangles. Mathematicians know that the series of Catalan numbers satisfies a quadratic equation.

Prof. Wildberger and Dr. Rubine expanded this idea to introduce hyper-Catalan numbers (𝐶𝐦), which count subdivisions of a polygon into different shapes, like triangles, quadrilaterals, and pentagons. Their research shows that the series of hyper-Catalan numbers also satisfies a polynomial equation with a distinct geometric pattern.

With this insight, they extended the method to solve general polynomial equations. By layering the series based on the number of faces in these shapes, they uncovered an extraordinary numerical pattern—the Geode.

“The Geode is a mysterious array that appears to underlie Catalan numerics,” says Prof. Wildberger.

This breakthrough isn’t just theoretical—it has real-world applications. Many scientific and computational problems rely on solving polynomial equations, and Prof. Wildberger’s method could lead to improved algorithms that avoid inefficient radical-based computations.

“This is a core computation for much of applied mathematics, so this is an opportunity for improving algorithms across a wide range of areas,” he explains.

His discovery has also opened new doors for mathematicians studying combinatorial sequences, sparking fresh questions about the structure and behavior of the Geode array.

“We expect that the study of this new Geode array will raise many new questions and keep combinatorialists busy for years,” Prof. Wildberger says.

With this new method, even quintic equations—polynomials of degree five—can now be tackled logically, and as such, the research continues to generate discussions in academic circles.

Source: UNSW, Informa

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The full Moon frames the ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. 

Credit: Juan Beltrán/European Southern Observatory

This week's Tuesday Telescope photo is pretty meta as it features... a telescope.

This particular telescope is under construction in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the darkest places on Earth with excellent atmospheric visibility. The so-called "Extremely Large Telescope" is being built on a mountaintop in the Andes at an elevation of about 3,000 meters.

And it really is extremely large. The primary mirror will be 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. Like, that's gigantic for an optical telescope. It is nearly four times larger than the largest operational reflecting telescopes in the world.

The Europeans are in a contest, of sorts, with other very large telescope construction projects. A consortium of several countries, including the United States, is building the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will have a primary diameter of 25.4 meters. This facility is also located in the Atacama Desert. Both facilities are targeting first light before the end of this decade, but this will depend on funding and how smoothly construction proceeds. A third large project, the Thirty Meter Telescope, is planned for Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. However, this effort has stalled due to ongoing opposition from native Hawaiians. It is unclear when, or if, it will proceed.

In any case, within less than a decade, we are going to undergo a radical revolution in how we see the cosmos when one or more of these next-generation ground-based optical telescopes come online. What will we ultimately observe?

The mystery of what's up there left to be discovered is half the fun!

Source: European Southern Observatory

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In 2012, clinicians at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia treated Emily Whitehead, a 6-year-old with leukemia, with altered immune cells from her own body. At the time, the treatment was experimental, but it worked: The cells targeted the cancer and eradicated it. Thirteen years later, Whitehead is still cancer-free.

The modified cells, called CAR-T cells, are a form of immunotherapy, where doctors change parts of the immune system into cancer-attacking instruments. About five years after Whitehead’s treatment, the first CAR-T drugs were approved by the FDA and were heralded, along with immunotherapy more broadly, as one of the most promising modern cancer treatments. Today, there are seven FDA-approved CAR-T therapies, including the one used to treat Whitehead.

Since then, however, studies have linked CAR-T to fatal complications due to treatment toxicity, and the treatment has had a harder time addressing certain types of cancers, particularly solid tumors affecting the breast and pancreas, although some small clinical trials have been starting to show positive results for solid cancers. “After a decade, a decade and a half, we arrive at the point that there are patients who answer, most of the patients still do not answer,” said George Calin, a researcher at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Now experts say that new therapies are beginning to surpass challenges that previous treatments couldn’t, providing safer, more targeted delivery directly to tumors. These include drugs that contain radioactive substances, called radiopharmaceuticals, which are used to diagnose or treat cancer; medications that can influence the genes that spur or suppress tumor growth; and therapeutic cancer vaccines.

These approaches have shown promise in the lab, and researchers and companies are now conducting various stages of human clinical trials to explore their effectiveness. And some promising treatments have even gained approval by the Food and Drug Administration. The hope is that improving on these strategies will ultimately help treat even the most resistant types of cancer.

Despite researchers’ excitement for innovative treatments, there is rampant online misinformation and there are occasions in which companies have been found to tout and sell fake cures, said Kathrin Dvir, an oncologist and researcher at Moffitt Cancer Center.

But other scientists remain optimistic about the future of cancer research, Calin said: “All the time in science, you have to open the door with something new.”

Targeting is tough

Historically, one of the biggest challenges in cancer treatments has been the lack of specific targets. The typical standards of care — chemotherapy and radiation — kill off not only cancer cells, but also healthy ones. (This is one reason why cancer patients on these treatments experience hair loss, nausea, and other symptoms.) In recent years, scientists have thus aimed to develop therapies that only attack cancer cells, leaving the rest of the body unharmed.

One way to achieve this is through more precise targeting of the tumor. In one of these approaches, drugs act as a ferry, delivering radioactive molecules directly to the cancer. They do this by targeting proteins that are only present on the surface of specific tumors.

Take, for example, prostate cancer. Here, the cancerous cells are sensitive to radiation, so some researchers are working on drugs containing unstable chemical elements that emit radiation — radioactive isotopes, or radiopharmaceuticals — to facilitate imaging of the tumors and provide enough radiation to treat them.

Already, the field of radiopharmaceuticals has seen growth following successes like the brand name drugs Pluvicto for prostate cancer and Lutathera for neuroendocrine tumors, which reportedly offer improved quality of life compared to traditional treatments. Additionally, using radioisotopes for imaging could also allow researchers to diagnose and classify patients much better to provide personalized care, said Jason Lewis, a radiochemist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. And while radiopharmaceutical therapy can have side effects, he added, it’s “designed to minimize radiation to healthy tissues.”

Other therapies, called antibody-drug conjugates, act similarly: They shuttle molecules that can kill the cancer cells via antibodies that can dock on tumors. About a dozen of such drugs have been approved by the FDA for various types of cancer.

There are also new vaccines to help the immune system ward off cancer, using the key approach behind a type of COVID-19 vaccine — mRNA technology. For example, one of the companies that developed one of the COVID-19 shots, BioNTech, is working on a vaccine called BNT116 designed to elicit immune reactions to treat a type of lung cancer, which is currently recruiting about 150 participants across the world to undergo safety testing.

mRNA therapeutic vaccines for cancer, which use messenger RNA as blueprint material so the body can create proteins that are unique to the tumor to help elicit an immune response, may offer several advantages. The shots can be personalized, for instance, to the patients’ own tumors, said Siow Ming Lee, an oncologist at University College London Hospitals and one of the lead researchers of the trial. Other vaccines are also in the works. “We are in this sort of new era now,” he said.

Another type of genetic molecule could also be a target to help treat cancer. Some RNAs, called microRNAs, can act on genes that are responsible for tumor growth. Researchers like Calin are developing small molecules that bind to cancer-related microRNAs, to turn them off and try to halt the disease’s spread.

With FDA approvals, human clinical trials underway and, with promising preclinical data for many of these therapies, the researchers who spoke to Undark said that the future appears bright. “We're not just seeing these dramatic improvements in outcomes and survival for patients with some indications, but the quality of life,” Lewis said.

New approaches, new problems

As more of these latest cancer technologies do get approved for treatment, new approaches can bring new problems, experts say. For example, with radiotherapeutics, one big challenge is to source enough radioisotopes for the drugs, and have a specialized workforce to handle radioactivity, said Lewis. For microRNAS, it’s tricky to identify exactly which type to target for a particular cancer, Calin emphasized.

And there are also companies that are trying to capitalize on new, unproven technologies and drugs prematurely. The company ExThera Medical, for instance, has been charging patients tens of thousands of dollars for unproven therapies, according to a recent report by The New York Times.

“All over the world, there are many so-called new therapeutics that are not well-tested and not well-developed,” said Calin. Dvir encounters misinformation at her clinic almost daily, she said. “Maybe some of those have some data in the preclinical, in animal studies — it doesn't mean that it works on the human because we need data before you expose people to those therapies.”

Although the FDA faces budget cuts, some of the researchers and clinicians that Undark spoke to insist that the agency will weed out bad science. If not, the clinicians that Undark spoke with said that they can also help guide patients toward evidence-based treatments.

Ultimately, researchers want to continue to improve these treatments to see if they might work in tandem. “I think the name of the game in the next five to 10 years is combinations,” said Dvir. Already, there are trials looking at precisely how using different approaches together might boost their ability to treat cancer, she adds. “We know that these drugs work in synergy. It's just finding the right combination that is effective but not too toxic.”

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At the ACM Web Conference, researchers introduced a technique that uses Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL)—a tool commonly used in fields like self-driving cars and game theory—to analyze how people interact online. This method makes it possible to track behavioral patterns and understand how users contribute to online discussions, rather than just looking at the content they post.

For their study, researchers examined 5.9 million Reddit interactions over six years and found five different types of users based on their behavior. One interesting group stood out—the "disagreers." These users actively seek out conversations just to argue. Instead of discussing topics constructively, they jump into debates, post opposing views, and then leave without waiting for responses. These kinds of users were most common in political subreddits like r/news, r/politics, and r/worldnews. But surprisingly, they weren’t as common in the now-banned r/The_Donald, a pro-Trump subreddit. In that forum, people mostly agreed with each other but showed hostility toward outsiders.

The study also looked at homophily, which is the tendency of people to connect with others who share similar views. This tendency creates echo chambers, where like-minded users reinforce each other’s opinions and deepen division. Normally, researchers measure homophily by looking at content (what people talk about) or social networks (who they interact with), but those methods don’t work well on platforms like Reddit, where users interact based on topics rather than friendships.

The researchers came up with a new way to measure homophily using behavior. Instead of just studying topics, they used IRL to analyze patterns in user activity. This revealed surprising connections, like the fact that people discussing soccer (r/soccer) and e-sports (r/leagueoflegends) behave almost the same way, even though they’re talking about completely different subjects. Fans in both communities strongly support their teams, follow matches closely, debate strategies, and critique rivals. This challenges the idea that online polarization comes from echo chambers based only on topics. Instead, it suggests how people interact matters just as much—if not more—than what they talk about.

The findings could be very useful for social media platforms. Unlike traditional moderation methods, which focus on detecting harmful content, this behavioral approach is harder to trick or avoid. Changing a user’s wording is easy, but changing how they interact takes much more effort. Moderators could use this research to identify problematic users early, even before they start posting lots of harmful content.

Ultimately, the study highlights an important lesson: What we say online matters, but how we interact shapes the digital world even more. As social platforms struggle with harassment, misinformation, and polarization, using behavioral analysis alongside traditional content moderation might be the key to creating healthier, more constructive online communities.

Source: The Conversation, ACM Digital Library

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It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally found the thing I want generative AI to do for me: program a damn fine cup of coffee.

Program, that is, but not make—that’s the job of the Fellow Aiden, a coffee maker that crafts automated, precision pour-overs in a countertop-ready cube. Thanks to other folks who love their Aidens, as well as API tweaking and large language model training, I can hand this mechanical robot a GPT-generated recipe and get impressive coffee out of it.

Strictly speaking, absolutely none of this is necessary. Humans can make great coffee with fresh beans, decent gear, time, patience, and experience. Experiments will reveal the differences in light and dark roasts, Ethiopian and Venezuelan, washed and honey-processed beans, or how often one agitates the grounds. But faced with something brand new, even an experienced brewer can be stumped and spend a good deal of time and none-too-cheap beans trying to get everything just right.

I've been hesitant to use generative AI in my personal life. Having a bot to ask for a pour-over starting point has softened me, slightly, on large language models. I wanted to learn more about what I was using and how it worked. So I asked the people who made these brewing and sharing tools what was going on behind the scenes.

“Assume the role of a master coffee brewer”

Brandon Dixon, a Partner AI Strategist at Microsoft, is serious enough about coffee to have considered leaving a career in digital security and AI to start his own roastery (and build the software to manage it). “If I had to summarize all I learned down to one simple fact, it’s this: Not every idea or passion needs to become a business,” Dixon wrote, just after turning back in 2021.

Brandon Dixon.

Credit: Brandon Dixon

So Dixon was in the right place when Fellow released its Aiden brewer in the fall of 2024. He was intrigued by Fellow’s Drops program, which ships buyers boutique beans with a matching Aiden brew profile, curated and cupped by experts. Dixon enjoyed some Drops but also grew wary of the pricing (such as $24 for an 8.8-ounce bag, plus $5 shipping). And he wanted to try out local and independent roasters’ wares without having to dial in every variation of temperature and timing (literally, as the only way to program an Aiden before an update to its companion app was by turning a dial).

“I’ve worked for two years applying AI to security problems, and I thought the Aiden could be a great way to tap into the creativity of the models,” Dixon said in a message with Ars. But first, Dixon needed to figure out how to talk to his web-connected brewer. As detailed in his blog post, Dixon used the Proxyman app, and, in 10 minutes, he had “a full enumeration of the Aiden API calls along with sample requests/responses.” Dixon built out his findings into a Python library, which eventually helped other people build a Home Assistant integration and an entirely different AI tool, which we’ll get to in a bit. Then he got to work on the AI part.

Dixon allowed ChatGPT’s o1 model to “lead the way on the application development,” giving it specifications and nudges and feeding its errors back in as adjustments. It wasn’t automatic; there was “attention drift” and “dimensional baggage,” among other issues. But after “about 30 turns” and cross-checking it against DeepSeek R1’s output from a similar spec, he was pretty close. You can see one of the base ChatGPT prompts powering his app in its files:

Assume the role of a master coffee brewer. You focus exclusively on the pour-over method and specialty coffee only. You often work with single origin coffees, but you also experiment with blends. Your recipes are executed by a robot, not a human, so maximum precision can be achieved. Temperatures are all maintained and stable in all steps. Always lead with the recipe, and only include explanations below that text, NOT inline.

After this role-playing exercise, Dixon makes ChatGPT reformat its system and then "assume the role of a data engineer" before processing brewing knowledge into strict profile parameters.

You can host Dixon’s app on your own or try it out on a Streamlit site. It requires a ChatGPT API key to run and requires putting in your Fellow credentials.

Turning coffee into numbers

Human-scale pour-over.

Credit: Getty Images

I asked Dixon about a nagging thought I had about this niche inside a niche. Coffee is grown and processed by humans, roasted by humans, and packaged and sold and brewed by humans. Is asking a language model to pull in the web’s knowledge, then act like a formula-focused barista, commoditizing and dehumanizing the process?

Dixon was of two minds about it. “People aren’t great at interpreting a bunch of numbers and thinking, ‘Ah, this is going to be a good coffee brew,’” he said. An AI prompt like his, Dixon said, “democratizes knowledge, which is really powerful.” Especially if, for example, “all of a sudden, prices start going up, beans get expensive to buy, and it’s harder to enjoy the learning process.”

At the same time, people should understand that recipes from any prompt are “a starting point” and that it’s the coffee maker's job to “learn from there what they like,” Dixon said. It was important to “celebrate the people along the chain that did a great job,” Dixon said, which too much emphasis on AI could diminish. It is just one tool, and he’s hoping people make good use of it.

“If you’re naturally curious, AI is awesome for this kind of thing,” Dixon said. “You’re learning things far faster than you ever could have learned by trial and error.”

Dixon’s greatest hope (noted on his blog post) is that Fellow opens up the Aiden brewer and app to greater community sharing and learning. The Drops program is great, but coffee enthusiasts could learn a lot more from each other, he said. That’s where two other tinkerers come in.

(Ars contacted Fellow Products for comment on AI brewing and profile sharing and will update this post if we get a response.)

Opening up brew profiles

Fellow's brew profiles are typically shared with buyers of its "Drops" coffees or between individual users through a phone app.

Credit: Fellow Products

Aiden profiles are shared and added to Aiden units through Fellow’s brew.link service. But the profiles are not offered in an easy-to-sort database, nor are they easy to scan for details. So Aiden enthusiast and hobbyist coder Kevin Anderson created brewshare.coffee, which gathers both general and bean-based profiles, makes them easy to search and load, and adds optional but quite helpful suggested grind sizes.

As a non-professional developer jumping into a public offering, he had to work hard on data validation, backend security, and mobile-friendly design. “I just had a bit of an idea and a hobby, so I thought I’d try and make it happen,” Anderson writes. With his tool, brew links can be stored and shared more widely, which helped both Dixon and another AI/coffee tinkerer.

Gabriel Levine, director of engineering at retail analytics firm Leap Inc., lost his OXO coffee maker (aka the “Barista Brain”) to malfunction just before the Aiden debuted. The Aiden appealed to Levine as a way to move beyond his coffee rut—a “nice chocolate-y medium roast, about as far as I went,” he told Ars. “This thing that can be hyper-customized to different coffees to bring out their characteristics; [it] really kind of appealed to that nerd side of me,” Levine said.

Levine had also been doing AI stuff for about 10 years, or “since before everyone called it AI—predictive analytics, machine learning.” He described his career as “both kind of chief AI advocate and chief AI skeptic,” alternately driving real findings and talking down “everyone who… just wants to type, ‘how much money should my business make next year’ and call that work.” Like Dixon, Levine's work and fascination with Aiden ended up intersecting.

The coffee maker with 3,588 ideas

The author's conversation with the Aiden Profile Creator, which pulled in both brewing knowledge and product info for a widely available coffee:

 

Kevin Purdy

 

Kevin Purdy

Levine’s Aiden Profile Creator is a ChatGPT prompt set up with a custom prompt and told to weight certain knowledge more heavily. What kind of prompt and knowledge? Levine didn’t want to give away his exact work. But he cited resources like the Specialty Coffee Association of America and James Hoffman’s coffee guides as examples of what he fed it.

What it does with that knowledge is something of a mystery to Levine himself. “There’s this kind of blind leap, where it’s grabbing the relevant pieces of information from the knowledge base, biasing toward all the expert advice and extraction science, doing something with it, and then I take that something and coerce it back into a structured output I can put on your Aiden,” Levine said.

It’s a blind leap, but it has landed just right for me so far. I’ve made four profiles with Levine’s prompt based on beans I’ve bought: Stumptown’s Hundred Mile, a light-roasted batch from Jimma, Ethiopia, from Small Planes, Lost Sock’s Western House filter blend, and some dark-roast beans given as a gift. With the Western House, Levine’s profile creator said it aimed to “balance nutty sweetness, chocolate richness, and bright cherry acidity, using a slightly stepped temperature profile and moderate pulse structure.” The resulting profile has worked great, even if the chatbot named it “Cherry Timber.”

Levine’s chatbot relies on two important things: Dixon’s work in revealing Fellow’s Aiden API and his own workhorse Aiden. Every Aiden profile link is created on a machine, so every profile created by Levine’s chat is launched, temporarily, from the Aiden in his kitchen, then deleted. “I’ve hit an undocumented limit on the number of profiles you can have on one machine, so I’ve had to do some triage there,” he said. As of April 22, nearly 3,600 profiles had passed through Levine’s Aiden.

“My hope with this is that it lowers the bar to entry,” Levine said, “so more people get into these specialty roasts and it drives people to support local roasters, explore their world a little more. I feel like that certainly happened to me.”

Something new is brewing

Having admitted to myself that I find something generated by ChatGPT prompts genuinely useful, I've softened my stance slightly on LLM technology, if not the hype. Used within very specific parameters, with everything second-guessed, I'm getting more comfortable asking chat prompts for formatted summaries on topics with lots of expertise available. I do my own writing, and I don't waste server energy on things I can, and should, research myself. I even generally resist calling language model prompts "AI," given the term's baggage. But I've found one way to appreciate its possibilities.

 

This revelation may not be new to someone already steeped in the models. But having tested—and tasted—my first big experiment while willfully engaging with a brewing bot, I'm a bit more awake.

 

This post was updated at 8:40 am with a different capture of a GPT-created recipe.

 

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

The research team tested six different home washing machines to see how well they could clean fabric contaminated with Enterococcus faecium, a bacteria linked to hospital infections. They found that only half of the machines (3 out of 6) properly disinfected uniforms at 60°C when using a full cycle, while rapid cycles performed inconsistently, making them unreliable for killing germs.

To get a better idea of bacteria inside washing machines, the team used shotgun metagenomics analysis to study biofilms in 12 different machines. The results showed that some machines contained potentially harmful bacteria, including Mycobacterium sp., Pseudomonas sp., and Acinetobacter sp., as well as antibiotic resistance genes, which help bacteria survive treatments meant to kill them.

The study also examined how well domestic detergents could fight Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, three bacteria that cause serious infections. The findings were worrying: Some bacteria became resistant to detergents, which made them more resistant to antibiotics, too.

Further genetic testing found mutations in efflux pump genes, specifically S. aureus (MrgA) and K. pneumoniae (AcrB), after exposure to detergents. These pumps help bacteria remove harmful substances, and changes to them could make antibiotic treatments less effective.

These results suggest that home washing machines might not be good enough for cleaning healthcare uniforms properly, which could contribute to hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Healthcare workers rely on domestic machines, but if bacteria survive the wash, they could spread to patients.

Professor Laird and her team believe laundry guidelines should be updated to make sure healthcare uniforms are properly disinfected. They also recommend that hospitals consider switching to industrial washing machines, which are far more effective at killing germs.

Professor Laird explained why this matters, saying: “Our research shows that domestic washing machines often fail to disinfect textiles, allowing antibiotic-resistant bacteria to survive. If we’re serious about transmission of infectious disease via textiles and tackling antimicrobial resistance, we must rethink how we launder what our healthcare workers wear.”

With antibiotic resistance becoming a serious health issue worldwide, stronger hospital laundry policies could be an important step toward keeping patients safe. Healthcare facilities may need to rethink how uniforms are cleaned to prevent the spread of dangerous bacteria and reduce hospital infections.

Source: De Montfort University, PLOS One

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

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That refresh also brought us the circular, four-colored "G" icon. It had those four solid color sections: blue, red, yellow, and green, making it easy to spot Google products and services across different devices. Ten years on, the Mountain View giant has apparently decided it is time for a visual refresh for that iconic 'G' icon. This comes after the recent report that Microsoft is exploring redesigning its icons for applications like Word and Excel, moving toward a more three-dimensional style.

The new version of the 'G' icon looks quite similar at first glance, but has a key difference in its color. Instead of the distinct, solid blocks of blue, red, yellow, and green, the colors now gently bleed into one another through gradients. Red fades into yellow, yellow flows into green, and green transitions softly into blue.

The new Google 'G' icon has already started showing up in the wild. It is currently present in the Google Search app on iOS (spotted by 9To5Google), appearing there after an update yesterday. It also came to Android today with the Google app version 16.18 (beta).

At the time of writing, Google has not made any statement regarding the logo update, so we are unsure of the specific reasons for the change or the company's full plans for rolling it out across its services. We also don't know if this gradient style will come to replace the 'quad-color' style that Google has used for many of its other product icons (like Maps and Drive) over time.

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Making a recent dinner, my wife Elisabeth put together Sohla El-Waylly's “hot and tingly” smashed cucumber salad, a wisp of a recipe that combines favorite ingredients like cukes, chili crisp, salt, sugar, and rice vinegar, along with something less commonly used in our household, MSG. Tucking in, it wasn't a surprise that the salad was good, but the monosodium glutamate gave it an extra savory deliciousness that made me wonder if Elisabeth intentionally set the salad bowl out of my reach.

In my decades living in North America and Europe, MSG was an unfortunately infrequently used ingredient, yet here it was making our tongues happy. Being drawn to it now was inspired by a trend I picked up on while reading some of the best new and recent cookbooks.

Easiest to pick out is the just-released Salt Sugar MSG, by Calvin Eng and Phoebe Melnick, that's a Cantonese-American extravaganza of deliciousness. Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho made regular use of MSG in 2024's The Memory of Taste, and Meathead Goldwyn makes a plea for its use with a special section way up on page five of his brand-new cookbook, The Meathead Method.

Plugging MSG into Eat Your Books, a subscription service that allows you to search recipes from within your own cookbook collection, I could see that among my cookbooks, El-Waylly makes great use of it in her 2023 James Beard Award book, Start Here. Helen Graves has a recipe for an MSG martini in her BBQ Days, BBQ Nights, along with a warning that—I'll paraphrase—you'll likely get hammered if you have more than one of them.

Salt Sugar MSG, By Calvin Eng with Phoebe Melnick.

Courtesy of Clarkson Potter/Crown Publishing

 

If I searched Eat Your Books for MSG but took out the results from these books, the list dried up to almost nothing. That's a shame considering what great work the ingredient does in the kitchen. El-Waylly uses it in that cucumber salad, a cauliflower and coconut soup, and a cool pistachio ranch fun dip made fun because she loves ranch. Meathead likes it on chicken, mac and cheese, and meat in general. Tu David Fu uses it with stir-fried clams, sticky rice dumplings, and tomato-braised salmon belly. Calvin Eng uses it on just about everything.

"I keep salt, sugar, MSG on my counter all the time," says Eng who's such a fan that he has a little MSG heart tattoo on the back of his left arm.

A self-professed "lover and user of MSG on a massive scale," he still has aha moments with it that help him appreciate its power. His favorite example is Cantonese chicken broth with scallions, garlic, ginger, and Shaoxing wine, finished with salt and MSG. Once for a private dinner, he featured a head-to-head tasting of the broth with salt next to broth with salt and MSG and was deeply impressed at the difference.

"It adds so much umami," he says, referring to the savory "fifth taste" that accompanies salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. "It adds a layer. It makes you want more." Indeed, I tried little head-to-heads with mugs of my own broth and enjoyed getting a hang of its effects and how to use it. Salt adds depth, but salt and MSG can make broth bigger, deeper, rounder, and more delicious.

Seasoning with MSG takes practice. Eng mentions that he didn't fully understand it until he worked in restaurant kitchens, but offers a simple suggestion on how to get used to using it.

"Have it on your counter next to your salt," he counsels. “Use both, but use less salt than you normally would, and taste as you go.”

More Than This

MSG is derived from glutamic acid (one of the amino acids) and is naturally occurring in delicious, umami-packed foods like anchovies, parmesan, tomatoes, and kelp.

When I asked chef turned food scientist, author, and fermentation expert David Zilber about how MSG makes things so delicious, he responded with his own question: "Shall I put this in Cheeto terms for you?"

My response was an emphatic yes.

"Glutamate is one of the most abundant amino acids in the living world. When you take it out of its natural context and add it to other foods in large quantities, it gets you to eat more," he explains. "They are like the signals in nature that the human body looks for when searching for the most digestible and nutritious foods. It hacks ancient and primal physiology to make bland foods more palatable and moreish."

Perhaps this makes my whole ritual of keeping a damp cloth next to my snack-touching hand on my annual (?) Cheeto binge make more sense.

Cravings are certainly affected by what we do and don’t like, Zilber explains, "but at the chemical level, smell and taste are the most ‘hands in the dirt’ senses our body has."

For as helpful as it is for making food better, the ingredient has had a tough go of it in North America. MSG "is derived from glutamic acid, one of the 22 amino acids," says my 2007 copy of The Food Lover's Companion, which calls the ingredient a popular flavor enhancer in Japan and China.

It also says "some people have reactions to MSG that caused them to suffer from a variety of maladies, including dizziness, headache, flushing, and burning sensations," information that is, like my copy, dated. This stems from a 1968 letter from Robert Ho Man Kwok printed in the New England Journal of Medicine, citing symptoms like dizziness, headache, and nausea that were dubbed “Chinese restaurant syndrome” and prompted many Chinatown restaurants around the world to hang glowing neon “NO MSG” signs on their front windows.

Problematically, it appears that either Kwok's story was more anecdotal than science-based or an orthopedic surgeon named Howard Steel penned the letter as part of a $10 bet with a colleague to see if he could get it published in a prestigious medical journal. Regardless, the Journal never made enough of an effort to correct things as they spiraled into a problem and a faux syndrome was born. (More on this in act one of this April 2025 episode of This American Life.)

Stuff like this makes for yarns that would be a lot more enjoyable if they didn't trail a 50-year xenophobic stink in their wake, and the "MSG is bad for you" stereotype persists. Too much of it can be harmful to you if you're ingesting ridiculous quantities. As El-Waylly writes, “If you have 1/2 cup of it on an empty stomach without food, you might feel ill, as you would from eating 1/2 cup of salt.” The dose makes the poison.

Eng's solution for promoting MSG, and one he encourages other chefs and food professionals to mimic, is right there on the cover of his book: Talk about it. Normalize it. Try it out.

Personally, I grabbed the aforementioned books and started cooking from them. Along with the hot and tingly cuke salad, El-Wally's dill pickle cucumber salad with pickle brine, onions, and toasted coriander seeds is another great place to start, and something that nearly set off a dinnertime squabble over who got the last bowl at a Ray-family meal. I tried Eng's popcorn recipe, which also features a dusting of toasted Szechuan peppercorns, fried garlic, MSG, and melted butter. I riffed on his sour cream and green onion dip, making mine with caramelized onions, then showering it with chives from my garden, quick-pickled onions, black pepper, and crumbled store-bought fried onions.

Not long afterward, I made a rather exquisite bagel with butter, cream cheese, smoked salmon, shallot, scallion, salt, pepper, and MSG. It's hard for something with ingredients this fantastic not to be delicious, but I started thinking that the MSG turned them all into the best versions of themselves.

There's a ways to go before MSG is anywhere near as mainstream as salt, but until then, I invite you to join me on the Normalization Team and, like Eng suggests, keep a container of it on the counter, right next to the salt.

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If you’re like me, you’ve been anxiously searching for any relief from the Bad News™ and endless stream of AI slop plaguing your feed. Joseph Ricketts’ breathtaking wildlife videos could be the antidote. An alligator taking a nap on the floor of a crystal clear spring. Schools of fish glittering in the darkness. A cosmic cloud of burnt orange tannic river swirling into clear blue water. A giant salamander battle on an Appalachian riverbed.

Joseph is an ecologist, underwater videographer, and alligator researcher based in Florida. He brings a calming and curious gaze to some of the more obscure underwater vistas through his work as a scientist and wildlife researcher, with his photography and videography skills. With his undersea strobes, he casts light on the mesmerizing behavior of some of the more obscure creatures that lurk below the water’s surface, creating beautiful videos while educating his audience on the vulnerable wildlife he finds there. Documenting Florida’s natural springs and America’s freshwater ecosystems has become a passion project. The Verge caught up with him to learn about his fascinating YouTube content.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Science or photography first?

It would probably be photography first. Actually, I got into wildlife and animals as a kid. There was a creek in a park near our house and we found bullfrog tadpoles in there and they were really big. That just blew my mind and set me on the path of being interested in wildlife. My dad got a camera at some point and on some family trips I would use it and got really interested in it. All of that together led to me getting interested in science and then conservation, storytelling, and wildlife filmmaking.

How did you get involved with ecology?

I was in Boy Scouts as a kid and there was another kid in our group who was really into snakes. I also grew up watching Steve Irwin, who was a huge hero of mine.

Growing up in the Southeast, people have very strong feelings about snakes. They do not like them — especially the venomous ones. It was neat to watch Steve Irwin and the way that he approached all sorts of animals, no matter how dangerous they were, with immense joy and curiosity. To see someone in my own community also be interested in that, it was like, “I can do this too.”

And then, learning to love these animals but still seeing a lot of people who just wanted all of them eliminated from the environment. Even when I was young, I was thinking: what does it mean to protect these animals and what does it mean to encourage other people to change their mindset? How do you justify protecting and conserving an animal that might be potentially dangerous? What about the environmental importance of predators? I was so interested and passionate, I ended up studying conservation science in undergraduate and grad school.

A manatee takes shelter on a cold, winter morning in the (relatively) warm waters of a Florida freshwater spring.

Photo: Joseph Ricketts

 

And you now specialize in alligators?

A lot of my professional work has been with reptiles and amphibians. Currently I am studying alligators and crocodiles.

What specifically are you researching?

We monitor alligator populations. I’ve helped out with some projects on American crocodiles, which are a native threatened species in Florida. One project I helped with was putting satellite transmitters on crocodiles we captured and monitoring their movements through urban areas in South Florida. The goal of that project was to get a better idea of their behavior in those highly urban environments because they move quite a bit. They have very variable home ranges. Some can be in a really small area, but then sometimes they’ll just up and go for a 20-mile swim to somewhere else entirely. The goal is to learn how to better cultivate safe coexistence with these animals in such a dense and highly populated area such as South Florida.

How did you start getting into underwater filming?

I first started out with a GoPro, because it’s a very accessible and not too expensive way to get a camera underwater. In college, my roommates and friends always tried to go on some kind of adventure during spring break. We were super fascinated with the idea of snorkeling in clear water, because that wasn’t something that was around us where we grew up. So every spring break we drove down to Florida. We snorkeled in the Keys and discovered Florida’s springs along some of those trips.

I would take photos with the GoPro, even though it’s not really meant for that. But underwater photography equipment is really expensive and I just thought, “There’s no way, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to afford that.”

But then after my wife and I graduated, we got married, lived in North Carolina for a little while, and then, because she’s originally from Pensacola, Florida, we moved back. I got a job doing some ecology work here in Gainesville.

One day I was just cruising around Facebook Marketplace and I saw a camera housing made to fit a 20-year-old camera that was within millimeters of the size of my camera. It was a tenth of the price of what an average full kit cost. So I got it. I had to make some modifications and I actually used Lego pieces to make some of the controls fit my camera. I had pretty limited control underwater, but I could do auto ISO, and then control the aperture and the shutter speed, and pull the trigger to get a shot. When I did video, I had to start recording, put the camera in the housing, close it, and then I couldn’t do anything else. It would just be one single shot the whole time. So it wasn’t great for video, but that’s how I got started. And then I realized I was a pretty decent wildlife photographer.

I took some photos and I got shortlisted in some pretty major international competitions. I didn’t push through to be a finalist, but it was enough to be, “I actually have some skill in this and it’s worth pursuing.” It just kind of kept building up from there. Eventually I got another used housing that was designed for my camera. By that point, I was selling prints and doing some other things, so I was able to finally fully upgrade my kit to where I’m at now.

An American alligator floats down to the bottom of a freshwater spring after grabbing a breath. This was taken at night.

Photo: Joseph Ricketts

What kind of tech is in your diving kit?

I’m using the Canon R5 with a Canon EF-RF adapter and a Canon EF 8-15mm f/4 L fish-eye lens. It’s a super wide-angle lens that people tend to use either for underwater or for skateboard photography. It’s a little weird because everything’s a little distorted and kind of rounded, but when you’re underwater, it’s really great for taking photos that just kind of immerse you in that system. You can focus extremely close to your subject. You can be an inch away and still focus on it. Since the angle is so wide, you can lock in on the eye of the wildlife and kind of capture their face, but also the rest of the scene and their entire body, even if it’s a bigger animal.

I use an Ikelite 200DL Dive Housing, and I’ve got two Sea & Sea YS-90DX strobes and two 2900 VTL BigBlue Dive Lights. The strobes connect to the camera so that when you pull the trigger, it lets off some light, because the deeper you go underwater, light tends to fade pretty quickly and that little flash of white light just kind of restores color to the scene.

I also have an Ikelite 8-inch Dome Port with an extension that is wide enough so that the super-wide fish-eye lens doesn’t get cut off by the design of the dive housing. If you hold it right on the surface it can create a water line so you can get split shots.

I use Lightroom and Photoshop for editing photos and making prints. I use Premiere Pro for editing videos.

How do you decide what you’re going to film?

I have to find an idea that is interesting to me. Sometimes it’s a story that I think needs to be told, and that I feel qualified with the knowledge to do it. I need to know the location and be confident that I can get the shots I need safely. I also want to feel capable of telling the story in a meaningful way.

Science and wildlife are such huge subjects. It’s hard. There’s a lot of people that tend to tout themselves as wildlife experts, but unless they’re very, very experienced, that raises a red flag. I wouldn’t describe myself as that. I have to do a lot of research myself and I learn things along the way too.

I’m really passionate about anything aquatic because I love doing underwater photography and videography. That’s the main part of my social media and YouTube channel. I especially love showing people unique environments where you wouldn’t tend to think about what life looks like underwater. I think about what wildlife I might encounter there, and what conservation story I can weave through that. Also, is there enough visibility in the water for me to get my camera in and actually get usable shots that people can connect with?

There’s a disconnect that exists between people and wildlife in the natural world that we have to actively combat, like climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction. There’s another disconnect between us and what lies beneath the surface, and I really want to do what I can to bridge that gap. It’s important that people put faces to the creatures that live in these places, no matter how big or how small they are. They’re all important, wonderful, worth learning and worth caring about. Aquatic ecosystems are very sensitive environments. It’s important to know what’s there, to know what we might stand to lose.

Do you have a story in mind before you dive, or do you usually piece things together after?

I love photography and being able to tell a story through a single image, but I also love longer forms, using video to tell stories as well.

My creative process is definitely evolving. I’ll have the beginnings of an idea while I’m trying to work out the storytelling and trying to find ways to help people connect to it. Typically I’ll have an idea of the area I want to cover for the shot and what I’m going to focus on. One example was trying to find a very specific species of very tiny fish that lives in springs.

A fully colored-up male Gulf Coast pygmy sunfish keeps a careful eye out for intruders while guarding its tiny 

territory at the edge of a Florida freshwater spring.

Photo: Joseph Ricketts

 

That Gulf Coast pygmy sunfish is a beautiful fish.

They’re so cool. So my idea was that it’s going to be about finding that fish, filming it, hopefully getting some behavior. That was about what I had to work with, and I was lucky enough to see quite a bit of behavior.

After I get the footage all edited down to the best clips and have a general concept of a story, that’s when I’ll write the script. Writing the script last is not normal for most creators, but I want the adventure and the action of going out and snorkeling, exploring these places, to be the heart of the channel. Sometimes I might have a little bit more script on certain parts, but normally I don’t have any control over what I’m going to see. So I have to go out and shoot, and then come back and do the story from that.

What are the biggest challenges that you’re trying to work through?

A big challenge is sustainability and how I can be consistent and not burn out, because it is a lot of work, going out to explore and dive, sometimes not having a lot of success and other times having success. How do I pace myself? I think I’ve kind of settled on a pretty decent schedule.

Another challenge is that a lot of YouTube is shock value and clickbait. I want to use my channel to push back against that. The algorithm seems to be changing to entertain longer attention spans and boost authentic and real content. But I want to be able to use my channel to help people appreciate even little details and small things.

Like if you go snorkeling and you’re in the ocean or on a reef, obviously the really big things like the sharks and huge rays are going to be what stand out to you. But if you’re in a tiny pond and there’s nothing around, and then you find one living thing, suddenly that thing becomes really interesting. I want to be able to tell stories about some of the less exciting things and make those interesting.

Such as the video you made about Appalachian Hellbenders. I never imagined salamanders would duke it out like that. Do you like being based in Florida?

It’s great, but in a lot of ways it’s hard and frustrating, too. Florida has some absolutely amazing wildlife and amazing ecosystems, and as an underwater photographer, it’s a great place to be. There’s the coasts, the Keys, freshwater springs, rivers and streams as well. There are a lot of places that are within reasonable driving distance to find underwater adventures and stories to tell. It’s frustrating because there’s so much to lose and Florida is also developing at a very unsustainable rate. There are new developments going up everywhere. A lot of spots I love are degrading. I’ve been going to the springs since college and some of them are almost unrecognizable from when I first visited them 10 years ago. It’s an issue globally and definitely around the US, but I think Florida is experiencing that at an accelerated rate.

It’s a good place to be as a conservationist because there’s lots of work to be done, messages to get out there, but it can be draining and exhausting. Sometimes [you] feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle with no breaks or rest.

Sounds like politics combined with being a tourist and retirement destination.

A huge problem is that people are moving here and not taking the time to learn about the natural community that exists prior to their arrival. So people move here and are surprised to see an alligator in their backyard. Or other really wealthy people move to South Florida and have crocodiles around, and they freak out because that’s totally new to them. But this is Florida. We have venomous snakes, we have alligators, we have crocodiles. They belong here. They’re important for this ecosystem. If you can’t embrace that, then I don’t know what you’re expecting.

There are plenty of ways to learn to safely live alongside these creatures. There’s just a huge need to meet the influx of new people with education and reminding people that we want Florida to remain wild. So much of the appeal of Florida is its natural environment and so there’s plenty of reasons why it needs to be protected, but it is kind of a constant battle.

I love Florida so much. It’s such a beautiful place, an important place to protect, but it has a ton of challenges facing it.

A river cooter paddles off into the confluence where the blue-green water of freshwater spring swirls with the 

tannic water of a nearby river.

Photo: Joseph Ricketts

 

Are there any spots that you really want to dive into that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

Because a lot of my stuff is Florida-based, I would really love to do a series of diving in every single state in the US. Some of that would be more predictable, like diving off the coast of Maine. That’d be cool. But though you never hear of anyone going to Nebraska or Oklahoma to snorkel, there’s underwater stories to be told there and I would love the chance to do that. So I’m hoping if the channel grows enough, there’ll be interest enough from the audience to support something like that.

Of course I would absolutely love to travel internationally to do some videos as well. I think that’s something I would need to earn, because there are definitely other people who might be more qualified to tell some of those stories. But I think if my channel [followers] were interested and wanted me to, I would absolutely love the chance to do that. There are a lot of freshwater springs around the world.

Any closing thoughts?

I just hope that I can continue to inspire people to be kind and curious about the world around them and pay attention to the little things. It’s important to be mindful of our individual impacts on the world around us, but also to hold ourselves as a community and as a country to a higher standard as far as protecting our natural resources and our wildlife, because we don’t get a second chance at this. It’s important that we take it seriously and we get it right.

I think it’s hard to learn to love something if you don’t know that that thing exists or haven’t been able to see it in its home. So I hope that my underwater videos can help people to get a glimpse into those underwater worlds to see that they’re places that are really special, worth protecting, and worth keeping wild.

During one of many stops on a long journey through Florida’s Panhandle, Joseph Ricketts swims through a 

remote spring, its waters tangled with tree roots, limbs, and dense algae growth.

Photo: Nick Conzone

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions, and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan for the future, crows count and use tools, cockatoos open and pillage booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.

“A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,” said Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “How is it possible?”

Researchers have long debated about the relationship between avian and mammalian intelligences. One possibility is that intelligence in vertebrates—animals with backbones, including mammals and birds—evolved once. In that case, both groups would have inherited the complex neural pathways that support cognition from a common ancestor: a lizardlike creature that lived 320 million years ago, when Earth’s continents were squished into one landmass. The other possibility is that the kinds of neural circuits that support vertebrate intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals.

It’s hard to track down which path evolution took, given that any trace of the ancient ancestor’s actual brain vanished in a geological blink. So biologists have taken other approaches—such as comparing brain structures in adult and developing animals today—to piece together how this kind of neurobiological complexity might have emerged.

A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found.

“It’s a milestone in the quest to understand and to integrate the different ideas about the evolution” of vertebrate intelligence, said Güntürkün, who was not involved in the new research.

The findings emerge in a world enraptured by artificial forms of intelligence, and they could teach us something about how complex circuits in our own brains evolved. Perhaps most importantly, they could help us step “away from the idea that we are the best creatures in the world,” said Niklas Kempynck, a graduate student at KU Leuven who led one of the studies. “We are not this optimal solution to intelligence.”

Birds got there too, on their own.

Pecking Disorder

For the first half of the 20th century, neuroanatomists assumed that birds were simply not that smart. The creatures lack anything resembling a neocortex—the highly ordered outermost structure in the brains of humans and other mammals where language, communication, and reasoning reside. The neocortex is organized into six layers of neurons, which receive sensory information from other parts of the brain, process it, and send it out to regions that determine our behavior and reactions.

“For the longest time, it was thought that this is the center of cognition, and you need this kind of anatomy to develop advanced cognitive abilities,” said Bastienne Zaremba, a postdoctoral researcher studying the evolution of the brain at Heidelberg University.

Rather than neat layers, birds have “unspecified balls of neurons without landmarks or distinctions,” said Fernando García-Moreno, a neurobiologist at the Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience in Spain. These structures compelled neuroanatomists a century ago to suggest that much of bird behavior is reflexive, and not driven by learning and decision-making. This “implies that what a mammal can learn easily, a bird will never learn,” Güntürkün said.

The conventional thinking started to change in the 1960s when Harvey Karten, a young neuroanatomist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mapped and compared brain circuits in mammals and pigeons, and later in owls, chickens, and other birds. What he found was a surprise: The brain regions thought to be involved only in reflexive movements were built from neural circuits—networks of interconnected neurons—that resembled those found in the mammalian neocortex. This region in the bird brain, the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR), seemed to be comparable to a neocortex; it just didn’t look like it.

In 1969, Karten wrote a “very influential paper that completely changed the discussion in the field,” said Maria Tosches, who studies vertebrate brain development at Columbia University. “His work was really revolutionary.” He concluded that because avian and mammalian circuits are similar, they were inherited from a common ancestor. That thinking dominated the field for decades, said Güntürkün, a former postdoc in Karten’s lab. It “sparked quite a lot of interest in the bird brain.”

A few decades later, Luis Puelles, an anatomist at the University of Murcia in Spain, drew the opposite conclusion. By comparing embryos at various stages of development, he found that the mammalian neocortex and the avian DVR developed from distinct areas of the embryo’s pallium—a brain region shared by all vertebrates. He concluded that the structures must have evolved independently.

Karten and Puelles were “giving completely different answers to this big question,” Tosches said. The debate continued for decades. During this time, biologists also began to appreciate bird intelligence, starting with their studies of Alex, an African gray parrot who could count and identify objects. They realized just how smart birds could be.

However, neither group seemed to want to resolve the discrepancy between their two theories of how vertebrate palliums evolved, according to García-Moreno. “No, they kept working on their own method,” he said. One camp continued to compare the circuitry in adult vertebrate brains; the other focused on embryonic development.

In the new studies, he said, “we tried to put everything together.”

Same but Not the Same

Two new studies, which were conducted by independent teams of researchers, relied on the same powerful tool for identifying cell types, known as single-cell RNA sequencing. This technique lets researchers compare neuronal circuits, as Karten did, not only in adult brains but all the way through embryonic development, following Puelles. In this way, they could see where the cells started growing in the embryo and where they ended up in the mature animal—a developmental journey that can reveal evolutionary pathways.

For their study, García-Moreno and his team wanted to watch how brain circuitry develops. Using RNA sequencing and other techniques, they tracked cells in the palliums of chickens, mice, and geckos at various embryonic stages to time-stamp when different types of neurons were generated and where they matured.

They found that the mature circuits looked remarkably alike across animals, just as Karten and others had noted, but they were built differently, as Puelles had found. The circuits that composed the mammalian neocortex and the avian DVR developed at different times, in different orders, and in different regions of the brain.

At the same time, García-Moreno was collaborating with Zaremba and her colleagues at Heidelberg University. Using RNA sequencing, they created “the most comprehensive atlas of the bird pallium that we have,” said Tosches, who wrote a related perspective piece published in Science. By comparing the bird pallium to lizard and mouse palliums, they also found that the neocortex and DVR were built with similar circuitry—however, the neurons that composed those neural circuits were distinct.

“How we end up with similar circuitry was more flexible than I would have expected,” Zaremba said. “You can build the same circuits from different cell types.”

Zaremba and her team also found that in the bird pallium, neurons that start development in different regions can mature into the same type of neuron in the adult. This pushed against previous views, which held that distinct regions of the embryo must generate different types of neurons.

In mammals, brain development follows an intuitive path: The cells in the embryo’s amygdala region at the start of development end up in the adult amygdala. The cells in the embryo’s cortex region end up in the adult cortex. But in birds, “there is a fantastic reorganization of the forebrain,” Güntürkün said, that is “nothing that we had expected.”

Taken together, the studies provide the clearest evidence yet that birds and mammals independently evolved brain regions for complex cognition. They also echo previous research from Tosches’ lab, which found that the mammalian neocortex evolved independently from the reptile DVR.

Still, it seems likely there was some inheritance from a common ancestor. In a third study that used deep learning, Kempynck and his coauthor Nikolai Hecker found that mice, chickens, and humans share some stretches of DNA that influence the development of the neocortex or DVR, suggesting that similar genetic tools are at work in both types of animals. And as previous studies had suggested, the research groups found that inhibitory neurons, or those that silence and modulate neural signals, were conserved across birds and mammals.

The findings haven’t completely resolved Karten and Puelles’ debate, however. Whose ideas were closer to the truth? Tosches said that Puelles was right, while Güntürkün thought the findings better reflect Karten’s ideas, though would partly please Puelles. García-Moreno split the difference: “Both of them were right; none of them was wrong,” he said.

How to Build Intelligence

Intelligence doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It is hard to define, there are no ideal steps toward it, and it doesn’t have an optimal design, Tosches said. Innovations can happen throughout an animal’s biology, whether in new genes and their regulation, or in new neuron types, circuits, and brain regions. But similar innovations can evolve multiple times independently—a phenomenon known as convergent evolution—and this is seen across life.

“One of the reasons I kind of like these papers is that they really highlight a lot of differences,” said Bradley Colquitt, a molecular neuroscientist at UC Santa Cruz. “It allows you to say: What are the different neural solutions that these organisms have come up with to solve similar problems of living in a complex world and being able to adapt in a rapidly changing terrestrial environment?”

Octopuses and squids, independently of mammals, evolved camera-like eyes. Birds, bats and insects all took to the skies on their own. Ancient people in Egypt and South America independently built pyramids—the most structurally efficient shape that will stand the test of time, García-Moreno said: “If they make a tower, it will fall. If they make a wall, it won’t work.”

Similarly, “there’s limited degrees of freedom into which you can generate an intelligent brain, at least within vertebrates,” Tosches said. Drift outside the realm of vertebrates, however, and you can generate an intelligent brain in much weirder ways—from our perspective, anyway. “It’s a Wild West,” she said. Octopuses, for example, “evolved intelligence in a way that’s completely independent.” Their cognitive structures look nothing like ours, except that they’re built from the same broad type of cell: the neuron. Yet octopuses have been caught performing incredible feats such as escaping aquarium tanks, solving puzzles, unscrewing jar lids and carrying shells as shields.

It would be exciting to figure out how octopuses evolved intelligence using really divergent neural structures, Colquitt said. That way, it might be possible to pinpoint any absolute constraints on evolving intelligence across all animal species, not just vertebrates.

Such findings could eventually reveal shared features of various intelligences, Zaremba said. What are the building blocks of a brain that can think critically, use tools, or form abstract ideas? That understanding could help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—and help improve our artificial intelligence. For example, the way we currently think about using insights from evolution to improve AI is very anthropocentric. “I would be really curious to see if we can build like artificial intelligence from a bird perspective,” Kempynck said. “How does a bird think? Can we mimic that?”

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"If this turns out to lead to a complete quantum field theory of gravity, then eventually it will give answers to the very difficult problems of understanding singularities in black holes and the Big Bang," Partanen says.

"A theory that coherently describes all fundamental forces of nature is often called the Theory of Everything," he adds. "Some fundamental questions of physics still remain unanswered. For example, the present theories do not yet explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe."

The Standard Model uses neat, compact mathematical rules to describe how particles interact. But gravity, as explained by Einstein’s general relativity, works differently—it relies on complex, infinite-dimensional spacetime concepts. This difference has made it difficult for scientists to bring gravity into the same framework as the other forces.

Partanen and Tulkki’s new approach creates a gauge theory of gravity that works similarly to how electromagnetism does in the Standard Model. The key to their idea is an eight-spinor representation of the Lagrangian, which includes a special quantity called the space-time dimension field. This helps translate eight-dimensional spinor information into the four-dimensional spacetime we experience.

By using four U(1) symmetries, the researchers developed a new unified gravity theory. The way gravity works in their model comes from these symmetries, leading directly to a mathematical description of the stress-energy-momentum tensor, which is the source term for gravity.

One important feature of unified gravity is that it produces a version of general relativity known as the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity (TEGR) in a particular setup called the Weitzenböck gauge. It also allows for an alternative description where gravity fits naturally into the Minkowski metric, a key concept in quantum field theory.

Unlike Einstein’s general relativity, where the metric of spacetime is tied directly to gravity, unified gravity treats the Minkowski metric as a fundamental part of its structure. This means gravity and the other forces in the Standard Model can be described together in a single consistent mathematical framework.

One of the biggest challenges in any quantum gravity theory is making sure calculations don’t produce infinite results. To solve this, the researchers studied renormalization—a technique that adjusts calculations to keep them finite. They tested their method at one-loop order and set up Feynman rules for their theory.

Importantly, they showed that their model respects Becchi–Rouet–Stora–Tyutin (BRST) symmetry, a key requirement for gauge theories. Their theory also has a dimensionless coupling constant, which suggests that unified gravity could be a fully renormalizable quantum theory of gravity—something previous attempts have struggled with.

There’s still work to do. One big hurdle is making sure renormalization works beyond the simplest calculations. “If renormalization doesn’t work for higher-order terms, you’ll get infinite results. So it’s vital to show that this renormalization continues to work,” explains Tulkki.

Despite the challenges, Partanen is optimistic. “I can’t say when, but I can say we’ll know much more about that in a few years,” he says. The researchers hope that by publishing their work now, other scientists will review it, test it, and help refine it further.

If this theory holds up, it could change our understanding of gravity in the same way Einstein’s discoveries did. Just as general relativity eventually helped create technologies like GPS, this new approach could open doors to unexpected breakthroughs in physics.

Source: Aalto University, IOP Publishing | Image via Depositphotos

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

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South Africa has a network of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) base stations that monitor land elevation. Between 2012 and 2020, data showed that parts of the country had risen by about six millimeters. Many scientists thought this was caused by mantle flow and dynamic topography, believing that a plume—a tube-like structure carrying hot material from deep inside Earth—was pushing the land upward.

However, researchers led by Dr. Makan Karegar explored a different idea: Could drought-related water loss be responsible? The team studied daily GPS height data from 2000 to 2021, using singular spectral analysis (SSA) to filter out noise and focus on long-term trends.

To understand the role of water in land movement, the team estimated water mass loading—how water weight affects the Earth's surface—using a grid system. They based their calculations on the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM), which describes how the Earth responds to changes.

The results showed a strong connection between water loss and land uplift. Data from NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission, which measures changes in gravity related to water storage, also supported this. Even though GRACE provides low-resolution readings, its data revealed that areas losing the most water were also rising the fastest.

When comparing GPS-based water storage estimates with GRACE satellite data and hydrological models, the researchers found high correlations—up to 90% and 94% on a monthly scale across different regions. Long-term trends also matched up well, with correlations of 46% and 53%, giving further proof that drought-driven water loss is the main reason for South Africa’s uplift.

The study explains that when water leaves the land, the surface expands—similar to how a foam ball regains its shape when you stop squeezing it. Before the droughts, underground water applied pressure that kept the land compressed. As these reserves dried up, the crust responded by rising.

This discovery could help scientists track drought severity using GPS receivers, which provide accurate information on groundwater depletion. Since much of the world’s fresh water is stored underground, these measurements could give early warnings about water shortages.

South Africa has faced major water crises, including the severe drought from 2015 to 2019, when Cape Town was close to "Day Zero", meaning taps could run dry. With climate change expected to alter rainfall patterns, the risk of future water shortages is high.

According to Karegar, “This data also showed that the land uplift could primarily be explained by drought and the associated loss of water mass.” The researchers hope this method will help policymakers make better decisions about water use, especially in areas where supplies are running low.

By studying how environmental changes affect the land, scientists can improve water management strategies and better prepare for future challenges. If droughts continue, South Africa’s gradual land uplift could become an even clearer warning sign of a worsening water crisis.

Source: University of Bonn, American Geophysical Union

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Across the African continent, the focus on disease has long been on infectious killers such as HIV and tuberculosis. But in early February, around 700 policymakers, academics, and philanthropists convened in Kigali, Rwanda, to discuss the alarming rise of noncommunicable diseases in the region. Of particular concern: spiraling rates of type 2 diabetes.

Earlier this year, a new study indicated that the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa with type 2 diabetes rose from 4 million in 1980 to 23.6 million in 2021, with projections suggesting that these cases will more than double to 54.9 million by 2045, driven, as in many other parts of the world, by rapid lifestyle changes including shifting diets and declining physical activity.

It’s a problem that needs urgent attention, but it could also provide an opportunity to better understand this deadly disease and even lead to more effective—and inclusive—treatments.

Segun Fatumo, a genetics professor at Queen Mary University of London who is currently leading studies of type 2 diabetes in Uganda and Malawi, says many of these patients are drug naïve, meaning their disease progression has yet to be altered by medication. “This gives researchers a rare window into the natural history of the disease—how it develops, progresses, and responds to different environmental and genetic factors,” he says. “It’s like being able to study a book from the first chapter, rather than jumping in halfway through.”

The remarkable genetic diversity across the African continent may also represent an opportunity for diabetes research. “Because human populations have lived in Africa the longest, they’ve had more time to accumulate genetic diversity, and this diversity is a scientific gold mine,” says Fatumo.

Research in sub-Saharan African populations has already challenged some basic understandings regarding the biology of type 2 diabetes. While the disease has traditionally been linked to obesity, with a steady accumulation of visceral fat in the liver and the pancreas progressively impacting the pancreas’ ability to produce insulin and control blood sugar levels, it appears that this isn’t the driving factor in many African patients.

In 2019, a major genetics study of more than 5,000 type 2 diabetes patients in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya pointed to a particular gene called ZRANB3 as being associated with the disease. The study indicates that some individuals carry variants of ZRANB3 which mean that they either produce fewer insulin-producing beta cells or struggle to maintain an adequate number of these cells, making them less responsive to surges in blood sugar.

The gene may therefore represent a potential new drug target, says Tinashe Chikowore, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School who is also leading studies of type 2 diabetes patients in the region. “We now need to find out just how many diabetics carry this African-specific mutation, both in sub-Saharan African populations and those of African ancestry around the world,” he says.

African men also appear to be particularly at risk of the disease. Earlier this year, the Lancet Global Health medical journal published a study of more than 6,500 middle-aged adults from four sub-Saharan African countries which found that, after family history, simply being male was one of the biggest predictors of type 2 diabetes risk.

Chikowore says there are many possible explanations for this, ranging from as yet undiscovered genetic variants to the physiological structure of the pancreas. The latter theory arises from research carried out in East Africa, which found that some men develop type 2 diabetes despite having a healthy weight. An ongoing study led by Uganda’s Medical Research Council, in partnership with UK researchers, is measuring the size of the pancreas in such men and assessing its function.

“These cases don’t appear to be related to fat, so we want to try and understand what’s going on,” says Chikowore. “Is it genetics? Or due to how the pancreas has developed? Some scientists think that it’s related to malnutrition in early life, impacting the development of the beta cells so they don’t produce as much insulin.”

As well as revealing the path to new treatments, understanding these cases could lead to improved screening tools. Currently, the gold-standard methods of diagnosing and assessing the progression of type 2 diabetes are fasting plasma glucose tests, which measure blood sugar after fasting, and the HbA1c blood test, which detects levels of a chemical compound called HbA1c that indicates blood sugar levels over time. But such tests are being shown to be ineffective in some populations.

Last year a major study highlighted that a significant number of people of African ancestry are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes much later than they might be, because they carry deficiencies in an enzyme called G6PD. This genetic variation is relatively common in parts of sub-Saharan Africa because it confers protection against severe malaria, but it also reduces levels of HbA1c, making it look like a person’s blood sugar levels are healthier than they actually are. The study showed that many of these patients end up experiencing preventable complications such as diabetic retinopathy, which can cause blindness.

Meanwhile, researchers like Julia Goedecke, a professor and chief specialist scientist at the South African Medical Research Council, have found that using fasting plasma glucose as a way of diagnosing type 2 diabetes in African women tends to be ineffective, because it assumes the patient is carrying a significant amount of liver fat. “Fasting glucose is often used as a marker of diabetes risk, but that’s because liver fat’s a big driver of fasting glucose levels,” says Goedecke. “In Africans it’s actually a poor marker, because most women who present with diabetes have low liver fat, so you often miss diabetes if you only take a fasting glucose value.”

Instead of liver fat, Goedecke’s research has indicated that many of these cases are being driven by an impaired ability to clear insulin from the bloodstream, causing people to already have abnormally high insulin levels.

Goedecke and others are now carrying out a study which includes men and women from the South African township of Soweto, various communities across Ghana, and Ghanaian immigrants to Germany and the Netherlands. They will regularly assess a range of biological characteristics over a number of years. “We hope this data will also give us a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the disease, and ideas for interventions to try and prevent it,” she says.

While research into diabetes across Africa should have direct impacts for patients in the region, Chikowore believes it could also benefit everyone with the disease. Understanding why sub-Saharan African women seem to be more resilient to gaining liver fat, for instance, could lead to the development of drugs that can improve metabolic health in other ethnic groups. “With diversity, you have both ends of the spectrum: people who are susceptible and people who are protected,” he says. “And we have higher chances of finding those people in Africa than anywhere else.”

As an example of what might be possible, Chikowore cites how genetic studies in African populations led to the development of a new class of cholesterol-lowering medications, with one company even exploring gene editing to treat patients. “Imagine if we could one day do the same for diabetes,” he says. “A genetically informed drug which can make people diabetes-proof. I think that’s what the world is looking for.”

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Several examples of shapes created by LegoGPT.  

Credit: Pun et al.

On Thursday, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, an AI model that creates physically stable Lego structures from text prompts. The new system not only designs Lego models that match text descriptions (prompts) but also ensures they can be built brick by brick in the real world, either by hand or with robotic assistance.

"To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of LEGO designs, along with their associated captions," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was posted on arXiv, "and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction."

This trained model generates Lego designs that match text prompts like "a streamlined, elongated vessel" or "a classic-style car with a prominent front grille." The resulting designs are simple, using just a few brick types to create primitive shapes—but they stand up. As one Ars Technica staffer joked this morning upon seeing the research, "It builds Lego like it's 1974."

A LegoGPT demo video assembled by the research team.

In the paper titled "Generating Physically Stable and Buildable Lego Designs from Text," the research team led by Ava Pun explained that many existing 3D generation models focus on making diverse objects with detailed geometry, but these digital designs often can't be physically made. "Without proper support, parts of the design can collapse, float, or remain disconnected," they wrote.

Unlike previous attempts at autonomous Lego modeling, LegoGPT reportedly produces step-by-step instructions for building Lego creations that don't fall apart. You can see demos of the system in action on the project's website.

How LegoGPT works

To build LegoGPT, the Carnegie Mellon team repurposed the technology behind large language models (LLMs), similar to the kind that run ChatGPT, for "next-brick prediction" instead of next-word prediction. To do so, the team fine-tuned LLaMA-3.2-1B-Instruct, an instruction-following language model from Meta.

The team then augmented the brick-predicting model with a separate software tool that can verify physical stability using mathematical models that simulate gravity and structural forces.

To train the model, the team assembled a new dataset called "StableText2Lego," which contained over 47,000 stable Lego structures paired with descriptive captions generated by a separate AI model, OpenAI's GPT-4o. Each structure underwent physics analysis to ensure it could be built in the real world.

LegoGPT works by first generating a sequence of precisely placed Lego bricks. For each new brick in the sequence, the system makes sure it doesn't collide with existing bricks and that it fits within the building space. After completing a design, it uses the aforementioned mathematical models to verify that the model can stand upright without falling apart.

If parts would collapse in real life, the system identifies the first unstable brick and backtracks, removing it and all subsequent bricks before trying a different approach. This "physics-aware rollback" method proved essential to the team's approach. Without it, only 24 percent of designs remained standing, compared to 98.8 percent with the full system.

The researchers also expanded the system's abilities by adding texture and color options. For example, using an appearance prompt like "Electric guitar in metallic purple," LegoGPT can generate a guitar model, with bricks assigned a purple color.

Testing with robots and humans

To prove their designs worked in real life, the researchers had robots assemble the AI-created Lego models. They used a dual-robot arm system with force sensors to pick up and place bricks according to the AI-generated instructions.

Human testers also built some of the designs by hand, showing that the AI creates genuinely buildable models. "Our experiments show that LegoGPT produces stable, diverse, and aesthetically pleasing Lego designs that align closely with the input text prompts," the team noted in its paper.

When tested against other AI systems for 3D creation, LegoGPT stands out through its focus on structural integrity. The team tested against several alternatives, including LLaMA-Mesh and other 3D generation models, and found its approach produced the highest percentage of stable structures.

A video of two robot arms building a LegoGPT creation, provided by the researchers.

Still, there are some limitations. The current version of LegoGPT only works within a 20×20×20 building space and uses a mere eight standard brick types. "Our method currently supports a fixed set of commonly used Lego bricks," the team acknowledged. "In future work, we plan to expand the brick library to include a broader range of dimensions and brick types, such as slopes and tiles."

The researchers also hope to scale up their training dataset to include more objects than the 21 categories currently available. Meanwhile, others can literally build on their work—the researchers released their dataset, code, and models on their project website and GitHub.

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It's easy to see that the bright spot of AT2024tvd is not at the center of its host galaxy.  

Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Yuhan Yao (UC Berkeley, Joseph DePasquale

Back in 2024, a system set up to identify objects that suddenly brighten found something unusual. Unfortunately, the automated system that was supposed to identify it couldn't figure out what it was looking at. Now, about a year later, we know it's the first tidal disruption event—meaning a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole—identified at visual wavelengths. It's also a rather unusual one, in that the supermassive black hole in question does not reside at the center of its galaxy. Instead, there's an even more massive object there, which is feeding on matter at the same time.

A mystery object

The object, now called AT2024tvd, was identified by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which is set up to scan the entire northern sky over a period of just two days, after which it repeats the process. Combined with software that scans the data for changes, these repeated exposures allow the system to identify objects that suddenly brighten (or, potentially, anything that suddenly goes dark). Among the events it can identify are tidal disruption events, where a star gets spaghettified by the enormous gravity of a supermassive black hole.

Normally, supermassive black holes live at the center of galaxies. So, the software that does the scanning will only flag something as a potential tidal disruption event if it coincides with the presence of a previous light source at the same location. And that wasn't the case with AT2024tvd, which appeared to be over 2,500 light-years from the center of the galaxy. As a result, the software didn't flag it as a potential tidal disruption event; people didn't figure out what it was until they looked more closely at it.

Fortunately, researchers were able to arrange for follow-up observations at wavelengths ranging from X-rays to radio waves. At least two of the observatories—the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Array radiotelescopes—could resolve both the object that brightened suddenly (meaning AT2024tvd) and a bright spot at the center of the galaxy, which appears to correspond to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. The fact that it's bright indicates that it's presently feeding on matter.

All of the observations indicated that AT2024tvd is a tidal disruption event. For example, it maintained a high temperature throughout the observations, unlike a supernova, which tends to cool down over time. There were also fewer high-energy X-rays than one would expect from a supernova. The UV spectrum also looked like previously identified tidal disruption events, with the signature of elements like carbon and nitrogen that don't require a supernova to be produced.

That makes this the fourth tidal disruption event we've identified that's the product of a supermassive black hole not located at the center of the galaxy. It's also the first that was initially identified at visible wavelengths.

Wandering black holes

This raises two questions: why are there two supermassive black holes here, and why is one of them not in the center of the galaxy? The first is relatively easy to answer. It appears that large galaxies are the product of galaxy mergers, essentially built by combining multiple smaller galaxies. Each of these small galaxies would come into the merger with its own black hole. In most cases, these newly arrived supermassive black holes would end up at the center of the galaxy and eventually merge with the central supermassive black hole.

But note the phrasing there: "in most cases" and "eventually." Even in the cases where a merger takes place, the process is slow, potentially taking millions or even billions of years. As a result, a large galaxy might have as many as 100 extremely large black holes wandering about, with about 10 of them having masses of over 10⁶ times that of the Sun. And the galaxy that AT2024tvd resides in is very large.

One consequence of all these black holes wandering about is that not all of them will end up merging. If two of them approach the central black hole at the same time, then it's possible for gravitational interactions to eject the smallest of them at nearly the velocity needed to escape the galaxy entirely. As a result, for millions of years afterwards, these supermassive black holes may be found at quite a distance from the galaxy's core.

At the moment, it's not possible to tell which of these explanations accounts for AT2024tvd's location. The galaxy it's in doesn't seem to have undergone a recent merger, but there is the potential for this to be a straggler from a far-earlier merger.

It's notable that all of the galaxies where we've seen an off-center tidal disruption event are very large. The paper that describes AT2024tvd suggests this is no accident: larger galaxies mean more mergers in the past, and thus more supermassive black holes floating around the interior. They also suggest that off-center events will be the only ones we see in large galaxies. That's because larger galaxies will have larger supermassive black holes at their center. And, once a supermassive black hole gets big enough, its event horizon is so far out that stars can pass through it before they get disrupted, and all the energetic release would take place inside the black hole.

Presumably, if you were close enough to see this happen, the star would just fade out of existence.

The arXiv. Abstract number: 2502.17661 (About the arXiv). To be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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