Welcome to Edition 7.43 of the Rocket Report! There's been a lot of recent news in hypersonic testing. We cover some of that in this week's newsletter, which is just a taste of the US military's appetite for fielding its own hypersonic weapons, and conversely, the Pentagon's emphasis on the detection and destruction of an enemy's hypersonic missiles. China has already declared its first hypersonic weapons operational, and Russia claims to have them, too. Now, the Pentagon is finally close to placing hypersonic missiles with combat units. Many US rocket companies believe the hypersonics sector is a lucrative business. Some companies have enough confidence in this emerging market—or lack of faith in the traditional space launch market—to pivot entirely toward hypersonics. I'm interested in seeing if their bets pay off.

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

Stratolaunch tests reusable hypersonic rocket plane. Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world's largest airplane. Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. Stratolaunch used the same Talon-A vehicle for both flights, demonstrating its reusability, a characteristic that sets it apart from competitors. Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch's president and CEO, said his team aims to ramp up to monthly flights by the end of the year.

A 21st century X-15 ... This is the first time anyone in the United States has flown a reusable hypersonic rocket plane since the last flight of the X-15, the iconic rocket-powered aircraft that pushed the envelope of high-altitude, high-speed flight 60 years ago. Like the Talon-A, the X-15 released from a carrier jet and ignited a rocket engine to soar into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere. But the X-15 had a pilot in command, while the Talon-A flies on autopilot. Stratolaunch is one of several companies participating in a US military program to test parts and technologies for use on future hypersonic weapons. "Why the autonomous flight matters is because hypersonic systems are now pushing the envelope in terms of maneuvering capability, maneuvering beyond what can be done by the human body," Krevor said.

New details about another recent hypersonic test. A hypersonic missile test on April 25 validated the launch mechanism for the US Navy Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) weapon program, the Defense Department said on May 2. The CPS missile, the Navy's name for what the US Army calls the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. While the Army and Navy versions use the same hypersonic glide vehicle and missile, they use different launch mechanisms. Last year, the Army tested its version of the hypersonic missile launcher. Now, the Navy has validated the cold-gas launch mechanism it will install on guided missile destroyers.

Deploying soon ... "The cold-gas approach allows the Navy to eject the missile from the platform and achieve a safe distance above the ship prior to first stage ignition," said Vice Adm Johnny R. Wolfe Jr., director of the Navy's Strategic Systems Programs, which is the lead designer of the common hypersonic missile. The Army plans to field its Long Range Hypersonic Weapon—also called "Dark Eagle"—with a combat unit later this year, while the Navy's version won't be ready for testing at sea until 2027 or 2028. Both missiles are designed for conventional (non-nuclear) strikes. The Army's Dark Eagle will be the US military's first operational hypersonic weapon.

Sentinel needs new silos. The Air Force will have to dig entirely new nuclear missile silos for the LGM-35A Sentinel, creating another complication for a troubled program that is already facing future cost and schedule overruns, Defense News reports. The Air Force originally hoped the existing silos that have housed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles could be adapted to launch Sentinel missiles, which would be more efficient than digging entirely new silos. But a test project at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California showed that approach would be fraught with further problems and cause the program to run even further behind and over budget, the service said.

Rising costs ... Sentinel, developed by Northrop Grumman, will replace the Air Force's fleet of Minuteman III ICBMs, which entered service in 1970, as the land-based leg of the military's nuclear triad. Sentinel was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion, but projected future costs ran so severely over budget that in January 2024, the program triggered a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach. After that review, the Pentagon last year concluded Sentinel was too critical to national security to abandon, but ordered the Air Force to restructure it to bring its costs under control. Additional studies of the program are highlighting more potential problems.

Gilmour says it (hopefully) will wait no more. The Australian launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies has been given approval by Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority for the debut launch of its Eris orbital rocket, InnovationAus.com reports. There is still one final regulatory hurdle, a final sign-off from the Australian Space Agency. If that happens in the next few days, Gilmour's launch window will open May 15. The company has announced tentative launch schedules before, only to be thwarted by technical issues, regulatory hangups, or bad weather. Most recently, Gilmour got within six days of its targeted launch date in March before regulatory queries and the impact of a tropical cyclone forced a delay.

Stand by for history ... The launch of Gilmour's three-stage Eris rocket will be historic. If successful, the 82-foot-tall (25-meter) rocket will be Australia's first homegrown orbital launcher. Eris is capable of hauling cargos up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to orbit, according to Gilmour. The company has dispatched a small team from its Gold Coast headquarters to the launch site in Queensland, on Australia's northeastern coast, to perform testing on the vehicle after it remained dormant for weeks. (Submitted by trainticket)

Fresh insights into one of SpaceX's worst days. When a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its launch pad nearly nine years ago, SpaceX officials initially struggled to explain how it could have happened. The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside "sniper" had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. A building leased by SpaceX's main competitor in launch, United Launch Alliance, lay just a mile away from the Falcon 9 launch pad, and a video around the time of the explosion indicated a flash on its roof. Ars has now obtained a letter sent to SpaceX by the Federal Aviation Administration more than a month after the explosion, indicating the matter was elevated to the FBI. The bureau looked into it, and what did they find? Nothing, apparently.

Investigation terminated ... "The FBI has informed us that based upon a thorough and coordinated review by the appropriate Federal criminal and security investigative authorities, there were no indications to suggest that sabotage or any other criminal activity played a role in the September 1 Falcon 9 explosion," an FAA official wrote in the letter to SpaceX. Ultimately, engineers determined the explosion was caused by the sudden failure of a high-pressure helium tank on the Falcon 9's upper stage.

Eric Schmidt's motivations become clearer. In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity are becoming increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space, Ars reports. During a congressional hearing last month, Schmidt discussed the need for more electricity to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications.

How big this crisis is ... "People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said at the hearing. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is." In an exchange with my colleague Eric Berger on X, Schmidt seemed to confirm he bought Relativity Space as a means to support the development of data centers in space. Such data centers, ideally, would be powered by solar panels and be able to radiate heat into the vacuum of space. Relativity's Terran R rocket, still in development, is well-sized to play a role in launching the infrastructure for data centers in space. But several big questions remain: How big would these data centers be? Where would they go within an increasingly cluttered low-Earth orbit? Could space-based solar power meet their energy needs? Can all of this heat be radiated away efficiently in space? Economically, would any of this make sense?

Rocket Lab, meet Rocket Cargo. Rocket Lab’s next-generation Neutron rocket has been selected for an experimental US Air Force mission to test rapid, global, cargo-delivery capabilities, a milestone for the company as it pushes further into the national security launch market, Space News reports. The mission, slated for no earlier than 2026, will fall under the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) "Rocket Cargo" program, which explores how commercial launch vehicles might one day deliver materiel to any point on Earth within hours—a vision akin to airlift logistics via spaceflight.

A new mission for Neutron ... Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO, said the Rocket Cargo contract from AFRL represents an "experimental phase" of the program. "It'll be interesting to see if that turns into a full requirement for an operational capability," he said Thursday. Neutron is expected to carry a payload that will reenter Earth’s atmosphere, demonstrating the rocket’s ability to safely transport and deploy cargo. SpaceX's Starship, with roughly 10 times more payload lift capacity than Neutron, is also on contract with AFRL for demonstrations for the Rocket Cargo program. Meanwhile, Beck said Neutron remains on schedule for its inaugural launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, later this year.

Trump calls for canceling the Space Launch System. The Trump administration released its "skinny" budget proposal earlier this week. Overall, NASA is asked to take a 25 percent cut in its budget, from about $25 billion to $18.8 billion. There are also significant changes proposed in NASA's biggest-ticket exploration programs. The budget would cancel the Lunar Gateway that NASA has started developing and end the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft after two more flights, Artemis II and Artemis III, Ars reports. A statement from the White House calls the SLS rocket "grossly expensive" with projected costs of $4 billion per launch.

If not SLS, then what? ... "The budget funds a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions," the Trump administration wrote. There are no further details about those commercial systems. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop reusable landers for the Moon, and both of these systems include vehicles to move from Earth orbit to the Moon. In the budget proposal, the White House sets a priority for a human expedition to Mars to follow the Artemis program's lunar landing.

FAA unlocks SpaceX launch cadence. Although we are still waiting for SpaceX to signal when it will fly the Starship rocket again, the company got some good news from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday, Ars reports. After a lengthy review, the federal agency agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. Previously, the company was limited to five launches, but now it will be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year.

Waiting for clearance ... Although the new finding permits SpaceX to significantly increase its flight rate from South Texas, the company still has work to do before it can fly Starship again. The company's engineers are still working to get the massive rocket back to flight after its eighth mission broke apart off the coast of Florida on March 6. This was the second time, in two consecutive missions, that the Starship upper stage failed during its initial phase of flight. After two consecutive failures, there will be a lot riding on the next test flight of Starship. It will also be the first time the company attempts to fly a first stage of the rocket for a second time. According to some sources, if additional testing of this upper stage goes well, Starship could launch as early as May 19. This date is also supported by a notice to mariners, but it should be taken as notional rather than something to be confident in.

SpaceX adds to its dominion. Elon Musk’s wish to create his own city has come true, the Texas Tribune reports. On Saturday, voters living around SpaceX’s Starship rocket testing and launch facility in South Texas approved a measure to incorporate the area as a new city. Unofficial results later Saturday night showed the election was a landslide: 212 voted in favor; 6 opposed. After the county certifies the results, the new city will be official.

Elections have consequences ... Only 283 people, those who live within the boundaries of the proposed city, were eligible to vote in the election. A Texas Newsroom analysis of the voter rolls showed two-thirds of them either work for SpaceX or had already indicated their support. The three unopposed people who ran to lead the city also have ties to SpaceX. It’s unclear if Musk, whose primary residence is at Starbase, cast a ballot. The vote clears the way for Musk to try to capture more control over the nearby public beach, which must be closed for launches.

Next three launches

May 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-3 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00:00 UTC

May 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-91 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06:28 UTC

May 11: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-83 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 04:24 UTC

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Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.

On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton, falls into the atmosphere about once per week. What's different this time is that Kosmos 482 was designed to land on Venus, with a titanium heat shield built to withstand scorching temperatures, and structures engineered to survive atmospheric pressures nearly 100 times higher than Earth's.

So, there's a good chance the spacecraft will survive the extreme forces it encounters during its plunge through the atmosphere. Typically, space debris breaks apart and burns up during reentry, with only a small fraction of material reaching the Earth's surface. The European Space Agency, one of several institutions that track space debris, says Kosmos 482 is "highly likely" to reach Earth's surface in one piece.

Fickle forecasts

The Kosmos 482 spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, now part of Kazakhstan, aboard a Molniya rocket on March 31, 1972. A short time later, the rocket's upper stage was supposed to propel the probe out of Earth orbit on an interplanetary journey toward Venus, where it would have become the third mission to land on the second planet from the Sun.

But the rocket failed, rendering it unable to escape the gravitational grip of Earth. The spacecraft separated into several pieces, and Russian engineers gave up on the mission. The main section of the Venus probe reentered the atmosphere in 1981, but for 53 years, the 3.3-foot-diameter (1-meter) segment of the spacecraft that was supposed to land on Venus remained in orbit around the Earth, its trajectory influenced only by the tenuous uppermost layers of the atmosphere.

The mission was part of the Soviet Union's Venera program, which achieved the first soft landing of a spacecraft on another planet with the Venera 7 mission in 1970, and followed up with another successful landing with Venera 8 in 1972. Because it failed, Soviet officials gave the next mission, which would have become Venera 9, a non-descriptive name: Kosmos 482.

Over time, the dead spacecraft succumbed to aerodynamic drag, slowly losing altitude before dipping deeper into the atmosphere in recent weeks. In the last few days, Kosmos 482's orbit brought the spacecraft less than 100 miles (150 kilometers) from Earth. This additional aerodynamic drag is hastening the craft's fall from space.

As of Thursday, expert predictions centered on a likely reentry of Kosmos 482 early Saturday. But reentry forecasts have large margins of error. Small variations in the density of the upper atmosphere driven by solar activity could bring down the spacecraft sooner or later than expected.

The Aerospace Corporation's experts predict Kosmos 482 will fall to Earth some time nine hours before or after 1:54 am EDT (05:54 UTC) Saturday. The European Space Agency's forecast is centered on 3:12 am EDT (07:12 UTC) Saturday, plus or minus 13.7 hours.

The reentry windows will narrow over the next couple of days, but experts won't be able to pinpoint an exact time or location before the spherical spacecraft makes its final plunge.

"As we approach the reentry, the uncertainty in the prediction decreases," the European Space Agency wrote on a website tracking Kosmos 482. "The remaining uncertainty is caused by the difficulty of modeling the atmosphere, the influence of space weather, and the unknowns about the object itself, such as which way it is facing."

However, there are a few things we know about where it will come down.

Kosmos 482's flight path takes the spacecraft between 52 degrees north and south latitude on each orbit, so it never flies over the northernmost parts of Canada, Europe, and Russia. As the forecasts become more precise, it will be possible to identify the corridors where Kosmos 482 will fly during the reentry window. A map of Kosmos 482's orbital tracks during the Aerospace Corporation's 18-hour reentry window is shown below.

If you go through most of your days without worrying about space junk falling on you, there's little reason for serious alarm now. The Aerospace Corporation says any one individual on Earth is "far likelier" to be struck by lightning than to be injured by Kosmos 482. The US government's safety threshold for uncontrolled reentries requires the risk of a serious injury or death on the ground to be less than 1 in 10,000. The Aerospace Corporation projects the risk of at least one injury or fatality from Kosmos 482 to be 0.4 in 10,000 if the descent craft reaches the surface intact.

Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness, wrote on his website that the risk of public injury from Kosmos 482 is lower than that from the reentry of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. One of those came down uncontrolled over Poland in February, scattering some debris but causing no injuries.

Langbroek said the reentry analysis suggests the Kosmos 482 descent capsule will impact the ground or water at about 150 mph (242 kilometers per hour), assuming it makes it to the surface in one piece. The lander carries a parachute that would have slowed its final descent to Venus, but it's not likely that the parachute deployment system still works after 53 years in space.

"There are many uncertain factors in whether the lander will survive reentry though, including that this will be a long shallow reentry trajectory, and the age of the object," Langbroek wrote.

If you find yourself along one of the lines on this map, perhaps it's worth keeping track of Kosmos 482 over the next couple of days—out of curiosity more than worry. Chances are the spacecraft will fall into the ocean or over an unpopulated area.

But what happens in the unlikely event that Kosmos 482 winds up in your yard? "If Kosmos defies the odds and does land in your yard, please don’t touch it!" the Aerospace Corporation said. "It could potentially be hazardous, and it is best to notify your local authorities.

"As for keeping it, don’t get your hopes up," Aerospace says. "There is a United Nations treaty that governs found debris—the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. It states that countries keep ownership of objects they launch into space, even after those objects reenter and return to Earth. The country that launched the object in this case is Russia, which could request the return of any parts that survived reentry. "It is also worth noting that the treaty says that the launching country is also internationally liable for damages."

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Over the last century or more, humanity has been developing an ever-growing list of chemicals that have never been seen by Earth's creatures. Many of these chemicals end up being toxic contaminants that we'd love to get rid of, but we struggle to purify them from the environment or break them down once we do. And microbes haven't had much chance to evolve the ability to break them down for us.

Over the last few years, however, we've found a growing number of cases where bacteria have evolved the ability to break down industrial contaminants and plastics. Unfortunately, these bacteria are all different species, target different individual contaminants, and thrive in different environments. But now, researchers have developed a new way to take the genes from all these species and place them in a single bacterial strain that can decontaminate complex waste mixtures.

Targeting contaminants

The inspiration for this work was the fact that a lot of industrial contamination contains a mixture of toxic organic molecules, but is found in brackish or salty water. So, the research team, based in Shenzhen, China, started by simply testing a number of lab strains to determine the ability to survive these conditions. The one that seemed to do the best is called Vibrio natriegens. These bacteria were discovered in a salt marsh, and their primary claim to fame is an impressive growth rate, with a population being able to double about every 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, Vibrio natriegens doesn't have the sophisticated molecular tools that are available in a species like E. coli. So, the researchers spent some time making Vibrio natriegens a bit more amenable to manipulations, making it more capable of taking up DNA and incorporating it into a specific location in the genome.

Once that was done, the researchers started looking through the genomes of species that have been identified as breaking down industrial contaminants. The breakdown of complex molecules typically involves more than one enzyme, and the genes for these enzymes tend to end up clustered together, so that they can be produced as a single, large RNA that encodes all the proteins needed. This simplifies regulating their production, making it easy to ensure the bacteria only make the proteins if the molecule they break down is actually present. In this case, the clusters ranged from just three genes all the way up to 11.

Once nine of these gene clusters were identified, the DNA that would encode them was ordered and assembled into a single DNA molecule in yeast. The researchers took some time while ordering this DNA to better optimize the genes to be active and produce proteins in Vibrio natriegens, as opposed to whatever species the genes were normally used by.

From yeast, each of these individual gene clusters was inserted into Vibrio natriegens, creating different strains that could digest one of the following: benzene, toluene, phenol, naphthalene, biphenyl, DBF29, and dibenzothiophene (DBT). (Some of the nine clusters target the same contaminant.) Each of these bacterial strains was then put in a solution with the chemical they were engineered to digest. Five of the nine worked, giving researchers strains that could digest biphenyl, phenol, napthalene, DBF, and toluene.

Good, but limited

From there, the researchers developed a system that would enable them to iteratively insert a new gene cluster at the tail end of a previously inserted gene cluster. This allowed them to build up a cluster of clusters, eventually including all five of the ones that had shown activity in the earlier tests. Given two days, this single strain could remove about a quarter of the phenol, a third of the biphenyl, 30 percent of the DBF, all of the naphthalene, and nearly all of the toluene.

All those contaminants came from a mixture created by the researchers specifically for the test. To get a better sense of its capabilities, the team got hold of two wastewater mixtures that also included some salt in the water. Here, the engineered Vibrio natriegens strain proved highly effective, eliminating over 95 percent of most chemicals, and about 80 percent of phenol. The strain also worked against contaminated soil.

That said, this shouldn't be seen as the solution to contamination with organic chemicals. For starters, there were a number of chemical targets that weren't digested—not to mention a huge range of chemicals that weren't tested. In addition, Vibrio natriegens doesn't grow especially well when salt isn't present, so it can't just be unleashed on all of our contamination.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that, unlike the bacteria that the gene clusters originated in, Vibrio natriegens has no way of using the broken-down products of these reactions. Other bacteria evolved these gene clusters because the clusters allowed them to incorporate the breakdown products as if they were food. In contrast, Vibrio natriegens lacks the enzymes that enable this sort of incorporation; instead, these chemical products just end up sitting around when the bacteria are done digesting.

That means that, while this engineered strain gets rid of dangerous chemicals, it will leave a variety of less dangerous chemical contaminants. And, since the Vibrio natriegens can't use this material as food, there's no evolutionary selection going on for the activity of these engineered gene clusters. That means that there's no pressure to even keep the gene clusters around (though the researchers confirmed they weren't lost during these experiments). Also, no pressure that could improve their activity further. So, in the long term, it might be best to start plugging in to the pathways that break down contaminants into the cell's basic metabolism.

Despite these limitations, though, the work is a clear demonstration of the potential of bacteria to help us clean up some of the messes we're making.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08947-7  (About DOIs).

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Like any big industry, the automotive business has several dumpsters filled with products and ideas that should have remained conceptual. From modern climate controls buried within successive infotainment menus that neither Lawrence of Arabia nor Columbo could find to the old and unlamented Chrysler TC by Maserati with its atrocious build quality and a terrible cylinder head (the Maserati part), the collective car circus has spawned no shortage of bad ideas.

However, there are a few good ideas buried under the weight of poor execution, lousy technology, dreadful marketing, steep pricing, or just merely something being ahead of its time. Several of these morsels deserved a better launch and a second chance. One of them is four-wheel steering.

Four-wheel steering, in concept

The idea of steering a two-axle vehicle's front and rear wheels isn't new. Very early American 4x4 trucks from the dawn of the 20th Century sported four-wheel-steering systems (4WS), including the Cotta Cottamobile, the American ¾-ton to 10-ton trucks, and Jeffery/Nash Quad Lorry 3-ton trucks.

By the early 1980s, a more modern iteration of active 4WS systems was found as a feature on concept (show) cars. However, since that breed of machine rarely had to prove itself, these are more display pieces than working technology.

Active 4WS systems do two physical things. First, they impart opposite-phase steering angles to the rear wheels from those applied to the fronts. When the fronts turn right, the rears turn left at a fraction of the front's steering angles. This effectively diminishes the vehicle's turning circle or radius, making it more maneuverable in tight spaces like parking lots.

Depending on the system's engineering, opposite-phase steering takes place only below a certain vehicle speed or with lots of steering lock applied (generally, more than three-quarters of a turn of the steering wheel or about 270 degrees of lock from center). It also never occurs above a trotting pace. Inducing opposite-phase steering above 30 or 40 mph could cause drastic instability at speed, creating a very rapid yaw moment that would likely cause an unrecoverable skid.

The second action of active 4WS is same-phase steering angle input to the rear wheels. Turn the wheel right, and the rear wheels also turn slightly to the right. However, that rear angle is even shallower than the opposite-phase angles in the above scenario. This improves higher-speed stability, like when a driver changes lanes or corners rapidly through fun twisties or on a racetrack. Rear steering angles vary anywhere from 2.5 degrees to 10 degrees, depending on vehicle design and purpose.

Four-wheel steering, in hard parts

In real nuts, bolts, and notoriety, Honda first brought 4WS to modern production in the 1988 Prelude Si as an option. Nissan followed suit with its HICAS system, and Mazda had a system in with extremely limited production, but Honda made the biggest splash.

The Honda system was entirely mechanical. It used a shaft connecting the front steering rack to a planetary gear. That gear created the phase (direction) and degree of rear steering indexed to steering wheel input. This shaft led to a sliding rod that acted like the rack of a rack and pinion steering gear, carrying that input to the rear wheels.

At small steering angles, the rear wheels turned a maximum of 1.5 degrees in phase (in the same direction) as the fronts. At larger steering wheel angles above roughly 270 degrees from center, the rear wheels steered as much as 5.3 degrees out-of-phase with the fronts, tightening the turning circle about 10 percent.

An early Honda test mule, mating two Accords together.

Honda

 

The results in those 1980s and ’90s Preludes were impressive. Some auto critics, like that most cerebral of British scribes, L.J.K. Setright of Car Magazine, cited that the third and fourth-generation Honda Preludes with 4WS exuded the finest steering in the history of history. Weight, feel, accuracy, and telepathic information all sent the auto critic into automotive euphoria.

Four-wheel steering, digitally rendered

As Honda engineers toiled away on their system outside Tokyo, about 37 km away, Nissan worked on its HICAS (“High Capacity Actively Controlled Steering”) variants. Only active above roughly 90 km/h (55 mph) and below 200 km/h (125 mph), it used a computer-controlled hydraulic actuator to move the rear lower lateral links. A computer signaled a rear steering rack, allowing toe changes of plus or minus one degree, depending on speed and front steering angle.

The rear wheels of Nissan's system would initially (and briefly) steer out of phase with the fronts to improve turn-in response. It then switched phasing for greater stability. This enabled excellent slalom performance with rapid directional changes, which Nissan considered important in contemporary vehicle reviews and tests of sporty vehicles at the time.

However, this early HICAS system had no rear steering at low speeds. The Nissan system also differed from Honda's in that it relied on a variety of sensors to instruct operation, whereas Honda's was entirely analog.

Other manufacturers had been working on 4WS at roughly the same time, and others even launched production cars with the system before Honda. Mazda's MX-02 concept car in 1983 showed a real working system, reaching production in the 1988 626 Turbo. Mitsubishi had a system in the Galant VR-4 in 1987 that only steered with same-phase angles above 50 km/h (30 mph). But none made as big an impact as Honda's.

However, 4WS did not take the world by storm in the marketplace. The complexity of sporty cars coming out of Japan in the 1980s grew enormously. Coupled with the Japanese Yen's dramatic rise in value against the US dollar and after the Plaza Accord agreement in September 1985 between major industrial countries, the cost of Japanese cars in overseas markets skyrocketed. In the US, the 1984 Nissan 300ZX Turbo cost around $16,000. By 1990, the 300ZX Turbo's MSRP was $33,260, more than doubling in just six years.

The bigger meaning for us in 2025 is that, conceptually, today's 4WS systems essentially do the same thing. Slow-speed opposite-phase inputs tighten maneuverability. Same-phase steering at high speed improves directional changes like lane shifting with generally small steering angles at the rear.

Trucks

Even though the 4WS concept dates back to the early 20th-century trucks, GM is the only manufacturer that has produced a 4WS pickup in the modern era. (Ford has tested systems, though.) The initial Quadrasteer system of the 2000s used a set of trailing tie rods (behind the axle), leading to a steering rack, the pinion of which was an electric motor. This motor dialed a maximum of 15 degrees of steering angle out-of-phase with the front wheels, but only below 45 mph. Where a normal GM pickup had a turning circle of 47 feet, a Quadrasteer truck required only 37 feet, a giant 22 percent improvement.

The Quadrasteer's in-phase rear-steering topped out at 5 degrees to improve highway stability at higher speeds. More importantly, since this was on a pickup truck, towing had to be considered, too. Therefore, GM limited the low-speed, opposite-phase steering angle in towing mode to 12 degrees. This prevented drastic angles from binding up a trailer while turning.

However, GM's Quadrasteer system fell flat because of its high price. It didn't cost the moon to produce, but GM priced it at $5,600. The company also made it optional only on the top trim levels of the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra.

GM also faced resistance among truck buyers because more complex mechanicals could mean a threat to durability. And if nothing else, pickup buyers want durability from their trucks, especially work trucks.

Modern-modern day

Mercedes-Benz EQE with four-wheel steering, full steering lock to the right.

Jim Resnick

 

Mercedes-Benz EQE full steering lock to the left.

Jim Resnick

 

Today, 4WS is still not commonplace, but many luxury cars and SUVs use it for the same reasons that existed nearly 50 years ago when Honda, Nissan, and Mazda began their studies in the mid-1970s. Mercedes offers it today on several vehicles like the electric EQS, plus S-Class and E-Class models. And it is showing up on some large GM EVs, like the new Silverado and Hummer.

GMC offers a system on pickup trucks that aids low-speed maneuverability and allows the vehicle to crabwalk, changing direction with no yaw. Some high-powered Porsche models and top-level Audis use 4WS with slight variations, but all for the same fundamental reasons as in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite other developments in suspension design, computer aids, and active driving assists, which didn't exist in the 1980s, the fundamental benefits of four-wheel steering—improved maneuverability at low speed and improved high-speed turning stability—still exist nearly 50 years after the concept first saw the light of day.

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VIENNA—Scientists at the European Geosciences Union conference last week said there is growing scientific evidence that global warming is driving a big increase in dangerous clear-air turbulence, which is invisible from the cockpit and can surprise pilots and damage aircraft.

Along some busy flight routes, turbulence is projected to “double or treble or quadruple over the next few decades,” said Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science and head of the weather research division at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. “What we find … is that the jet stream regions in both the Northern and the Southern hemispheres are affected.”

As its name implies, clear-air turbulence can happen when there are no visible signs of a weather disturbance, often at or near the boundary of contrasting air masses, moving in different directions and at varying speeds. It can unexpectedly toss large airplanes up and down by several hundred feet, potentially damaging the airframe and injuring passengers and crew.

The increase of clear-air turbulence has been documented for a few years. Researchers are now starting to understand how and why it happens, which could help develop new ways to forecast and avoid it, especially when it involves the jet stream, strong rivers of air in the Northern and Southern hemispheres that steer weather systems and air masses from west to east.

But looking at how climate change affects wind speeds in the upper atmosphere hasn’t proven very helpful in understanding clear-air turbulence, Williams said. Vertical wind shear—the difference in the speed and direction of winds at different altitudes—is a much more useful variable for the researchers.

“When we look in the same three re-analysis data sets of what the vertical wind shear has been doing, there’s been a clear increase by around 15 percent over the past four decades,” he said.

Vertical wind shear in the jet streams can be compared to what happens when a smooth river starts flowing more steeply downhill and speeds up, said Davide Faranda, research director of climate physics in the Laboratoire de Science du Climat et de l’Environnement, part of the French National Center for Scientific Research.

“It can become turbulent,” he said. “So if you have a small boat and you put it in this river, you will see shaking a lot, and it’s the same for planes when they fly in the turbulent jet streams.”

Faranda’s interest in clear-air turbulence stems from a childhood fascination with both planes and weather, as well as a personal experience with a very bumpy ride on the way home from a science conference in 2023.

“It was LA to Charlotte, after the AGU conference in San Francisco,” he said. “We basically had clear-air turbulence for over three hours, with extreme things like the luggages storage opening, luggage flying away. So that traumatized me.”

Rough spots in the jet stream

The waves in the jet streams can start on the land surface, Faranda said.

“You don’t have rocks or slopes in the atmosphere, but in fact, it can feel the slopes of the continental shelves, the Rocky Mountains, or the Alps or Greenland,” he said. “Where you have these strong changes in elevation that perturb the atmosphere, it can propagate up to the level where planes are flying.”

But the exact location of each rough patch changes constantly because the jet streams shift in wavy patterns, sometimes with big loops north and south, driven mainly by regional temperature contrasts between polar regions and the mid-latitudes, he said.

“Global warming is faster at the poles,” Faranda said, “and it’s melting ice and it’s also warming differently in oceans and on continents.”

As global warming jars climatic patterns, it affects the jet streams, he said.

Williams, the University of Reading scientist, was “the first to understand that if the jet stream is affected, then turbulence in the jet stream is affected, and therefore flight operations are affected,” Faranda said.

In his EGU presentation, Williams said it’s important to look at vertical wind shear because the signal in the data is much stronger compared to the noise.

“Why do we care about stronger wind shear? Well, of course, it’s because we fly through it,” he said, showing a photo of a grounded jet plane that lost an engine in severe clear-air turbulence. The data shows there has been a 55 percent increase of severe air turbulence since the 1970s, he added.

Climate models show that, under the most realistic greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, a “hotspot in the tropical upper troposphere will continue to grow, which means an even stronger midlatitude temperature gradient,” he said.

That hotspot in the upper troposphere is an area of amplified warming resulting partly from water vapor feedbacks, as moist, hot air steams off the tropical oceans. That heat bulge is increasing the temperature gradient in areas near some of the busiest flight paths, including transatlantic routes.

If rapid warming continues, Williams said, studies show vertical wind shear could increase 29 percent by 2100, or 17 percent if global emissions are halved by mid-century and keep dropping.

“This, of course, means a lot more turbulence in not that many years from now,” he said.

Faranda added that his own experiences and research on clear-air turbulence won’t keep him from flying. New measurements by weather instruments and greater awareness of the potential for such turbulence will help keep most flights safe, and changes to wing design and plane construction could make them less vulnerable, he added.

“In principle, you can fly through these areas without consequences in most cases,” Faranda said. But with projections for more intense and frequent turbulence, it’s important to maintain observation programs, he added.

“With the new global political situation, there is a lot of talk of reducing instruments for monitoring the weather and the climate, and this would produce worse weather forecasts,” he said. And fewer weather observations will likely lead to shakier flights.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Animation: WIRED Staff/Getty Images

Amazon has developed a new warehouse robot that uses touch to rummage around shelves to find the right product to ship to customers.

The robot, called Vulcan, is a meaningful step towards making robots less sausage-fingered compared to human beings. Honing robots’ tactile abilities further may allow them to take on more fulfillment and manufacturing work in the years ahead.

Aaron Parness, Amazon’s director of robotics AI who led the development of Vulcan, explains that touch sensing helps the robot push items around on a shelf and identify what it’s after. “When you’re trying to stow [or pick] items in one of these pods, you can't really do that task without making contact with the other items,” he says.

The Vulcan system consists of a conventional robotic arm with a custom spatula-like appendage for poking into a shelf, and a sucker for grabbing items to pull them out.

Vulcan has sensors on several of its joints that allow the robot to detect the edge and contours of items. Parness says that machine learning is key to making sense of the sensor signals and also forms part of the algorithmic loop that controls how a robot takes actions. “The special sauce we have is the software interpretation of the force torque, and how we wrap those into our control loop and into our motion plans,” he says.

Amazon revealed Vulcan at a fulfillment center in Hamburg, Germany today. The company says the robot is already working at this facility and another in Spokane, Washington.

The new robots will work on the same line as human pickers, and will aim to spare them from back-aching work by grasping more items from shelves that are high up or low down. Items that the robot decides it cannot find will be reassigned to human workers.

“Amazon stores many different products in bins, so rummaging is necessary to pull out a specific object to fill an order,” says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Until now this has been very difficult, so I'm curious to see the new system.”

Goldberg says that research on robotic touch sensing has advanced in recent years, with numerous groups working on joint and surface sensing. But he added that robots have some way to go before they can match the tactile abilities of flesh-and-blood workers. “The human sense of touch is extremely sensitive and complex, with a huge dynamic range,” Goldberg says. “Robots are progressing rapidly but I'd be surprised to see human-equivalent [skin] sensors in the next five-to-ten years.”

Robot coworkers

Even so, Vulcan should help automate more of the work currently done by humans inside Amazon’s vast empire of fulfillment centers. The company has ramped up automation in recent years with AI-infused robots capable of grabbing and transporting packages and packed boxes. Stowing and retrieving items from shelves is one of the more challenging jobs for robots to do, and it is heavily dependent on human labor.

Parness says he does not foresee robots taking on all of the work done inside Amazon’s fulfillment centers. “We don't really believe in 100 percent automation, or lights out fulfillment,” he says. “We can get to 75 percent and have robots working alongside our employees, and the sum would be greater [than either working alone].”

Increased use of robots may raise concerns around automation eliminating human jobs. Some economic studies show that robots can eliminate jobs, while others point to a more complex picture, with automation both replacing workers and creating new roles as productivity increases. Amazon’s robot rollout has seen some new jobs created including ones that involve assisting robots when they get confused or stuck.

Parness says that Amazon plans to give other robots similar sensing capabilities to Vulcan, which should improve their abilities. The company may be cooking up new AI algorithms that make its robots smarter, too, having acquired the team behind a startup called Covariant that was developing AI foundation models for industrial machines. As WIRED revealed last year, other startups such as Physical Intelligence are looking to build AI models that make robots much smarter. Adding touch-sensor data to the training mix could perhaps help speed things up.

Bringing more manufacturing back to US shores, including the iPhone assembly work that Trump seems so keen on would surely require greater use of robots—especially systems with the touchy-feely skills needed to manipulate small, intricate components.

What do you think about Amazon giving robots the power to feel? Let me know by emailing hello@wired.com or in the comments section below.

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Jessica Frick wants to build furnaces in space. Her company, California-based Astral Materials, is designing machines that can grow valuable materials in orbit that could be used in medicine, semiconductors, and more. Or, as she puts it, “We’re building a box that makes money in space.”

Scientists have long suggested that the microgravity environment of Earth’s orbit could enable the production of higher-quality products than it is possible to make on Earth. Astronauts experimented with crystals—a crucial component of electronic circuitry—as early as 1973, on NASA’s Skylab space station. But progress was slow. For decades, in-space manufacturing has been experimental rather than commercial.

That is all set to change. A host of new companies like Astral are making use of the lower costs of launching into space, coupled with emerging ways to return things to Earth, to reignite in-space manufacturing. The field is getting “massively” busier, says Mike Curtis-Rouse, head of in-orbit servicing, assembly, and manufacturing at the UK-based research organization Satellite Applications Catapult. He adds that by 2035 “the anticipation is that the global space economy is going to be a multitrillion-dollar industry, of which in-space manufacturing is probably in the region of about $100 billion.”

At its simplest, in-space manufacturing refers to anything made in space that can then be used on Earth or in space itself. The absence of gravity allows for unique manufacturing processes that cannot be replicated on Earth, thanks to the interesting physics of near-weightlessness.

One such process is crystal growth—in particular, producing seed crystals, which play a vital role in semiconductor manufacturing. On Earth, engineers take a high-purity, small, silicon seed crystal and dip it into molten silicon to create a larger crystal of high-quality silicon that can be sliced into wafers and used in electronics. But the effect of gravity on the growth process can introduce impurities. “Silicon now has an unsolvable problem,” says Joshua Western, CEO of UK company Space Forge. “We basically can’t get it any purer.”

Growing these seed crystals in space could lead to much more pure wafers, says Western: “You can almost press the reset button on what we think is the limit of a semiconductor.”

Frick’s company Astral plans to do this with a mini fridge-sized furnace that reaches temperatures of about 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,700 degrees Fahrenheit). The applications of crystal growth are not just limited to semiconductors but could also lead to higher quality pharmaceuticals and other materials science breakthroughs.

Other products made in space could be produced with similar benefits. In January, China announced it had made a groundbreaking new metal alloy on its Tiangong space station that was much lighter and stronger than comparable alloys on Earth. And the unique environment of low gravity can offer new possibilities in medical research. “When you shut off gravity, you’re able to fabricate something like an organ,” says Mike Gold, the president of civil and international space business at Redwire, a Florida-based company that has experimented with in-space manufacturing on the International Space Station for years. “If you try to do this on Earth, it would be squished.”

A key challenge for in-space manufacturing is how you actually get equipment to space and products back to Earth in a way that makes production at scale viable. But rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 have dramatically reduced the cost of accessing space, while companies including Space Forge and the California firm Varda Space Industries are developing uncrewed capsules that could fly equipment like Astral’s furnace and return materials to Earth.

Varda has already launched three missions to demonstrate this capability, bringing capsules down for a landing in the Utah desert and Australian outback. On its first mission last year, the company successfully grew crystals of an antiviral drug called ritonavir. Eric Lasker, Varda’s chief revenue officer, says the market potential and health benefits could be “pretty dramatic” for products like this. “It can really help people down here,” he says.

As orbital manufacturing capabilities increase in the coming years, things could scale up rapidly. “I envision manufacturing facilities in orbit will look like factories in space,” says Lasker. “You’re going to see ready-built stations or vehicles. It’s very much not hard to see that future.”

Further afield, there is the prospect of using resources from space itself in manufacturing, rather than sending materials up. Several companies have their sights set on asteroid mining; California-based AstroForge aims to land on a suspected metallic asteroid in the next year and see if it can extract usable material. Asteroids might be rich in high-value metals called platinum group metals, but also water and other resources.

Still, that’s the future. Right now, space manufacturing still “seems like a novelty,” says Curtis-Rouse, but “I think very rapidly, inside 10 years, it’s going to be seen as business as usual.”

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EEG scans are an important tool for diagnosing conditions like epilepsy, sleep disorders, and brain injuries. Doctors often need to observe brain waves for extended periods, but the standard EEG setup can be bulky and uncomfortable. The Penn State team wanted to fix that by designing an electrode that sticks to the scalp naturally, without needing skin preparation or messy gels.

Their study, published in NPC Biomedical Innovations, tested this new "stick-and-play" electrode. The results showed it could provide high-quality EEG readings for more than 24 hours straight, without losing signal strength. Researchers also ran tests to see how well the device held up through repeated use—it stayed firmly attached and maintained stable performance across 100 cycles of movement. The design mimics the look of human hair, making it almost invisible when worn.

A big challenge with EEG recordings is making sure the electrodes stay securely connected to the scalp. Weak signals, hair getting in the way, and movement interference can make results unreliable. Typically, metallic electrodes with electrolyte gel are used, but they can dry out over time, causing inconsistencies. The new hairlike electrode avoids these problems by using a flexible material and a strong bioadhesive, making it ideal for extended monitoring.

“This electrode allows for more consistent and reliable monitoring of EEG signals and can be worn without being noticeable, which enhances both functionality and patient comfort,” said Tao Zhou, Wormley Family Early Career Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics and senior author of the study.

The device has potential applications beyond medical use—it could also play a role in consumer wellness technology that tracks brain activity. Because it's small, comfortable, and long-lasting, it could help researchers study how the brain works in real-world settings without disrupting a person’s daily life.

Source: Penn State University, Nature

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

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As we grow older, our hearts slowly change in size, shape, and function. These changes can affect how well it pumps blood and handles stress. But some people’s hearts age faster than others—especially if they have conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, or obesity.

MRI scans provide a clear, detailed picture of how the heart is working. The UEA team wanted to use this imaging technology to create a formula that predicts a heart’s functional age—which tells us how old it acts, rather than how old the person actually is.

The research team studied 557 people across multiple hospitals in the UK, Spain, and Singapore. They split them into two groups:

• The healthy group: 191 people with normal body weight and no heart or metabolic diseases (like diabetes or hypertension).
• The validation group: 366 people who had a higher body mass index (BMI above 25) and at least one condition such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or atrial fibrillation.

By analyzing their MRI scans, the team focused on two important heart measurements—left atrial end-systolic volume and left atrial ejection fraction—to create a formula for calculating heart age. Here's what they found:

• In healthy individuals (median age 34 years, 55% female), the functional heart age was almost identical to their actual age. Statistical analysis confirmed there was almost no difference (P = 0.993).
• But in people with health conditions (median age 53 years, 43% female), their functional heart age was, on average, 4.6 years older than their real age (P = 0.003).
• The heart aging effect was most noticeable in people with hypertension (P

Among people who were obese, the aging effect varied:

• Mild obesity (Class I): Heart age was slightly higher (P = 0.07).
• Moderate obesity (Class II): Similar trend (P = 0.11).
• Severe obesity (Class III): The heart was significantly older than expected (P

Lead researcher Dr. Pankaj Garg explained why this discovery is important. “We found that an MRI scan can reveal your heart’s ‘functional age’—how old it acts, not how old you are. For example, a 50-year-old with high blood pressure might have a heart that works like it’s 55.”

By knowing this information, doctors could step in early, giving advice or treatments before serious heart disease develops. “This is a game-changer for keeping hearts healthier, longer,” Dr. Garg said. “Heart disease remains one of the world’s biggest killers. Our MRI method provides a powerful tool to evaluate heart health before symptoms even appear.”

PhD student Hosam Assadi also emphasized how this method could change routine heart check-ups. “We’ve found a way to spot hearts that are aging too fast, and that could mean catching problems early enough to fix them. I hope this could become a standard check-up for hearts in the future.”

Source: UEA, Open European Heart Journal

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

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Physical inactivity is common among university students and can contribute to poor mental health and wellbeing. While physical activity (PA) programs can help, many struggle to keep up long-term behavior changes. Researchers wanted to see if mindfulness training—designed to build psychological skills and PA-related thinking—could make a difference.

The study involved 109 participants who were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group received an activity monitor and a daily step goal of 8,000 steps (PA-only group). The second group followed the same step target but also received digital mindfulness training for 30 days (MPA group). The researchers tracked their self-reported physical activity levels, sedentary time, wellbeing, mental health, motivation, enjoyment, and self-efficacy before and after the intervention.

Results showed that physical activity levels doubled, and students spent less time being sedentary. However, the MPA group—who had mindfulness training—showed greater but not statistically significant improvements compared to the PA-only group. The increase in PA was measured at 305 MET-minutes per week, while sedentary time dropped by 9.5 hours per week.

Psychological outcomes varied. While both groups became more mindful during exercise, the MPA group felt stronger intentions to stay active compared to the PA-only group. However, exercise self-efficacy remained unchanged, meaning participants' confidence in their ability to exercise regularly did not improve.

Lead researchers concluded that adding mindfulness training helped students become more motivated to stay active but did not lead to major differences in actual physical activity levels or time spent sitting. They recommend further studies to explore whether mindfulness-driven thinking can lead to lasting behavioral changes in physical activity over longer periods.

The findings highlight the potential for digital mindfulness interventions in health programs. However, researchers stress that more investigation is needed to determine how best to encourage long-term engagement in physical activity among university students.

Source: ScienceDirect

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Lightning, from space. 

Credit: Nichole Ayers/NASA

Most astronauts these days are fairly anonymous, and chances are you have never heard of Nichole Ayers. And that's OK.

But sometimes it's worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just how accomplished these people are. Ayers, 36, flew the supersonic F-22 stealth aircraft in the international war against the Islamic State and rose to become a major in the US Air Force before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021. Oh, yeah, she also completed a master's degree in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

For her first spaceflight, Ayers launched on the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station in March. This flight got a fair amount of media attention, but that was largely because the arrival of Crew-10 allowed the Crew Dragon spacecraft to which Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were assigned to return home. Since then, Ayers has spent 50 days in space, astronauting. This included a spacewalk last week, her first, alongside veteran astronaut Anne McClain.

As they returned to the airlock, the Earth below started to put on a lightning show, and Ayers took note, mesmerized. A day later, she picked up a camera and captured some additional lightning strikes, saying, "I am so amazed by the view we have up here of our Earth’s weather systems." I've chosen my favorite of these photos for today's post.

Source: Nichole Ayers/NASA

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In 2022, we told you about a study reporting evidence that an ancient Peruvian people called the Wari laced the beer served at their feasts with hallucinogens—particularly a substance derived from the seeds of the vilca tree, which was common in the region during the Middle Horizon period (circa 850 CE) when the Wari empire thrived. This may have helped the Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire.

Now archaeologists have discovered direct evidence that the use of vilca was a common practice some 1,000 years earlier than the Wari, thanks to analysis of artifacts unearthed at Chavín de Huántar, located about 250 kilometers north of Lima, Peru. And the Chavín people may have used it for a different purpose: to reinforce social hierarchies by limiting consumption of those substances to an elite few, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes ancient Egypt, as well as ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have been known to participate. The Wari empire lasted from around 500 CE to 1100 CE in the central highlands of Peru.

Vilca typically grows in the dry tropical forests in the region. The trees produce long legumes filled with thin seeds. The seeds, bark, and other parts of the tree all contain DMT, a well-known psychedelic substance that is also found in the ayahuasca brews of Amazonian tribes. However, the primary active ingredient is bufotenine, the effects of which quickly wear off if the drug is taken orally. So it's usually smoked, ingested in the form of snuff, or used as an enema by those seeking the full hallucinogenic effect.

A 4,000-year-old pipe laced with bufotenine residue and related paraphernalia was found in an Incan cave in Argentina in 1999—the oldest archaeological evidence to date for using vilca in South America. There is also evidence from historical accounts that a juice or tea derived from vilca seeds was sometimes added to chicha, a fermented beverage made from maize or the fruits of the molle tree native to Peru. This is one way to take vilca orally while still getting a weaker, sustained psychedelic effect, since the beta-carbolines produced during the fermentation of chicha suppress the stomach enzymes that counteract the high by deactivating the active compounds.

People of the neighboring state of Tiwanaku were known to mix such hallucinogens with alcohol, specifically maize beer. There are depictions of vilca seed pods on Wari jars that are about the right size for serving chicha. Excavations at a remote Wari outpost called Quilcapampa unearthed seeds from the vilca tree. Since no snuff paraphernalia was recovered from the site, it's most likely that the vilca was added to the chicha.

Heart of the Andes

Chavin de Huantar in modern-day Peru hosts several monumental buildings overseeing a large plaza, located at an elevation of 10,000 ft.

Daniel Contreras

 

A rendering of the Chavin de Huantar in modern-day Peru at its height.

Daniel Contreras

 

Chavín de Huántar was once the heart of the Chavín culture, a civilization that flourished in the central Andes centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire. Its oldest granite and limestone temples date back to about 1200 BCE, but people have lived at the site for much longer, since at least 3000 BCE. The center features an array of stone-faced structures built around open plazas with interior species that archaeologists call galleries. In 2022, archaeologists rediscovered a narrow duct leading to a small ritual chamber 8 meters deep beneath one of the site’s temple buildings. They dubbed it the Condor Gallery.

That expedition was led by Stanford University archaeologist John Rick, a co-author on this latest paper, which concerns the excavation of a sealed gallery located in the atrium of the site's Circular Plaza. Among the artifacts recovered were 23 items associated with using psychoactive plants: short snuff tubes, flat tablets, and small spoons, all made of animal bone except for one made of a marine mollusk shell.

The chemical analysis of the artifacts revealed that six showed traces of both vilca and nicotine derived from wild relatives of tobacco (Nicotiana), per the authors, with the latter confirmed by microbotanical analysis. Furthermore, there was some damage to starch grains recovered from inside the snuff tubes, suggesting exposure to dry heat—most likely the drying and toasting of vilca seeds and Nicotiana roots. "Drying and toasting is consistent with ethnographic accounts of the preparation of snuff in general and of vilca and tobacco in particular," the authors wrote. "The latter preparation also includes grinding, which could also be a cause of some of the observed damage."

Such psychoactive compounds may have been used in certain immersive rituals. "One of the few practices clearly represented in Chavín art is the procession," co-author Daniel Contreras, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Florida, told Ars. "These involve apparently costumed individuals, in some cases carrying shell trumpets. Some examples of the trumpets themselves have actually been excavated from another underground gallery very near the one that we write about here, lending credence to the idea that what's depicted in the art is some part of actual ceremonial practice."

A cultural transition

Unlike the Wari, who used psychedelics in communal settings to strengthen social bonds, the Chavín people were more exclusive about who got to partake, based on the fact that the snuff tubes were found in private chambers with limited capacity. This would serve to strengthen social hierarchies and reinforce the authority of the select few.

"The Wari examples are about 1,000 years later, as are the Tiwanaku ones, so maybe it's not surprising that there should be some variation in how people were using vilca," Contreras told Ars. "We don't know that this is the only context in which vilca was used at Chavín—just that it's clear it was being used in this particular restricted-access context. That's not to say that it or other substances—including such simple things as food and chicha—weren't also being used in more open contexts to build social bonds. Work parties for harvest or canal cleaning, for example, are still very much part of life in the rural Central Andes, and for that matter anywhere else (including the U.S.)."

"If I had to guess, I'd say those were very much part of Chavín as well," he added. "But that at the same time some kinds of rituals were very particular and likely exclusive with respect to location, content, and maybe substances involvement—both procuring plants and knowing how to prepare them may have required pretty specialized knowledge."

The discovery has broader implications because Chavín straddled a major social transition. Between 500 and 1,000 years after Chavín, "there were already sedentary villages practicing agriculture and engaged in communal building projects recognizably similar to Chavín—platform mounds arrayed around plazas," said Contreras. "However, there's little evidence of the existence of substantial and durable inequality, and much less evidence of craft specialization, production, and long-distance trade/exchange than there is at Chavín."

But in the 1,000 years after  Chavín, "settlements got significantly bigger and more urban, and several Andean societies can be found (Moche, for instance) that were very clearly strongly hierarchical; social, political, and economic inequality had become the norm," Contreras said. "Chavín is obviously not the only archaeological site found between those two extremes, but it's a really interesting place to examine that transition."

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425125122  (About DOIs).

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A new species of bacteria that functions like electrical wiring has recently been discovered on a brackish beach in Oregon. The species was named Candidatus Electrothrix yaqonensis in honor of the Yaquina tribe of Native Americans that once lived in and around Yaquina Bay, where the bacteria were found.

This species is a type of cable bacteria: rod-shaped microbes that are connected at both ends to one another to create a chain and which share an outer membrane, forming filaments several centimeters long. Cable bacteria are found in marine and freshwater sediments and, unusually among bacteria, are electrically conductive. This is due to their special metabolism, in which electrons generated by oxidizing sulfides in their deeper layers are sent to their surface layer, where they are received by oxygen and nitric acid.

The 25 species of cable bacteria known so far have been organized into two genera, Candidatus Electrothrix, which live in saltwater, and Candidatus Electronema, which live in fresh and brackish water. The new species discovered in this study has the genes and metabolic pathways of both the genera but is believed to be a bridge to an earlier branch of the Candidatus Electrothrix lineage, and so was classified as part of that genus.

The recently discovered species may provide new insights into how cable bacteria evolved and how they can function in diverse environments, Cheng Li, a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University and coauthor of the research, explained in a statement.

High Electrical Conductivity

Candidatus Electrothrix yaqonensis is distinct from existing cable bacteria in its appearance. Cable bacteria have outer shells that feature ridges, which spread out like mountains. The ridges of the new species are much thicker than those of previously known species, reaching an average thickness of about 228 nanometers, up to three times thicker than what has been seen before. The new species’ ridges are arranged in a spiral-like pattern on the surface of the filament, and their overall shape is more angular than that of other species.

But the most striking difference is that the new species’ filament is surrounded by a thick, transparent sheath. According to the authors of the paper outlining the discovery, this is a structure not previously seen. This sheath does not conduct electricity and is thought to protect the filament from the environment and foreign enemies.

Inside the new bacteria’s ridge is a fiber containing a nickel-centered metal complex, which functions as a “biological wire” that efficiently transports electrons along the filament. It is as if the structure itself was designed with an engineering intent.

The physical performance of the bacteria as a conductor is impressive. When the researchers placed microscopically isolated filaments on a gold electrode and applied a voltage, a graph showing the change in current and voltage produced a linear, symmetrical I-V curve—implying high electrical conductivity. The new species’ electrical resistance was approximately 370 kilo-ohms, which is equal to or better than that of known cable bacteria.

A Genetic Mosaic

Genomic analysis revealed that the new species has genetic features of both the Candidatus Electrothrix and Candidatus Electronema genera. This phenomenon, where genetically distinct material is intermingled within a single individual, is known as “mosaicism.” For example, this can be seen in the novel bacteria’s cytochrome, a type of protein involved in electron transport. Typically in the genus Candidatus Electrothrix, bacteria have a single heme (a complex composed of a divalent iron atom and a porphyrin). But the new species, like some other types of cable bacteria, is equipped with a cytochrome with two hemes.

This new species is also unique in the way it adapts to saline environments. Candidatus Electrothrix species, which live in saltwater, typically use an electron-transfer enzyme called “sodium-transporting NADH-quinone oxidoreductase (NQR)” to regulate osmotic pressure. But this enzyme is absent in Candidatus Electrothrix yaqonensis, which instead has several proteins— “sodium and proton exchange transporters (NHE)”—that exchange sodium ions and protons across the cell membrane. This is thought to be the result of adaptation to the unique environment of brackish water, where salinity fluctuates.

Further studies will reveal the mechanism of the unique sheath formation of Candidatus Electrothrix yaqonensis as well as the self-assembling process of its conductive fibers. According to the research team, this new species, because it combines high-electrical conductivity and environmental adaptability, has the potential to be used as a new material in the field of bioelectronics. Potentially it could help with the creation of biodegradable electronic devices and biosensors in the future. Its characteristics may also be useful for remediation of heavy metals and organic pollutants in sedimentary environments.

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

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Automakers that nest key controls deep in touchscreen menus—forcing motorists to drive eyes-down rather than concentrate on the road ahead—may have their non-US safety ratings clipped next year.

From January, Europe’s crash-testing organization EuroNCAP, or New Car Assessment Program, will incentivize automakers to fit physical, easy-to-use, and tactile controls to achieve the highest safety ratings. “Manufacturers are on notice,” EuroNCAP’s director of strategic development Matthew Avery tells WIRED, “they’ve got to bring back buttons.”

Motorists, urges EuroNCAP’s new guidance, should not have to swipe, jab, or toggle while in motion. Instead, basic controls—such as wipers, indicators, and hazard lights—ought to be activated through analog means rather than digital.

Driving is one of the most cerebrally challenging things humans manage regularly—yet in recent years manufacturers seem almost addicted to switch-free, touchscreen-laden cockpits that, while pleasing to those keen on minimalistic design, are devoid of physical feedback and thus demand visual interaction, sometimes at the precise moment when eyes should be fixed on the road.

A smattering of automakers are slowly admitting that some smart screens are dumb. Last month, Volkswagen design chief Andreas Mindt said that next-gen models from the German automaker would get physical buttons for volume, seat heating, fan controls, and hazard lights. This shift will apply “in every car that we make from now on,” Mindt told British car magazine Autocar.

Acknowledging the touchscreen snafus by his predecessors—in 2019, VW described the “digitalized” Golf Mk8 as “intuitive to operate” and “progressive” when it was neither—Mindt said, “we will never, ever make this mistake anymore … It’s not a phone, it’s a car.”

Still, “the lack of physical switchgear is a shame” is now a common refrain in automotive reviews, including on WIRED. However, a limited but growing number of other automakers are dialing back the digital to greater or lesser degrees. The latest version of Mazda’s CX-60 crossover SUV features a 12.3-inch infotainment screen, but there’s still physical switchgear for operating the heater, air-con, and heated/cooled seats. While it’s still touch-sensitive, Mazda’s screen limits what you can prod depending on the app you’re using and whether you’re in motion. There’s also a real click wheel.

But many other automakers keep their touchscreen/slider/haptic/LLM doohickeys. Ninety-seven percent of new cars released after 2023 contain at least one screen, reckons S&P Global Mobility. Yet research last year by Britain’s What Car? magazine found that the vast majority of motorists prefer dials and switches to touchscreens. A survey of 1,428 drivers found that 89 percent preferred physical buttons.

Motorists, it seems, would much prefer to place their driving gloves in a glove compartment that opens with a satisfying IRL prod on a gloriously yielding and clicking clasp, rather than diving into a digital submenu. Indeed, there are several YouTube tutorials on how to open a Tesla’s glove box. “First thing,” starts one, “is you’re going to click on that car icon to access the menu settings, and from there on, you’re going to go to controls, and right here is the option to open your glove box.” As Ronald Reagan wrote, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Voice Control Reversion

The mass psychosis to fit digital cockpits is partly explained by economics—updatable touchscreens are cheaper to fit than buttons and their switchgear—but “there’s also a natural tendency [among designers] to make things more complex than they need to be,” argues Steven Kyffin, a former dean of design and pro vice-chancellor at Northumbria University in the UK (the alma mater of button-obsessed Sir Jonny Ive).

“Creating and then controlling complexity is a sign of human power,” Kyffin says. “Some people are absolutely desperate to have the flashiest, most minimalist, most post-modern-looking car, even if it is unsafe to drive because of all the distractions.”

Automakers shouldn’t encourage such consumers. “It is really important that steering, acceleration, braking, gear shifting, lights, wipers, all that stuff which enables you to actually drive the car, should be tactile,” says Kyffin, who once worked on smart controls for Dutch electronics company Philips. “From an interaction design perspective, the shift to touchscreens strips away the natural affordances that made driving intuitive,” he says.

“Traditional buttons, dials, and levers had perceptible and actionable qualities—you could feel for them, adjust them without looking, and rely on muscle memory. A touchscreen obliterates this," says Kyffin. "Now, you must look, think, and aim to adjust the temperature or volume. That’s a huge cognitive load, and completely at odds with how we evolved to interact with driving machines while keeping our attention on the road.”

To protect themselves from driver distraction accusations, most automakers are experimenting with artificial intelligence and large language models to improve voice-activation technologies, encouraging drivers to interact with their vehicles via natural speech, negating the need to scroll through menus. Mercedes-Benz, for example, has integrated ChatGPT into its vehicles' voice-control, but it's far too early to say whether such moves will finally make good on the now old and frequently broken promise of voice-controlled car systems from multiple manufacturers.

In fact, sticking with Mercedes, the tyranny of touchscreens looks set to be with us for some time yet. The largest glass dashboard outside of China is the 56-inch, door-to-door “Hyperscreen” in the latest S-Class Mercedes comprising, in one curvaceous black slab, a 12.3-inch driver’s display, a 12.3-inch passenger touchscreen, and a 17.7-inch central touchscreen that, within submenus, houses climate control and other key functions.

To turn on the heated steering wheel on a Nissan Leaf, there’s an easy-to-reach-without-looking square button on the dashboard. To be similarly toasty on the latest Mercedes, you will have to pick through a menu on the MBUX Hyperscreen by navigating to “Comfort Settings.” (You can also use voice control, by saying “Hey Mercedes,” but even if this worked 100 percent of the time, it is not always ideal to speak aloud to your auto, as passengers may well attest.)

Tesla might have popularized the big-screen digital cockpit, but Buick started the trend with its Riviera of 1986, the first car to be fitted with an in-dash touchscreen, a 9-inch, 91-function green-on-black capacitive display known as the Graphic Control Center that featured such delights as a trip computer, climate control, vehicle diagnostics, and a maintenance reminder feature. By General Motors' own admission, drivers hated it, and it was this seemingly trailblazing feature, along with a reduction in the car's size, that supposedly led to the model's year-on-year sales plummeting by 63 percent.

Buick soon ditched the Riviera’s screen, but not before a TV science program reviewing the car asked the obvious question: “Is there a built-in danger of looking away from the road while you’re trying to use it?”

Reaction Times Worse Than Drunk or High

Screens or not, “motorists shouldn’t forget they are driving [potentially] deadly weapons,” says Kyffin. An average of 112 Americans were killed every day on US roads in 2023, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s most recent full-year statistics. That’s equivalent to a plane crash every day.

Despite the proliferation of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), motor crash fatalities in the United States have increased 21 percent in the past 15 years. Forty thousand people have died on the roads in each of the past three years for which complete federal records are available.

In-vehicle infotainment systems impair reaction times behind the wheel more than alcohol and narcotics use, according to researchers at independent British consultancy TRL. The five-year-old study, commissioned by road-safety charity IAM RoadSmart, discovered that the biggest negative impact on drivers’ reactions to hazards came when using Apple CarPlay by touch. Reaction times were nearly five times worse than when a driver was at the drink-drive limit, and nearly three times worse than when high on cannabis.

A study carried out by Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare in 2022 showed that physical buttons are much less time-consuming to use than touchscreens. Using a mix of old and new cars, the magazine found that the most straightforward vehicle to change controls on was the 2005 Volvo V70 festooned with buttons and no screens. A range of activities such as increasing cabin temperature, tuning the radio, and turning down instrument lighting could be handled within 10 seconds in the old Volvo, and with only a minimum of eyes-down. However, the same tasks on an electric MG Marvel R compact SUV took 45 seconds, requiring precious travel time to look through the nested menus. (The tests were done on an abandoned airfield.)

Distraction plays a role in up to 25 percent of crashes in Europe, according to a report from the European Commission published last year. “Distraction or inattention while driving leads drivers to have difficulty in lateral control of the vehicle, have longer reaction times, and miss information from the traffic environment,” warned the report.

A Touch Too Far

Seemingly learning little from Buick’s Riviera, BMW reintroduced touchscreens in 2001. The brand’s iDrive system combined an LCD touchscreen with a rotary control knob for scrolling through menus. Other carmakers also soon introduced screens, although with limitations. Jaguar and Land Rover would only show certain screen functions to drivers, with passengers tasked with the fiddly bits. Toyota and Lexus cars had screens that worked only when the handbrake was applied.

With curved pillar-to-pillar displays, holographic transparent displays, displays instead of rear-view mirrors, and head-up displays (HUD), it’s clear many in-car devices are fighting for driver attention. HUDs might not be touch-sensitive, but projecting a plethora of vehicle data, as well as maps, driver aids, and multimedia information, onto the windscreen could prove as distracting as toggling through menus.

“Almost every vehicle-maker has moved key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes,” EuroNCAP’s Avery tells WIRED. “Manufacturers are realizing that they’ve probably gone too far with [fitting touchscreens].”

“A new part of our 2026 ratings is going to relate to vehicle controls,” says Avery. “We want manufacturers to preserve the operation of five principal controls to physical buttons, so that’s wipers, lights, indicators, horn, and hazard warning lights.” This however does not address the frequent needs for drivers to adjust temperature, volume, or change driver warning systems settings (an endeavor all too commonly requiring navigating down through multiple submenus).

Perhaps unfortunately, it looks like continuing with touchscreens won’t lose manufacturers any of the coveted stars in EuroNCAP’s five-star safety ratings. “It’s not the case that [automakers] can’t get five stars unless they’ve got buttons, but we’re going to make entry to the five-star club harder over time. We will wind up the pressure, with even stricter tests in the next three-year cycle starting in 2029.”

Regardless, Avery believes auto manufacturers around the world will bring back buttons. “I will be very surprised if there are markets where manufacturers have a different strategy,” he says.

“From a safety standpoint, reducing the complexity of performing in-vehicle tasks is a good thing,” says Joe Young, the media director for the insurance industry-backed Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). “The research is clear that time spent with your eyes off the road increases your risk of crashing, so reducing or eliminating that time by making it easier to find and manipulate buttons, dials, and knobs is an improvement.”

Neither Young nor Jake Nelson, director of traffic safety research for AAA, would be drawn on whether US automakers—via the US version of NCAP—would adopt EuroNCAP’s button nudges. “Industry design changes in the US market are more likely to occur based on strong consumer demand,” Nelson says. “It would be ideal to see better coordination between NCAP and EuroNCAP, however, we have not observed much influence in either direction.”

Nevertheless, Nelson agrees that “basic functions, such as climate control, audio, and others, should be accessible via buttons.” He adds that the “design of vehicle technologies should be as intuitive as possible for users” but that the “need for tutorials suggests otherwise.”

For Edmund King, president of the AA (the UK equivalent to AAA), driver distraction is personal. “When cycling, I often see drivers concentrating on their touchscreens rather than the road ahead," he says. "Technology should be there to help drivers and passengers stay safe on the roads, and that should not be to the detriment of other road users.”

Screen Out

The deeper introduction of AI into cars as part of software-defined vehicles could result in fewer touchscreens in the future, believes Dale Harrow, chair and director of the Intelligent Mobility Design Center at London’s Royal College of Art.

Eye scanners in cars are already watching how we’re driving and will prod us—with haptic seat buzzing and other alerts—when inattention is detected. In effect, today’s cars nag drivers not to use the touchscreens provided. “[Automakers] have added [touchscreen] technologies without thinking about how drivers use vehicles in motion,” says Harrow. “Touchscreens have been successful in static environments, but [that] doesn’t transfer into dynamic environments. There’s sitting in a mock-up of a car and thinking it’s easy to navigate through 15 layers, but it’s far different when the car is in motion.”

Crucially, touchscreens are ubiquitous partly because of cost—it’s cheaper to write lines of computer code than to add wires behind buttons on a physical dash. And there are further economies of scale for multi-brand car companies such as Volkswagen Group, which can put the same hardware and software in a Skoda as they do a Seat, changing just the logo pop-ups.

Additionally, over-the-air updates almost require in-car computer screens. A car’s infotainment system, the operation of ambient lighting, and other design factors are an increasingly important part of car design, and they need a screen for manufacturers to incrementally improve software-defined vehicles after rolling off production lines. Adding functionality isn’t nearly as simple when everything is buttons.

Not all screens cause distractions, of course—reversing cameras are now essential equipment, and larger navigation screens mean less time looking down for directions—but to demonstrate how touchscreens and voice control aren’t as clever as many think they are, consider the cockpit of an advanced passenger jet.

The Boeing 777X has touchscreens, but they are used by pilots only for data input—never for manipulation of controls. Similarly, the cockpit of an Airbus A350 also has screens, but they’re not touch-sensitive, and there are no voice-activated controls either. Instead, like in the 777X, there are hundreds of knobs, switches, gauges, and controls.

Of course, considering the precious human cargo and the fact that an A350 starts at $308 million, you can't fault Airbus for wanting pilots' eyes on the skies rather than screens. There are slightly fewer tactile controls in the $429,000 Rolls-Royce Spectre, the luxury car company’s first electric vehicle. There’s a screen for navigation, yes, but also lots of physical switchgear. Reviewing the new Black Badge edition of the high-end EV, Autocar said the vehicle’s digital technology was “integrated with restraint.”

Along with Volkswagen reintroducing physical buttons for functions like volume and climate control, Subaru is also bringing back physical knobs and buttons in the 2026 Outback. Hyundai has added more buttons back into the new Santa Fe, with design director Ha Hak-soo confessing to Korean JoongAng Daily towards the end of last year that the company found customers didn't like touchscreen–focused systems. And, if EuroNCAP gets its way, that’s likely the direction of travel for all cars. Buttons are back, baby.

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It has been two hours since the divers left the coast behind. As they reach their designated GPS points in the Gulf of Mexico, their boats’ engines go from roaring to whispering. In pairs, they enter the Celestún Fishing Refuge Zone, one of the largest in Mexico. Their ritual is absolute: put on fins, adjust vests and hoses, clean visors, and load oxygen tanks and weights. For the next few minutes, their lives depend on having carefully prepared their dives to this place of hope.

They are here seeking to restore fisheries in decline or on the verge of collapse. This refuge, a no-catch zone established in 2019, covers 324 square kilometers and is monitored by the Yucatán Coast Submarine Monitoring Community Group, a group of community divers and fishers, who are supported by personnel from the Mexican Institute for Research in Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture (IMIPAS) and the civil association the Community and Biodiversity (COBI). Their methodology mixes local knowledge with scientific rigor.

The problem they face is a global one: Overfishing and environmental degradation are destroying the biodiversity of the oceans, with many countries lacking the will or resources to combat the problem. In 2024, as sea-surface temperatures broke all-time records, the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet report showed that, over the past 50 years, marine populations worldwide have declined in size by 56 percent. Over a third of current marine populations are overfished.

In Mexico, more than 700 marine species are fished in 83 fisheries, which support 200,000 Mexican families. Analysis of Mexico’s National Fishing Charter by IMIPAS indicates that 17 percent of the country’s fisheries are deteriorated, 62 percent are being exploited at their maximum sustainable level, and 15 percent have no information on their state. When the conservation nonprofit Oceana analyzed the same data, it found that 34 percent of Mexico’s fisheries are in "poor condition,” says to Esteban García Peña, Oceana’s coordinator of research and public policy.

Part of the problem is that, under Mexican law, no one is obligated to look after the health of the country’s fisheries; Mexico’s General Fisheries Law doesn’t obligate the government to take on this responsibility. Oceana has petitioned to change this, and in the face of legislative disinterest, even filed an injunction in 2021 against the Congress of the Union, alleging violations of human rights, such as access to a healthy environment and food. This inspired a proposal to revive Mexico’s deteriorated fishing zones, only for it not to be analyzed or approved by Congress, and the project was frozen.

In 50 years, the world has lost 56 percent of its marine populations.

Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

 

Faced with this uncertainty, communities have taken things into their own hands. Although the government isn’t obliged to protect and revive the country’s fisheries, people can request for it set up refuge zones to conserve and repopulate marine ecosystems. And so today, there are refuges in Baja California Sur, Quintana Roo, and Campeche, totaling more than 2 million hectares and benefiting, directly or indirectly, 130 species.

“When the first proposal was put forward, it seemed crazy,” says Alicia Poot, an IMIPAS researcher and head of the Regional Center for Aquaculture and Fisheries Research in Yucalpetén. “Some people think it’s closing the sea, but it’s not. It is working an area in a sustainable way, with community oversight.”

The Limits of Abundance

The day before the monitoring begins, the Celestún team gathers under a large palapa. Jacobo Caamal, COBI’s scientific diving expert, reviews the plan for the next few days. He jokingly gives practical advice, using coconuts to show how to measure sea cucumbers and sea snails.

They talk about sea cucumbers because, although it is not part of Mexican gastronomy, its fishing has brought a lot of profit to this coast. In the Chinese market these creatures can fetch more than $150 per plate. The hype over the echinoderm has driven practices that are harmful to the ecosystem and to the fishermen’s health, such as diving using a hookah, a makeshift diving machine that runs on gasoline and pumps oxygen down a tube to divers below the surface. Sanitary towels sometimes stand in as an oil filter, while mint tablets are taken to mitigate the taste of gas. In Celestún, nobody denies the risk of diving with this machine. Many know someone who has had an accident or died from decompression.

Until 2012, this area had cucumbers in abundance, but violation of its closed seasons brought the species to the brink of extinction. Divers started going deeper and deeper to hunt them. The situation became untenable. Then, a group of fishermen asked IMIPAS researchers for help to establish an area where the sea could have a chance to recover.

Overfishing has depleted other species here too. Leonardo Pech, founder of the refuge and captain of one of the boats during the monitoring trip, has been accompanying IMIPAS researchers for years to evaluate the state of marine species. A couple of decades ago, he says, scallops were fished until they were spent. It was intense and unregulated, Pech recalls. The fishermen knew they had to let the species recover, he says, but not everyone respected this need.

Some time later, the same thing happened with the Moorish crab. “They would cut off both claws. Everywhere you walked by, you’d see dead crab breasts. It was spent.” Then fishing of grouper began. “There were plenty, big. Now it’s gone down and the juvenile is this size,” Pech says, showing its small length with his hands.

Predation then reached the octopuses. New fishermen opted to use illegal compressors to dive instead of relying on artisanal fishing, which is done with wooden sticks, string, and bait. With this traditional method, females with young do not take the bait, and that protects the species from overfishing. But diving sweeps up octopuses evenly. In 2023, over 20,000 tons of octopus were caught in Yucatán.

The collapse of fisheries doesn’t just result in fewer animals and smaller sizes. It also pushes fishermen to go further and further out into the ocean sea and spend more days at sea. They even make unregulated adjustments to their fleet. “They raise their boats in search of more stability in deeper places, they add huts,” says Poot. Keeping profits higher than their operating costs is a necessity, even if this puts fishermen’s lives at risk—for instance when getting caught in storms in in homemade boats.

Nancy Gocher, coordinator of Oceana’s campaign team, explains that the depletion of marine resources—while partially being driven by overfishing—at the same time violates the fishermen’s right to work, their food sovereignty (more than 3 billion people obtain their nutrients from the sea), their identity, and their right to a healthy environment. They are also victims of forces outside of their control. "Fishing communities receive the first impact of the inclemencies aggravated by climate change,” she says.

Before applying for the refuge in Celestún, local fishermen and researchers had many conversations. When they saw the fisheries information compiled by the Regional Center for Aquaculture and Fisheries Research, they realized that it was not only the cucumber that needed protection. Species such as red grouper (Epinephelus morio) and red octopus (Octopus maya) were also listed as overexploited or in decline. So the community agreed to try replenish populations of red grouper, Caribbean lobster (Panulirus argus), Mayan octopus, and sea cucumber. Within the delimited area of the refuge, artisanal octopus fishing and the capture of king mackerel (Scomberomorus cavalla), Atlantic Spanish mackerel (Scomberomorus maculatus), and great barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda) is allowed between October and February using “trolling”—pulling a baited hook behind a boat; diving, sport fishing, and domestic consumption of other species is prohibited.

Against the “Race for Fish”

Josué Canul is one of the people under the palapa. “I was one of the first divers, known for being a poacher fisherman. I have been one of the biggest predators,” he says. For 30 years, Canul dived with hookahs. “I was their hater,” he says of conservationists—now he the refuge’s president. Three years ago, he didn’t believe in the project, but he went to one of its meetings. “I was going to fight,” he admits. But first, he sat down to listen. That day he understood his mistake: it was not a forbidden site, but a workspace. The area was new, and much remained to be done, but the idea captivated him for two reasons: the loss of marine abundance, which he was witnessing, and the promise of a better future. “I had always wanted, in unison, for the community to say: we don’t fish in this area so that it will reproduce and leave some here for us.”

In the past, it was said “that in Celestún they burned your boats, that the most terrible and furtive fishermen lived there,” says Mariana Suasnávar, a climate change specialist at COBI. To think that this community would be the first in the state to take such measures to recover the fisheries was far-fetched. Today, the idea is backed by 66 leaders, men and women.

Dismantling illegal fishing is difficult. Canul says that fishermen justify being poachers because it feeds their families. “Since we were kids, we have the culture that the more you catch, the more you have. We were never taught to take care,” he says. Andrea Saénz, a marine biologist and environmental economist at the Colegio de la Frontera Sur, calls this phenomenon “the race for fish,” in which “whoever gets there fastest gets the treasure.” In her view, this extractivist approach to the sea occurs because there is open access, which leads to thinking: “If I don’t take it out, someone else is going to do it.”

Poot points out that fishing refuge zones are a management tool, so that the communities return little by little to good practices. “That piece motivates them to take care, to teach the new generations how fishing should be, because today it has been distorted,” she says.

It’s expected that a well-kept fishing refuge will result in larger organisms, greater abundance of fish, and more diversity of species. A desired effect is overflow—that is, for these benefits to be seen beyond the borders of the protection site. Poot explains that, to measure this, it is crucial to establish a baseline of how the site is at the beginning and implement a constant monitoring program. “If five years go by and you don’t notice results, it is possible to extend it longer. Not all areas are equally resilient.”

Saénz says there is evidence of recovery with this strategy, but evaluating benefit takes time. “Experiments to evaluate that the cost of not fishing is offset by larval dispersal are scarce,” she says. She collaborated with COBI on a study on Isla Natividad, off the coast of Baja California Sur, where they collected data over ten years and found that lobster fishing was good at the boundaries of the reserve set up there.

Participatory Underwater Science

On the day of the monitoring, the divers are dropped on their backs into the sea and descend. For 30 minutes, a buoy tracks their location. Some pairs practice wandering dives, others follow a transect, a sampling line, to systematically collect data. Some describe the type of seabed and its contents every 50 centimeters for 50 meters; others identify, count, and indicate the size of fish. The invertebrate biometry team collects snails and cucumbers to measure them on the boat and, underwater, they record lobsters, octopus, and other organisms. Everyone notes whether the sampling site is inside or outside the refuge, key information for future comparisons. “It’s like taking a picture of the sea,” says Suasnávar.

Esther Yerves, a lawyer and part of a fishing family, returns soaking wet to the boat with a smile: “It's like entering another world,” she says. She joined the project after seeing the decline of the octopus and today is treasurer of the refuge and a member of the Yucatán Coast Submarine Monitoring Community Group, where 14 women and 12 men from different Yucatecan communities participate. She learned to dive to see with her own eyes if the effort was worth it, and to make her voice heard in the decision-making process.

The monitoring group is made up of people involved in the fishing chain with the support of organizations such as COBI, agencies such as IMIPAS, the Secretariat of Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture of Yucatán, and the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas. Members have received certifications in open water scuba diving, first aid, and species identification methodologies designed by IMIPAS and COBI. Their work helps to expose the results of sustainable management and to recognize if there is anything to adjust in the management of the area.

The Blue Economy Is Also Inland

When the team returns to land, they eat, bathe, and rest for a while. They get gas for the next trips, prepare food, and digitize their log sheets. Data capture takes place in a small room with air conditioning, cake, and coffee. From the log sheets jump the marine characters: mackerel scad (Decapterus macarellus), yellowtail snapper (Ocyurus chrysurus), canané. If someone mispronounces the Latin, they gently correct each other, rehearsing the name out loud with laughter. A copy of Paul Humann’s Reef Creature Identification, considered a must-have for divers, biologists, and marine life lovers, is passed from hand to hand, with team members pointing out the species they have already found and those they would like to see soon.

In the evenings, Caamal, the scientific diving expert from COBI, sits among the mosquitoes and the noise of filling tanks. There he explains to me that the success of the refuge goes beyond the biological aspects. “Monitoring biomass and fish is useful, but if the community doesn’t participate or know about the project, it loses meaning,” he says. A research article he coauthored emphasizes that protected conservation areas are most effective when combining technical expertise, Western science, and participatory science with local fishermen.

On land, they seek to empower fishermen, reduce the gender gap in the local economy, diversify voices in decision making (in Celestún there is a committee of women and another of young people), and strengthen community pride and the defense of the territory. Some groups are organizing against predatory tourism or the care of other coastal ecosystems, such as dunes or mangroves.

When Canul joined the project, there were pending issues that could not be put off: surveillance and monitoring. But there was no money. Canul is a restless person—his colleagues say that even underwater he keeps talking. It was only a few months after joining the refuge team that he assumed the presidency.

To raise funds, the Celestún group organizes festivals, but now they have won a grant from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). As a result, they are about to integrate electric motors into their work. Alondra Ramírez, UNDP Mexico Small Grants Programme associate in charge of the energy projects portfolio, explains that, using electric mobility will help reduce the environmental impact of surveillance, monitoring, and fishing.

Missing Eyes at Sea

In addition to the effort to obtain scientific data, fishermen monitor the area against poaching and look for ways to finance this. Since 2019, there has been no federal budget allocated to fisheries management in Mexico, including the operation of these zones. “Your budget speaks of your priorities. In the last six-year term, fishing was priority zero. Many of the things that have happened are thanks to the management and organization of civil society,” stresses Saénz.

Gocher of Oceana points out that many of the obstacles faced in marine conservation are due to the lack of social fabric. It’s known locally who is fishing illegally. “That they have to ask them not to do it implies a community conflict, but it also opens the opportunity to restore the social fabric. When the community sees results—that there are more resources, that forms of economy are created, such as tourism, that are more sustainable and at their pace—they begin to take care,” Gocher says.

“There are many fishing refuge zones and protected marine areas in which fishermen and fisherwomen make vigilance committees to make sure that fishing is done legally; they take care of everyone’s resources,” says Gocher. “In Mexico, 75 percent of the fisheries are exploited without management plans, which puts the sustainable development and wellbeing of the communities at risk.”

Many vigilance groups begin by financing activities out of their own pockets and, as they organize, they look for ways to be reimbursed.

Against poaching, the refuge team knows that they are swimming against the current, that they must deal with the frustration of taking care of a resource that others steal at night. They know they are at risk for pointing out those who break the rules, even if they are their neighbors. “Many times we look like clowns when we do surveillance, catch people who do something illegal and the law does nothing to them,” says Canul. During the monitoring, one of the captains notices a boat on the horizon and deduces that they are coming from illegal fishing. He picks up the radio and asks the others what to do; they decide not to interrupt the monitoring.

“We have little data to know how to fight illegal fishing. Inspection and surveillance in Mexico are not robust,” Gocher says. Analysis from Oceana has revealed a reduction in surveillance patrols by the National Commission of Aquaculture and Fisheries. In 2023, 332 maritime patrols and 99 land patrols were recorded, the lowest figures in 15 years. “There is no information on what happens when someone is caught or a vessel or product is seized. After the complaint, almost no one knows what happens. There is opacity in the data and a high level of impunity,” Gocher says.

Mexico is in the process of establishing 14 fishing refuge zones, which would total more than 100,000 hectares of conservation in seven states—mainly in Sonora and Yucatán. This year the peninsular state added two more refuges, one in El Cuyo and another in Chabihau; months ago, the Actam Chuleb refuge was made official, which had been operating as a community marine reserve for years. Due to the growing interest in the refuges, the creation of a National System of Fishing Refuge Zones has been proposed. A consultancy, financed by the World Bank and the French Development Agency, in coordination with the Mexican government, reviewed the idea. Suggestions include incorporating fishing goals as part of the National Development Plan, strengthening community management, creating a national fund, and providing legal security for coastal communities to manage their territory.

The vision for recovering the productivity of the sea, says Saénz, is an example of “coupled scales.” First, work with those who access a maritime territory, then see how they connect with their neighbors, then with currents, and with land-based activities. “You need a complete understanding of these phenomena.” What is impossible, she assures, is to try to recover a species without listening to the fishermen.

Juan Pech has seen marine beauty and also a damaged sea. The diver explains his commitment with an anecdote. Years ago, the man who taught him commercial diving told him where to go to find fish. Juan followed his instructions, but came to a dead site; nothing his teacher described was still there. If he ever has children, he says he doesn’t want to tell them about a sea they can’t see.

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

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Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton at the Lego drivers parade during the F1 Grand Prix of Miami.

PHOTOGRAPH: BRYN LENNON, FORMULA 1

If you've ever attended a Formula 1 event, you'll know: The cars are loud. The revving of an F1 car’s power unit can reach up to 140 decibels. That’s like standing next to a firework as it’s exploding. Now imagine there’s twenty of them, twenty fireworks going off simultaneously as the cars roar past you at 200 mph. The shock waves rip through the air and rattle the bones in your chest. It’s a full-body sensory experience. Most importantly, it rules hard.

It's exactly that visceral experience that Lego wanted to tap into when, last year, it partnered with Formula 1 to create ten full sets of teams and drivers for its Speed Champions line. This year, it's taking that a step further, and making them an awesome, full-sized reality. Today at the Miami Grand Prix, twenty drivers—including the celebrity drivers for McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull, and Ferrari—introduced themselves to the crowd while driving lifelike Big Builds of their F1 cars in the driver’s parade.

The project to get here has been as big as it sounds. Over the course of eight months, a team of 26 Lego engineers took about 22,000 hours total to build the brick-based fleet. This took the total cooperation of each Formula 1 team. Lego designer Marcel Stastny noted that each F1 team provided complete IP with approvals for faithful reproduction. “We had great cooperation,” Stastny said, which, beyond the engineering, was a coup given that Formula 1 teams guard the car's designs so closely.

Before their track debut, the cars were displayed in the Lego Garage at the west campus of Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Florida. I had the opportunity to get inside the McLaren car, which is made from the exact same standard Lego bricks that your kids can buy at home, made with Lego’s famously tight tolerances. It feels … well, as solid as a brick, which makes sense given that the car weighs over 3,000 pounds. You can lean on it or slap it with your hand without worry, although I’m pretty sure someone would’ve stopped me if I’d tried to kick it. There are some surprisingly faithful features. It might not have a real V6 engine (in fact, each car can only go 12 mph), and the drag reduction system (DRS) might not work either, but those are real F1 Pirelli tires set in a Lego hub.

PHOTOGRAPH: HECTOR VIVAS; GETTY IMAGES

PHOTOGRAPH: HECTOR VIVAS; GETTY IMAGES

PHOTOGRAPH: HECTOR VIVAS; GETTY IMAGES

Attention to Detail

F1 superfan and Lego ambassador Nicole, who goes by the name GirlBricksALot, concurs. “Down to the spoons for the side view mirrors, the tiles that are used for the camera mount on top, even the cheese slope piece on the front wing—they’re identical,” she says. “Every part of the car is satisfying.”

This isn't Lego's first Big Build in this space. In 2018, its designers brought that same commitment to authenticity with the drivable 1:1 Lego Bugatti made from Lego Technic elements (that’s Lego’s engineering line with rods, gears, and axles). Last year, McLaren driver Lando Norris took a Lego Technic P1 all the way around the course at Silverstone. But building ten authentic, driveable cars in eight months has been a feat on a different scale.

Each one of these is, of course, a masterful marketing operation, with Lego keen to promise this level of attention to detail has filtered down to the versions that you can build at home for $30—bringing racing fans closer to the cars they might never see in real life. A bit like Drive to Survive, it feels that Lego Speed Champions is serving as an entryway into a sport that has been opaque and inaccessible to so many for most of its history—something Nicole says she experienced as a young fan.

“[As a kid], I would follow F1 with articles or YouTube snippets,” she said. “You couldn’t even watch it. It’s impossibly hard to get into the sport as a driver, and it was impossibly expensive to go to.”

Today, the sport doesn't feel as inaccessible. I myself had a number of surprises. For a sport that has traditionally catered to such a wealthy clientele, it requires a surprising amount of physical endurance, whether that’s walking 11,000 steps to get from the gate to your section, broiling in the sun in your seat, or surviving for 8 hours on ice cream with chocolate sauce because you (I) refuse to wait in any more lines.

The second surprise was just how much fun everyone was having (not alcohol-related, although there was plenty of that). There are way more people wearing funny hats shaped like cars or wings than I expected, way more kids shrieking at the vibrations in the turn bridges. When it started raining during the practice rounds, I hid under an umbrella until I noticed fans gathering around the turns cheering whenever a driver threw up a high sheet of water, like Shamu. Both Formula 1 and Lego have a rich history and a deeply loyal fan base. It was especially easy to notice during the driver's parade that both are just … fun.

My 7-year-old son might not be able to tolerate the heat and walking that a Grand Prix requires (I can barely tolerate it, and I’m in my 40s) but he’s currently on his 6th Formula 1 set and counting. It's pretty awesome that teenage prodigy Kimi Antonelli rode in a car that looks just like his.

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but for computer scientists, two birds in a hole are better still. That’s because those cohabiting birds are the protagonists of a deceptively simple mathematical theorem called the pigeonhole principle. It’s easy to sum up in one short sentence: If six pigeons nestle into five pigeonholes, at least two of them must share a hole. That’s it—that’s the whole thing.

“The pigeonhole principle is a theorem that elicits a smile,” said Christos Papadimitriou, a theoretical computer scientist at Columbia University. “It’s a fantastic conversation piece.”

But the pigeonhole principle isn’t just for the birds. Even though it sounds painfully straightforward, it’s become a powerful tool for researchers engaged in the central project of theoretical computer science: mapping the hidden connections between different problems.

The pigeonhole principle applies to any situation where items are assigned to categories, and the items outnumber the categories. For example, it implies that in a packed football stadium with 30,000 seats, some attendees must have the same four-digit password, or PIN, for their bank cards. Here the pigeons are football fans, and the holes are the 10,000 distinct possible PINs, 0000 through 9999. That’s fewer possibilities than the total number of people, so some people must have the same digits.

This proof is notable not just for its simplicity, but also for what it leaves out. Many mathematical methods for proving that something exists are “constructive,” meaning they also show you how to find it. “Nonconstructive” proofs, like ones based on the pigeonhole principle, don’t have this property. In the football stadium example, knowing that some people must have the same PINs won’t tell you what they are. You can always go through the stands asking each person in turn. But is there a simpler way?

Questions like this one, about the most efficient way to solve problems, are at the heart of the branch of computer science known as computational complexity theory. Complexity theorists study such questions by lumping problems into classes based on certain shared properties. Sometimes the first step toward a breakthrough is simply defining a new class to unite problems that researchers hadn’t previously studied together.

That’s what happened in the 1990s, when Papadimitriou and other complexity theorists began to study new classes of problems, in which the goal is to find something that must exist because of the pigeonhole principle or another nonconstructive proof. That line of work has led to important progress in disparate fields of computer science, from cryptography to algorithmic game theory.

By January 2020, Papadimitriou had been thinking about the pigeonhole principle for 30 years. So he was surprised when a playful conversation with a frequent collaborator led them to a simple twist on the principle that they’d never considered: What if there are fewer pigeons than holes? In that case, any arrangement of pigeons must leave some empty holes. Again, it seems obvious. But does inverting the pigeonhole principle have any interesting mathematical consequences?

It may sound as though this “empty-pigeonhole” principle is just the original one by another name. But it’s not, and its subtly different character has made it a new and fruitful tool for classifying computational problems.

To understand the empty-pigeonhole principle, let’s go back to the bank-card example, transposed from a football stadium to a concert hall with 3,000 seats—a smaller number than the total possible four-digit PINs. The empty-pigeonhole principle dictates that some possible PINs aren’t represented at all. If you want to find one of these missing PINs, though, there doesn’t seem to be any better way than simply asking each person their PIN. So far, the empty-pigeonhole principle is just like its more famous counterpart.

The difference lies in the difficulty of checking solutions. Imagine that someone says they’ve found two specific people in the football stadium who have the same PIN. In this case, corresponding to the original pigeonhole scenario, there’s a simple way to verify that claim: Just check with the two people in question. But in the concert hall case, imagine that someone asserts that no person has a PIN of 5926. Here, it’s impossible to verify without asking everyone in the audience what their PIN is. That makes the empty-pigeonhole principle much more vexing for complexity theorists.

Two months after Papadimitriou began thinking about the empty-pigeonhole principle, he brought it up in a conversation with a prospective graduate student. He remembers it vividly, because it turned out to be his last in-person conversation with anyone before the Covid-19 lockdowns. Cooped up at home over the following months, he wrestled with the problem’s implications for complexity theory. Eventually he and his colleagues published a paper about search problems that are guaranteed to have solutions because of the empty-pigeonhole principle. They were especially interested in problems where pigeonholes are abundant—that is, where they far outnumber pigeons. In keeping with a tradition of unwieldy acronyms in complexity theory, they dubbed this class of problems APEPP, for “abundant polynomial empty-pigeonhole principle.”

One of the problems in this class was inspired by a famous 70-year-old proof by the pioneering computer scientist Claude Shannon. Shannon proved that most computational problems must be inherently hard to solve, using an argument that relied on the empty-pigeonhole principle (though he didn’t call it that). Yet for decades, computer scientists have tried and failed to prove that specific problems are truly hard. Like missing bank-card PINs, hard problems must be out there, even if we can’t identify them.

Historically, researchers haven’t thought about the process of looking for hard problems as a search problem that could itself be analyzed mathematically. Papadimitriou’s approach, which grouped that process with other search problems connected to the empty-pigeonhole principle, had a self-referential flavor characteristic of much recent work in complexity theory—it offered a new way to reason about the difficulty of proving computational difficulty.

“You’re analyzing the task of complexity theory using complexity theory,” said Oliver Korten, a researcher at Columbia.

Korten was the prospective student with whom Papadimitriou had discussed the empty-pigeonhole principle right before the pandemic. He came to Columbia to work with Papadimitriou, and in his first year of grad school he proved that the search for hard computational problems was intimately linked to all other problems in APEPP. In a specific mathematical sense, any progress on this one problem will automatically translate into progress on a host of others that computer scientists and mathematicians have long studied, such as the search for networks that lack simple substructure.

Korten’s paper immediately attracted attention from other researchers. “I was quite surprised when I saw it,” said Rahul Santhanam, a complexity theorist at the University of Oxford. “It’s incredibly exciting.” He and others have since built on Korten’s breakthrough to prove a flurry of new results about connections between computational difficulty and randomness.

“There is amazing richness to this,” Papadimitriou said. “It goes to the bone of important problems in complexity.”

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

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Raymond Ward wants to see solar panels draped over every balcony in the United States and doesn’t understand why that isn’t happening.

The technology couldn’t be easier to use—simply hang one or two panels over a railing and plug them into an outlet. The devices provide up to 800 watts, enough to charge a laptop or power a small fridge. They’re popular in Germany, where everyone from renters to climate activists to gadget enthusiasts hail them as a cheap and easy way to generate electricity. Germans had registered more than 780,000 of the devices with the country’s utility regulator as of December. They’ve installed millions more without telling the government.

Here in the US, though, there is no market for balcony solar. Ward, a Republican state representative in Utah who learned about the tech last year, wants that to change. The way he sees it, this is an obvious solution to surging power demand. “You look over there and say, ‘Well, that’s working,’” he told Grist. “So what is it that stops us from having it here?”

His colleagues agree. Last month, the legislature unanimously passed a bill he sponsored to boost the tech, and Republican governor Spencer Cox signed it. HB 340 exempts portable solar devices from state regulations that require owners of rooftop solar arrays and other power-generating systems to sign an interconnection agreement with their local utility. These deals, and other “soft costs” like permits, can nearly double the price of going solar.

Utah’s law marks the nation’s first significant step to remove barriers to balcony solar—but bigger obstacles remain. Regulations and standards governing electrical devices haven’t kept pace with development of the technology, and it lacks essential approvals required for adoption—including compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories. Nothing about the bill Ward wrote changes that: Utahans still can’t install balcony solar because none of the systems have been nationally certified.

These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean-energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.

In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.

“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems. The initial standard was followed by revised versions in 2018 and 2019 that further outlined technical requirements.

The regulatory structure has continued to evolve. Ofenheusle has worked with other advocates to amend grid safety standards, create simple online registration for plug-in devices, and enshrine renters’ right to balcony solar. Politicians supported such efforts because they see the tech easing the nation’s reliance on Russian natural gas. Cities like Berlin and Munich have provided millions of euros in subsidies to help households buy these systems, and the country is creating a safety standard for batteries that can store the energy for later use.

Meanwhile, the United States has yet to take the first step of creating a safety standard for the technology. US electrical guidelines don’t account for the possibility of plugging a power-generating device into a household outlet. The nation also operates on a different system that precludes simply copying and pasting Germany’s rules. The US grid, for example, operates at 120 volts, while that country’s grid operates at 230 volts.

Without proper standards, a balcony solar system could pose several hazards.

One concern is a phenomenon called breaker masking. Within a home, a single circuit can provide power to several outlets. Each circuit is equipped with a circuit breaker, a safety device within the electrical panel that shuts off power if that circuit is overloaded, which happens when too many appliances try to draw too much electricity at the same time. That prevents overheating or a fire. When a balcony solar device sends power into a circuit while other appliances are drawing power from the circuit, the breaker can’t detect that added power supply. If the circuit becomes overloaded—imagine turning on your TV while a space heater is running and you’re charging your laptop, all in the same room—the circuit breaker might fail to activate.

This was a concern in Germany, so it developed standards that limit balcony solar units to just 800 watts, about half the amount used by a hair dryer. That threshold is considered low enough that even in the country’s oldest homes, the wiring can withstand the heating that occurs in even the worst of worst-case scenarios, said Sebastian Müller, chair of the German Balcony Solar Association, a consumer education and advocacy group. As a result, Ofenheusle said there haven’t been any cases of breaker masking causing harm. In fact, with millions of the devices installed nationwide, Germany has yet to see any safety issues beyond a few cases where someone tampered with the devices to add a car battery or other unsuitable hardware, he said.

Another issue in the US is the lack of a compatible safety device called a ground fault circuit interrupter, or a GFCI. They are typically built into outlets installed near water sources, like a sink, washing machine, or bathtub. They’re designed to minimize the risk of electric shock by cutting off power when, for example, a hair dryer falls into a sink. Yet there are no certified GFCI outlets in the US designed for use with devices that consume power, like a blender, and those that generate it, like a balcony solar setup. Germany’s equivalent of a GFCI, called a residual current device, can detect bidirectional power flows, said Andreas Schmitz, a mechanical engineer and YouTuber in Germany who makes videos about balcony solar.

Some people have raised concerns about the shock risk of touching the metal prongs of a plug after unplugging a balcony solar device. German regulators accounted for that by requiring the microinverter—which converts currents from the panel into electricity fed into the home—shut down immediately in an outage or when it is suddenly unplugged. Most of them already have this feature, but any US standard will likely need to formalize that requirement.

The lack of an Underwriters Laboratories (UL) standard is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the adoption of balcony solar. The company certifies the safety of thousands of household electrical products; according to Iowa State University, “every light bulb, lamp, or outlet purchased in the US usually has a UL symbol and says UL Listed.” This assures customers that the product follows nationally recognized guidelines and can be used without the risk of a fire or shock.

While some companies have sold plug-in solar devices in the US without a UL listing, the company’s seal of approval typically is a prerequisite for selling products on the wider market. Consumers might be wary of using something that lacks its approval. Utah’s new balcony solar policy, for example, specifies that the law applies only to UL-listed products.

Achim Ginsberg-Klemmt, vice president of engineering at the plug-in solar startup GismoPower, has been working on creating such a standard for more than a year and a half. In 2023, the Department of Energy awarded his company a grant to work with UL to develop a standard.

GismoPower sells a mobile carport with a roof of solar panels and an integrated electric vehicle charger. Unlike rooftop solar, the system doesn’t need to be mounted in place but can be rolled onto a driveway and plugged in, generating electricity for the car, house, and the grid. “We’re basically taking rooftop solar to the next level” by making it portable and accessible for renters, Ginsberg-Klemmt said. The product is in use at pilot sites nationwide, though a lack of standardized rules for plug-in solar has forced the company to negotiate interconnection agreements with local utilities—a time-consuming and sometimes costly process.

GismoPower’s product avoids one of the biggest technical challenges with balcony solar by plugging into a dedicated 240-volt outlet, the kind typically used for dryers. Such an outlet serves a single appliance and uses a dedicated circuit, sidestepping the risk of overloading. But it runs headlong into the same obstacle of lacking a compatible UL standard. Ginsberg-Klemmt is working with researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, other entrepreneurs, and engineers at Underwriters Laboratories to develop such a standard, but it hasn’t been easy. “We have found so many roadblocks,” he told Grist.

One major sticking point is that any standard must comply with the National Electrical Code, a set of guidelines for electrical wiring in buildings that does not allow for the installation of plug-in energy systems like balcony solar. The rules are issued by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit trade association, and adopted on a state-by-state basis.

The code is updated every three years, with the next iteration due later this year for the 2026 edition. Ginsberg-Klemmt and his working group submitted recommendations for amending the code to allow plug-in solar—and every one of them was rejected in October.

Jeff Sargent, the National Fire Protection Association’s staff liaison to the National Electrical Code committee, told Grist that this is the first time the organization had received public comments about plug-in solar systems. For now, it cannot consider amendments to allow their use until a compatible ground fault circuit interrupter exists, he said. Once that’s available, he said, the association can ensure that outdoor outlets can be safely used for balcony solar.

Electrical standards are constantly evolving, and it often takes more than one cycle of code changes to allow for new products, said Sargent. Ginsberg-Klemmt said his group will continue to pursue other avenues to amend the codes.

Until that happens, a UL standard for plug-in solar is unlikely to go anywhere. But interest in plug-in energy solutions isn’t going away, and decisionmakers will have to adjust to that reality eventually, Ward said. It happened in Germany, where people across the political spectrum have embraced the technology. Ward believes the same thing will happen here. The way he sees it, “It’s just a good thing if you set up a system so people have a way to take care of as much of their own problems as they can.”

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The first production satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network launched earlier this week, but if you tuned in to the mission's official livestream, the truncated coverage had the feel of a spy satellite launch.

This changed with a video Amazon posted on social media Friday, giving space enthusiasts and prospective Kuiper customers their first look at the real satellites. The 40-second clip shows the Kuiper satellites separating from their launch vehicle in the blackness of space following liftoff Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Since Amazon unveiled Project Kuiper in 2019, officials at the retail giant have been shy about showing even the most basic imagery of their satellites. Images released by Amazon previously provided glimpses inside the company's satellite factory near Seattle, along with views of the shipping containers Amazon uses to transport spacecraft from Washington their launch base in Florida.

But none of the images showed what the satellites actually looked like. Ars asked Amazon officials multiple times over the last two years if the company would release pictures of the satellites in production, undergoing launch preparations, or even an artist's illustration. The answer was always no, or not at this time.

This policy contrasts with that of SpaceX, which operates the Starlink network in competition with Kuiper. Starlink is the largest constellation of satellites in orbit, with more than 7,300 spacecraft currently in space. OneWeb operates the second-largest satellite fleet, with more than 650 active satellites. Both constellations broadcast Internet signals with global reach using satellites in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX and OneWeb revealed basic information and photos about their satellites before they ever launched into space.

Amazon is far behind SpaceX in the market for consumer broadband service from space. Amazon aims to launch 3,232 Kuiper satellites on more than 80 rockets, primarily United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Atlas V and Vulcan, over the next few years.

An Atlas V rocket provided the ride to orbit for Amazon's first 27 operational Kuiper satellites Monday. The rocket's Centaur upper stage released the satellites at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers) less than an hour after liftoff.

Amazon requested ULA end the official live broadcast of the launch around five minutes into the flight, barely a quarter of the way through the Atlas V's 18-minute climb into orbit. After reaching orbit, the Centaur upper stage released the Kuiper satellites three at a time from a cylindrical carrier module fastened to the forward end of the rocket.

Trapezoids in space

All of these milestones occurred out of public view, a policy of secrecy similar to the launch of a clandestine military spy satellite. Of course, commercial companies like ULA have no obligation to broadcast their launches at all, and there's no requirement for Amazon to show pictures of its satellites.

The video Amazon released Friday of the Kuiper deployments is fuzzy, and the finer details of the satellites are unseen. However, it's clear enough to make out their basic design.

The Kuiper satellites are trapezoidal in shape. With their solar arrays folded up for launch, they look much like OneWeb's satellites, and a lot different than Starlinks, which have a flatter design to stack one on top of another inside SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX has used this architecture since the first Starlink launch in 2019, and it was novel at the time. Once in orbit, SpaceX releases tensioners to passively cast free the Starlink satellites all at once, allowing the stack of more than 20 spacecraft to disperse as they begin their missions.

Amazon's satellites were individually mounted to a dispenser for their ride to orbit Monday. Their deployments were staggered over about 15 minutes, with each satellite relying on its own timed separation mechanism.

What might have been

The employment history of Amazon's head of Project Kuiper, Rajeev Badyal, makes it all the more compelling to compare the two companies' designs. Badyal was SpaceX's vice president of satellites until he was fired by Elon Musk in 2018, reportedly because Musk wanted to move faster with Starlink. Badyal, a veteran of Microsoft, joined Amazon as a vice president of technology a few months later, the year before the official announcement of Project Kuiper.

"Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner," a source told Reuters at the time of Badyal's dismissal. Earlier in 2018, SpaceX launched a pair of prototype cube-shaped Internet satellites for demonstrations in orbit. Then, less than a year after firing Badyal, Musk's company launched the first full stack of Starlink satellites, debuting the now-standard flat-panel design.

In a post Friday on LinkedIn, Badyal wrote the Kuiper satellites have had "an entirely nominal start" to their mission. "We’re just over 72 hours into our first full-scale Kuiper mission, and the adrenaline is still high."

The Starlink and Kuiper constellations use laser inter-satellite links to relay Internet signals from node-to-node across their networks. Starlink broadcasts consumer broadband in Ku-band frequencies, while Kuiper will use Ka-band.

Ultimately, SpaceX's simplified Starlink deployment architecture has fewer parts and eliminates the need for a carrier structure. This allows SpaceX to devote a higher share of the rocket's mass and volume capacity to the Starlink satellites themselves, replacing dead weight with revenue-earning capability. The dispenser architecture used by Amazon is a more conventional design, and gives satellite engineers more flexibility in designing their spacecraft. It also allows satellites to spread out faster in orbit.

Others involved in the broadband megaconstellation rush have copied SpaceX's architecture.

China's Qianfan, or Thousand Sails, satellites have a "standardized and modular" flat-panel design that "meets the needs of stacking multiple satellites with one rocket," according to the company managing the constellation. While Chinese officials haven't released any photos of the satellites, which could eventually number more than 14,000, this sounds a lot like the design of SpaceX's Starlink satellites.

Another piece of information released by United Launch Alliance helps us arrive at an estimate of the mass of each Kuiper satellite. The collection of 27 satellites that launched earlier this week added up to be the heaviest payload ever flown on ULA's Atlas V rocket. ULA said the total payload the Atlas V delivered to orbit was about 34,000 pounds, equivalent to roughly 15.4 metric tons.

It wasn't clear whether this number accounted for the satellite dispenser, which likely weighed somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds at launch. This would put the mass of each Kuiper satellite somewhere between 1,185 and 1,259 pounds (537 and 571 kilograms).

This is not far off the estimated mass of SpaceX's most recent iteration of Starlink satellites, a version known as V2 Mini Optimized. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has launched up to 28 of these flat-packed satellites on a single launch.

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We're on the verge of being screwwormed.

The biological barrier was breached, they're slithering toward our border, and the US Department of Agriculture is now carpet-bombing parts of Mexico with weaponized flies to stave off an invasion.

This is not a drill. Screwworms are possibly the most aptly named parasites imaginable, both literally and figuratively. Screwworms—technically, New World Screwworms—are flies that lay eggs on the mucous membranes, orifices, and wounds of warm-blooded animals. Wounds are the most common sites, and even a prick as small as a tick bite can be an invitation for the savage insects.

Once beckoned, females lay up to 400 eggs at a time. Within about a day, ravenous flesh-eating larvae erupt, which both look and act like literal screws. They viciously and relentlessly bore and twist into their victim, feasting on the living flesh for about seven days. The result is a gaping ulcer writhing with maggots, which attracts yet more adult female screwworms that can lay hundreds more eggs, deepening the putrid, festering lesion. The infection, called myiasis, is intensely painful and life-threatening. Anyone who falls victim to screwworms is figuratively—well, you know.

Previous victories

Screwworms aren't a new foe for the US. Decades ago, they were endemic to southern areas of the country, as well as the whole of Central America, parts of the Caribbean, and northern areas of South America. While they're a threat to many animals, including humans, they are a bane to livestock, causing huge economic losses in addition to the carnage.

In the 1950s, the US began an intensive effort to eradicate screwworms. The successful endeavor required carefully inspecting animals and monitoring livestock movements. But most importantly, it relied on a powerful method to kill off the flies.

The ploy—called the Sterile Insect Technique—throws a wrench into the unique life cycle of screwworms. After the larvae feast on flesh, they fall to the ground to develop into adults, a process that takes another seven days or so during warm weather. Once adults emerge, they can live for around two weeks, again depending on the weather. In that time, females generally only mate once, but don't worry—they make the most of the one-night stand by retaining sperm for multiple batches of eggs. While females lay up to 400 eggs at once, they can lay up to 2,800 in their lives.

After carefully studying the life cycle, USDA scientists figured out a way to sterilize male fly larvae with doses of gamma radiation without hurting the males' abilities to find mates. USDA scientists then used small aircraft to bomb screwworm-riddled areas with millions of sterile male flies. The onslaught of sterilized flies elbows out fertile ones from their one-time chances of mating with a female, cratering the population.

The method is remarkably successful. Screwworms were eradicated from the US by about 1966. Through the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, the frontline of the worms was pushed down through Central America. Screw worms were eventually declared eradicated from Panama in 2006. That year, the USDA partnered with Panama to build a sterile fly production facility that would be used to maintain a biological barrier along the Darién Gap at the border of Panama and Columbia. Along the barrier, sterile flies have been released by air at least once a month since the eradication, according to Mark Fox, an entomologist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who gave a clinical presentation on screwworms in October.

Risk of resurgence

For decades, the US and Central America have mostly been free of screwworms, a fact that is estimated to have saved US farmers $900 million every year. There was a blip in 2016 when screwworms mysteriously showed up in the Florida Keys, producing ghastly wounds on the islands' adorable and endangered Key deer, the smallest of North America’s white-tailed deer. But with intensive efforts and about 188 million sterile flies, the outbreak was declared over by the end of March 2017. The source of the screwworms was never identified.

Now, the US is staring down a more significant threat. In 2022, the biological barrier at the Darién Gap was breached. By July 2023, screwworms reached Costa Rica, then Nicaragua in March 2024, and Honduras by September 2024. Now, they are in Mexico.

In February, the USDA announced it was shifting its aerial sterile fly bombings from Panama to Mexico to try to halt the northward advancement. In comments this week, Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins said that the parasites are currently south of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest strip of land between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. The overall goal is to push them back down to the Darién Gap.

But the effort to force the worms southward will be challenging. In the CDC's October presentation warning clinicians of the threat, Fox and other experts noted that keeping the parasites from spreading has been difficult. Challenges include varied topography that makes surveillance tricky, indigenous communities in hard-to-reach areas, communication barriers, inadequate wound care in animals, and continued transportation of animals through unmonitored checkpoints.

Clinical horrors

Compared to humans, livestock and other animals are at far greater risk from screwworms' resurgence. For instance, there were at least 18,553 animal cases in Panama last October but only 79 human cases in the country. Still, when screwworms get a taste for human flesh, it's not pretty. The infection is extremely painful, and every single one of the larvae must be physically removed—and again, there are often hundreds. The procedure typically requires surgery.

As CDC Medical Officer Rebecca Chancey remarked in the clinical presentation, the larvae are "pretty tenacious and hang on pretty tightly, so oftentimes, you know, a great deal of force is required to remove them." Once the larvae are out, doctors must remove necrotic tissue, clean the wound, treat for any secondary infections, and try to manage the pain.

There have been at least three human cases of screwworm myiasis in the US in recent years: In 2014, a 26-year-old US woman fell asleep on a beach in the Dominican Republic after drinking and came home with an infestation of screwworm larvae in her ear. In 2023, a 64-year-old man took a trip to Argentina and Brazil soon after having surgery on his cheek. Larvae were visible in the surgical wound before he left, and his cheek bandage reportedly fell off during his flight home. And last year, an immunosuppressed man traveled to the Dominican Republic and came back with an infestation in his nose and sinus cavities. (You can watch extremely graphic footage of US doctors trying to remove them here.)

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Have you ever pulled an all-nighter because of anxiety? Found yourself doomscrolling on your phone when you should have gone to bed hours ago? Purposely downed too many cups of coffee at three in the morning? There are some insomniac flies who would like a word.

It appears that fruit flies that spend their days lazily buzzing through the lush orchards and rainforests of Queensland, Australia, live in paradise. That changes at sunset. After dark, the flies are plagued by the Gamasodesqueenslandicus mites, which can attach themselves like ticks and literally eat the flies alive in their sleep. Researchers led by University of Cincinnati biologist Joshua Benoit have now discovered that flies that have had enough of the mites will stay awake at the expense of their health.

These mite-resistant flies drain their nutrient reserves to stay up all night, making them more susceptible to starvation. Insomniacs consumed more oxygen and were generally more active than non-resistant flies; they also experienced changes in gene activity related to their metabolisms.

Having a breakdown

Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) may be pests to humans, but they have their own pests to contend with. Ectoparasitic mites such as G. queenslandicus are some of the worst. Being bitten can put the flies' immune and repair responses into overdrive, at great energy cost. Parasitized flies are also less successful at mating.

Given all that, the flies are likely better off staying awake and in defense mode.

Benoit and his team compared the flies’ daytime and nighttime activities. They also bred generation after generation of mite-resistant flies to see how their resistance would evolve. When humans purposely select for or against certain features in other organisms like this, it's known as artificial selection. This was meant to give the researchers an idea of how mite-resistant flies evolve in response to mites in nature.

While many genes saw changes after the researchers selected for mite resistance, those associated with metabolic processes such as glycolysis, which involves enzymes breaking down glucose, were especially affected.

“We found that more than 30 metabolism genes were differently [activated] in these flies, suggesting they were burning their energy a little faster than you’d expect,” Benoit said in a press release.

Those genes associated with metabolism were upregulated, meaning they showed an increase in activity. An observed loss of body fat and protein reserves was evidently a trade-off for resistance to mites. This suggests there was increased lipolysis, or the breakdown of fats, and proteolysis, the breakdown of proteins, in resistant lines of flies.

Parasite paranoia

The depletion of nutrients could make fruit flies less likely to survive even without mites feeding off them, but their tenaciousness when it comes to staying up through the night suggests that being parasitized by mites is still the greater risk. Because mite-resistant flies did not sleep, their oxygen consumption and activity also increased during the night to levels no different from those of control group flies during the day.

Keeping mites away involves moving around so the fly can buzz off if mites crawl too close. Knowing this, Benoit wanted to see what would happen if the resistant flies’ movement was restricted. It was doom. When the flies were restrained, the mite-resistant flies were as susceptible to mites as the controls. Activity alone was important for resisting mites.

Since mites are ectoparasites, or external parasites (as opposed to internal parasites like tapeworms), potential hosts like flies can benefit from hypervigilance. Sleep is typically beneficial to a host invaded by an internal parasite because it increases the immune response. Unfortunately for the flies, sleeping would only make them an easy meal for mites. Keeping both stereoscopic eyes out for an external parasite means there is no time left for sleep.

“The pattern of reduced sleep likely allows the flies to be more responsive during encounters with mites during the night,” the researchers said in their study, which was recently published in Biological Timing and Sleep. “There could be differences in sleep occurring during the day, but these differences may be less important as D. melanogaster sleeps much less during the day.”

Fruit flies aren’t the only creatures with sleep patterns that parasites disrupt. Evidence of shifts in sleep and rest in birds and bats has been shown to happen when there is a risk of parasitism after dark. For the flies, exhaustion has the upside of better fertility if they manage to avoid bites, so a mate must be worth all those sleepless nights.

Biological Timing and Sleep, 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s44323-025-00031-7

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Welcome to Edition 7.42 of the Rocket Report! For about a decade now, we've been following the development of the Starbase facility in South Texas. Up until 2019, progress was slow, but then the Starship program kicked into high gear, and SpaceX built up a production site beneath tents. The area has come a long way since then, and as soon as this weekend, there may be a new municipality, Starbase, in Texas.

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

Firefly's Alpha rocket fails again. Firefly Aerospace launched its two-stage Alpha rocket from California early Tuesday, but something went wrong about two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, rendering the vehicle unable to deploy an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin, Ars reports. The booster stage jettisoned from Alpha's upper stage two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, and that's when things went awry. A bright cloud of white vapor appeared high in the sky, indicating an explosion—or something close to it.

Not a great record ... A short time later, Firefly released a statement acknowledging a "mishap during first stage separation... that impacted the Stage 2 Lightning engine nozzle." Firefly is one of just a handful of active US launch companies with rockets that have reached low-Earth orbit, but its Alpha rocket hasn't established a reliable track record. In six flights, Alpha has amassed just two unqualified successes. Two prior Alpha launches deployed their payloads in lower-than-planned orbits, and the rocket's debut test flight in 2021 failed soon after liftoff.

Hypersonic missile launches from the Cape. The US military launched a long-range hypersonic missile last Friday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a test flight that, if successful, could pave the way for the weapon's operational deployment later this year. The Army's Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon fired out of a canister on a road-mobile trailer shortly after sunrise on Florida's Space Coast, then headed east over the Atlantic Ocean propelled by a solid-fueled rocket booster, Ars reports.

Getting into the game ... The new missile is poised to become the first ground-based hypersonic weapon fielded by the US military. Russia has used hypersonic missiles in combat against Ukraine. China has "the world's leading hypersonic missile arsenal," according to a recent Pentagon report on Chinese military power. After a successful test flight from Cape Canaveral last year, the long-range hypersonic weapon—officially named "Dark Eagle" by the Army earlier this week—will give the United States the ability to strike targets with little or no warning.

Vega launches Biomass satellite. A Vega C rocket successfully launched an Earth science satellite for the European Space Agency, a mission officials said was also a demonstration of European space sovereignty, Space News reports. The 1,250 kg Biomass satellite was built by Airbus Defence and Space as part of ESA’s Earth Explorer program of Earth science missions. The launch was the first for the Vega C since its return to flight in December 2024, nearly two years after a launch failure on a mission designated VV22.

Space sovereignty a priority ... After the launch, officials emphasized the importance of having both Vega C and the larger Ariane 6 rocket in operation. "In the current context, full of uncertainty and with some geopolitical evolution," said David Cavaillolès, chief executive of Arianespace, "the fact that we are able to cover any mission with our two launchers is something that is of utmost importance." There are four more Ariane 6 and two more Vega C launches planned for this year, with the next being another Vega C launch in July.

Europe tests P160C rocket booster. The European Space Agency said that the initial test of its P160C solid-propellant rocket motor, on April 24, was a success. The test firing lasted for more than two minutes, completing a full burn and expending all of its propellant as would happen during a launch. This new booster is a larger version of the P120C motor currently in use as a strap-on booster by the Ariane 6 rocket and as the core stage of the Vega C rocket.

We need more power, Scotty ... Compared to the P120C, the new booster holds 14 percent more propellant, for a total of 167 metric tons, and is a meter taller. The larger and more powerful booster will allow Ariane 6 and Vega-C to launch heavier payloads into different orbits and destinations. It will also be used by the next-generation Vega-E rocket. The upgraded booster is important for the Ariane 6 to meet its commitment to launch hundreds of Project Kuiper satellites for Amazon.

ULA launches its first rocket of the year. The first 27 operational satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network lifted off from Florida's Space Coast on Monday evening on an Atlas V rocket, the opening salvo in a challenge to SpaceX's dominant Starlink global Internet service, Ars reports. Monday's milestone launch kicks off a test campaign in low-Earth orbit to verify the functionality and performance of Amazon's satellites. In a statement earlier this month, Amazon said it planned to begin providing service to customers later this year.

Putting the Atlas V to the test ... The Atlas V, manufactured by United Launch Alliance, flew in its most powerful configuration, with five strap-on solid rocket boosters and an extended nose cone to accommodate the Kuiper satellites. Amazon's 27 spacecraft added up to become the heaviest payload ever launched by an Atlas V in 102 missions. Amazon is using the Atlas V to boost its first batches of satellites to orbit and aims to launch thousands more Kuiper satellites in the next few years.

SpaceX launches 50th rocket of the year. The California company launched two separate Starlink missions within six hours of each other on Monday. The second of these, the Starlink 12-10 mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, was the company's 50th of the year, Spaceflight Now reports.

That's quite a cadence you've got there ... Since there are so many, it is kind of boring keeping count of Falcon 9 missions these days, but with 50 launches in the first third of the year, the company is on pace for 150 Falcon family launches this year. For what it's worth, the company also recently launched its 250th Starlink mission overall, a pretty remarkable feat in less than six years.

Isaacman commits to Artemis II and III as is. The US Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday advanced the nomination of private astronaut and businessman Jared Isaacman as the next administrator of NASA to the Senate floor, setting up the final step before he is confirmed, Ars reports. The vote was not unanimous, at 19–9, with all of the nay votes coming from senators on the Democratic side of the aisle. However, some key Democrats voted in favor of Isaacman, including the ranking member of the committee, Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

Approval was contingent on support for Artemis ... Notably, both Cantwell and the committee's chair, Republican Ted Cruz of Texas, cited Isaacman's support for the Artemis Program, and flying the next two missions on the Space Launch System rocket, as critical factors in their support. "A commitment to keeping on with the Moon mission is the key requirement we have to have in this position," Cantwell said. "While it's not clear to me where the Trump administration ultimately will end up on the NASA budget, and I have concerns about some of their proposed cuts today, Mr. Isaacman seems to be committed to the current plan."

NASA swaps an Artemis II rocket engine. A couple of weeks ago, ground teams at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida removed one of the four main engines from the Space Launch System rocket slated to send four astronauts on a voyage around the Moon next year, Ars reports. NASA officials ordered the removal of one of the massive rocket's RS-25 main engines after discovering a hydraulic leak on the engine's main oxidizer valve actuator, which controls the flow of super-cold liquid oxygen propellant into the engine's main combustion chamber.

Installed two years ago ... In its place, technicians installed another RS-25 engine from NASA's inventory to the bottom of the rocket's core stage, which is standing vertical on its mobile launch platform inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy. This is the first time NASA has replaced a main engine on the SLS core stage. The four RS-25 main engines had been installed on the core stage in 2023 while the rocket lay horizontally inside its factory in New Orleans before its shipment to Florida.

China eyes stainless steel, like Starship. A Chinese state-owned rocket maker is making progress in producing large diameter stainless steel tanks for its next-generation launch vehicles, Ars reports. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology has announced the development of prototype 5.0-meter and 10.6-meter-diameter stainless steel propellant tanks over the past month, with the latter marking a breakthrough for the country’s super heavy-lift rocket plans.

Working toward Long March 9 ... The 10.6-meter-diameter, 9.0-meter-high tank is part of the development of the Long March 9, a future reusable super heavy-lift rocket designed for large lunar and infrastructure missions that would transform the country’s launch capabilities. It is also being used in early mission concepts for crewed Mars missions. The Long March 9 project has morphed in recent years from an expendable rocket designed to facilitate crewed lunar missions, to a reusable, stainless-steel project for major infrastructure missions. The changes follow the development and demonstrated progress of SpaceX’s Starship.

A vote is coming on Starbase, the city. Nearly 10 years after SpaceX began operating in a small community in Cameron County just a few miles inland of the Gulf Coast, employees who live there and other residents will vote to incorporate their Starbase community as Texas’ newest city. If the majority of them vote yes on Saturday, the leaders they elect at the same time will have the responsibility of creating a city from the ground up, the Texas Tribune reports.

Given who is voting, a yes vote is likely ... As a Type C municipality, Starbase will have a commission form of government—a mayor and two commissioners—who will be elected by the voters on the same day they vote to incorporate. Their terms in office last two years, unlike the typical four-year terms held by officials in larger cities. SpaceX leaders have made no secret of their plans to grow Starbase. "Incorporating Starbase will streamline the processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world-class place to live—for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space," Starbase Manager Kathryn Lueders wrote recently.

However, SpaceX loses contest over beach access. Proposed legislation that would have handed authority to SpaceX to issue closures of Boca Chica Beach and the nearby road died after a vote by state lawmakers on Monday, Chron.com reports. The vote was close, with seven members of the Texas House State Affairs Committee against and six members in favor of Senate Bill 2188, which is the companion to state Rep. Janie Lopez's House Bill 4660. SpaceX sought more control over when it could control the main road leading to and from the Starbase site for launch-related activities.

Battle is not over yet ... The South Texas Environmental Justice Network celebrated the bills' demise, saying it also stopped an associated bill that would have made it a Class B misdemeanor for unauthorized people to remain at a closed beach, as it would be an "FAA-designated hazard area." The group said the bills' defeat is a "significant victory" in preserving beach access for future generations. Going forward, Cameron County in South Texas can retain authority over beach closures near SpaceX's launch facilities. Still, a retooled version of the bill could wind up going through the legislature before it adjourns at the end of May.

Next three launches

May 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-3 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 18:13 UTC

May 4: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-84 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 08:48 UTC

May 5: Long March 12 | Unknown payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 11:05 UTC

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Image: Aurora

After years of testing and validation, Aurora says its first fully autonomous tractor-trailers are operating on public highways in Texas. The company’s Class 8 trucks are now making customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, having already completed 1,200 miles “without a driver,” Aurora said. The clients for these initial trips are Uber Freight, the ridehailing company’s trucking brokerage, and Hirschbach Motor Lines, a carrier that delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight.

Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said he rode in the backseat during the first truck’s inaugural ride, which he called “the honor of a lifetime.”

“We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly,” Urmson said in a statement. “Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads.”

Aurora said it plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025.

Driverless trucks were once expected to precede robotaxis and personally owned autonomous vehicles in mass adoption, considering that highways are vastly less complex than city and residential streets. But self-driving truck operators have run into hurdles involving the technology and regulation that have delayed their public debut. Some companies, like Embark Trucks, TuSimple, and Locomation, have gone out of business, while others have cut plans to deploy driverless trucks as timelines have stretched into the future and funding has dried up.

Moreover, public opinion toward autonomous vehicles has trended downward, thanks in part to missteps of companies like Tesla and Cruise. But like Waymo, Aurora has placed its hopes on a measured, conservative approach to commercialization, as well as an emphasis on safety.

Founded in 2017 by alumni of Uber, Tesla, and Waymo, Aurora had planned to deploy its fully autonomous trucks in 2024. But those plans got delayed until this year, with the company continuing to tweak its autonomous system for surface-street driving and construction sites.

Aurora says its technology presents a possible solution to the challenges currently facing the trucking industry, such as a trucker shortage, high turnover rates, and increasingly expensive operating costs. The company says its system can address these specific problems, while also reducing labor costs and heightening safety on the highway.

Aurora has spent four years conducting supervised pilot hauls, mostly in Texas, where it delivered over 10,000 customer loads across 3 million autonomous miles. The company says it has also demonstrated capabilities, such as predicting red light runners, avoiding collisions, and detecting pedestrians in the dark hundreds of meters away. And it has forged partnerships with a bunch of leading players in the trucking industry, including Continental, Volvo, Uber, and others.

The need to start charging customers for deliveries is evident if you look at Aurora’s earnings. In its most recent report, the company reported a net loss of $748 million for 2024, down from $796 million the previous year. While the loss decreased, Aurora’s revenue estimates have declined. Aurora expects to report its first quarter earnings on May 8th.

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Being a model citizen and a person of taste, you probably don't need this reminder, but some others do: Federal judges do not like it when lawyers electronically watermark every page of their legal PDFs with a gigantic image—purchased for $20 online—of a purple dragon wearing a suit and tie. Not even if your firm's name is "Dragon Lawyers."

Federal Magistrate Judge Ray Kent of the Western District of Michigan was unamused by a recent complaint (PDF) that prominently featured the aubergine wyrm.

"Each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multi-colored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit," he wrote on April 28 (PDF). "Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon."

Kent then ordered "that plaintiff shall not file any other documents with the cartoon dragon or other inappropriate content."

The unusual order generated coverage across the legal blogging community, which was apparently ensorcelled by a spell requiring headline writers to use dragon-related puns, including:

• Judge Slays Dragon-Branded Lawyer’s Marketing Effort
• Magistrate judge is breathing fire over law firm's dragon logo on legal pleadings
• Exit the Dragon
• US judge gives fiery response to e-filing “dominated by large cartoon dragon dressed in a suit”

Jacob A. Perrone is the lawyer behind Dragon Lawyers (phone number: [area code redacted] JAKELAW). His website, which also features the purple dragon and a bunch of busted links in the footer, says that the firm "integrates AI to lower the cost of legal services."

The New York Times got in touch with Perrone this week, who explained that he liked Game of Thrones, that he bought the dragon image online, and that he selected it because "people like dragons." He plans to keep using the logo but will tone it down in future filings.

The whole story would be far more humorous were it not from a case in which Perrone represented a woman who claims that she nearly died after being incarcerated and not given proper medical care. Perrone must now refile his complaint in that case—without the cartoon dragon.

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Military-grade infrared vision goggles use detectors made of mercury cadmium telluride, a semiconducting material that’s particularly sensitive to infrared radiation. Unfortunately, you need to keep detectors that use this material extremely cool—roughly at liquid nitrogen temperatures—for them to work. “Their cooling systems are very bulky and very heavy,” says Xinyuan Zhang, an MIT researcher and the lead author of a new study that looked for alternative IR-sensitive materials.

Added weight was a sacrifice the manufacturers of high-end night-vision systems were mostly willing to make because cooling-free alternatives offered much worse performance. To fix this, the MIT researchers developed a new ultra-thin material that can sense infrared radiation without any cooling and outperforms cooled detectors at the same time. And they want to use it to turn thermal vision goggles into thermal vision spectacles.

Staying cool

Cooling-free infrared detectors have been around since before World War II and mostly relied on pyroelectric materials like tourmaline that change their temperature upon absorbing infrared radiation. This temperature change, in turn, generates an electric current that can be measured to get a readout from the detector. Although these materials worked, they had their issues. Operating at room temperature caused a lot of random atomic motion in the pyroelectric material, which introduced electrical noise that made it difficult to detect faint infrared signals.

In cooled mercury cadmium telluride detectors, this atomic motion is dramatically lower. “Cooling them down to liquid nitrogen temperatures is done to suppress the internal noise,” Zhang explains. Her team figured getting this kind of low-noise performance out of pyroelectric materials was theoretically possible. The caveat was that these materials need to be absurdly thin to get the noise down. And this made manufacturing a bit tricky.

Non-stick surfaces

The process of fabricating ultra-thin films (between one and a few tens of nanometers) made of various materials is called epitaxy and is used in manufacturing chips and two-dimensional semiconductors. It relies on growing crystalline structures on a substrate material. The key challenge is getting those crystalline films off the substrate without damaging them—they tended to stick to the substrates like fried eggs to an old pan.

One way to do that is called remote epitaxy, where an intermediate layer made out of graphene or other material is introduced between the substrate and the growing crystals. Once the epitaxy process is done, the substrate and everything on it are soaked in a chemical solution that dissolves this intermediate layer, leaving the crystalline film intact. This works but is expensive, difficult to scale, and takes a lot of time. To make the process cheaper and faster, the MIT team had to grow the crystals directly on the substrate, without any intermediate layers. What they were trying to achieve was a non-stick frying pan effect but at an atomically small scale.

Weakening the bonds

The material that prevented the crystalline films from sticking to substrates wasn’t Teflon but lead. When the team was experimenting with growing different films in their previous studies, they noticed that there was a material that easily came off the substrate, yet retained an atomically smooth surface: PMN-PT, or lead magnesium niobate-lead titanate.

The lead atoms in the PMN-PT weakened the covalent bonds between the film and the substrate, preventing the electrons from jumping through the interface between the two materials. “We just had to exert a bit of stress to induce a crack at the interface between the film and the substrate and we could realize the liftoff,” Zhang told Ars. “Very simple—we could remove these films within a second.”

But PMN-PT, besides its inherent non-stickiness, had more tricks up its sleeves; it had exceptional pyroelectric properties. Once the team realized they could manufacture and peel away PMN-PT films at will, they tried something a bit more complex: a cooling-free, far-infrared radiation detector. “We were trying to achieve performance comparable with cooled detectors,” Zhang says.

The detector they constructed was made from 100 pieces of 10-nanometer-thin PMN-PT films, each about 60 square microns, that the team transferred onto a silicon chip. This produced a 100-pixel infrared sensor. Tests with ever smaller changes in temperature indicated that it outperformed state-of-the art night vision systems and was sensitive to radiation across the entire infrared spectrum. (Mercury cadmium telluride detectors respond to a much narrower band of wavelengths.)

But before the US Air Force that funded this study gets its predator-like thermal vision spectacles—or even super-thin, lightweight FIR sensors—there are a few challenges left to overcome.

Next-gen night vision?

Sensors and their cooling systems alone are not enough to build a good night-vision system. “We are still working to develop this into a functional night-vision device. We still need some optical design to focus light onto our detector, some power supply, circuitry, and we need to integrate this into our goggles,” Zhang says.

She said that, although the infrared detecting layers are very thin themselves, finding space for all the other parts will be the next problem to solve on the way toward miniaturizing night-vision devices further. “I think night-vision contact lenses will be challenging to build, but I expect our technology could potentially be used to make something that looks like normal spectacles,” Zhang suggested. Other applications she is considering are infrared sensors that could enable autonomous cars to orient themselves better in difficult weather conditions, like during a heavy fog. But there’s a lot we can potentially do with easily manufactured ultra-thin films.

Zhang thinks the atomic liftoff method developed by her team can be applied to other films, not just ones containing lead. Her team suspects that it can induce the same non-stick effect using lead in the substrate, rather than in the film. This should open a path toward using them in wearable sensors, flexible transistors, or even very small computers. “If we can generalize this method to other materials, we can use it in many other applications,” Zhang claims.

Nature, 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08874-7

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

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of March): 1,357

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend