Archaeologists recently unearthed a bone projectile point someone dropped on a cave floor between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago—which, based on its location, means that said someone must have been a Neanderthal.

The point (or in paleoarchaeologist Liubov V. Golovanova and colleagues’ super-technical archaeological terms, “a unique pointy bone artifact”) is the oldest bone tip from a hunting weapon ever found in Europe. It’s also evidence that Neanderthals figured out how to shape bone into smooth, aerodynamic projectiles on their own, without needing to copy those upstart Homo sapiens. Along with the bone tools, jewelry, and even rope that archaeologists have found at other Neanderthal sites, the projectile is one more clue pointing to the fact that Neanderthals were actually pretty sharp.

Getting to the point

Archaeologists found the bone point in Mezmaiskaya Cave, high in the Caucasus Mountains (Mezmaiskaya is also home to the remains of three Neanderthals who lived around 90,000 years ago; anthropologists sequenced samples of their DNA in earlier studies). Herbivore teeth from the same layer of sediment dated to around 70,000 years old, and the bone point’s position near the bottom of that layer probably makes it closer to 80,000 or 70,000 years old. That makes it the oldest bone projectile point ever found in Europe (so far).

At about 9 centimeters long and just 6 millimeters wide at its base, the point is much too light to be of much use as a thrusting weapon, which means it must have been meant to strike from a distance. And it’s shaped for the purpose, sleek and straight.

The point lay near an ancient hearth, which the Neanderthals had built “in a natural hollow on top of a large limestone block.” A few stone tools, along with debris from flint-knapping, lay scattered nearby, hinting that the Neanderthals probably sat near the hearth to make and retouch their tools. Ten thousand years before them, other Neanderthals had lived and died here. And thousands of years later, still others would leave behind more traces of their lives and handiwork.

But the bone spear tip, as Golovanova and colleagues point out, is unique (and pointy).

Paleolithic weaponsmithing 101

The point is shaped from the hard outer layer of bone (called cortical bone), probably from one of the massive leg bones of a bison. Under the microscope, Golovanova and colleagues could still see the grain pattern that marked where muscle once attached to the bone, even though the original knob of bone that formed the attachment had been ground flat and smooth by the Neanderthal who made the point.

Golovanova and colleagues’ microscopes also revealed shallow, parallel grooves where Neanderthal crafters had used stone tools and carefully scraped, ground, and polished the bone into exactly the right shape without breaking or splintering it. A couple of discolored spots also reveal that the point’s maker hardened its tip in a fire.

And if the tip doesn't seem as sharp as you'd expect, Golovanova and colleagues say it's sharp enough.

"To be an effective hunting weapon," write the archaeologists, "the bone point does not need to have a sharply pointed (needle-like) distal end (in contrast to bone awls), but it needs to have a strong, conical tip, symmetrical outlines, and a straight profile."

Traces of bitumen, or tar, on the point—which Golovanova and colleagues identified using spectroscopy—show that it must have been secured to its wooden haft with the sticky substance. That’s also how Neanderthals mounted many of their stone tools, so it’s not surprising that they’d do the same with a bone point. But making and using tar or resin requires a fair amount of technical know-how, and it’s easy to get it wrong and end up with an unusable mess.

Earlier hominins made bone tools, too; archaeologists have found a hippo femur hand ax made by Homo erectus and even some knapped bone dating back 1.5 million years. But those tools were roughly shaped, using the same chipping and flaking methods their makers would have used on stone. For some things, that works, but for something like the streamlined spear point from Mezmaiskaya, working bone takes different techniques: less flaking, more grinding.

Working bone into a streamlined, aerodynamic spear point, then hafting it onto a shaft with tar that had to be extracted and refined before use takes some sophisticated knowledge and skill. And it’s clear that the Neanderthals developed that skill on their own, instead of acquiring it from our species through some sort of prehistoric ITAR violation. Even so, Golovanova and colleagues note in their paper that “the production technology of bone-tipped hunting weapons used by Neanderthals was in the nascent level in comparison to those used and introduced by modern humans.” (Which seems a bit rude.)

Slightly damaged, use at own risk

A small crack at the tip of the spear point shows that some Neanderthal hunter used it at least once and managed to hit something. Golovanova and colleagues examined the crack and the finer network of cracks (visible in micro-CT images) that spread back and out from the original break. Those cracks closely resembled damage from a head-on impact, which archaeologists have seen in bone tools from other sites and in experimental studies (also called “archaeologists made some bone-tipped spears and threw them at things to see what would happen,” which is an excellent approach to science).

And apparently a bone spear point was worth trying to fix up and reuse, because traces of grinding show that someone tried to smooth out the crack, probably with a stone tool.

What kinds of prey were the Neanderthals of Mezmaiskaya Cave hunting? Based on the bones found in the cave, many of which show marks from cutting and scraping, the local menu included some birds and small mammals, but also bigger game like bison, deer, relatives of modern horses, and wild sheep and goats.

The point is, interspecies interactions are complicated

Archaeologists have found plenty of evidence that Neanderthals used bone tools for all sorts of things, from shaping and retouching stone to softening animal hides. The projectile point, though, is the first evidence that Neanderthals knew how to carefully work bone into a particular shape, instead of just picking up a conveniently shaped rib to smooth out some hides.

Using specific processes to sculpt bone, combined with using ocher to decorate things and using tar and resin to stick things together, is part of what anthropologists have defined as “modern” human behavior. And it looks like Homo sapiens and Neanderthals each worked most of it out on their own, separately, long before the two species met.

There’s good reason to think that the two groups eventually traded some key bits of technology here and there, but that exchange wasn’t the one-way street that anthropologists once expected.

Journal of Archaeological Science, 2023 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2025.106223; (About DOIs).

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Later this year, Boston Dynamics plans to put its all-electric humanoid Atlas robot to work in a Hyundai factory. The new version of the bot, evolved from the hydraulic Atlas model that’s been performing viral video demos since 2013, made its public debut last spring. But while the company’s dog-like Spot and warehouse robot Stretch are already deployed at industrial sites, the Hyundai pilot will be the first time Atlas is used in commercial manufacturing.

Boston Dynamics, which was acquired by Hyundai for $1.1 billion in 2021, is coy about how the robot will be used, but the general idea is that it’s designed to be stronger and more reliable than a human worker. “The robot is going to be able to do things that are difficult for humans,” Boston Dynamics spokesperson Kerri Neelon says. “Like pick up very heavy objects and carry things that are awkward for humans to carry.”

Atlas will have friends: 2025 looks set to be the year that multipurpose humanoid robots, until now largely confined to research labs, go commercial. Some have already taken their first tentative robot steps into paid work, with Agility Robotics’ Digit moving items in a warehouse and Figure’s eponymous biped shipping out to commercial customers last year.

Tech giants are also getting in on the trend: Both Apple and Meta are rumored to be working on some kind of consumer-facing humanoid robot. A 2024 Goldman Sachs report estimates that humanoid robots will represent a $38 billion market by 2035—more than six times what the firm projected a year earlier.

The basic promise of humanoid robots is that they will be able to switch between multiple tasks, just like their human peers. It’s a fundamentally different approach from traditional assembly line automation, which builds an entire environment around the specific tasks required for manufacturing. Jonathan Hurst, cofounder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, expects its robots to sit alongside that process, not disrupt it.

“A purpose-built automation solution is always going to be higher performance and lower cost for that purpose,” Hurst says. “That’s great if you have 24/7 operations for that specific thing you want to do.” But for tasks that don’t need to run around the clock, a flexible robot could be more productive.

Boston Dynamics puts it a different way. With factories already designed to be a safe place for automation, the company says it built Atlas with an eye toward making a robot that could go everywhere else. “We live in a human-first world,” Neelon says, “so we should build a robot that reflects that.”

But there are challenges to getting humanoid robots to market. Tesla’s Optimus has been heavily anticipated since the company first announced it in 2021, but a demo in October drew concerns when the robots on display were revealed to be human-controlled, raising questions about the extent to which Optimus could function autonomously. In January, Musk said the company was set to build “several thousand” robots over the course of 2025—but in April he told investors production could be impacted by the restrictions on rare-earth metal exports China implemented in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

One of the biggest roadblocks to making multipurpose humanoids truly useful has been the time it takes to teach robots how to do different tasks. But experts think the huge progress made by large language models could help with that problem. That’s part of the reason humanoid robot projects are emerging at companies like Apple, Meta, and Tesla, which already have thriving AI labs. In March, Google DeepMind released a new AI model called Gemini Robotics with just this application in mind, using the adaptability of a large language model to make robots better at adapting to new situations.

Once robots have the ability to learn skills on the fly, they’re better equipped to switch from task to task like a human worker. “You can imagine a grocery or tractor supply store has one, and that robot can be in the backroom depalletizing, cleaning, stocking shelves, checking inventory, just a huge range of things,” says Hurst. “That’s where the real value comes in.”

Ongoing progress in natural language processing also means robots could take guidance through voice commands. Programming a new task could be as simple as a supervisor saying, “Please mop the floor,” making it easier for robots to work alongside human colleagues.

But there are still safety concerns around heavy metal robots working side by side with humans, and there will be plenty of edge cases to contend with. Chris Atkeson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, says the central challenge will be reliability. He used the example of a robot left to restock shelves overnight. The task might be done perfectly for months until a failure case emerges.

“Suppose the owner comes in one day and nothing’s on the shelves, everything’s on the floor. Suppose the place burns down,” Atkeson says. “Those are very expensive failures.”

Still, the rapid pace of progress on AI models gives reason to be optimistic. “If you’d asked me five years ago, I would have said, ‘Never gonna happen,’” Atkeson says. “But with large language models, we have made enormous progress in what I’ll call ‘common sense.’ Maybe we’re almost there.”

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NASA's Psyche spacecraft, located nearly 150 million miles from Earth on the way to an unexplored metal asteroid, has stopped firing its engines after detecting a problem in its propulsion system.

NASA published an update Tuesday revealing that the robotic spacecraft shut off its plasma thrusters earlier this month. The news wasn't widely shared until Wednesday, when NASA science chief Nicky Fox posted it on X.

"Engineers with NASA’s Psyche mission are working to determine what caused a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system," the agency said. The spacecraft detected the drop in pressure April 1 inside the line that feeds xenon fuel to the spacecraft's four plasma thrusters.

Sensors aboard the Psyche probe detected a pressure reduction in the xenon fuel line from about 36 pounds per square inch to about 26 psi. "As designed, the orbiter powered off the thrusters in response to the decrease," NASA said.

The Psyche spacecraft uses solar electric propulsion, a highly efficient means of maneuvering through space that relies on solar-generated electricity and more than a ton of xenon gas stored in seven 22-gallon (82-liter) tanks. Inside each of the mission's four thrusters, an electromagnetic field ionizes the xenon gas before expelling the ions to produce thrust.

These things happen

Louise Prockter, director of NASA's planetary science division, said engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are looking into the problem.

So far, there's no effect on the Psyche spacecraft's trajectory. Psyche's plasma thrusters can remain unpowered until at least mid-June before the spacecraft would begin to drift off course, according to NASA. Mission managers decided to keep Psyche's engines turned off until they better understand the pressure decrease. If engineers trace the problem to the fuel line itself, NASA has the option of switching to a backup fuel line to resume thrusting.

"This kind of thing happens and that’s why we build redundancy into our missions," Prockter said at a meeting of Mars scientists Wednesday. "We don't have any concerns at the moment about it, but we’re obviously keeping tabs on it.”

Each electric thruster on Psyche generates just 250 milli-newtons of thrust, roughly equivalent to the weight of three quarters. But they can operate for months at a time, and over the course of a multi-year cruise, these thrusters provide a more efficient means of propulsion than conventional rockets.

The plasma thrusters are reshaping the Psyche spacecraft's path toward its destination, a metal-rich asteroid also named Psyche. The spacecraft's four electric engines, known as Hall effect thrusters, were supplied by a Russian company named Fakel. Most of the other components in Psyche's propulsion system—controllers, xenon fuel tanks, propellant lines, and valves—come from other companies or the spacecraft's primary manufacturer, Maxar Space Systems in California.

The Psyche mission is heading first for Mars, where the spacecraft will use the planet's gravity next year to slingshot itself into the asteroid belt, setting up for arrival and orbit insertion around the asteroid Psyche in August 2029.

Psyche launched in October 2023 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on the opening leg of a six-year sojourn through the Solar System. The mission's total cost adds up to more than $1.4 billion, including development of the spacecraft and its instruments, the launch, operations, and an experimental laser communications package hitching a ride to deep space with Psyche.

Psyche, the asteroid, is the size of Massachusetts and circles the Sun in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. No spacecraft has visited Psyche before. Of the approximately 1 million asteroids discovered so far, scientists say only nine have a metal-rich signature like Psyche. The team of scientists who put together the Psyche mission have little idea of what to expect when the spacecraft gets there in 2029.

Metallic asteroids like Psyche are a mystery. Most of Psyche's properties are unknown other than estimates of its density and composition. Predictions about the the look of Psyche's craters, cliffs, and color have inspired artists to create a cacophony of illustrations, often showing sharp spikes and grooves alien to rocky worlds.

In a little more than five years, assuming NASA gets past Psyche's propulsion problem, scientists will supplant speculation with solid data.

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. April's list includes new research on tattooed tardigrades, the first live image of a colossal baby squid, the digital unfolding of a recently discovered Merlin manuscript, and an ancient Roman gladiator whose skeleton shows signs of being gnawed by a lion.

Gladiator vs. lion?

Popular depictions of Roman gladiators in combat invariably include battling not just human adversaries but wild animals. We know from surviving texts, imagery, and artifacts that such battles likely took place. But hard physical evidence is much more limited. Archaeologists have now found the first direct osteological evidence: the skeleton of a Roman gladiator who encountered a wild animal in the arena, most likely a lion, based on bite marks evident on the pelvic bone, according to a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The skeleton in question was that of a young man, age 26 to 35, buried between 200–300 CE near what is now York, England, formerly the Roman city of Eboracum. It's one of several such skeletons, mostly young men whose remains showed signs of trauma—hence the suggestion that it could be a gladiator burial site. "We used a method called structured light scanning [to study the skeleton]," co-author Tim Thompson of Maynooth University told Ars. "It's a method of creating a 3D model using grids of light. It's not like X-ray or CT, in that it only records the surface (not internal) features, but since it uses light and not X-rays etc, it is much safer, cheaper, and more portable. We have published a fair bit on this and shown its use in both archaeological and forensic contexts."

The team compared the pelvic lesions found on the subject skeleton with bite marks from modern animal specimens and concluded that the young man had been bitten by a "large feline species," most likely a lion scavenging on the body around the time of death. The young man was decapitated after death for unknown reasons, although this was a ritualistic practice for some people during the Roman period. While the evidence is technically circumstantial, "we are confident with our conclusions," said Thompson. "We've adopted a multidisciplinary approach to address this issue and have drawn on methods from different subjects, too. Our use of contemporary comparison zoological material is really what gives us the confidence."

PLoS ONE, 2025. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0319847  (About DOIs).

Tattooed tardigrades

Tardigrades (aka "water bears") are micro-animals that can survive in the harshest conditions: extreme pressure, extreme temperature, radiation, dehydration, starvation—even exposure to the vacuum of outer space. Scientists have exploited the robustness of these creatures to demonstrate a new ice lithography technique that can be used to essentially tattoo patterns at the nanoscale on living creatures. They described their method in a paper published in the journal Nano Letters.

Creating precision patterns on living organisms is challenging because the latter require very specific conditions in order to thrive, while fabrication techniques typically require harsh environments—the use of corrosive chemicals, for instance, vacuum conditions, or high radiation. So researchers at Westlake University tested their ice lithography on tardigrades in their dehydrated state (cryptobiosis). Once cooled, the tardigrades were coated with vaporized anisole, creating an ice layer. The team used an electron beam to etch patterns in that layer. Once the creatures were warmed back up, the parts of the ice layer that had not been exposed to the beam sublimated away, and the pattern was preserved on the tardigrade's surface, even after the creatures were rehydrated.

Granted, only about 40 percent of the tardigrade test subjects survived the full procedure, but further improvements could improve that rate significantly. Once the technique is fully developed, it could enable the fabrication of nanoscale patterns for marking living organisms, such as tracking single cells as they develop or for the creation of sophisticated biosensors.

Nano Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c00378  (About DOIs).

Holograms that can be grabbed

A volumetric display consists of scattering surfaces distributed throughout the same 3D space occupied by the resulting 3D image. Volumetric images can be viewed from any angle, as they seem to float in the air, but no existing commercial prototypes let the user directly interact with the holograms—until now. There is a new kind of volumetric display called FlexiVol that allows people to interact directly with 3D graphics displayed in mid-air. Elodie Bouzbib of the Public University of Navarra presented the research at the CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Japan this month.

The key lies in a fast oscillating sheet known as a diffuser, onto which synchronous images are projected at high speed (2,880 images per second) and at different heights; human persistence of vision ensures that these images are perceived as true 3D objects. But the diffusers are usually made of rigid materials and hence pose a safety hazard should a user try to reach through and interact directly with the hologram; safety domes are usually employed because of this.

FlexiVol replaces the rigid diffuser with elastic bands that will not permanently deform or twist, distorting the 3D display, and has a different resonant frequency from the volumetric system. The team was inspired by the taxonomy of gestures used with 2D elastic displays and touch screens: swiping, for instance, or pinching in and out to make an image larger or smaller. They tested FlexiVol with a selection of users performing three sample tasks showcasing the ability to manipulate the 3D graphics, such as "grasping a cube between the thumb and index finger to rotate it, or simulating walking legs on a surface using the index and ring fingers," said Bouzbib.

Look ma, no spashback!

Men, are you tired of urine splashback when you use the loo? Scientists at the University of Waterloo have developed the optimal design for a splash-free urinal, dubbed the Nautilus (aka the "Nauti-loo"). We first covered this unusual research back in 2022, when the researchers presented preliminary results at a fluid dynamics conference. Their final findings have now formally appeared in a paper published in PNAS Nexus.

Per the authors, the key to optimal splash-free urinal design is the angle at which the pee stream strikes the porcelain surface; get a small enough angle, and there won't be any splashback. Instead, you get a smooth flow across the surface, preventing droplets from flying out. (And yes, there is a critical threshold at which the urine stream switches from splashing to flowing smoothly, because phase transitions are everywhere—even in our public restrooms.) It turns out that dogs have already figured out the optimal angle as they lift their legs to pee, and when the team modeled this on a computer, they pegged the optimal angle for humans at 30 degrees.

The next step was to figure out a design that would offer that optimal urine stream angle for men across a wide range of heights. Instead of the usual shallow box shaped like a rectangle, they landed on the curved structure of the nautilus shell. They conducted simulated urine stream experiments with the prototypes, et voila! They didn't observe a single droplet splashing back. By comparison, the other urinal designs produced as much as 50 times more splashback. The team did come up with a second design with the same optimal angle, dubbed the Cornucopia, but unlike the Nautilus, it does not fit a range of heights, limiting its usefulness.

PNAS Nexus, 2025. DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf087  (About DOIs).

Colossal baby squid

In 1925, scientists first described the colossal squid in a scientific paper, based on the discovery of arm fragments in the belly of a sperm whale. This species of squid is especially elusive because it prefers to stay in the deep ocean, although occasionally full-grown colossal squid have been found caught in trawl nets, for instance. One hundred years after its discovery, the colossal squid has now been filmed alive in its deep-ocean home environment for the first time by a team aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too) in waters off the South Sandwich Islands.

Colossal squid can grow up to 23 feet long and weigh as much as 1,100 pounds and have distinctive hooks on the middle of their eight arms. Juvenile squid have transparent bodies. It was a baby squid just 30 centimeters long that the team captured on video at a depth of 1,968 feet (600 meters) during a 35-day expedition searching for new marine life; a remote submersible dubbed SuBastian took the footage. The scientists hope to eventually be able to capture an adult colossal squid on camera. The team also filmed the first confirmed living footage of a similar cephalopod species, the glacial glass squid, spotted in the Bellingshausen Sea near Antarctica in January.

Digitally unfolding a Merlin manuscript

Virtual opening of CUL’s Vanneck Merlin fragment.

In 2019, conservationists at Cambridge University discovered a fragment of an Arthurian medieval manuscript that had been repurposed as the cover of a land register document. Written between 1275 and 1315 CE, it was far too fragile to manually unfold, but the university library's Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory has succeeded in digitally unfolding the fragment so that the text can be read for the first time, while keeping the original artifact intact as a testament to archival practices in 16th-century England. Their method could be used to noninvasively study fragile manuscript fragments held in other collections.

The team used a combination of CT scanning, multispectral imaging, and 3D modeling, as well as an array of mirrors, prisms, magnets, and other tools to photograph each section of the fragment. In this way they were able to reconstruct and virtually unfold the manuscript, revealing the text. Scholars had originally thought it was a text relating to Sir Gawain in Arthurian lore, but it turned out to be part of a French language sequel to the King Arthur legend called the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. There are only 40 known surviving manuscripts of this work. One section concerns Gawain's victory over Saxon kings at the Battle of Cambenic; the other is a story of Merlin appearing in Arthur's court disguised as a harpist on the Feast of the Assumption.

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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.

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, an agency spokesperson told Ars.

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. Teams began integrating the replacement engine with the rocket last Friday and are in the process of firmly securing it in the Engine 4 position on the core stage, the NASA spokesperson said.

Old for older

This is the first time NASA has replaced a main engine on the SLS core stage. The space agency earmarked individual RS-25 engines for the first four flights of the Space Launch System rocket a decade ago. Those assignments were locked in until now.

What's more, workers swapped the engines with the rocket vertical on its launch platform as NASA assembles the vehicle for the Artemis II mission, the first human flight on the Space Launch System. The 10-day mission will send an Orion crew capsule with astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth. Artemis II will be the first flight of astronauts to such distances since the final Apollo lunar mission in 1972.

Artemis II is scheduled for launch in early 2026. The schedule is primarily driven by the readiness of the Orion spacecraft. "The replacement does not affect the mission timeline, and the engine with the leak will be repaired for a future flight," the NASA spokesperson said.

Last month, ground crews placed the 212-foot-tall (64.6-meter) core stage between the Space Launch System's twin solid rocket boosters stacked inside one of the Vehicle Assembly Building's high bays. Since then, workers have added a cone-shaped structural adapter to the top of the core stage and will raise the cryogenic upper stage atop the rocket this week.

The four RS-25 main engines were installed on the core stage in 2023 while it lay horizontally inside its factory in New Orleans before its shipment to Florida.

The RS-25s are refurbished engines left over from the Space Shuttle program. During that era, technicians swapped out main engines several times when the shuttle was on the launch pad. NASA developed a dedicated 30-by-30-foot piece of ground support equipment called a vertical engine installer to use in the event workers needed to replace an SLS engine at Kennedy. The installer moves underneath the core stage to allow technicians to access engine connections for the swapout.

The engine removed from the Artemis II rocket—serial number E2063—was built at NASA's Stennis Space Center by Aerojet Rocketdyne, now part of L3Harris, a Florida-based tech company and defense contractor. Technicians finished constructing the engine in 2015. It was the last RS-25 built using leftover parts, such as turbopumps, that flew on the Space Shuttle, but the fully assembled engine has never flown before.

In its place, NASA installed E2061 into the Engine 4 position on the Artemis II core stage. This engine was the final one built for the shuttle. NASA certified the engine for flight in 2008, and it flew twice in 2010 and 2011.

A finite supply

NASA had 14 flight-rated shuttle main engines in its inventory after the final shuttle mission in 2011 and sufficient parts to build two more, giving the agency enough engines to power four SLS flights. The engines consume a potent combination of cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and contain approximately 50,000 parts.

The shuttle main engines were designed in the 1970s, ahead of the first shuttle launch in 1981. In the 1990s and 2000s, NASA built a new series of upgraded engines with higher thrust and improved reliability, but the engines used much the same architecture as the prior generation.

While the RS-25 engines are undeniably old, they remain among the highest-performing and most reliable US rocket engines. The engines were reusable when they flew on the Space Shuttle. Now, on the Space Launch System, NASA will discard the engines on each mission.

This means NASA must purchase more RS-25 engines from L3Harris' Aerojet Rocketdyne at a staggering cost of $100 million per unit, according to a 2023 report from NASA's inspector general. The watchdog projected that each SLS rocket flying with brand-new RS-25 engines will cost $2.5 billion.

Put simply, these high costs will hamstring any attempt to create an enduring campaign of deep space exploration, the inspector general wrote in 2023. "Given the enormous costs of the Artemis campaign, failure to achieve substantial savings will significantly hinder the sustainability of NASA’s deep space human exploration efforts."

NASA placed the first of this new lot of RS-25 engines on a test stand in Mississippi earlier this year in preparation for test-firings to prove it is ready to launch on the fifth Space Launch System rocket. That assumes it ever flies.

The Trump administration is considering canceling the SLS program in favor of less expensive commercial rockets, favoring a pivot toward human missions to Mars. If the White House does propose cancellation, and Congress agrees, a natural point to terminate the SLS program could be after the Artemis III flight, slated to be NASA's first lunar landing mission since Apollo.

This would also end the SLS program before the debut of a larger SLS upper stage. This alone is estimated to cost $5.7 billion to develop, NASA's inspector general reported.

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The first 27 operational satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network lifted off from Florida's Space Coast on Monday evening, the opening salvo in a challenge to SpaceX's dominant Starlink global Internet service.

Amazon's Project Kuiper, costing up to $20 billion, will beam high-speed, low-latency broadband signals to consumers around the world. 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.

These initial services are likely to have limited reach. Amazon needs more than 80 launches to complete the first-generation Kuiper network, and this will probably take several years.

Amazon's first 27 satellites soared into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The Atlas V 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.

A first step in a long journey

The 205-foot-tall (62.5-meter) rocket lifted off at 7:01 pm EDT (23:01 UTC) Monday and headed northeast from Cape Canaveral. In the first five minutes of the flight, the Atlas V jettisoned its five boosters, payload fairing, and kerosene-fueled first stage. A Centaur upper stage took over to accelerate the rocket to orbital velocity, approximately 17,000 mph (7.6 kilometers per second).

United Launch Alliance ended its live video coverage of the mission a few minutes after the launch at the request of Amazon, which insisted on a level of secrecy normally reserved for spy satellites. Amazon has not publicly released any photos or illustrations of the Kuiper satellites, breaking from the convention established by other Western companies with megaconstellations.

An Amazon spokesperson said a rudimentary illustration in a ULA-produced animation of the launch sequence provides a "sense of the satellite stack" on top of the Atlas V rocket. For launch, the spacecraft were attached to a lightweight dispenser, like ornaments on a Christmas tree.

After reaching orbit, the Kuiper satellites deployed from the dispenser at an altitude of roughly 280 miles (450 kilometers) and an inclination of 51.9 degrees to the equator. Amazon and ULA confirmed a successful outcome to the launch later Monday night.

"Important moment for Project Kuiper as we just confirmed our first 27 production satellites are operating as expected in low-Earth orbit," wrote Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, on X. "While this is the first step in a much longer journey to launch the rest of our low-Earth orbit constellation, it represents an incredible amount of invention and hard work. Am really proud of the collective team."

Amazon aims to launch thousands more Kuiper satellites in the next few years. When complete, the first generation of the Kuiper constellation will consist of 3,232 satellites flying in 98 orbital planes crisscrossing the planet at altitudes of less than 400 miles.

In 2022, Amazon signed the largest commercial launch contract in history, snatching up rides on ULA's new Vulcan rocket, Blue Origin's New Glenn, and Arianespace's Ariane 6 launcher. Amazon booked nine launches on ULA's soon-to-retire Atlas V rocket the previous year and reserved three flights on the Falcon 9 rocket operated by rival SpaceX in 2023.

Amazon is using the Atlas Vs to boost its first batches of satellites to orbit. An Atlas V rocket launched 18 months ago with a pair of prototype Kuiper satellites for testing in space. There are seven Atlas Vs remaining on Amazon's contract following Monday's launch.

ULA won the majority of Amazon's launch contracts, with 38 flights on the company's new Vulcan rocket and nine on the Atlas V. Arianespace won 18 missions using its Ariane 6 rocket, and Blue Origin—owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—won 12 missions, with a contract option for 15 more.

Only SpaceX has demonstrated the kind of high-tempo launch rate Amazon expects of its launch providers. SpaceX recently launched its 250th Starlink mission and now has more than 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, with multiple launches adding more each week. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was already a mature, reliable launch vehicle when Starlink missions began flying.

Amazon's launch providers are all flying brand-new rockets, other than the Atlas V and Falcon 9. New rockets often have trouble ramping up to their promised launch cadence.

Amazon is helping to fund a big expansion in ULA's footprint at Cape Canaveral, an effort that officials say will double the company's launch capacity. The investment to fund the growth in ULA's capability to support Kuiper launches totals about $2 billion, with around $500 million going toward upgrades at Cape Canaveral.

Those upgrades include the outfitting of a second vertical hangar and a second mobile launch platform for Vulcan rockets, alongside the integration facility and launch table already built to support the first few Vulcan missions. Having dual lanes for launch processing in Florida will allow ULA to fly as many as 25 Vulcan rockets per year, the company said. ULA's primary Vulcan customers are the US Space Force and Amazon.

"The addition of a second launch processing capability allows for dual, simultaneous launch processing between both integration facilities seamlessly," said Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO, in a statement.

"This launch marks the first step toward the future of our partnership and increased launch cadence," Bruno said. "We have been steadily modifying our launch facilities in Cape Canaveral to support the capacity for future Project Kuiper missions in a manner that will ultimately benefit both our commercial and government customers as we endeavor to save lives, explore the universe, and connect the world."

Amazon ground controllers in Redmond, Washington, are overseeing the operation of the first 27 Kuiper satellites. Engineers there will test each satellite's ability to independently maneuver and communicate with mission control. So far, this appears to be going well.

The next step will involve activating the satellites' electric propulsion systems to gradually climb to their assigned orbit of 392 miles (630 kilometers).

Amazon and its launch suppliers need to get moving. Kuiper officials face a July 2026 deadline from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy half of the fleet's 3,232 satellites to maintain network authorization. This is not going to happen. It would require an average of nearly one launch per week, starting now.

The time limit is movable, and the FCC has extended network authorization deadlines before. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, has argued for a more "market-friendly regulatory environment" in a chapter he authored for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, widely seen as a blueprint for the Trump administration's strategies.

But Carr is a close ally of Elon Musk, owner of Kuiper's primary competitor, Starlink.

Amazon is not selling subscriptions for Kuiper service yet, and the company has said its initial focus will be on testing Kuiper connectivity with "enterprise customers" before moving on to consumer broadband. Apart from challenging Starlink, Kuiper will also compete in some market segments with Eutelsat OneWeb, the London-based operator of the only other active Internet megaconstellation.

OneWeb's more than 600 satellites provide service to businesses, governments, schools, and hospitals rather than direct service to individual consumers.

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Stars, from space. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

NASA Astronaut Don Pettit returned to Earth 10 days ago, landing in Kazakhstan. During his latest mission, his third long-duration on the International Space Station, Pettit brought his brand of wonderment to the assignment.

During his time in microgravity, Pettit, an inveterate tinkerer, said he likes to spend his free time either doing experiments in microgravity he cannot do on Earth or taking images to bring the experience back home. At a news conference Monday, Pettit was asked why he took so many images—670,000!—during his most recent stay on the space station.

"When I'm looking out the window, just enjoying the view, it's like, 'Oh, wow, a meteor. Look at that. Man, there's a flash there. What's that? Oh, look at that volcano going off. Okay, where's my camera? I gotta record that.' And part of this drive for me is when your mission is over, it's photographs and memories. When you want to share the experience with people, you can share the memories through verbal communication, like we're doing now, but the photographs are just another dimension of sharing what it's like. It's an experience where most people on Earth right now can't share, and I can try to give them a glimpse through my imagery."

It would be almost impossible to pick just a single photo of Pettit's to share this week in the Tuesday Telescope, but I've selected this one for several reasons. First, it's beautiful, and the framing through the Dragon spacecraft window is lovely. It also shows stars from the vantage point in space. Pettit built his own star tracker, of course, to make this happen. And finally, Earth's atmosphere is a showstopper by itself.

Anyway, thank you, Don Pettit, for all of the beauty and wonderment you've brought back from space. Most of us will, indeed, never go. But you've brought us all that little bit closer.

Source: Don Pettit/NASA

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Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday.

Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is a singular individual. His birthday is April 20, and when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him landed at dawn in Kazakhstan, the calendar had turned over to that date. John Glenn, then 77, was older when he went to space. But no one as old as Pettit had spent as long as he had in orbit, 220 days, on a mission.

On Monday, a little more than a week after returning from orbit, Pettit met with reporters at Johnson Space Center. "It's good to be back on planet Earth," he said. "As much as I love exploring space, going into the frontier, and making observations, you do reach a time when it's time to come home."

Flying in space at 70 years old

Pettit first went into space at the age of 47 for his first of three long-duration missions to the International Space Station. Since then, he has flown a shorter shuttle mission and two more space station increments. All told, he has lived in space for 590 days, the third-most all-time among NASA astronauts.

"I've got a few creaks and groans in my body, but basically I feel the same as I did 20 years ago, and coming back to gravity is provocative," he said.

After every one of his missions, Pettit said the readjustment to gravity for him has been a challenge. He added that the surprising thing about spaceflight is that it's not so much your large muscles that ache, but the smaller ones.

"A week ago, I was on station, and I was doing really heavy squats, I was doing dead lifts, I could float around with the greatest of ease, even though I had no trapeze," he said. "I was at the peak of my game. And then you come back to Earth, and it's like, God, I can't even get up from the floor anymore. It's humbling. But it isn't about the large muscle groups. It's about the little, tiny muscles that everybody forgets about because they're just there and they work. When you're in weightlessness, these muscles don't work anymore. And they take a six-month vacation until you come back to Earth. And now, all of a sudden, they start groaning and talking to you, and it takes a while to get all these little muscles tuned back up to being an Earthling."

In terms of aging, Pettit said, like a lot of older people, he wakes up after a night sleeping on Earth with a sore shoulder or a stiff neck. That's just part of the process. But microgravity took some of those aches and pains away.

"I love being in space," he said. "When you're sleeping, you're just floating, and your body, all those little aches and pains heal up. You feel like you're 30 years old again and free of pain, free of everything. So I love being on orbit. It's a great place to be for me and my physiology."

The space station isn’t old, either

Pettit has visited the space station on all four of his spaceflights. He lived there, near the beginning of the station's lifetime, as part of Expedition 6 in 2002. More than two decades later he said the station is operating at full capacity, delivering on its promise of robust scientific research, studies of long-duration spaceflight, and much more. Asked if he felt nostalgic about the station coming to an end in 2030—NASA plans to de-orbit the facility at that time—Pettit said the laboratory should live on.

"I'm a firm believer we don't need to dump the space station in the ocean at 2030 if we don't want to," he said. "If we as a society decided to keep [the] space station, we could keep it like a B-52. I mean, how many years is it they've been flying? It'll be flying close to 100 years by the time the Air Force finally retires the B-52, and it's basically the same airframe with the same aerodynamics, but everything else is new. There's no limit to what we can do to [the] space station, except for our will to keep refurbishing it and having the funding necessary."

Pettit said he never looked out the window of the space station without a camera at hand. This image shows cities streaking by below.

Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

And maybe that's because he wants to go back. Pettit did not rule out flying into space again. For now, he wants to take a few weeks to allow his body time to re-adjust to gravity. He wants to enjoy some time with his family. But soon, he knows, space will start to call to him again.

"I call it the explorer's paradox," he said. "When you're back in civilization, you want to be out there wherever your wilderness happens to be; and then when you're in your wilderness, it's like, wow, I need to be back with my family. I think it's probably gone on for as long as humanity has had people who go off into the wilderness. When the flight docs say I'm ready to go back, I'm ready to do it. And I know John Glenn flew at age 76, something like that, and I'm only 70, so I've got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in before I'm ready to hang up my rocket nozzles."

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At 12:30 pm local time on Monday, the power went out. Across Spain and Portugal trains, planes, and traffic lights abruptly stopped working.

Reports emerged of people being stuck in lifts, and Google Maps live data showed traffic jams in big cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, as they became gridlocked. Major airports warned passengers of delays due to the blackout. Its cause is still unknown. The blackout is estimated to have affected the entirety of Portugal and Spain and small regions in France.

“Traffic lights aren’t working. The streets are chaotic because there is an officer at every crossing,” says Gustavo, who lives in Madrid. “Water doesn’t reach flats at the top of buildings because the pumps are electric, and the very few shops that are open are only taking cash.”

This is every electrical engineer’s nightmare scenario, says Paul Cuffe, assistant professor of the School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at University College Dublin. “The reason we don’t have widespread outages all the time is because system operators are very conservative and very proactive about using big safety margins to make sure this doesn’t happen,” he says. Engineers plan for failures in grids or surges in consumer demand that could destabilize the power supply. “These things are unusual, but to a power engineer the latent threat of it happening is always there.”

Spain’s electricity operator Red Eléctrica said in a post on X a few hours after the initial blackout that it had recovered power in some areas of Cataluña and Aragón in the northeast; País Vasco, Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias, Navarra, and Castilla y Léon in the north; Extremadura in the east; and Andalucía in the south.

Experts believe that getting the grid back up and running in both countries could take between a few hours to several days, depending on the area. While the grid is powering back up, emergency services will likely be prioritized over things like stable internet connection, they say.

There is a well-rehearsed sequence of steps that now happens, says Cuffe. They are going to be doing what is called a “black start"—a process that gradually reconnects power stations to form a functioning grid again. Electrical supply and demand has to be balanced to avoid further blackouts, meaning as power stations come online, only portions of the grid can come online with them, with the country gradually powering up, step by step. There should be a team within the grid operator that plans for this and that has identified which generators to bring online first, he explains.

“You should be anticipating every failure that can happen and you should survive any one of them,” Cuffe says. From the control room, engineers should be able to tell what parts of the grid are definitely functioning so they won’t be flying blind—but it will still take time.

“Even with a completely healthy grid, to do that black start could take 12 hours or 16 hours. You have to do it sequentially, and it takes a long time. I’m sure there are engineers in vans swarming all over the place as we speak trying to make all this happen.

“It’s like assembling some hellishly complicated IKEA furniture.”

The biggest issue is that without an established, obvious cause for the blackout in the first place, it will be difficult for engineers to know where to re-establish power first without triggering another outage.

“The challenge is to constantly match supply and demand,” says Ketan Joshi, an independent climate and energy consultant. “You need to perform that balancing act, not just plugging everything back in there.” Joshi describes it as a blackout “in reverse.”

“When a tree falls on a power line you end up chopping off a small chunk of the grid. It’s a pain. A hundred homes get blacked out, a crew comes and they re-energize and reconnect the section that was disconnected,” Joshi explains. This is the same thing, but at an enormous scale. “When you have a blackout like the one we are seeing in Spain and in Portugal, the challenge to map supply and demand becomes ridiculously complicated. Every time you connect up a new chunk of households, you have to perform that same balancing act. The generators that are producing electricity have to match the new demand that has suddenly come on to the grid.”

REN (Red Eletrica Nacional) the main power operator in Portugal, gave a statement to the BBC saying that the outage was caused by “extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400KV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’.” Spain has yet to respond to this allegation.

“I scratched my head at that,” says Cuffe. Both of the country’s grids may be run by national operators, he explains, but they are shackled together as a synchronized grid, which means if one side fails the other one does too—making it not entirely unexpected for one to blame the other.

When it comes to propping the grid back up, both operators are on their own. The Iberian peninsula is an “energy island,” says Jan Rosenow, vice president of global strategy at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a NGO advancing policy innovation and thought leadership within the energy community. Spain and Portugal’s collective interconnection capacity with the rest of Europe—that is, how much of their energy they can draw from or send into the wider continent—is around 6 percent, far lower than the 15 percent target set by the European Union by 2030.

“There’s a lot of speculation at the moment, but perhaps with better interconnection the problem would have been a lot less worse,” he says.

In a press conference, Spanish president Pedro Sánchez said that the cause of the power cut is still unknown and warns against speculation. He claimed that the regions that have recovered power have done so with the assistance of connections with France and Morocco, and confirmed that the hydroelectric plants in Spain are back online. He claims that hospitals are unaffected by the power outage, and that air traffic had been “voluntarily” reduced by 20 percent during this incident. He said that trains will be halted for security reasons.

Blackouts in Europe do not happen frequently—a blackout across the whole of Italy in 2003 is the closest example that experts cite as having a similar scale to the one affecting the Iberian peninsula: a tree brought down a line between Switzerland and Italy, causing other lines close by to take over the power from the failed line and overload. This caused a blackout for 18 hours that plunged over 55 million people into darkness.

At the beginning of the current blackout, things seemed more or less normal, says Daniel Borrás, head of editorial content at WIRED’s sister publication GQ, who is based in Madrid. “People understood that it would be a couple of hours, or something like that. Now the feeling is a little different because a lot of communities in Spain are recovering step by step, for example Cataluña and Galicia, and Pais Vasco are more or less working, but in Madrid it’s basically still a complete blackout. A lot of people are in the streets and in the bars and the terraces drinking something and it’s a very quiet mood.”

The main issue where he is, says Borrás, is with people trying to come back into Madrid and finding themselves in terrible traffic because trains aren’t running.

“No one has lost their sense of humor, and people are going out to enjoy some digital disconnection,” says Gustavo. He says he’s on his balcony enjoying a good book and contemplating going out to buy candles. “I’ll need a couple of hours to decide whether I should get lavender vanilla spa or geranium.”

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National grid operators in Spain and Portugal confirm that a massive electrical blackout has hit the Iberian Peninsula today, starting just a couple of minutes after 12:30 pm Central European Summer Time (10:30 am UTC, or about 6:30 am US Eastern Daylight Time). The outage appears to have resulted in near-total loss of electricity in Spain, Portugal, the Principality of Andorra, and at least some portions of southwest France.

The impacts are widespread and pervasive; in major cities like Madrid, trains are not running, airports are unable to operate, and businesses and schools have closed. Citizens are still able to use cellular networks to communicate so far (most cell towers and network operations centers have battery or generator backup systems).

Electrical demand curve from Red Eléctrica site showing the outage.

Credit: Red Eléctrica

Bloomberg energy reporter Akshat Rathi posted on Bluesky that Spanish grid operator Red Electrica claims the outage is due to "grid oscillation," a phenomenon that occurs when the system is unable to suppress oscillations that normally happen as sources and load enter and leave the system. Rathi quotes Bloomberg cybersecurity reporter Ryan Gallagher, noting that a cyber attack has been ruled out, and the fault is likely technical:

Initial investigations into the cause of the outages suggest a technical fault rather than a cyberattack, according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). "For the moment the investigation seems to point to a technical/cable issue," said a spokesperson for the agency in an emailed statement. "Nevertheless, ENISA is closely monitoring the situation and we are in contact with the relevant authorities at national and EU level."

Ars spoke directly to a reader named Tiago Carvalho, currently in Lisbon, Portugal. According to Carvalho, banks and supermarkets in Lisbon have been closed for hours, with a small number of shops and restaurants remaining open and accepting only cash. Tourists in Lisboa are still walking around enjoying the sunny weather, but locals are doing what they can to stock up, anticipating three or more days without power. Carvalho says only his 5G data connection is functional; when reached via Discord, he described the conditions like this:

After 3h with no power, locals are starting to talk with each other and share the news from battery-powered radio. Talks of maybe 3 days without power. Local groceries shops are full as people are increasing food stock. Cash only mostly (sometimes they get connection working on wireless terminal). Lots of honking because no traffic lights. People stuck in metro and trains from what I understand have been rescued. Airport closed. Supermarkets and banks mostly closed.

 

It’s a lovely day in Lisboa with sunny weather, but if this lasts, I fear things will complicate a bit as tourists will seek food, and restaurants have no power and no card payments.

This is a breaking story, and Ars will update it if new events come to light.

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Two years ago, astronomers believe they detected a star devouring one of its planets. Now, new observations of the aftermath of same event from the James Webb Space Telescope have suggested a scenario previously only considered in the realms of science fiction: that a planet about the size of Jupiter self-destructed by heading straight into its parent star. The scientists in charge of the observation believe they witnessed the first “planetary suicide” in history.

The only noted way for a star to consume its own planets is for the star to increase significantly in size. This happens when a main sequence star, like our Sun, runs out of hydrogen to fuse and swells to many times its original size, becoming a red giant. Experts are studying this process with interest because the solar system itself is likely to face it. In about 5 billion years, after exhausting the hydrogen in its core, the Sun will expand to 100 times its current radius, devouring nearby planets such as Mercury and Venus in the process.

When a star absorbs a planet, observatories on Earth detect an increase in its luminosity, albeit one that's short-lived. Such a moment of brightening is known as a nova.

In 2023, the Gemini South observatory observed a nova 12,000 light-years away. It was initially suspected to be a red giant consuming one of its nearby planets. However, two years later, a more detailed analysis with the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared instrument revealed that the star was still in its main sequence phase, fusing hydrogen—the star had not aged and expanded into being a red giant. This new evidence suggests that the young star's nova was caused by it being impacted by a Jupiter-sized body.

According to a recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal, this nova is the most convincing direct detection of a planet being consumed by its host star. The same researchers had already posited that this nova was evidence of a planet being engulfed in another report, published in Nature a couple of years ago. But in the new study, the team added more evidence of this being the signs of an engulfment, having conducted spectroscopy of the star—that is, analysis of the visible light and other radiation it emitted—820 days after its peak brightness.

This provided new data on the star's luminosity and ejected dust debris, and gave the team of astronomers a better idea of what might have happened in that solar system. They believe a Jupiter-sized planet, orbiting at the same distance as Mercury does from the Sun, gradually approached its star until it was destroyed by the star's outer layers.

As far as the evidence allows us to know, planets moving towards their star, towards destruction, are not common. Scientists estimate that the process may have been triggered by the same phenomenon that generates tides on Earth—the gravitational pull of other nearby celestial bodies (which in Earth's case is the Moon and the Sun). Over millions of years, the gravitational forces exerted by the star would have extracted some of the planet's orbital energy, pulling it out of its stable path towards the host star. In the end, the planet would have orbited too close to maintain its structural integrity.

Not all of the scientific community is convinced by this explanation. One of the main counter-hypotheses says that the star only looks young, because it is could be surrounded by a dense cloud of stellar dust, dampening its luminosity. If it turns out that the age or type of star is different from what is hypothesized, then there may be another explanation for the nova.

New measurements with more powerful telescopes will measure this star's brightness better, and will hopefully provide more evidence as to what happened. It's also possible that more “suicide” planets will be found in future in other places, revealing that the scenario is more common than thought.

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

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve—akin to identifying a peak to climb—and then they must develop a strategy to solve it. Classical and quantum researchers compete using different strategies, with a healthy rivalry between the two. Quantum researchers report a fast way to solve a problem—often by scaling a peak that no one thought worth climbing—then classical teams race to see if they can find a better way.

This contest almost always ends as a virtual tie: When researchers think they’ve devised a quantum algorithm that works faster or better than anything else, classical researchers usually come up with one that equals it. Just last week, a purported quantum speedup, published in the journal Science, was met with immediate skepticism from two separate groups who showed how to perform similar calculations on classical machines.

But in a paper posted on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org last year, researchers described what looks like a quantum speedup that is both convincing and useful. The researchers described a new quantum algorithm that works faster than all known classical ones at finding good solutions to a wide class of optimization problems (which look for the best possible solution among an enormous number of choices).

So far, no classical algorithm has dethroned the new algorithm, known as decoded quantum interferometry (DQI). It’s “a breakthrough in quantum algorithms,” said Gil Kalai, a mathematician at Reichman University and a prominent skeptic of quantum computing. Reports of quantum algorithms get researchers excited, partly because they can illuminate new ideas about difficult problems, and partly because, for all the buzz around quantum machines, it’s not clear which problems will actually benefit from them. A quantum algorithm that outperforms all known classical ones on optimization tasks would represent a major step forward in harnessing the potential of quantum computers.

“I’m enthusiastic about it,” said Ronald de Wolf, a theoretical computer scientist at CWI, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, who was not involved with the new algorithm. But at the same time, he cautioned that it’s still quite possible researchers will eventually find a classical algorithm that does just as well. And due to the lack of quantum hardware, it’ll still be a while before they can test the new algorithm empirically.

The algorithm might inspire new work on the classical side, according to Ewin Tang, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who came to prominence as a teenager by creating classical algorithms that match quantum ones. The new claims “are interesting enough that I would tell classical-algorithms people, ‘Hey, you should look at this paper and work on this problem,’” she said.

The Best Way Forward?

When classical and quantum algorithms compete, they often do so on the battlefield of optimization, a field focused on finding the best options for solving a thorny problem. Researchers typically focus on problems in which the number of possible solutions explodes as the problem gets bigger. What’s the best way for a delivery truck to visit 10 cities in three days? How should you pack the parcels in the back? Classical methods of solving these problems, which often involve churning through possible solutions in clever ways, quickly become untenable.

The specific optimization problem that DQI tackles is roughly this: You’re given a collection of points on a sheet of paper. You need to come up with a mathematical function that passes through these points. Specifically, your function has to be a polynomial—a combination of variables raised to whole-number exponents and multiplied by coefficients. But it can’t be too complicated, meaning the powers can’t get too high. This gives you a curved line that wiggles up and down as it moves across the page. Your job is to find the wiggly line that touches the most points.

Variations of this problem show up in various forms across computer science, especially in error coding and cryptography—fields focused on securely and accurately encoding data as it’s transmitted. The DQI researchers recognized, basically, that plotting a better line is akin to shifting a noisy encoded message closer to its accurate meaning.

But all that came later. When the researchers behind DQI started working on their algorithm, they didn’t even have this problem in mind.

A Problem Decoded

“It would have been entirely plausible for a goal-oriented researcher to start by stating the problem and then investigating whether quantum algorithms could solve it faster than classical algorithms,” said Stephen Jordan, a physicist at Google Quantum AI and one of the main architects of DQI. “Of course, for us, that’s not how it happened. We came upon it by a backward and circuitous route.”

Stephen Jordan helped come up with a quantum approach to certain problems that 

works better than any classical approach—so far.

 

Jordan embarked on that route in 2023, when he joined Google and found out he’d be working with Eddie Farhi, a physicist at Google whose work has long focused on quantum algorithms that outperform classical ones. (Farhi was once Jordan’s doctoral adviser at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) Jordan knew that in 2014, Farhi had made a quantum attack on an optimization problem by thinking of energy, with lower energies corresponding to better solutions. For Farhi, energy connected optimization to quantum physics.

But Jordan wanted to do something different. He turned to another concept built into quantum physics—recognizing everything as waves. Using a mathematical tool called a quantum Fourier transform, Jordan found a way to translate all the potential answers to a well-known class of optimization problems into quantum waves. In doing so, he could manipulate the quantum system so that bigger waves (in the form of higher quantum amplitudes) corresponded to better solutions.

But there was still a huge challenge that had to be overcome. In a quantum system, asking “What’s the biggest amplitude?” is not as simple as recognizing the biggest wave at the beach. The quantum landscape is incredibly complex, and it was unclear how to identify the quantum amplitudes that would correspond to the best solutions.

After many false starts, Jordan made a breakthrough: The process of selecting the best solutions turned out to be similar to the process of weeding out errors in coded messages, which is known as decoding. This is a well-studied area of computer science, full of techniques that Jordan could explore. By translating an optimization problem into a quantum one, and then applying the decoding lens to it, he had stumbled into a new way to develop quantum algorithms.

Together with Noah Shutty, also at Google, Jordan began testing decoding schemes, seeing how they fared against classical algorithms on various optimization problems. They needed both the right approach and a problem where it worked. “It turns out classical algorithms are hard to beat,” Jordan said. “After a few months of trying, we still had not notched up any wins for quantum.”

But eventually, the pair landed on a decoding algorithm first introduced in the 1960s to find and fix individual errors in an encoded message. Finding that problem was the key. “When we investigated, we seemed to hit success almost immediately,” Jordan said. Finally, they had found a problem and an approach that, together, looked like a quantum speedup.

Of course, that didn’t mean it was bulletproof. “Maybe there is some classical method that can efficiently replicate your entire approach,” Jordan said. “Such dequantizations are not always obvious.”

Gaining Confidence

To assuage those fears, they consulted with Mary Wootters, a coding theory expert (and Shutty’s former doctoral adviser at Stanford University). She carefully searched for any known classical algorithm that might match their quantum speedup. The advantage held. The team’s checks likewise suggest that it will continue to hold. “They did due diligence,” Tang said.

Bolstered by this analysis, they looked more carefully at the optimization problem they were solving. Jordan had worried that it might be too niche, with no wider applications, but Shutty recognized that this decoding problem was a variation of well-known and useful problems in encryption and other fields.

Jordan acknowledges that without a large enough quantum machine, DQI will remain a theoretical breakthrough. “DQI cannot run on present-day quantum computers,” he said. But they’re still moving forward. Since the group posted their work last August, they have extended the application of DQI beyond the original problem to a broader class of optimization problems, which includes more cases of these “best path” problems.

So far, Jordan said, he expects that DQI can beat classical algorithms in those problems, too.

For the moment, the quantum community remains elated. “Finding quantum algorithms that show an advantage over classical algorithms is a very exciting endeavor of the last three decades, and the number of definite algorithms that show such an advantage is not large,” Kalai said. “Therefore, every new algorithm is a reason for celebration.”

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 Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The tricky thing about generating electricity is that for the most part, you pretty much have to use it or lose it.

This fundamental fact has governed and constrained the development of the world’s largest machine: the $2 trillion US power grid. Massive generators send electrons along a continent-wide network of conductors, transformers, cables, and wires into millions of homes and businesses, delicately balancing supply and demand so that every light switch, computer, television, stove, and charging cable will turn on 99.95 percent of the time.

Making sure there are always enough generators spooled up to send electricity to every single power outlet in the country requires precise coordination. And while the amount of electricity actually used can swing drastically throughout the day and year, the grid is built to meet the brief periods of peak demand, like the hot summer days when air conditioning use can double average electricity consumption. Imagine building a 30-lane highway to make sure no driver ever has to tap their brakes. That’s effectively what those who design and run the grid have had to do.

But what if you could just hold onto electricity for a bit and save it for later? You wouldn’t have to overbuild the grid or spend so much effort keeping power generation in equilibrium with users. You could smooth over the drawbacks of intermittent power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, like wind and solar. You could have easy local backup power in emergencies when transmission lines are damaged. You may not even need a giant, centralized power grid at all.

That’s the promise of grid-scale energy storage. And while the US has actually been using a crude form of energy storage called pumped hydroelectric power storage for decades, the country is now experiencing a gargantuan surge in energy storage capacity, this time from a technology that most of us are carrying around in our pockets: lithium-ion batteries. Between 2021 and 2024, grid battery capacity increased fivefold. In 2024, the US installed 12.3 gigawatts of energy storage. This year, new grid battery installations are on track to almost double compared to last year. Battery storage capacity now exceeds pumped hydro capacity, totaling more than 26 gigawatts.

There’s still plenty of room to expand—and a pressing need to do so. The power sector remains the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and there will be no way to add enough intermittent clean energy to sufficiently decarbonize the grid without cheap and plentiful storage.

The aging US grid is also in dire need of upgrades, and batteries can cushion the shock of adding gigawatts of wind and solar while buying some time to perform more extensive renovations. Some power markets are finally starting to understand all the services batteries can provide—frequency regulation, peak shaving, demand response—creating new lines of business. Batteries are also a key tool in building smaller, localized versions of the power grid. These microgrids can power remote communities with reliable power and one day shift the entire power grid into a more decentralized system that can better withstand disruptions like extreme weather.

If we can get it right, true grid-scale battery storage won’t just be an enabler of clean energy, but a way to upgrade the power system for a new era.

How Big Batteries Got so Big

Back in 2011, one of my first reporting assignments was heading to a wind farm in West Virginia to attend the inauguration of what was at the time the world’s largest battery energy storage system. Built by AES Energy Storage, it involved thousands of lithium-ion cells in storage containers that together combined to provide 32 megawatts of power and deliver it for about 15 minutes.

“It was eight megawatt-hours total,” said John Zahurancik, who was vice president of AES Energy Storage at the time and showed me around the facility back then. That was about the amount of electricity used by 260 homes in a day.

In the years since, battery storage has increased by orders of magnitude, as Zahurancik’s new job demonstrates. He is now the president of Fluence, a joint venture between AES and Siemens that has deployed 38 gigawatt-hours of storage to date around the world. “The things that we’re building today, many of our projects are over a gigawatt-hour in size,” Zahurancik said.

Last year, the largest storage facility to come online in the US was California’s Edwards & Sanborn Project, which can dispatch 33 GW for several hours. That’s roughly equivalent to the electricity needed to power 4.4 million homes for a day.

It wasn’t a steady climb to this point, however. Overall grid battery capacity in the US barely budged for more than a decade. Then, around 2020, it began to spike upward. What changed?

One shift is that the most common battery storage technology, lithium-ion cells, saw huge price drops and energy density increases. “The very first project we did was in 2008 and it was on the order of $3,000 a kilowatt-hour for the price of the batteries,” said Zahurancik. “Now we’re looking at systems that are on the order of $150, $200 a kilowatt-hour for the full system install.”

That’s partly because the cells on the power grid aren’t that different from those in mobile devices and electric vehicles, so grid batteries have benefited from manufacturing improvements that went into those products.

“It’s all one big pipeline,” said Micah Ziegler, a professor at Georgia Tech who studies clean energy technologies. “The batteries in phones, cars, and the grid all share common characteristics.” Seeing this rising demand, China went big on battery manufacturing and, much as it did in solar panels, created economies of scale to drive global prices down. China now produces 80 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries.

The blooming of wind and solar energy created even more demand for batteries and increased the pressure to improve them. The wind and the sun are often the cheapest sources of new electricity, and batteries help compensate for their variability, providing even more reason to scale up storage. “The benefits of this relationship are apparent in the increasing number of power plants that are being proposed and that have already been deployed that combine these resources,” Ziegler said. The combination of solar plus storage accounted for 84 percent of new US power added in 2024.

And because grid batteries don’t have to be small enough to be mobile—unlike the batteries in your laptop or phone—they can take advantage of cheaper, less dense batteries that otherwise might not be suited for something that has to fit in your pocket. There’s even talk of giving old EV batteries a second life on the power grid.

Regulation has also helped. A major hurdle for deploying grid energy storage systems is that they don’t generate electricity on their own, so the rules for how they should connect to the grid and how much battery developers should get paid for their services were messy and restrictive in the past. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 841 removed some of the barriers for energy storage systems to plug into wholesale markets and compete with other forms of power. Though the regulation was issued in 2018, it cleared a major legal challenge in 2020, paving the way for more batteries to plug into the grid.

Eleven states to date including California, Illinois, and Maryland have also set specific procurement targets for energy storage, which require utilities to install a certain amount of storage capacity, creating a push for more grid batteries. Together, these factors created a whole new businesses for power companies, spawned new grid battery companies, and fertilized the ground for a bumper crop of energy storage.

What Can Energy Storage Do for You?

Energy storage is the peanut butter to the chocolate of renewable energy, making all the best traits about clean energy even better and balancing out some of its downsides. But it’s also an important ingredient in grid stability, reliability, and resilience, helping ensure a steady flow of megawatts during blackouts and extreme weather.

The most common use is frequency response. The alternating current going through power lines in the US cycles at a frequency of 60 hertz. If the grid dips below this frequency when a power-hungry user switches on, it can trip circuit breakers and cause power instability. Since batteries have nearly zero startup time, unlike thermal generators, they can quickly absorb or transmit power as needed to keep the grid humming the right tune.

Grid batteries can also step in as reserve power when a generator goes offline or when a large power user unexpectedly turns on. They can smooth out the hills and valleys of power load over the course of the day. They also let power providers save electricity when it’s cheap to produce, and sell it back on the grid at times when demand is high and power is expensive. It’s often faster to build a battery facility than an equivalent power plant, and since there are no smokestacks, it’s easier to get permits and approvals.

Batteries have already proven useful for overstressed power networks. As temperatures reached triple digits in Texas last year, batteries provided a record amount of power on the Lone Star State’s grid. ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, didn’t have to ask Texans to turn down their power use like it did in 2023. Between 2020 and 2024, Texas saw a 4,100 percent increase in utility-scale batteries, topping 5.7 gigawatts.

Grid batteries have a halo effect for other power generators too. Most thermal power plants—coal, gas, nuclear—prefer to run at a steady pace. Ramping up and down to match demand takes time and costs money, but with batteries soaking up some of the variability, thermal power plants can stay closer to their most efficient pace, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and keeping costs in check.

“It’s kind of like hybridizing your car,” Zahurancik said. “If you think about a Prius, you have an electric motor and you have a gasoline motor and you make the gas consumption better because the battery absorbs all the variation.”

Another grid battery feature is that they can reduce the need for expensive grid upgrades, said Stephanie Smith, chief operating officer at Eolian, which funds and develops grid energy storage systems. You don’t have to build power lines to accommodate absolute maximum electricity needs if you have a battery—on the generator side or on the demand side—to dish out a few more electrons when needed.

“What we do with stand-alone batteries, the more and more of those you get, you start to alleviate needs or at least abridge things like new transmission build,” Smith said. These batteries also allow the grid to adapt faster to changing energy needs, like when a factory shuts down or when a new data center powers up.

On balance this leads to a more stable, efficient, cheaper, and cleaner power grid.

Charging Up

As good as they are, lithium-ion batteries have their limits. Most grid batteries are designed to store and dispatch electricity over the course of two to eight hours, but the grid also needs ways to stash power for days, weeks, and even months since power demand shifts throughout the year.

There are also some fundamental looming challenges for grid-scale storage. Like most grid-level technologies, energy storage requires a big upfront investment that takes decades to pay back, but there’s a lot of uncertainty right now about how the Trump administration’s tariffs will affect battery imports, whether there will be a recession, and if this disruption will slow electricity demand growth in the years to come. The extraordinary appetite for batteries is increasing competition for the required raw materials, which may increase their prices.

Though China currently dominates the global battery supply chain, the US is working to edge its way in. Under the previous administration, the US Department of Energy invested billions in energy storage factories, supply chains, and research. There are dozens of battery factories in the US now, though most are aimed at electric vehicles. There are 10 US factories slated to start up this year, which would raise the total EV battery manufacturing capacity to 421.5 gigawatt-hours per year. Total global battery manufacturing is projected to reach around 7,900 gigawatt-hours in 2025.

There’s also a long and growing line of projects waiting to connect to the power grid. Interconnection queues for all energy systems, but particularly solar, wind, and batteries, typically last three years or more as project developers produce reliability studies and cope with mounting regulatory paperwork delays.

The Trump administration is also working to undo incentives around clean energy, particularly the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The law established robust incentives for clean energy, including tax credits for stand-alone grid energy projects. “I do worry about the IRA because it will change the curve, and quite honestly we cannot afford to change the curve right now with any form of clean energy,” Smith said. On the other hand, Trump’s tariffs may eventually spur even more battery manufacturing within the US.

Still, utility-scale energy storage is a tiny slice of the sprawling US power grid, and there’s enormous room to expand. “Even though we’ve been accelerating and going fast, by and large, we don’t have that much of it,” Zahurancik said. “You could easily see storage becoming 20 or 30 percent of the installed power capacity.”

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The NASA rover Perseverance recently discovered a strange rock on Mars, which appears to be made up of small rounded stones a few hundred millimeters in diameter. NASA’s research team is trying to determine its origin.

Perseverance was launched in July 2020 with the mission of searching for traces of microorganisms that may have existed on Mars in ancient times. It carries seven scientific instruments, including SuperCam, which uses cameras, lasers, and spectrometers to study the Martian surface, and Mastcam-Z, a camera with a special filter to increase resolution, which is used to record high-definition video as well as panoramic color and 3D images. The rover is exploring the Jezero Crater, a region of Mars thought to have once been a river delta.

This is not the first time such a strange rock has been discovered on the Red Planet. In the past, Martian rovers have discovered a number of strange objects that could hold important clues as to the geological history of Mars.

It was early March 2025 when Perseverance arrived at Broom Point on Witch Hazel Hill, on the rim of the Jezero Crater.

Satellite observations had shown alternating stripes of light-colored and dark-colored rock in this area. In late March, Perseverance excavated one of the light-colored formations and collected a sample. In the process it discovered the strange rock—which has been named “St. Paul's Bay.”

According to the Perseverance team, St. Paul’s Bay is a “float” rock—that is, a rock that should not exist at this location. But what created this rock formation on Mars, and how it came to be located in this region, remains unknown. This rock appears to be made up of smaller, round, dark gray stones each several hundred millimeters in size. The shapes of these small round stones vary: Some are oval-shaped, some have sharp edges, and some have small holes in them.

It’s possible that these spherules are concretions—formations created by groundwater moving through pores in a rock, which suggests that there might have once been abundant liquid water on Mars. However, on Earth these spherules are also created when molten rock cools rapidly, for example after a volcanic eruption. The Perseverance science team is investigating the origin of the small round stones that make up St. Paul’s Bay. It is possible that they are derived from a dark-colored stripe of rock formation observed nearby.

NASA’s Mars rovers have also discovered a number of other strange rocks during their missions. The first pictured below were nicknamed “blueberries” and were found by the rover Opportunity. They were discovered near Fram Crater, which Opportunity explored during April 2004. Opportunity launched in July 2003 and landed on the Meridiani Plain on Mars’ equator in January 2004. Opportunity continued to explore Mars for more than 15 years until its mission ended in February 2007. The blueberries are said to be rich in hematite, a type of iron oxide (Fe₂O₃).

Next was a formation discovered by NASA’s rover Curiosity, in which many small round stones are visible. This formation is part of a formation called the “sheepbed,” exposed in an area on Mars called Yellowknife Bay. These small round pebbles are often found in other parts of the sheepbed as well. Curiosity was launched in November 2011 and continues to explore Mars.

The final image below is of a sedimentary rock formation with a “popcorn” texture, discovered by Perseverance. After completing its exploration of a part of the Jezero Crater called Mt. Washburn, Perseverance headed north and reached an area in the Neretva Valley called Bright Angel, where layered, light-colored rocks are exposed on the surface. It was here that Perseverance discovered this strangely textured rock formation, which also contains small rounded stones.

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

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What does the "typical" exosolar system look like? We know it's not likely to look like our own Solar System, given that our familiar planets don't include entire classes of planets (Hot Jupiters! Mini-Neptunes!) that we've found elsewhere. And our discovery methods have been heavily biased toward planets that orbit close to their host star, so we don't really have a strong sense of what might be lurking in more distant orbits.

A new study released on Thursday describes a search for what are called "microlensing" events, where a planet acts as a gravitational lens that magnifies the star it's orbiting, causing it to brighten briefly. These events are difficult to capture, but can potentially indicate the presence of planets in more distant orbits. The researchers behind the new work find indications that there's a significant population of rocky super-Earths that are traveling in orbits similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn.

Lenses go micro

The two primary methods we've used to discover exoplanets are called transit and radial velocity. In the transit method, we simply watch the star for dips in the light it sends to Earth, which can be an indication of a planet orbiting in a way that it eclipses a small fraction of the star. For radial velocity, we look for red- or blue-shifts in the light received from the star, caused by a planet tugging the star in different directions as it orbits.

Obviously, a planet's gravitational influence is stronger when it's closer to the host star. And stars can temporarily dim for all sorts of reasons, so we've generally set a standard for discovery that involves observing multiple transits. That, in turn, means a shorter orbital period, and so also biases us toward discovering planets that are close to their host star. As a result, most of what we know about exosolar systems comes from planets that are far closer to their host star than Earth is to the Sun. Even the most distant object discovered by the Kepler mission orbits is only about as distant as Mars.

Looking at this another way, if we'd known of a star with a planet that took as long as Jupiter to orbit, and started observations back in the mid-1990s, when the first exoplanets were discovered, there's a good chance we'd only have observed three transits so far. For something out in the neighborhood of Neptune, the odds are that we'd not have seen any.

Microlensing can be thought of as a bit like the inverse of a transit event, in that gravitational lensing will cause a star to appear brighter. These are difficult to detect partly because the magnitude of the brightening is relatively small, and because it can last for as little as a few hours. If a microlensing event happens during daytime or on a cloudy day, you miss it if you're not observing from space.

The other challenge with microlensing is that it doesn't tell you much about the planet itself. Transit methods give us a sense of the size of the planet, while radial velocity sets limits on the planet's mass. Microlensing only tells us the ratio of the mass of the planet to the mass of the star. Unless we can get a good picture of the star's mass, it's not especially informative.

Earth-like planet, Saturn-like orbit

The team behind the new publication relied on the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network, which has access to widely spaced telescopes spread around the globe. This reduces the chance of missing an event because of bad timing or weather. The new paper is both the description of a one of the microlensing events it captured, as well as an attempt to understand the big picture using all of the potential planetary discoveries the network has made so far.

The microlensing event described here, OGLE-2016-BLG-0007, was first reported by another similar effort (the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE), but was also picked up by the Korean network. It was identified as part of a longer microlensing event where one star was creating a lens that brightened a second star. Amid that gradual, multi-month brightening, there was a small bump in the light. There are several ways to potentially explain that smaller bump (a third star, a very large planet in a very close orbit), but most of them are highly improbable. The only thing that makes sense is a planet orbiting at a considerable distance from its host star.

From there, we get into the issue of figuring out what that planet might look like. The ratio of the masses of the planet to its host star is roughly twice that of the Earth to the Sun. But there is no good imaging of the host star available, so we don't know how massive it is. Based on the fact that the typical star in the Milky Way is considerably smaller than the Sun, the researchers assume a red dwarf, which produces a planet with a mass about 1.3 times that of Earth. Given those numbers, the best fit for microlensing data is an orbit about 10 times wider than the Earth's.

That means a super-Earth with an orbital distance roughly that of Saturn's.

Not alone

To get a better sense of how typical this is, the researchers run through all the data obtained with the Korean telescope network, which has identified a bit over 60 likely exoplanets so far. Their analysis of the planet:star mass ratios suggests that there are likely to be a lot of planets similar to this one in orbits that keep them distant from their host stars. Separately, there seems to be a second population of planets that are considerably larger, assuming the stars they orbit are typical of the Milky Way's population.

These two populations are consistent with what we currently view as the typical planet formation process. In this view, rocky planets can grow up to a certain point, after which they become large enough to rapidly pull in gas and other materials nearby, quickly growing to gas giants. The two populations found here would be separated by the gap between the largest planets that failed to start a runaway gas accretion, and those that did begin the process and grew into gas giants.

If that's correct, then the microlensing data also implies that there's a large population of rocky planets, including many super-Earths, in orbits similar to Jupiter's and beyond, which would ensure they're perpetually icy. That's something that's completely absent in our own Solar System, where the rocky planets end with Mars.

It's important to be cautious about this. The total number of planets discovered through microlensing remains small, and there are significant uncertainties in what we can learn about planetary masses using it. At the moment, this method accounts for most of the planets in more distant orbits. Still, if this pattern holds up as we gradually increase our knowledge of more distant planets, then it will be one more bit of evidence that we live in a rather unusual solar system.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adn6088  (About DOIs).

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Waymo may sell autonomous vehicles for personal ownership at some point in the future, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during an earnings call last night. Pichai was asked about the long-term business model for Waymo, and he responded that it includes expanding partnerships like it has with Moove in Miami and Uber in Austin and, soon, Atlanta, but also mentioned “future optionality around personal ownership.”

It’s not the first time Waymo extended the idea to sell you a self-driving car. Back in 2018 it swung a deal with Chrysler to build self-driving Pacifica minivans and the companies began discussions about how to eventually sell them as privately owned ones.

And Waymo isn’t the only company thinking about selling you a personal self-driving car. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared at the “We, Robot” event last year that people can buy a Cybercab for $30,000 by 2026. During Tesla’s earnings call on Tuesday, Musk quipped that robotaxis built by competitor Waymo “cost way more money” compared to the Cybercab. Tesla’s robotaxi seats two, lacks a steering wheel, and uses camera vision instead of the intricate set of sensors, including lidar, that are equipped in Waymo’s most common five-seater Jaguar I-Pace EVs.

Waymo does have way more operational robotaxis on the road compared to Tesla, which has none. Waymo recently expanded testing to Japan, and Tesla plans to introduce robotaxis in Austin this summer as Musk promises “millions” of autonomous Tesla cars will be active by the end of next year.

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Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum.

Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.

A limited resource

By ingesting billions of creations, chatbots learn to talk, and image synthesizers learn to draw. Along the way, the AI companies behind them treat our shared culture like an inexhaustible resource to be strip-mined, with little thought for the consequences.

But human creativity isn't the product of an industrial process; it's inherently throttled precisely because we are finite biological beings who draw inspiration from real lived experiences while balancing creativity with the necessities of life—sleep, emotional recovery, and limited lifespans. Creativity comes from making connections, and it takes energy, time, and insight for those connections to be meaningful. Until recently, a human brain was a prerequisite for making those kinds of connections, and there's a reason why that is valuable.

Every human brain isn't just a store of data—it's a knowledge engine that thinks in a unique way, creating novel combinations of ideas. Instead of having one "connection machine" (an AI model) duplicated a million times, we have seven billion neural networks, each with a unique perspective. Relying on the cognitive diversity of human thought helps us escape the monolithic thinking that may emerge if everyone were to draw from the same AI-generated sources.

Today, the AI industry's business models unintentionally echo the ways in which early industrialists approached forests and fisheries—as free inputs to exploit without considering ecological limits.

Just as pollution from early factories unexpectedly damaged the environment, AI systems risk polluting the digital environment by flooding the Internet with synthetic content. Like a forest that needs careful management to thrive or a fishery vulnerable to collapse from overexploitation, the creative ecosystem can be degraded even if the potential for imagination remains.

Depleting our creative diversity may become one of the hidden costs of AI, but that diversity is worth preserving. If we let AI systems deplete or pollute the human outputs they depend on, what happens to AI models—and ultimately to human society—over the long term?

AI’s creative debt

Every AI chatbot or image generator exists only because of human works, and many traditional artists argue strongly against current AI training approaches, labeling them plagiarism. Tech companies tend to disagree, although their positions vary. For example, in 2023, imaging giant Adobe took an unusual step by training its Firefly AI models solely on licensed stock photos and public domain works, demonstrating that alternative approaches are possible.

Adobe's licensing model offers a contrast to companies like OpenAI, which rely heavily on scraping vast amounts of Internet content without always distinguishing between licensed and unlicensed works.

OpenAI has argued that this type of scraping constitutes "fair use" and effectively claims that competitive AI models at current performance levels cannot be developed without relying on unlicensed training data, despite Adobe's alternative approach.

The "fair use" argument often hinges on the legal concept of "transformative use," the idea that using works for a fundamentally different purpose from creative expression—such as identifying patterns for AI—does not violate copyright. Generative AI proponents often argue that their approach is how human artists learn from the world around them.

Meanwhile, artists are expressing growing concern about losing their livelihoods as corporations turn to cheap, instantaneously generated AI content. They also call for clear boundaries and consent-driven models rather than allowing developers to extract value from their creations without acknowledgment or remuneration.

Copyright as crop rotation

This tension between artists and AI reveals a deeper ecological perspective on creativity itself. Copyright's time-limited nature was designed as a form of resource management, like crop rotation or regulated fishing seasons that allow for regeneration. Copyright expiration isn't a bug; its designers hoped it would ensure a steady replenishment of the public domain, feeding the ecosystem from which future creativity springs.

On the other hand, purely AI-generated outputs cannot be copyrighted in the US, potentially brewing an unprecedented explosion in public domain content, although it's content that contains smoothed-over imitations of human perspectives.

Treating human-generated content solely as raw material for AI training disrupts this ecological balance between "artist as consumer of creative ideas" and "artist as producer." Repeated legislative extensions of copyright terms have already significantly delayed the replenishment cycle, keeping works out of the public domain for much longer than originally envisioned. Now, AI's wholesale extraction approach further threatens this delicate balance.

The resource under strain

Our creative ecosystem is already showing measurable strain from AI's impact, from tangible present-day infrastructure burdens to concerning future possibilities.

Aggressive AI crawlers already effectively function as denial-of-service attacks on certain sites, with Cloudflare documenting GPTBot's immediate impact on traffic patterns. Wikimedia's experience provides clear evidence of current costs: AI crawlers caused a documented 50 percent bandwidth surge, forcing the nonprofit to divert limited resources to defensive measures rather than to its core mission of knowledge sharing. As Wikimedia says, "Our content is free, our infrastructure is not.” Many of these crawlers demonstrably ignore established technical boundaries like robots.txt files.

Beyond infrastructure strain, our information environment also shows signs of degradation. Google has publicly acknowledged rising volumes of "spammy, low-quality," often auto-generated content appearing in search results. A Wired investigation found concrete examples of AI-generated plagiarism sometimes outranking original reporting in search results. This kind of digital pollution led Ross Anderson of Cambridge University to compare it to filling oceans with plastic—it’s a contamination of our shared information spaces.

Looking to the future, more risks may emerge. Ted Chiang's comparison of LLMs to lossy JPEGs offers a framework for understanding potential problems, as each AI generation summarizes web information into an increasingly "blurry" facsimile of human knowledge. The logical extension of this process—what some researchers term "model collapse"—presents a risk of degradation in our collective knowledge ecosystem if models are trained indiscriminately on their own outputs. (However, this differs from carefully designed synthetic data that can actually improve model efficiency.)

This downward spiral of AI pollution may soon resemble a classic "tragedy of the commons," in which organizations act from self-interest at the expense of shared resources. If AI developers continue extracting data without limits or meaningful contributions, the shared resource of human creativity could eventually degrade for everyone.

Protecting the human spark

While AI models that simulate creativity in writing, coding, images, audio, or video can achieve remarkable imitations of human works, this sophisticated mimicry currently lacks the full depth of the human experience.

For example, AI models lack a body that endures the pain and travails of human life. They don't grow over the course of a human lifespan in real time. When an AI-generated output happens to connect with us emotionally, it often does so by imitating patterns learned from a human artist who has actually lived that pain or joy.

Even if future AI systems develop more sophisticated simulations of emotional states or embodied experiences, they would still fundamentally differ from human creativity, which emerges organically from lived biological experience, cultural context, and social interaction.

That's because the world constantly changes. New types of human experience emerge. If an ethically trained AI model is to remain useful, researchers must train it on recent human experiences, such as viral trends, evolving slang, and cultural shifts.

Current AI solutions, like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), address this challenge somewhat by retrieving up-to-date, external information to supplement their static training data. Yet even RAG methods depend heavily on validated, high-quality human-generated content—the very kind of data at risk if our digital environment becomes overwhelmed with low-quality AI-produced output.

This need for high-quality, human-generated data is a major reason why companies like OpenAI have pursued media deals (including a deal signed with Ars Technica parent Condé Nast last August). Yet paradoxically, the same models fed on valuable human data often produce the low-quality spam and slop that floods public areas of the Internet, degrading the very ecosystem they rely on.

AI as creative support

When used carelessly or excessively, generative AI is a threat to the creative ecosystem, but we can't wholly discount the tech as a tool in a human creative's arsenal. The history of art is full of technological changes (new pigments, brushes, typewriters, word processors) that transform the nature of artistic production while augmenting human creativity.

Bear with me because there's a great deal of nuance here that is easy to miss among today's more impassioned reactions to people using AI as a blunt instrument of creating mediocrity.

While many artists rightfully worry about AI's extractive tendencies, research published in Harvard Business Review indicates that AI tools can potentially amplify rather than merely extract creative capacity, suggesting that a symbiotic relationship is possible under the right conditions.

Inherent in this argument is that the responsible use of AI is reflected in the skill of the user. You can use a paintbrush to paint a wall or paint the Mona Lisa. Similarly, generative AI can mindlessly fill a canvas with slop, or a human can utilize it to express their own ideas.

Machine learning tools (such as those in Adobe Photoshop) already help human creatives prototype concepts faster, iterate on variations they wouldn't have considered, or handle some repetitive production tasks like object removal or audio transcription, freeing humans to focus on conceptual direction and emotional resonance.

These potential positives, however, don't negate the need for responsible stewardship and respecting human creativity as a precious resource.

Cultivating the future

So what might a sustainable ecosystem for human creativity actually involve?

Legal and economic approaches will likely be key. Governments could legislate that AI training must be opt-in, or at the very least, provide a collective opt-out registry (as the EU's “AI Act” does).

Other potential mechanisms include robust licensing or royalty systems, such as creating a royalty clearinghouse (like the music industry's BMI or ASCAP) for efficient licensing and fair compensation. Those fees could help compensate human creatives and encourage them to keep creating well into the future.

Deeper shifts may involve cultural values and governance. Inspired by models like Japan's "Living National Treasures"—where the government funds artisans to preserve vital skills and support their work. Could we establish programs that similarly support human creators while also designating certain works or practices as "creative reserves," funding the further creation of certain creative works even if the economic market for them dries up?

Or a more radical shift might involve an "AI commons"—legally declaring that any AI model trained on publicly scraped data should be owned collectively as a shared public domain, ensuring that its benefits flow back to society and don’t just enrich corporations.

Meanwhile, Internet platforms have already been experimenting with technical defenses against industrial-scale AI demands. Examples include proof-of-work challenges, slowdown "tarpits" (e.g., Nepenthes), shared crawler blocklists ("ai.robots.txt"), commercial tools (Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth), and Wikimedia's "WE5: Responsible Use of Infrastructure" initiative.

These solutions aren't perfect, and implementing any of them would require overcoming significant practical hurdles. Strict regulations might slow beneficial AI development; opt-out systems burden creators, while opt-in models can be complex to track. Meanwhile, tech defenses often invite arms races. Finding a sustainable, equitable balance remains the core challenge. The issue won't be solved in a day.

Invest in people

While navigating these complex systemic challenges will take time and collective effort, there is a surprisingly direct strategy that organizations can adopt now: investing in people. Don't sacrifice human connection and insight to save money with mediocre AI outputs.

Organizations that cultivate unique human perspectives and integrate them with thoughtful AI augmentation will likely outperform those that pursue cost-cutting through wholesale creative automation. Investing in people acknowledges that while AI can generate content at scale, the distinctiveness of human insight, experience, and connection remains priceless.

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Welcome to Edition 7.41 of the Rocket Report! NASA and its contractors at Kennedy Space Center in Florida continue building a new mobile launch tower for the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket, a taller, upgraded version of the SLS rocket being used for the agency's initial Artemis lunar missions. Workers stacked another segment of the tower a couple of weeks ago, and the structure is inching closer to its full height of 355 feet (108 meters). But this is just the start. Once the tower is fully assembled, it must be outfitted with miles of cabling, tubing, and piping and then be tested before it can support an SLS launch campaign. Last year, NASA's inspector general projected the tower won't be ready for a launch until the spring of 2029, and its costs could reach $2.7 billion. The good news, if you can call it that, is that there probably won't be an SLS Block 1B rocket that needs to use it in 2029, whether it's due to delays or cancellation.

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.

Fresh details on Astra's strategic pivot. Astra, the once high-flying rocket startup that crashed back to Earth with investors before going private last year, has unveiled new details about its $44 million contract with the Department of Defense, Space News reports. The DOD contract announced last year supports the development of Rocket 4, a two-stage, mobile launch vehicle with ambitions to deliver cargo across the globe in under an hour. While Astra's ill-fated Rocket 3 focused on launching small satellites into low-Earth orbit, Astra wants to make Rocket 4 a military utility vehicle. Rocket 4 will still be able to loft conventional satellites, but Astra's most lucrative contract for the new launch vehicle involves using the rocket for precise point-to-point delivery of up to 1,300 pounds (590 kilograms) of supplies from orbit via specialized reentry vehicles. The military has shown interest in developing a rocket-based rapid global cargo delivery system for several years, and it has a contract with SpaceX to study how the much larger Starship rocket could do a similar job.

Back from the brink... The Alameda, California-based company, which was delisted from Nasdaq in June 2024 after its shares collapsed, is now targeting the first test flight of Rocket 4 in 2026. Astra's arrangement with the Defense Innovation Unit includes two milestones: one suborbital (point-to-point) and the other orbital, with the option to launch from a location outside the United States, as Astra is developing a mobile launcher. Chris Kemp, Astra's co-founder and CEO, told Space News the orbital launch will likely originate from Australia. Astra's first launches with the new-retired Rocket 3 vehicle were based in Alaska and Florida.

The Army has a catchy name for its newest weapon. The Long Range Hypersonic Weapon has a new name: Dark Eagle. The US Army announced the popular name for the service's quick strike missile this week. "Part of the name pays tribute to the eagle—a master hunter known for its speed, stealth, and agility—due to the LRHW's combination of velocity, accuracy, maneuverability, survivability, and versatility," the Army said in a press release. "In addition, the bald eagle—our national bird—represents independence, strength, and freedom." The Dark Eagle is designed to strike targets with little or no warning via a hypersonic glide vehicle capable of maneuvering in the upper atmosphere after an initial launch with a conventional missile. The hypersonic weapon's ability to overcome an adversary's air and missile defenses is embodied in the word "dark" in Dark Eagle, the Army said.

Flying again soon... The Army tested the hypersonic weapon's "all-up round" during a missile launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December. The test was delayed more than a year due to unspecified issues. The Army appears to be preparing for another Dark Eagle test from Florida's Space Coast as soon as Friday, according to airspace and maritime warning notices in the Atlantic Ocean. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Northrop's niche with Minotaur. Ars mentioned in last week's Rocket Report that Northrop Grumman's Minotaur IV rocket launched April 16 with a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. This was the first Minotaur IV launch in nearly five years and the first orbital Minotaur launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, in 14 years. The low-volume Minotaur IV uses solid rocket motors from the Air Force's stockpile of retired Peacekeeper ballistic missiles, turning part of a weapon of mass destruction into, in this case, a tool to support the US government's spy satellite agency. The Minotaur IV's lift capability fits neatly between the capacity of smaller commercial rockets, like Firefly's Alpha or Rocket Lab's Electron, and larger rockets like SpaceX's Falcon 9. The most recent Minotaur IV launch contract cost the Space Force roughly $30 million, more than a mission with Firefly but less than a dedicated ride on a Falcon 9.

Minotaur IV will keep flying... The Space Force has at least two more missions reserved to launch on the expendable Minotaur IV rocket. One of the missions will launch multiple small satellites for the US military's Space Test Program, and the other will place a military weather satellite into orbit. Both missions will launch from California, with planning launch dates in 2026, a Space Systems Command spokesperson told Ars. "We do have multiple launches planned using Minotaur family launch vehicles between our OSP-4 (Orbital/Suborbital Program) and SRP-4 (Sounding Rocket Program) contracts," the spokesperson said. "We will release more information on those missions as we get closer to launch." The Commercial Space Act of 1998 prohibits the use of surplus ICBM motors for commercial launches and limits their use to only specific kinds of military launches. The restrictions were intended to encourage NASA and commercial satellite operators to use privately developed launch vehicles.

NASA's launch prices have somehow gone up. In an era of reusable rockets and near-daily access to space, NASA is still paying more than it did 30 years ago to launch missions into orbit, according to a study soon to be published in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica. Adjusted for inflation, the prices NASA pays for launch services rose at an annual average rate of 2.82 percent from 1996 to 2024, the report says. "Furthermore, there is no evidence of shift in the launch service costs trend after the introduction of a new launch service provider [SpaceX] in 2016." Ars analyzed NASA's launch prices in a story published Thursday.

Why is this? ... One might think SpaceX's reuse of Falcon 9 rocket components would drive down launch prices, but no. Rocket reuse and economies of scale have significantly reduced SpaceX's launch costs, but the company is charging NASA roughly the same as it did before booster reuse became commonplace. There are a few reasons this is happening. One is that SpaceX hasn't faced any meaningful competition for NASA launch contracts in the last six years. That should change soon with the recent debuts of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket and Blue Origin's New Glenn launcher. NASA levies additional requirements on its commercial launch providers, and the agency must pay for them. These include schedule priority, engineering oversight, and sometimes special payload cleanliness requirements and the choice of a particular Falcon 9 booster from SpaceX's inventory.

What's holding up ULA's next launch? After poor weather forced ULA to scrub a launch attempt on April 9, the company will have to wait nearly three weeks for another try to launch an Atlas V rocket with Amazon's first full-up load of 27 Kuiper broadband satellites, Ars reports. The rocket and satellites are healthy, according to ULA. But the military-run Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, is unable to accommodate ULA until Monday, April 28. The Space Force is being unusually cagey about the reasons for the lengthy delay, which isn't affecting SpaceX launches to the same degree.

Finally, a theory... The publishing of airspace and maritime warning notices for an apparent test launch of the Army's Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, or Dark Eagle, might explain the range's unavailability. The test launch could happen as soon as Friday, and offshore keep-out zones cover wide swaths of the Atlantic Ocean. If this is the reason for the long Atlas V launch delay, we still have questions. If this launch is scheduled for Friday, why has it kept ULA from launching the last few weeks? Why was SpaceX permitted to launch multiple times in the same time period? And why didn't the first test flight of the Dark Eagle missile in December result in similar lengthy launch delays on the Eastern Range?

Shenzhou 20 bound for Tiangong. A spaceship carrying three astronauts docked Thursday with China’s space station in the latest crew rotation, approximately six hours after their launch on a Long March 2F rocket from the Gobi Desert, the Associated Press reports. The Shenzhou 20 mission is commanded by Chen Dong, who is making his third flight. He is accompanied by fighter pilot Chen Zhongrui and engineer Wang Jie, both making their maiden voyages. They will replace three astronauts currently on the Chinese Tiangong space station. Like those before them, they will stay on board for roughly six months.

Finding a rhythm... China's human spaceflight missions have launched like clockwork since the country's first domestic astronaut launch in 2003. Now, with the Tiangong space station fully operational, China is launching fresh crews at six-month intervals. While in space, the astronauts will conduct experiments in medical science and new technologies and perform spacewalks to carry out maintenance and install new equipment. Their tasks will include adding space debris shielding to the exterior of the Tiangong station. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX resupplies the ISS. SpaceX launched an uncrewed Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station early Monday on a resupply mission with increased importance after a transportation mishap derailed a flight by another US cargo ship, Spaceflight Now reports. The Dragon cargo vessel docked at the space station early Tuesday with 4,780 pounds (2,168 kilograms) of pressurized cargo and 1,653 pounds (750 kilograms) of unpressurized payloads in the vehicle’s trunk. NASA adjusted the Dragon spacecraft's payload because an upcoming flight by Northrop Grumman's Cygnus supply freighter was canceled after the Cygnus cargo module was damaged during transport to the launch site.

Something strange... The payloads aboard this Dragon cargo mission—the 32nd by SpaceX—include normal things like fresh food (exactly 1,262 tortillas), biomedical and pharmaceutical experiments, and the technical demonstration of a new atomic clock. However, there's something onboard nobody at NASA or SpaceX wants to talk about. A payload package named STP-H10 inside Dragon's trunk section will be installed on a mounting post outside of the space station to perform a mission for the US military's Space Test Program. STP-H10 wasn't mentioned in NASA's press kit for this mission, and SpaceX didn't show the usual views of Dragon's trunk when the spacecraft deployed from its Falcon 9 rocket shortly after launch. These kinds of Space Test Program experiment platforms have launched to the ISS before without any secrecy. Stranger still is the fact that the STP-H10 experiments are unclassified. You can see the list here. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

There are some drawbacks to rideshare. SpaceX launched its third "Bandwagon" rideshare mission into a mid-inclination orbit Monday evening from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Space News reports. The payloads included a South Korean military radar spy satellite, a small commercial weather satellite, and the most interesting payload: an experimental reentry vehicle from a German startup named Atmos Space Cargo. The startup's Phoenix vehicle, fitted with an inflatable heat shield, separated from the Falcon 9's upper stage about 90 minutes after liftoff. Roughly a half-hour later, it began reentry for a splashdown in the South Atlantic Ocean, about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) off the coast of Brazil. Until last month, the Phoenix vehicle was supposed to reenter over the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, near the island of Réunion. The late change to the mission's trajectory meant Atmos could not recover the spacecraft after splashdown.

Changes in longitude... Five weeks before the launch, SpaceX informed Atmos of a change in trajectory because of “operational constraints” of the primary payload, a South Korean reconnaissance satellite. Smaller payloads on rideshare launches benefit from lower launch prices, but their owners have no control over the schedule or trajectory of the launch. The change for this mission resulted in a splashdown well off the coast of Brazil, ruling out any attempt to recover Phoenix after splashdown. It also meant a steeper reentry than previously planned, creating higher loads on the spacecraft. The company lined up new ground stations in South America to communicate with the spacecraft during key phases of flight leading up to reentry. In addition, it chartered a plane to attempt to collect data during reentry, but the splashdown location was beyond the range of the aircraft. Some data suggests that the heat shield inflated as planned, but Atmos's CEO said the company needed more time to analyze the data it had, adding that it was "very difficult" to get data from Phoenix in the final phases of its flight, given its distance from ground stations.

Ariane 6 is gonna need a bigger booster. A qualification motor for an upgraded solid rocket booster for Europe's Ariane 6 rocket successfully fired up for the first time on a test stand Thursday in Kourou, French Guiana, according to the European Space Agency. The new P160C solid rocket motor burned for more than two minutes, and ESA declared the test-firing a success. ESA's member states approved the development of the P160C motor in 2022. The upgraded motor is about 3 feet (1 meter) longer than the P120C motor currently flying on the Ariane 6 rocket and carries about 31,000 pounds (14 metric tons) more solid propellant. The Ariane 6 rocket can fly with two or four of these strap-on boosters. Officials plan to introduce the P160C on Ariane 6 flights next year, giving the rocket's heaviest version the ability to haul up to 4,400 pounds (2 metric tons) of additional cargo mass to orbit.

A necessary change... The heavier P160C solid rocket motor is required for Arianespace to fulfill its multi-mission launch contract with Amazon's Project Kuiper satellite broadband network. Alongside similar contracts with ULA and Blue Origin, Amazon reserved 18 Kuiper launches on Ariane 6 rockets, and 16 of them must use the upgraded P160C booster to deliver additional Kuiper satellites to orbit. The P160C is a joint project between ArianeGroup and Avio, which will use the same motor design on Europe's smaller Vega C rocket to improve its performance. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Progress toward the second flight of New Glenn. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said his team completed a full-duration 15-second hot-fire test Thursday of the upper stage for the company's second New Glenn rocket. In a post on X, Limp wrote that the upper stage for the next New Glenn flight will have "enhanced performance." The maximum power of its hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engine will increase from 173,000 pounds to 175,000 pounds of thrust. Two BE-3U engines fly on New Glenn's second stage.

A good engine... The BE-3U engine is a derivative of the BE-3 engine flying on Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard rocket. Limp wrote that the upper stage on the first New Glenn launch in January "performed remarkably" and achieved an orbital injection with less than 1 percent deviation from its target. So when will New Glenn launch again? We've heard late spring, June, or October, depending on the source. I'll note that Blue Origin test-fired the New Glenn upper stage for the rocket's first flight about four months before it launched.

Next three launches

April 27: Alpha | "Message in a Booster" | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13:37 UTC

April 27: Long March 3B/E | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 15:55 UTC

April 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-9 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20:55 UTC

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The buried roots and stumps of an ancient forest in southern China are the charred remains of an ancient war and the burning of a capital city, according to a recent study from researchers who carbon-dated the stumps and measured charcoal and pollen in the layers of peat surrounding them.

It may not be obvious today, but there’s an ancient forest hidden beneath the farmland of southern China’s Pearl River Delta. Spread across 2,000 square kilometers are thick layers of waterlogged peat, now covered by agriculture. It’s all that is left of what used to be a thriving wetland ecosystem, home to forests of Chinese swamp cypress along with elephants, tigers, crocodiles, and tropical birds. But the peat hides the buried, preserved stumps and roots of cypress trees; some of the largest stumps are almost 2 meters wide, and many have burn marks on their tops.

“These peat layers are locally known as ‘buried ancient forest,’ because many buried trees appear fresh and most stumps are found still standing,” writes Ning Wang of the Chinese Academy of Scientists, who along with colleagues, authored the recent paper. It turns out that the eerie buried forest is the last echo of the Han army’s invasion during a war about 2,100 years ago.

When the Fire Nation attacked

Wang and colleagues radiocarbon dated the stumps’ outermost rings to find out when the trees had stopped growing, and the answer is around 2,100 years ago (give or take about 70 years). It looks like the cypress trees died at roughly the same time across a broad swath of swampland, in some kind of ecological calamity. Based on the burn marks scarring the tops of many of the stumps, the forest ended in fire.

As it happens, history does record a fiery calamity in the Pearl River Delta around 111 BCE. The delta was home to an ancient kingdom called Nanyue, which ruled most of what are now the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, along with what’s now the northern part of Vietnam. Nanyue rose to power around 204 BCE, just as the Qin Empire (which had united most of China under its rule) was beginning to crumble. A former Qin general, Zhao Tuo, took advantage of the chaos to turn a former Qin province into an independent kingdom, which his descendants ruled for the next century.

Then everything changed when the Fire Nation—sorry, the Han Empire—attacked.

Han rose to power in the wake of Qin’s collapse, after a short war with a rival dynasty called Chu, and spent the next century smugly referring to Nanyue as a vassal state and occasionally demanding tribute. At times, the rulers of Nanyue played along, but it all came to a head around 111 BCE, in the wake of an attempted coup and a series of assassinations. The Han Emperor sent an army of between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers to invade Nanyue under a general named Lu Bode.

The troops marched across the countryside from five directions, converging outside Nanyue’s capital city of Panyou, which stood in the Pearl River Delta, near the modern city of Guangzhou. An enterprising company commander named Yang Pu got the bright idea to set the city on fire, and it ended badly.

“The fire not only destroyed the city but also ran out of control to the surrounding forests,” write Wang and colleagues. The cypress trees burned down to the waterline, leaving only their submerged stumps behind.

After war came fire and rice

At the time of the invasion, the land around Panyou was mostly swamp, forested with cypress trees. People had lived there for thousands of years, and had been growing rice for about 2,000 years. Bits of charcoal in the peat layers Wang and colleagues sampled reveal that they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, but on a small scale, rotating their fields so the cypress forest could start to recover after a season or two.

The small burns are nothing like the forest fire Yang Pu unleashed, or the massive burning and reworking of the landscape that came after.

The stumps of the burned cypress trees slowly disappeared under several meters of peat, while above the buried ancient forest, life went on. Tigers, elephants, rhinos, and green peafowl no longer walked here. Instead, grains of pollen from the layers of clay above the peat reveal a sudden influx of plants from the grassy Poaceae family, which includes rice, wheat, and barley.

That pollen, along with thicker-than-usual deposits of charcoal, suggests that people were burning the remaining trees on a massive scale to make room for more rice fields. Combined with historical records, Wang and colleagues say the pollen and charcoal buried in those sediments point to a dramatic increase in the local population and the scale of their agricultural industry. That was probably an effort to feed the huge invading army at first, but was followed by what Wang and colleagues describe as “a government action aimed at consolidating the results of the victory”—in other words, moving more people into the region and putting them to work on farms.

Nearby ocean sediments reveal that around the same time, about 2,100 years ago, more copper and lead started washing into the sea from the Pearl River Delta, suggesting that people were making copper farming tools and coins and using lead in cosmetics and metalware (always a fantastically healthy idea).

Biodiversity as a casualty of war

Meanwhile, the cypress trees that had once grown across thousands of square kilometers had been burned out of their home as surely as the Nanyue rulers had been burned out of theirs. The Han army’s out-of-control fire attack, followed by the years of burning and farming that followed, pushed the species (Chinese swamp cypress, formally called Glyptostrobus pensilis) to the brink of extinction.

Most of southeast China is still technically good habitat for the trees today, but no wild Chinese swamp cypress trees grow anywhere in China. In northern Vietnam, its numbers are small and dwindling, confined to a few remote patches of land. The problem is not climate or environmental change; it’s that so many of the trees were destroyed.

“Most G. pensilis populations are small and scattered, unable to provide the ecosystem services they once did,” write Wang and colleagues. G. pensilis is a critically endangered species, and according to Wang and colleagues, that’s mostly due to the Han invasion of Nanyue more than 2,000 years ago.

Science Advances, 2025 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adt1736; (About DOIs).

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We think of moths and butterflies as relatively harmless creatures, but there are certain species with a darker side—for example, carnivorous caterpillars that eat aphids, butterflies that drink alligator tears, or "vampire" moths that feed on livestock blood. Add to that list the newly discovered "bone collector" caterpillar, which conducts daring raids on spider webs for sustenance, camouflaging itself in the body parts of already-consumed insects to avoid being eaten. Not only that, but according to a new paper published in the journal Science, the caterpillars can tailor those insect parts, nibbling away at any excess material to ensure a proper fit.

Daniel Rubinoff, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, studies a genus of moths found in Hawaii called Hyposcoma, or as he has dubbed their larval form, "Hawaiian Fancy Case" caterpillars, so named because they spin their own casings, adding to them as they grow, although the materials used can vary widely.  There are now more than 600 species within this genus, many of them not yet officially described, so it was a rich research area to explore.

The discovery of the bone collector species was serendipitous. "You never forget your first bone collector," Rubinoff told Ars. His team was on Oa'hu looking for Hyposcoma when they came across a little tree hollow and spotted something at the bottom that at first glance just looked like "a bag of bug bits." The caterpillar then stuck its head out, and the researchers realized it was a new kind of case. Rubinoff assumed that the spider web also found in the tree hollow was a coincidence; the caterpillar just used the materials readily available in the tree hollow to make its fancy case.

But then the team started finding more of these caterpillars, all covered in the body parts of other insects and shed spider skins, and all in the vicinity of spider webs. "We started realizing these things are only hanging out where there are spiders," said Rubinoff, who spent several years verifying that this was, indeed, a rare new species. "It's the sort of thing you really want to be sure of because it's not just incredible, it's unimaginable."

A genomic analysis confirmed the researchers' suspicions and shed some light on the bone collector's possible evolutionary pathway. The bone caterpillar may have only just been discovered by humans, but it's at least 5 million years old and possibly as old as 12 million years, predating the island of O'ahu on which it now exclusively resides in an area of about 15 square kilometers in the Wai'anae Mountains. No other known member of the same lineage has yet been found, suggesting that the species originated on an early island in a chain that has since subsided.

Dressed for success

Why do the caterpillars do this? "It's a decorate or die situation," said Rubinoff. "In evolutionary history, the ones that didn't decorate their cases were probably removed from the gene pool pretty quickly. But a few of them started incorporating bug and spider bits in their cases and survived. Selection would drive them toward having the sensory capacity to detect those bits and use them as camouflage. If you're going to live in Smaug's lair, you'd better look like treasure."

Bone collector larva in web.

Rubinoff lab/University of Hawaii, Manoa

 

Pinned adult female (left) of the bone collector caterpillar and portable case (right) in which the larva resides decorated with body parts from ants, bark beetles, weevils, and flies.

D. Rubinoff et al., 2025

 

Bone collector cases.

Rubinoff lab/University of Hawaii, Manoa

 

It's a jumbled-up, messy kind of treasure, since arranging the body parts in too orderly a fashion would defeat the purpose of camouflage as they crawl around the three-dimensional cobwebs they favor. "They're not going to do a tightrope walk between two trees; they're hiding in a little hole in a log where there are cobwebs," said Rubinoff. "A spider detects vibrations in the web, rushes out to grab its prey, smells itself and prey it's already eaten, and assumes there is nothing new to eat."

The next step is to take a closer look at the caterpillar genome to find an underlying mechanism for this unusual behavior, as well as details on how the caterpillars can distinguish between bug bits and, say, dirt, and how they are able to perceive size for tailoring purposes. A bone collector can be quite selective, picking up potential body parts among the web detritus and probing them with its mandibles, chewing larger pieces down to the desired size. Nor will the caterpillars accept other materials when they spin their cases: It's the discarded corpses of their enemies or nothing, even in captivity.

Rubinoff has already brought several into the lab, where the caterpillars can gorge themselves on Drosophila pupae with no fear of spiders interrupting the feast. This confirmed that bone collectors are no mere scavengers; they are predatory, chewing right through the silk to eat the live pupae. They will even cannibalize each other, "which is why you don't see more than one at each spiderweb," said Rubinoff.

The clock is ticking, however, as the bone collector is extremely rare and in danger of extinction, due to the large number of invasive species—especially non-native ants and parasitic wasps—that have found their way to Hawaii. Thus far, the bone collector has been able to adapt and raid the cobwebs of non-native spiders to survive. "I don't want to say it's on the verge of winking out, but in the context, it seems likely," said Rubinoff. "We've lost entire genera of endemic insects [in Hawaii]. It could be one new ant species away from being obliterated."

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads4243  (About DOIs).

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We all want to know if and how we can come back to form after injury, illness, or a long hiatus. Muscles adapt in response to the environment: They grow when we put in the work and shrink when we stop. But what if we could help them remember how to grow?

As a general rule, cell biologists don’t enter their careers by running through the gauntlet of top-tier professional sports. But in the years that Adam Sharples played as a front-row forward in the UK’s Rugby Football League, he found himself wondering about cell mechanisms that helped muscles to grow after different types of exercise.

A front-row position in pro rugby means that you have to be, well, “quite big,” as Adam puts it. “I was in the gym lifting weights from the age of about 12, I think,” he says.

He spent much of his teenage life in training. When he was 19, he was playing a Boxing Day match on soggy ground that was heavy underfoot. He’d just planted his foot when a player on the opposing team tackled him, torquing his upper body to the left. His right foot remained firmly stuck in the mud.

“That’s when I tore my ACL, but I don’t remember much about it. You should ask my dad,” Adam tells me with a wry smile. “He could tell you down to the minute, in great detail: when it happened, how it happened.” (Sports, I’m reminded, has the remarkable capacity to be a love language.)

Adam took a year off from rugby and continued to study, completing his master’s degree in human physiology. He’d always been curious about muscles and muscle growth, but the hiatus gave him time to think—pro rugby players, he was well aware, have notoriously short careers. That acknowledgment eventually led him to pursue a PhD in muscle cell biology.

When we talk about muscle memory, most of the time we refer to the way our bodies seem to remember how to do things that we haven’t done in some time—riding a bike, say, or doing a complicated dance we learned in childhood. When you learn and repeat certain movements over time, that movement pattern becomes refined and regular, and so does the firing pattern of neurons that control that movement. The memory of how to perform that action lives in our motor neurons, not in the actual muscles that are involved. But as Adam proceeded through his academic training, he became more and more interested in the question of whether muscle itself possesses a memory at the cellular and genetic level.

Almost two decades later, Adam teaches and runs a lab at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo. In 2018, his research group was the first in the world to show that human skeletal muscle possesses an epigenetic memory of muscle growth after exercise.

Epigenetic refers to changes in gene expression that are caused by behavior and environment. The genes themselves aren’t changed, but the way they work is. When you lift weights, for instance, small molecules called methyl groups detach from the outside of certain genes, making them more likely to turn on and produce proteins that affect muscle growth. Those changes persist; if you start lifting weights again, you’ll add muscle mass more quickly than before. In other words, your muscles remember how to do it: They have a lasting molecular memory of past exercise that makes them primed to respond to exercise, even after a months-long pause. (Cellular muscle memory, on the other hand, works a little differently than epigenetic muscle memory. Exercise stimulates muscle stem cells to contribute their nuclei to muscle growth and repair, and cellular muscle memory refers to when those nuclei stick around for a while in the muscle fibers—even after periods of inactivity—and help accelerate the return to growth once you start training again.)

Athletes have always known this to be true, at least anecdotally. After periods of injury, as with a torn ACL, they notice that it’s fairly easy to regain the muscle strength they lost. The joints, though, are another story.

Adam took his reconstructed knee and ground through another year of pro rugby before retiring for good. In his academic work, he began to investigate the why behind his observations about muscle memory. In doing so, he found a way to grapple with what it means to age as an athlete, and as a human.

“Looking back, I was probably overtraining in the attempt to be the best I could be,” Adam says. “Because if you can find the exercise that provides your muscle with the longest-lasting memory, or find the type of training that your muscle can respond better to the second time around—after an injury, say, or after taking some time off—then you can potentially reduce the amount of exercise you do for the same benefit.”

He laughs. “I could have saved myself some work, I suppose. I’ve got that hindsight now.”

Excerpt adapted from On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters by Bonnie Tsui. Copyright © 2025 by Bonnie Tsui. Published by arrangement with Algonquin Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY, U.S.A. All rights reserved.

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Since the arrival of nuclear power in the 1950s, more than 400 reactors in 31 countries have produced about 430,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, and until now no one has developed a permanent solution for disposing of it. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that about 30 percent of this fuel has been reprocessed—elements in spent fuel can be recycled to create new fuel for nuclear plants—but the rest has been “parked” in temporary storage systems, with its final destination yet to be determined.

And with the nuclear sector showing signs of undergoing a renaissance—as countries look to decarbonize energy production and with the tech sector seeking ways to power its electricity-hungry AI systems—the pressure for nuclear-waste disposal is likely to grow.

The best solution would be to put spent fuel in an underground facility that can contain it safely for millennia. Spent fuel is a major threat to human health for at least 10,000 years and remains radioactive for several million. But such facilities have to be built from scratch, and while several are being developed, none have been completed. The leader in this race is Finland, which has dug the underground space needed for a repository.

On the country’s west coast, roughly three hours’ drive from the capital, Helsinki, is what will become the country’s first encapsulation plant. Known as Onkalo, it will receive spent fuel from Finland’s five nuclear reactors—three on the nearby island of Olkiluoto and two in Loviisa, in the southeast of the country. The repository is being built by Posiva Oy, a Finnish company set up by two of the country’s nuclear operators in 1995 to find a way of permanently storing spent nuclear fuel.

In the bedrock here, at a depth of 430 meters, testing is underway. Storage of spent fuel involves placing spent fuel rods inside copper canisters, which in turn have to be inserted into slots dug into the granite walls of the subterranean repository. Everything is then sealed with bentonite, a soft, plastic clay that insulates the containers and acts as a buffer against minor movements in the bedrock.

In mid-March, five test containers, filled with nonradioactive materials, were sealed in a special aboveground facility before being transported underground and stored along a 70-meter-long subterranean tunnel, to provide an initial proof of concept for Onkalo’s storage process. The completion of this dummy run puts Finland in the lead in the race to build the world’s first operational deep geological repository.

Onkalo’s construction has so far cost €900 million, while an estimated €4 billion more is needed to complete the project. Breaking ground here followed decades of research to find the best location for the repository and years waiting for permits and approvals. There are some who still don’t believe the project will happen and others who hope it won’t. Some locals have been hostile to the project, unhappy with the prospect of nuclear waste being stored nearby and perplexed at how easily, in their opinion, Posiva Oy was able to get permits for the repository. Researchers have also expressed concerns about potential corrosion of storage containers, specifically the copper canisters.

Together with his colleagues, Jinshan Pan, a professor of corrosion science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, published a study in January 2023 devoted to the risk of sulfides in groundwater corroding the copper used for spent nuclear fuel containers. “More work is needed to define […] the nature and chemistry of the surface films that develop on copper surfaces in repository conditions,” the paper says.

While Posiva Oy looks like it may have the first functioning repository, other countries are following its lead. Neighbouring Sweden is also preparing to start work on its own repository, which is intended to contain up to 12,000 metric tons of Swedish spent nuclear fuel. It is expected to extend over 60 kilometers of tunnel once it is finished, at a depth of 500 meters. It is a major work that has been on the drawing table for 40 years and obtained its necessary environmental permits for construction only a few months ago. Construction could start within the next decade and would continue until the 2080s, with this repository’s underground space gradually extending—provided an appeal made by the Office for Nuclear Waste Review, a Swedish NGO, does not slow or halt the work. Concerns about the Swedish project are the same as with the Finnish one: danger of corrosion of the copper canisters, possibly resulting in the release of radioactive elements into the groundwater.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Canada is also planning to build a storage facility. The repository doesn’t exist yet, but the path forward appears relatively free of obstacles—at least there are no apparent legal ones. After 14 years of dialog and debates, the relevant bodies and citizens have selected a host site within the Township of Ignace, Ontario, part of the indigenous community the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation. Both the town and nation were open to the project, seeing it as a source of investments and new jobs.

France and Switzerland are also working on projects, gradually making progress, even if much of it is a matter of getting over bureaucratic hurdles. In the Meuse region of northeastern France, field work on the Cigéo project could begin in 2027 now that it has received a positive assessment of its soundness. The implementing company Andra has been authorized to continue with plans, providing it gives greater consideration to the potential impact of climate change on the aboveground structures.

It has taken Switzerland’s national radioactive-waste-disposal cooperative, Nagra, 14 years to decide where to locate its storage facility. It has chosen to build its repository north of Zurich, in Nördlich Lägern, because it is an area particularly rich in very compact opaline clay, which is perfect for acting as a long-term container for radioactive materials. (Finland’s site is also rich in this material.) Final approval is expected around 2030, subject to a referendum, and the repository should start to operate by 2060.

Finally, Italy is considering 51 sites that could potentially be suitable to host a repository for nuclear waste storage. These plans were first drawn up in 2015 and then published in December 2023. The government has since decided to reopen the application process to accommodate new applications. In the meantime, radioactive waste in the country remains stored in temporary repositories at the sites of decommissioned nuclear power plants, nuclear research facilities, and nuclear medicine and industry locations.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

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Even though stretchable electronics have advanced a lot for health applications, a big challenge has been avoiding interference when measuring different signals at once. To fix this, the Penn State team created a hybrid device with separate sensors and a wireless module for charging and transmitting data.

The sticker-like patch was designed to provide real-time emotion tracking while keeping measurements accurate and interference-free. Researchers also made sure it’s comfortable and compact.

Lead researcher Huanyu “Larry” Cheng explained why this approach is important: "Relying only on facial expressions to understand emotions can be misleading. People often don't visibly show how they truly feel, so that’s why we’re combining facial expression analysis with other physiological signals, which will ultimately lead to better mental health monitoring and support."

The device is built with stacked layers that help separate different measurements like temperature, strain, and humidity, so they don’t affect each other. The team also trained an AI model to analyze facial expressions and match them with body signals.

To test how well the AI could detect emotions, researchers recruited volunteers who acted out six common emotions—happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust—100 times each. The AI correctly identified performed emotions 96.28% of the time and real emotions 88.83% of the time. The results suggest combining facial recognition with body signals could help distinguish between genuine feelings and those people try to hide.

Co-author Yangbo Yuan, a doctoral student at Penn State, pointed out the importance of this for mental health: "This technology has the potential to help people who are struggling with their mental health, but maybe aren’t being fully honest with others or even themselves about how much they are struggling."

Since the sticker can wirelessly send data to mobile devices and the cloud, healthcare providers could use it for remote monitoring and telemedicine. This means doctors could track a patient’s emotions and offer help without needing in-person visits.

Cheng believes this could be particularly useful for detecting anxiety or depression early. He also highlighted how cultural differences can affect emotional expression, and this device could help doctors better understand patients across different backgrounds.

The researchers think the technology could be useful beyond mental health, including:

• Helping non-verbal patients communicate their emotional state
• Tracking early signs of dementia
• Identifying opioid overdoses
• Monitoring neurodegenerative diseases and chronic wounds
• Improving athletic performance tracking

The Penn State team is looking at ways to expand the device’s AI-powered diagnostic capabilities beyond emotions. Over time, they believe it could play a major role in proactive mental health care, leading to more personalized support for patients.

Cheng summarized the bigger goal: "Given the rising stress levels in modern society, the ability to monitor emotions can provide early indicators of debilitating conditions and allow for proactive support." Thus, although still in development, this wearable technology is paving the way for more advanced and accessible mental health tracking.

Source: Penn State, ACS | Image via Depositphotos

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

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Fujitsu and RIKEN (a leading Japanese research institute) have announced that they’ve developed a new 256-qubit superconducting quantum computer, which significantly expands their quantum computing capabilities. Fujitsu said that the computer is at the RIKEN RQC-FUJITSU Collaboration Center and implements high-density implementation techniques.

This new machine builds on a previous quantum computer that the pair developed, which had 64 qubits. With the fourfold increase in qubits, this computer will be able to perform analysis of larger molecules and help to demonstrate more advanced error correction algorithms.

This new quantum computer won’t be monopolized by Fujitsu and RIKEN, and the pair has plans to give companies and research institutes from around the world access to the machine to advance their projects. It said access will be given to these entities during the first quarter of fiscal 2025.

Aside from just expanding the number of qubits available, Fujitsu and RIKEN made a breakthrough related to cooling. They said that effective cooling has been achieved through a dilution refrigerator “through the incorporation of high-density implementation and cutting-edge thermal design."

In the future, Fujitsu and RIKEN are planning to improve their platform’s usability by enabling the seamless interaction between quantum and classical computers. This will allow users to run hybrid classical-quantum algorithms. The pair also said they’re now working on a 1,000-qubit quantum computer, and it’s due to be installed next year.

The two organizations also revealed an agreement to continue collaborating through March 2029. That will enable them to continue innovating on this work.

While this 256-qubit quantum computer is not the leader of the pack (there are already 1,000+ qubit quantum computers), it’s important that different approaches to quantum computing are tried, as some may ultimately fail to scale to a level where they have true utility.

Source: Fujitsu

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