I'll bet you don't spend a ton of time thinking about Deimos, the smaller of the two Martian moons, which is named after the Ancient Greek god that personified dread.

And who could blame you? Of the two Martian moons, Phobos gets more attention, including as a possible waystation for human missions to Mars. Phobos is larger than Deimos, with a radius of 11 km, and closer to the Martian surface, a little more than 9,000 km away.

By contrast, Deimos is tiny, with a radius of 6 km, and quite a bit further out, more than 23,000 km from the surface. It is so small that, on the surface of Mars, Deimos would only appear about as bright in the night sky as Venus does from Earth.

But who doesn't love a good underdog story? Scientists have dreamed up all kinds of uses for Deimos, including using its sands for aerobraking large missions to Mars, returning samples from the tiny moon. So maybe Deimos will eventually get its day.

Recently, we got one of our best views yet of the tiny moon when a European mission named Hera, en route to the asteroid Didymos, flew through the Martian system for a gravity assist. During this transit, the spacecraft came within just 300 km of Deimos. And its Asteroid Framing Camera captured this lovely image, which was, admittedly, artificially colored.

Anyway, it's a rare glimpse at one of the smallest known moons in the Solar System, and I think it's spectacular.

Source: European Space Agency

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Is there anything more human than gathering in groups to share food and partake in a fermented beverage or two (or three, or....)? Researchers have caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be similar activity: sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, the observational data is the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild.

The fruit in question is seasonal and comes from Treculia africana trees common across the home environment of the wild chimps in Cantanhez National Park in Guinea-Bissau. Once mature, the fruits drop from the tree to the ground and slowly ripen from a hard, deep green exterior to a yellow, spongier texture. Because the chimps are unhabituated, the authors deployed camera traps at three separate locations to record their feeding and sharing behavior.

They recorded 10 instances of selective fruit sharing among 17 chimps, with the animals exhibiting a marked preference for riper fruit. Between April and July 2022, the authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).

That's comparatively low to alcoholic drinks typically consumed by humans, but then again, fruit accounts for as much as 60 to 80 percent of the chimps' diet, so the amount of ethanol consumed could add up quickly. It's highly unlikely the chimps would get drunk, however. It wouldn't confer any evolutionary advantage, and per the authors, there is evidence in the common ancestor of African apes of a molecular mechanism that increases the ability to metabolize alcohol.

The interpretation of the observed behavior remains somewhat speculative. It's unclear, for instance, whether any of the chimps were related to each other; kin-selection effects may be at play. Nor could the authors conclude definitively that the chimps were deliberately consuming ethanol-rich fruits and sharing it with their compatriots. That said, there are well-known benefits to such behavior.

“For humans, we know that drinking alcohol leads to a release of dopamine and endorphins, and resulting feelings of happiness and relaxation,” said co-author Anna Bowland of the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall. “We also know that sharing alcohol–including through traditions such as feasting–helps to form and strengthen social bonds. So—now we know that wild chimpanzees are eating and sharing ethanolic fruits–the question is: could they be getting similar benefits?”

The authors believe this data suggests that the human inclination toward feasting in groups is part of our deep evolutionary history. "To fully understand this in a social context requires data on the role of alcohol consumption in reinforcing social bonds and building social capital, including the exchange of other goods, between extended kin and non-kin, and the degree to which ethanol ingestion is intentional or not," they concluded. "This necessitates long-term observations of individuals with well-established relationships where changes in feeding and social behavior can be monitored, alongside measurement of ethanol in foods."

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.02.067 (About DOIs).

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Neuroscientists are striving to give a voice to people unable to speak in a fast-advancing quest to harness brainwaves to restore or enhance physical abilities.

Researchers at universities across California and companies, such as New York-based Precision Neuroscience, are among those making headway toward generating naturalistic speech through a combination of brain implants and artificial intelligence.

Investment and attention have long been focused on implants that enable severely disabled people to operate computer keyboards, control robotic arms, or regain some use of their own paralyzed limbs. But some labs are making strides by concentrating on technology that converts thought patterns into speech.

“We are making great progress—and making brain-to-synthetic voice as fluent as chat between two speaking people is a major goal,” said Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco. “The AI algorithms we are using are getting faster, and we are learning with every new participant in our studies.”

Chang and colleagues, including from the University of California, Berkeley last month published a paper in Nature Neuroscience detailing their work with a woman with quadriplegia, or paralysis of the limbs and torso, who had not been able to speak for 18 years after suffering a stroke.

She trained a deep-learning neural network by silently attempting to say sentences composed using 1,024 different words. The audio of her voice was created by streaming her neural data to a joint speech synthesis and text-decoding model.

The technique reduced the lag between the patient’s brain signals and the resultant audio from the eight seconds the group had achieved previously to one second. This is much closer to the 100-200 millisecond time gap in normal speech. The system’s median decoding speed was 47.5 words per minute, or about a third the rate of normal conversation.

Many thousands of people a year could benefit from so-called voice prosthesis. Their cognitive functions remain more or less intact, but they have suffered speech loss due to stroke, the neurodegenerative disorder ALS, and other brain conditions. If successful, researchers hope the technique could be extended to help people who have difficulty vocalizing because of conditions such as cerebral palsy or autism.

The potential of voice neuroprosthesis is beginning to trigger interest among businesses. Precision Neuroscience claims to be capturing higher resolution brain signals than academic researchers, since the electrodes of its implants are more densely packed.

The company has worked with 31 patients and plans soon to collect data from more, providing a potential pathway to commercialization.

Precision received regulatory clearance on April 17 to leave its sensors implanted for up to 30 days at a time. That would enable its scientists to train their system with what could within a year be the “largest repository of high resolution neural data that exists on planet Earth,” said chief executive Michael Mager.

The next step would be to “miniaturize the components and put them in hermetically sealed packages that are biocompatible so they can be planted in the body forever,” Mager said.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the best-known brain-computer interface (BCI) company, has focused on enabling people with paralysis to control computers rather than giving them a synthetic voice.

An important obstacle to the development of brain-to-voice technology is the time patients take to learn how to use the system.

A key unanswered question is how much the response patterns in the motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary actions, including speech—vary between people. If they remained very similar, machine-learning models trained on previous individuals could be used for new patients, said Nick Ramsey, a BCI researcher at University Medical Centre Utrecht.

That would accelerate a process that today takes “tens or hundreds of hours generating enough data by showing a participant text and asking them to try to speak it.”

Ramsey said all brain-to-voice research focused on the motor cortex where neurons activate the muscles involved in speaking, with no evidence that speech could be generated from other brain areas or by decoding inner thoughts.

“Even if you could, you wouldn’t want people to hear your inner speech,” he added. “There are a lot of things I don’t say out loud because they wouldn’t be to my benefit or they might hurt people.”

The development of a synthetic voice as good as healthy speech could still be “quite a ways away,” said Sergey Stavisky, co-director of the neuroprosthetics lab at University of California, Davis.

His lab had demonstrated it could decode what someone was trying to say with about 98 percent accuracy, he said. But the voice output isn’t instantaneous and it doesn’t capture important speech qualities such as tone. It was unclear if the recording hardware—electrodes—being used could enable the synthesis to match a healthy human voice, he added.

Scientists needed to develop a deeper understanding of how the brain encodes speech production and better algorithms to translate neural activity into vocal outputs, Stavisky added.

He said: “Ultimately a voice neuroprosthesis should provide the full expressive range of the human voice, so that for example they can precisely control their pitch and timing and do things like sing.”

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About 12,000 human athletes ran in a half marathon race in Beijing on Saturday, but most of the attention was on a group of other, more unconventional participants: 21 humanoid robots. The event’s organizers, which included several branches of Beijing’s municipal government, claim it’s the first time humans and bipedal robots have run in the same race, though they jogged on separate tracks. Six of the robots successfully finished the course, but they were unable to keep up with the speed of the humans.

The fastest robot, Tiangong Ultra, developed by Chinese robotics company UBTech in collaboration with the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, finished the race in two hours and 40 minutes after assistants changed its batteries three times and it fell down once.

The slowest time allowed for human runners in the race was 3 hours and 10 minutes, and Tiangong Ultra was the only robot that barely qualified for a human participation award. Most of the humanoid participants didn’t stay in the game for long and disappeared from the live broadcast soon after they took off from the starting line.

Alan Fern, a robotics professor at Oregon State University, tells WIRED that researchers who build these robots typically focus on trying to get them to complete tasks and respond effectively in a diverse range of different environments, rather than run as fast as possible. Fern adds that the AI technology used in humanoids hasn't progressed very much since 2021, when his team sent a bipedal robot to run a 5k race.

What the race does demonstrate, he says, is how robust humanoid hardware has become. “Until five years ago or so, we didn't really know how to get robots to walk reliably. And now we do, and this will be a good demonstration of that,” he told WIRED on Thursday before the race took place. His team’s robot fell twice during the 2021 5k run, once due to operator error and another due to overheating. “The impressive thing about going from a 5k to a half marathon is really a hardware robustness problem. And you know, I'll be surprised if one of these companies makes it through without replacing the robot,” he says.

Fern’s predictions were totally right. On Saturday, almost every robot fell down and faced overheating problems, prompting their operators to switch them out for new replacements. While the event did generate a lot of interest and pride among Chinese people—many human runners stopped to take selfies with Tiangong Ultra when they saw it—it also showed the reality and limitations of China’s humanoid robot industry.

Impressive looking humanoid robots developed by several Chinese companies have made international headlines this year. One robot firm called Unitree, for example, went viral in January after it sent an army of robots to perform synchronized dances during China’s Spring Festival gala on state TV. Unitree didn’t officially participate in the race, but two of its robots were still running the half marathon while being operated by other institutions. (One of its robots fell on the ground before reaching the starting line and struggled to stand up quickly.)

While capabilities like dancing can be fun and eyecatching, they don’t actually show how useful humanoid robots are in real-world situations, says Fern. Even being able to run a half marathon isn’t a very useful benchmark for their skills—it’s not like there’s market demand for robots that can compete with human runners. The benchmarks that Fern says matter to him are how well they can handle diverse real-world tasks without step-by-step human instructions. “But I would expect to see China shifting this year to focusing more on doing useful things, because people are going to be bored of dancing and karate,” Fern says.

The robots who participated in the race came in a variety of forms. The shortest one was only 2 feet and 5 inches tall. Sporting a blue and white tracksuit and waving to onlookers every few seconds, it was probably the crowd favorite. The tallest, at five feet nine inches, was the winner Tiangong Ultra.

What all of the robots have in common is that they are bipedal instead of running on wheels, a requirement to participate in the race. As long as the robots met that requirement, they were free to get creative, and the companies behind them adopted a wide range of strategies to try to get an advantage over their competitors. Some were wearing kid-sized sneakers (though screwed to their pedals to avoid falling off). Others were equipped with knee pads to protect their delicate parts from damage when they fell. Most of the robots had their fingers removed and some were even missing heads—you don't need such parts for running, after all, and taking them off reduces a robot’s weight and the amount of burden placed on their motors.

Tiangong Ultra and another model, the N2 robot made by Chinese company Noetix Robotics, which won second place in the race, stood out for their consistent, albeit slow pace. The performance of the other humanoids was mostly disastrous. One robot called Huanhuan, which has a human-like head, only moved at the speed of a snail for a few minutes while its head shook uncontrollably—as if it could fall off any time.

Another robot named Shennong looks like a real Frankenstein’s monster, with the head that resembles Gundam and four drone propellers that face backwards. It sits on a foundation with eight wheels, and it’s not clear how that alone wasn’t disqualifying. But that wasn’t even Shennong’s biggest problem, as the robot immediately twirled in two circles after taking off from the starting line, hit the wall, and dragged down its human operators with it. It was painful to watch.

Duct tape proved to be the most effective problem-solving tool. Not only did the accompanying humans make makeshift robot shoes with duct tape, they also used it to adhere the head of a robot back onto its body after it repeatedly fell off during the run, making for some very jarring scenes.

Every robot had human operators, often two or three running beside them. Some held control panels that allowed them to give the robot instructions, including how fast to go, while other operators led the way for their robots and tried to clear potential obstacles on the ground. Quite a few of the humanoids were being held on what looked like, well, pet leashes. “You wanna think of these robots more like running a remote control car through the race. But the robots don't have wheels,” says Fern.

In fact, by the end of the race, many people who tuned into the livestream started to comment on how exhausted the robots’ human operators looked. They were guiding the robots where to go, furiously changing their batteries, and endlessly spraying liquid on them to cool down their motors, all while running (or walking, to be honest) 13.1 miles on their own.

Besides running and tripping, some of the robots also performed dances and backflips. Seven robot dogs and one humanoid also performed more dances on a nearby stage. At the end, yet another robot brought the trophies onto the award stage and presented them to their four fellow robots who completed the run.

The limitations of the robots, however, could make for some memorable scenes. Xuanfeng Xiaozi, a robot developed by the Chinese company Noetix, started off strong but broke down more and more frequently towards the end of the race. At one point, it fully plunged to the ground, face down, and its head became dislodged from its body. A team of human operators quickly swooped in with duct tape to fix things and put Xuanfeng Xiaozi back on its way.

When it was finally almost done with the race, Xuanfeng Xiaozi had a cooling pad attached to its front and its right foot was out of step with its left, and yet, it still managed to wobble to the finish line, where the runner-up robot, made by the same company, had been waiting for it for ten minutes. The half marathon certainly showed off the design flaws of these robots far more than their capabilities. But still, at that moment, I was really happy to see Xuanfeng Xiaozi finish the race.

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Whether anything ever lived on Mars is unknown. And the present environment, with harsh temperatures, intense radiation, and a sparse atmosphere, isn’t exactly propitious for life. Despite the red planet’s brutality, lichens that inhabit some of the harshest environments on Earth could possibly survive there.

Lichens are symbionts, or two organisms that are in a cooperative relationship. There is a fungal component (most are about 90 percent fungus) and a photosynthetic component (algae or cyanobacteria). To see if some species of lichen had what it takes to survive on Mars, a team of researchers led by botanist Kaja Skubała used the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences to expose the lichen species Diploschistes muscorum and Cetrarea aculeata to simulate Mars conditions.

“Our study is the first to demonstrate that the metabolism of the fungal partner in lichen symbiosis was active while being in a Mars-like environment,” the researchers said in a study recently published in IMA Fungus. “X-rays associated with solar flares and SEPs reaching Mars should not affect the potential habitability of lichens on this planet.”

Martian ionizing radiation is threatening to most forms of life because it can cause damage at the cellular level. It can also get in the way of physical, genetic, morphological, and biochemical processes, depending on the organism and radiation level.

Going to extremes

Lichens have an edge when it comes to survival. They share characteristics with other organisms that can handle high levels of stress, including a low metabolism, not needing much in the way of nutrition, and longevity. Much like tardigrades, lichens can stay in a desiccated state for extended periods until they are rehydrated. Other lichen adaptations to extreme conditions include metabolites that screen out UV rays and melanin pigments that also defend against radiation.

Because the effects of UV radiation on lichens have been studied before, Skubała decided to focus on something that had not previously been explored, which is what happens to them when exposed to ionizing radiation while they are still metabolically active (lichens need water to keep their metabolism going). To do so, the researchers sprayed the lichens with water for hydration to keep them in a metabolically active state.

Each species spent five hours inside a dark chamber with simulated Martian conditions. This meant low pressure, low humidity, an “atmosphere” that was mostly carbon dioxide, and temperatures that started at a daytime 18° C (64° F), then plunged down to a nighttime minus-26° C (minus-14° F). X-ray radiation levels in the chamber were similar to those on the surface of Mars when there is strong solar activity, though solar flares and fluctuations in solar wind make actual Martian levels unpredictable.

I’m a survivor

When the lichens emerged from their simulated Martian habitat, both species were found to have retained some moisture despite a lack of humidity, so the researchers assumed that at least some metabolic activity was going on in both the fungal and photosynthetic components. Earlier, the photosynethic component of lichens had been tested during exposure to ionizing radiation, but not the fungal component.

Lichens that are not dehydrated are more prone to damage from ionizing radiation. Both fungal and algal cells in metabolically active lichens have repair mechanisms they can activate, but D. muscorum was much more resistant to the radiation than C. aculeata. This species suffered less oxidative stress, meaning that fewer reactive oxygen species built up in its cells. These unstable molecules contain oxygen and can severely damage cellular components and even lead to cell death.

Other adverse Martian conditions, such as an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide, can affect lichen metabolism but not completely shut it down. The fungal component needs oxygen so it can metabolize carbohydrates, but the metabolic processes of both species kept going even though there was little oxygen available. The researchers think it is also possible that the photosynthetic portion of the lichens might have produced oxygen that the fungal components could use.

Surprisingly, the process of photosynthesis was not that sensitive to X-rays in dark conditions. Fluorescence imaging measurements of chlorophyll concentrations showed that the photosynthetic component of D. muscorum remained undamaged throughout the experiment, while that in C. aculeata experienced a decrease in chlorophyll when exposed to X-rays. Both lichens were frozen after the experiment. When thawed, both became photosynthetically active again, with C. aculeata quickly regaining its initial chlorophyll levels.

Whether lichens can survive on Mars really depends on the species. Skubała thinks that further research is needed to determine all the features and adaptations that make them likely to survive in the face of intense ionizing radiation.

“Our findings lay the foundation for future studies, including long-term exposure experiments on the Mars surface,” she and her team said optimistically in the same paper. We haven’t yet intentionally landed an Earth organism on Mars, and it will likely be a long time before we can carry out an in situ experiment on the red planet.

Why D. muscorum was more effective at mitigating radiation damage is not completely known. After the experiment, concentrations of antioxidants (especially glutathione) were found to have increased during exposure. Glutathione can also limit cellular damage in humans and other organisms. It may help a lichen to survive ionizing radiation, but that doesn’t mean it can provide equivalent protection to us—we should think twice before we attempt to put boots on Mars.

IMA Fungus, 2025. DOI: 10.3897/imafungus.16.145477

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A team of scientists has identified areas of the brain that are activated when a person becomes aware of themself and their thoughts. This enigmatic process appears to be controlled by the thalamus, a central region of the brain already known for its function as a filter between sensory signals and the cerebral cortex, the portion of the brain that governs higher-level processes such as memory, thought, and personality.

Conscious perception is the ability of human beings to become aware of the stimuli received by their senses. It is a different state from simply being awake, where sensations are processed automatically and unreflectively. Rather, conscious perception requires a detailed and voluntary analysis of external stimuli. For example, we can breathe automatically, but we can also be aware of our breathing and modify its rhythm. Likewise, when listening to a song, we can pay attention to and differentiate the instruments that compose it.

Recently, neurologists have set out to find the part of the brain where this change in perception occurs. Researchers had traditionally suspected that such a function must be controlled by the cerebral cortex, because it is where advanced brain processing occurs. The thalamus has never been ruled out from being involved in conscious perception, however it has typically been assigned a minor role as a filter that prepares sensory information to the cortex. A new study recently published in Science redefines that view, positioning the thalamus as an active participant in conscious perception.

Most studies of consciousness involving the thalamus have faced skepticism, either because they lack key observational data of the thalamus at work or, if they are evidenced with data, because of the controversial way in which that data was likely obtained. To see whether a patient's brain region “lights up” with activity when paying conscious attention to something, it's necessary for that patient to be aware of stimuli—that is, be conscious—while simultaneously having their brain surveyed with invasive sensors.

But in this new research, a team from Beijing Normal University in China turned to a group of people who already had thin electrodes inserted into their brains as part of an experimental headache therapy, bypassing the ethical question of whether this sort of research justifies an invasive operation.

The researchers administered a visual perception test to these patients. A blinking object was displayed on a screen, which would hide itself for half of the time of the test. These characteristics meant the patients had to pay attention to the object and adjust their eyes and focus to keep watching it, rather than just regard the screen without analyzing it. This thus facilitated conscious perception, with the already-implanted electrodes then recording the brain activity that accompanied this.

The researchers say that this is one of the first simultaneous recordings of conscious perception, and the information they recorded, they say, offers strong evidence for the hypothesis that the thalamus region acts a kind of gateway to conscious perception. “The findings indicate that the intralaminar and medial thalamic nuclei regulate conscious perception. This conclusion represents a significant advance in our understanding of the network that forms the basis of visual consciousness in humans,” the authors write.

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

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For those of us whose memory of high school biology hasn't faded entirely, planarians will probably sound very familiar. They're generally used as an example of one of the extreme ends of regenerative capacity. While some animals like mammals have a limited ability to regenerate lost tissues, planarians can be cut roughly in half and regenerate either an entire head or entire tail, depending on which part of the body you choose to keep track of.

In doing so, they have to re-establish something that is typically only needed early in an animal's development: a signaling system that helps tell cells where the animal's head and tail are. Now, a US-based team asked a question that I'd never have thought of: What happens if you cut the animal in half early in development, while the developmental head-to-tail signaling system is still active? The answer turned out to be surprisingly complex.

Heads or tails?

Planarians are small flatworms that would probably be living quiet lives somewhere if biologists hadn't discovered their ability to regenerate lots of adult tissues when damaged. The process has been well-studied by this point and involves the formation of a cluster of stem cells, called a blastema, at the site of damage. From there, many of the signals that control the formation of specialized tissues in the embryo get re-activated, directing the stem cells down the developmental pathways needed to reproduce any lost organs.

Critical to this process is a signaling system that helps inform the animal of where its head is. Signaling molecules called wnts help developing embryos form what's called the anterior-posterior axis by telling the animal where its posterior resides. If it's needed, wnt signaling may also be reactivated during regeneration after the loss of major portions of the animal, inducing the blastema to form new tail structures. That reactivation takes place in the animal's muscle, which appears to be a key tissue in the process of sensing the damage and inducing regeneration.

The question being asked here is what happens if the damage that induces regeneration happens while the animal is still developing at a time when wnt signaling is normally patterning the animal's organs. To find out, the researchers started taking planarian embryos (from the species named Schmidtea polychroa) and slicing them in half.

Before a critical point in development, the animals failed to close the wound made by the cut, causing the two embryo halves to simply spew cells out into the environment. Somewhat later, however, there was excellent survival, and the head portion of the embryo could regenerate a tail segment. This tells us that the normal signaling pathways present in the embryo are sufficient to drive the process forward.

But the tail of the embryo at this stage doesn't appear to be capable of rebuilding its head. But the researchers found that they could inhibit wnt signaling in these posterior fragments, and that was enough to allow the head to develop.

Lacking muscle

One possibility here is that wnt signaling is widely active in the posterior of the embryo at this point, blocking formation of anterior structures. Alternatively, the researchers hypothesize that the problem is with the muscle cells that normally help organize the formation of a stem-cell-filled blastema, which is needed to kick off the regeneration process. Since the anterior end of the embryo develops earlier, they suggest there may simply not be enough muscle cells in the tail to kick off this process at early stages of development.

To test their hypothesis, they performed a somewhat unusual experiment. They started by cutting off the tails of embryos and saving them for 24 hours. At that point, they cut the front end off tails, creating a new wound to heal. At this point, regeneration proceeded as normal, and the tails grew a new head. This isn't definitive evidence that muscle cells are what's missing at early stages, but it does indicate that some key developmental step happens in the tail within the 24-hour window after the first cut.

The results reinforce the idea that regeneration of major body parts requires the re-establishment of the signals that lay out organization of the embryo in development—something that gets complicated if those signals are currently acting to organize the embryo. And it clearly shows that the cells needed to do this reorganization aren't simply set aside early on in development but instead take some time to appear. All of that information will help clarify the bigger-picture question of how these animals manage such a complex regeneration process.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.065  (About DOIs).

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Mars has not always been a seemingly lifeless red desert. We have evidence that billions of years ago it had a warm, habitable climate with liquid water in lakes and flowing rivers, which is somewhat confusing, given that Mars is much farther from the Sun than the Earth and that the Sun was much less bright back then. “In order for Mars to be warm enough to host liquid water, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” says Benjamin Tutolo, a researcher at the University of Calgary. “The question we’ve been asking for at least 30 years was where the record of all this carbon is.”

Tutolo led a new study of rock samples collected by the Curiosity rover that might have answered this question.

The tallest sediment stack

The mystery of Mars’ missing carbon stems from two seemingly conflicting results. On the one hand, we have already found dried riverbeds and lakes on the surface of Mars, so we know there must have been liquid water on its surface at some point. To account for the presence of this water, every Martian climate model we have run indicates that huge amounts of atmospheric carbon were needed to provide a sufficient greenhouse effect to keep the surface temperature above freezing. But the data we were getting from satellite observations of Mars found much less carbon in the Martian soil than those climate models would suggest. “So, either the models were incorrect—and there’s no good reason to believe that—or there really was lots of carbon in the Martian atmosphere,” Tutolo says.

The only way to resolve that mystery was to put boots on the ground and look for that carbon. Or wheels.

Curiosity rover was called Mars Science Laboratory for a reason. It went to the red planet fitted with a suite of instruments, some of which even the newer Perseverance was lacking. These enabled it to analyze the collected Martian rocks on the spot and beam the results back to Earth. “To get the most bang for the buck, NASA decided to send it to the place on Mars called the Gale Crater, because it was the tallest stack of sediments on the planet,” Tutolo says. The central peak of Gale Crater was about 5 kilometers tall, created by the ancient meteorite impact.

The Curiosity mission started near the bottom of the crater, at the base of a formation called Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp, where NASA expected to find the earliest geological samples. The idea then was to climb up Mount Sharp and collect samples from later and later geological periods at increasing elevations, tracing the history of habitability and the great drying up of Mars. On the way, the carbon missed by the satellites was finally found.

An imperfect cycle

Tutolo’s team focused their attention on four sediment samples Curiosity drilled after climbing over a kilometer up Mount Sharp. The samples were examined with the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, which uses X-ray diffraction to determine their composition. It turned out the samples contained roughly between 5 and 10 percent of siderite. “It was an iron carbonate, directly analogous to a mineral called calcite found in sedimentary rocks like limestone. The difference is it has iron in its cation site rather than calcium,” Tutolo explained. “We expected that because Mars is much richer in iron—that’s why it is the red planet.”

The siderite found in the samples was also pure, which Tutolo thinks indicates it has formed through an evaporation process akin to what we see in evaporated lakes on Earth. This, in turn, was the first evidence we’ve found of the ancient Martian carbon cycle. “Now we have evidence that confirms the models,” Tutolo claims. The carbon from the atmosphere was being sequestered in the rocks on Mars just as it is on Earth. The problem was, unlike on Earth, it couldn’t get out of these rocks.

“On Earth, whenever oceanic plates get subducted into the mantle, all of the limestone that was formed before gets cooked off, and the carbon dioxide gets back to the atmosphere through volcanoes,” Tutolo explains. Mars, on the other hand, has never had efficient plate tectonics. A large portion of carbon that got trapped in Martian rocks stayed in those rocks forever, thinning out the atmosphere. While it’s likely the red planet had its own carbon cycle, it was an imperfect one that eventually turned it into the lifeless desert it is today.

But Tutolo’s work didn’t provide all the answers.

Persisting mysteries

The problem is, the missing Martian carbon found by Tutolo’s team doesn’t explain everything about its past climate. Even with huge amounts of carbon dioxide (enough to give Mars one Earth atmosphere’s worth of pressure), Tutolo thinks it would still be quite challenging to warm the planet.

Another mystery that remains is that Martian habitability was seemingly intermittent and fluctuating. “It doesn’t seem like the full first billion years were warm and wet on Mars, so how do we place constraints on the habitable conditions on Mars?” Tutolo wonders.

But before tackling more far-reaching questions, his team wants to work on new Mars climate models that will reflect these new findings. Tutolo suspects some of the siderite was redissolved and returned some of its carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The new models he wants to set up will attempt to pinpoint the timing of this process—how long the carbon stayed trapped in the siderite and how much of it was potentially cycled back. “That would enable habitability for longer than if it was just permanently sequestered,” Tutolo says. “That’s the big thing I’m going to work on but have been too busy to get to.”

Science, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/science.ado9966

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Welcome to Edition 7.40 of the Rocket Report! One of the biggest spaceflight questions in my mind right now is when Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket will fly again. The company has been saying "late spring." Today, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said they were told June. Several officials have suggested to Ars that the next launch will, in reality, occur no earlier than October. So when will we see New Glenn again?

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

Phantom Space delays Daytona launch, again. In a story that accepts what Phantom Space Founder Jim Cantrell says at face value, Payload Space reports that the company is "an up-and-coming launch provider and satellite manufacturer" and has "steadily built a three-pronged business model to take on the industry’s powerhouses." It's a surprisingly laudatory story for a company that has yet to accomplish much in space.

Putting the brakes on Daytona ... What caught my eye is the section on the Daytona rocket, a small-lift vehicle the company is developing. "The company expects to begin flying Daytona late next year or early 2027, and already has a Daytona II and III in the works," the publication reports. Why is this notable? Because in an article published less than two years ago, Cantrell said Phantom was hoping to launch an orbital test flight in 2024. In other words, the rocket is further from launch today than it was in 2023. I guess we'll see what happens. (submitted by BH)

It appears the Minotaur IV rocket still exists. A Northrop Grumman Minotaur IV rocket successfully launched multiple classified payloads for the US National Reconnaissance Office on Wednesday, marking a return to Vandenberg Space Force Base for the solid-fueled launch vehicle after more than a decade, Space News reports. The mission, designated NROL-174, lifted off at 3:33 pm Eastern from Space Launch Complex 8 at Vandenberg, California. The launch was successful.

Back on the California Coast ... The Minotaur IV is a four-stage vehicle derived in part from decommissioned Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles. The first three stages are government-furnished Peacekeeper solid rocket motors, while the upper stage is a commercial Orion solid motor built by Northrop Grumman. NROL-174 follows previous NRO missions flown on Minotaur rockets—NROL-129 in 2020 and NROL-111 in 2021—both launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

French launch firm gets some funding runway. The French government has awarded Latitude funding to support the construction of its new rocket factory in Reims, which is expected to open in 2026, European Spaceflight reports. Latitude first announced plans to develop a larger rocket factory in late 2023, when it expanded its original site from 1,500 to 3,000 square meters. The new facility is expected to span approximately 25,000 square meters and will support a production capacity of up to 50 Zephyr rockets per year.

Working toward a launch next year ... The Zephyr rocket is designed to deliver payloads of up to 200 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. It could make its debut in 2026 if all goes well. Latitude did not disclose the exact amount of funding it received for the construction of its new factory. However, it is known that while part of the funding will be awarded as a straight grant, a portion will take the form of a recoverable loan. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

RFA gets a new CEO. German launch vehicle startup Rocket Factory Augsburg has replaced its chief executive as it works toward a second chance for its first launch, Space News reports. Last Friday, RFA announced that Stefan Tweraser, who had been chief executive since October 2021, had been replaced by Indulis Kalnins.

Working toward a second launch attempt ... The announcement did not give a reason for the change, but it suggested that the company was seeking someone with expertise in the aerospace industry to lead the company. Kalnins is on the aerospace faculty of a German university, Hochschule Bremen, and has been managing director of OHB Cosmos, which focused on launch services. RFA is working toward a second attempt at a first flight for RFA ONE later this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin launches all-female mission. Blue Origin’s 11th human flight—and first with an all-female flight team—blasted off from West Texas’ Launch Site One Monday morning on a flight that lasted about 10 minutes, Travel + Leisure reports. Katy Perry and Gayle King were joined by aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist and scientist Amanda Nguyễn, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and Jeff Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sánchez.

I kissed a Kármán line ... "This experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, how much love you have to give, and how loved you are, until the day you launch," Perry said in her post-flight interview on the Blue Origin livestream, calling the experience "second only to being a mom" and rating it "10 out of 10."

Bahamas to SpaceX: Let's press pause. The Bahamas government said on Tuesday it is suspending all SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landings in the country, pending a full post-launch investigation of the latest Starship mishap, Reuters reports. "No further clearances will be granted until a full environmental assessment is reviewed," Bahamian Director of Communications Latrae Rahming said.

Falling from the sky ... The Bahamian government said in February, after SpaceX's first Falcon 9 first stage landing in the country, that it had approved 19 more throughout 2025, subject to regulatory approval. The Bahamas' post-launch investigation comes after a SpaceX Starship spacecraft exploded in space last month, minutes after lifting off from Texas. Following the incident, the Bahamas said debris from the spacecraft fell into its airspace.

NASA will fly on Soyuz for a while longer. NASA and Roscosmos have extended a seat barter agreement for flights to the International Space Station into 2027 that will feature longer Soyuz missions to the station, Space News reports. Under the no-exchange-of-funds barter agreement, NASA astronauts fly on Soyuz spacecraft and Roscosmos cosmonauts fly on commercial crew vehicles to ensure that there is at least one American and one Russian on the station should either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles be grounded for an extended period. "NASA and Roscosmos have amended the integrated crew agreement to allow for a second set of integrated crew missions in 2025, one set of integrated crew missions in 2026, and a SpaceX Dragon flight in 2027," an agency spokesperson said.

Flying fewer times per year. One change with the agreement is the cadence of Soyuz missions. While Roscosmos had been flying Soyuz missions to the ISS every six months, missions starting with Soyuz MS-27 this April will spend eight months at the station. Neither NASA nor Roscosmos offered a reason for the change, which means that Roscosmos will fly one fewer Soyuz mission over a two-year period: three instead of four. I presume that this is a cost-saving measure. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 sets reuse record. SpaceX notched another new rocket reuse record with its midnight Starlink flight on Sunday night from Florida, Spaceflight Now reports. The Falcon 9 rocket booster with the tail number 1067 launched for a record-setting 27th time, further cementing its position as the flight leader among SpaceX’s fleet.

Approaching 500 launches ... It supported the launch of 27 Starlink V2 Mini satellites heading into low-Earth orbit. The 27th outing for B1067 comes nearly four years after it launched its first mission, CRS-22, on June 3, 2021. Its three most recent missions were all in support of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. The Starlink 6-73 mission was also the 460th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to date. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

The real story behind the Space Shuttle legislation. Last week, two US senators from Texas, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, filed the "Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act" to move Space Shuttle Discovery from its current location at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to Houston. After the senators announced their bill, the collective response from the space community was initially shock. This was soon followed by: why? Ars spoke with several people on background, both from the political and space spheres, to get a sense of what is really happening here.

Bill is not going anywhere ... The short answer is that it is all political, and the timing is due to the reelection campaign for Cornyn, who faces a stiff runoff against Ken Paxton. The legislation is, in DC parlance, a "messaging bill." Cornyn is behind this, and Cruz simply agreed to go along. The goal in Cornyn's campaign is to use the bill as a way to show Texans that he is fighting for them in Washington, DC, against the evils there. Presumably, he will blame the Obama administration, even though it is quite clear in hindsight that there were no political machinations behind the decision to not award a space shuttle to Houston. Space Center Houston, which would be responsible for hosting the shuttle, was not even told about the legislation before it was filed.

Next three launches

April 18: Long March 4B | Unknown payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 22:55 UTC

April 19: Falcon 9 | NROL-145 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 10:41 UTC

April 21: Falcon 9 | CRS-32 | Cape Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 08:15 UTC

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On Wednesday, news broke that researchers had found the most compelling evidence yet of a "biosignature"—a chemical present at levels that are only consistent with life—on a distant exoplanet. It didn't take much time for some less-than-reliable news sources to go from there to talk of a planet that "could be 'teeming with life'" and the obvious follow-up, "Scientists reveal what aliens could REALLY look like on exoplanet K2-18b."

Even in the best of circumstances, however, talk of a biosignature is an invitation to scientists to think of alternative chemistries that could explain the results without needing biological activity. And these are not the best of circumstances, as astronomers are pointing to earlier papers that give a range of reasons to be skeptical of the new results; in fact, an astronomer named Chris Glein emailed me to alert me of potential issues the day before the news broke.

To help you understand the controversy, we're going to look at the data that is being presented as evidence of a biosignature and then go through all the reasons that confirming a biosignature is so difficult.

What’s new here

The planet under discussion is called K2-18b, and it's what's termed a sub-Neptune. It has a radius of about 2.5 times that of Earth's and is 8.6 times more massive. Its orbit is also within the inner edge of its star's habitable range, meaning it receives enough radiation from its star that water could be liquid on its surface, depending on other factors like its atmosphere's composition. All of this can be determined based on its orbital properties and the amount of light that it blocks out as it passes between Earth and its host star.

As the new paper acknowledges, these properties are consistent with a number of different planet types, including a small version of Neptune or a rocky planet with a very thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere. But the researchers behind the new work favor what's called a hycean planet, a merger of hydrogen and ocean. That's because the initial characterization of its atmosphere suggested that, in addition to copious amounts of hydrogen, it had methane and carbon dioxide present but seemingly lacked ammonia and carbon monoxide. The presence of an ocean can account for those chemical properties.

The new paper follows up on a tantalizing hint raised by earlier work: the possible presence of a chemical called dimethyl sulfide. It uses an instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to image K2-18b as it passes in front of its host star. A small portion of the light that reaches Earth does so after having passed through the planet's atmosphere, allowing the chemicals present there to leave a mark on the spectrum of that light.

The research team used two different methods of constructing a spectrum from the JWST data, and the results are in good agreement. They then searched for a combination of molecules that could produce a similar spectrum, starting with a list of 20. They found two: dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide (we can't tell the difference between the two, given the existing data).

On Earth, the only processes that naturally produce this chemical take place inside cells, and it had previously been suggested to be a biosignature. So, the researchers propose it may be a biosignature here, although they acknowledge that the statistical significance of its signal, currently at three sigma, falls short of declaring a clear discovery. Still, that would qualify it as, in the words of a University of Cambridge press release, the "strongest hints yet of biological activity."

Reasons for doubt

So why are many astronomers unconvinced? To be compelling, a biosignature from an exoplanet has to clear several hurdles that can be broken down into three key questions:

• Is the planet what we think it is?
• Is the signal real?
• Are there other ways to produce that signal?

At present, none of those questions can be answered with a definitive yes.

The first question is whether we're actually looking at a hycean world. As the researchers acknowledge in their paper, the presence of an ocean on K2-18b depends very strongly on its weather: "A cloud-/haze-free atmosphere would render the surface too hot to be habitable and/or have water in a supercritical state." And, as they later acknowledge, the data obtained from the JWST shows no signs of clouds. That doesn't mean they're not there, but it certainly doesn't help the case.

And, in fact, a different research group has already found evidence that the planet isn't reflecting enough light back into space to keep from boiling away any oceans it tries to form. That manuscript suggests that K2-18b is more likely to be a magma-ocean or gas-dwarf world. And a modeling paper suggests that most potential hycean worlds would suffer from a runaway greenhouse effect unless they receive significantly less illumination than Earth does. Then there's a draft paper from Glein and his collaborators, which suggests you can get many of the same properties seen in K2-18b from a planet with a deep atmosphere sitting above a magma ocean.

Combined, these raise significant questions about whether K2-18b is in fact a hycean world. And they indicate that, if it's not, it's likely to be far too hot to support life.

Which brings us to whether the signal of a biosignature—the presence of these key wiggles in the JWST spectrum—is real. While the signal is there at three sigma, that's three sigma above a completely featureless spectrum. For its specific identity as dimethyl sulfide, we only know that it's the best fit out of the 20 chemicals considered in this paper. There are a whole host of other chemicals that could plausibly be produced on a planet like this that weren't included in this analysis. The potential presence of a dimethyl sulfide signal at other wavelengths in earlier work may seem to solidify this identification, but a reanalysis of that data found no evidence of a statistically significant signal.

Finally, there's a potential problem that the authors of the new paper acknowledge: the spectral information they used comes from Earth. We only have data on dimethyl sulfide's absorption and emission at room temperature and one atmosphere, which is likely to be very different from the conditions it would see in the upper atmosphere of a mini-Neptune. While this wouldn't alter the existence of spectral lines, the differences could broaden them or accentuate their significance, altering how well they match the JWST data.

The last issue is whether, if dimethyl sulfide is really present on K2-18b, it was produced by life as it is here on Earth. The answer appears to be "possibly not": A 2024 paper indicates it's possible to produce the chemical through light-activated reactions. The results suggest that these reactions may max out at lower concentrations of dimethyl sulfide than indicated by the data from K2-18b, but they're certainly a reason for pause and should motivate people to explore whether there are ways to boost the efficiency of the relevant chemical reactions.

Good, or just the best we’ve got?

It should be clear that it's simply not possible to provide a definitive answer to any of the three key questions. So, while this might be, to use Cambridge's phrasing, the "strongest hints yet," that doesn't make them especially strong. And, given the significance of the question they speak to—is there life beyond Earth—maybe the overall strength of the evidence was a far more relevant standard to use here. At least within the body of the press release, the scientists behind the work were appropriately cautious, saying things like "It’s important that we’re deeply sceptical of our own results," and “Our work is the starting point for all the investigations that are now needed to confirm and understand the implications of these exciting findings."

In the end, the potential issues we've laid out above should make it clear that there will be no obvious before-and-after moment of discovery when it comes to finding hints of life over the next few decades. Any hint we get from telescope data will simply be the start of a conversation among astronomers, chemists, atmospheric scientists, and others meant to get definitive answers to all three of the key questions. It will only be after that conversation has settled on "yes" to all of them that we'll be able, in retrospect, to realize a discovery was made.

Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8  (About DOIs).

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Macular degeneration is a condition where the central part of the retina, called the macula, breaks down over time, often as people age. Retinitis pigmentosa, on the other hand, is a rare genetic disorder that leads to the gradual loss of photoreceptor cells in the retina. These cells, known as rods and cones, are responsible for capturing light.

In this study, published in the journal ACS Nano, the research team showed that injecting gold nanoparticles into the retina and stimulating them with near-infrared laser light could activate other retinal cells called bipolar and ganglion cells. These cells process visual signals and send them to the brain, bypassing the damaged photoreceptor cells affected by these eye conditions.

Compared to existing treatments, such as surgical implants of electrode arrays, this nanoparticle technique is less invasive and simpler. As lead researcher Jiarui Nie explained, "This is a new type of retinal prosthesis that has the potential to restore vision lost to retinal degeneration without requiring any kind of complicated surgery or genetic modification." Nie also pointed out that the injection process, known as an intravitreal injection, is one of the easiest procedures in eye care.

This approach could also improve how well patients see. Surgical implants are limited in resolution, but the nanoparticle solution spreads across the whole retina and might cover the entire field of vision. Additionally, since the nanoparticles respond to infrared light instead of visible light, the system could preserve any remaining vision the patient still has.

The researchers tested the technique in mice and found positive results. They saw increased activity in the part of the brain responsible for processing vision, which suggests some sight was restored. No harmful side effects or toxicity were detected, even months after the procedure.

In the future, the scientists hope to combine this technology with wearable devices like glasses or goggles equipped with cameras and lasers. While more studies are needed before human trials, this new method shows promise as a safe and effective treatment for retinal diseases.

Source: Brown University, ACS Nano | Image via Depositphotos

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

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There is a signal, born in the earliest days of the cosmos. It’s weak. It’s faint. It can barely register on even the most sensitive of instruments. But it contains a wealth of information about the formation of the first stars, the first galaxies, and the mysteries of the origins of the largest structures in the Universe.

Despite decades of searching for this signal, astronomers have yet to find it. The problem is that our Earth is too noisy, making it nearly impossible to capture this whisper. The solution is to go to the far side of the Moon, using its bulk to shield our sensitive instruments from the cacophony of our planet.

Building telescopes on the far side of the Moon would be the greatest astronomical challenge ever considered by humanity. And it would be worth it.

The science

We have been scanning and mapping the wider cosmos for a century now, ever since Edwin Hubble discovered that the Andromeda “nebula” is actually a galaxy sitting 2.5 million light-years away. Our powerful Earth-based observatories have successfully mapped the detailed location to millions of galaxies, and upcoming observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will map millions more.

And for all that effort, all that technological might and scientific progress, we have surveyed less than 1 percent of the volume of the observable cosmos.

The vast bulk of the Universe will remain forever unobservable to traditional telescopes. The reason is twofold. First, most galaxies will simply be too dim and too far away. Even the James Webb Space Telescope, which is explicitly designed to observe the first generation of galaxies, has such a limited field of view that it can only capture a handful of targets at a time.

Second, there was a time, within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, before stars and galaxies had even formed. Dubbed the “cosmic dark ages,” this time naturally makes for a challenging astronomical target because there weren’t exactly a lot of bright sources to generate light for us to look at.

But there was neutral hydrogen. Most of the Universe is made of hydrogen, making it the most common element in the cosmos. Today, almost all of that hydrogen is ionized, existing in a super-heated plasma state. But before the first stars and galaxies appeared, the cosmic reserves of hydrogen were cool and neutral.

Neutral hydrogen is made of a single proton and a single electron. Each of these particles has a quantum property known as spin (which kind of resembles the familiar, macroscopic property of spin, but it’s not quite the same—though that’s a different article). In its lowest-energy state, the proton and electron will have spins oriented in opposite directions. But sometimes, through pure random quantum chance, the electron will spontaneously flip around. Very quickly, the hydrogen notices and gets the electron to flip back to where it belongs. This process releases a small amount of energy in the form of a photon with a wavelength of 21 centimeters.

This quantum transition is exceedingly rare, but with enough neutral hydrogen, you can build a substantial signal. Indeed, observations of 21-cm radiation have been used extensively in astronomy, especially to build maps of cold gas reservoirs within the Milky Way.

So the cosmic dark ages aren’t entirely dark; those clouds of primordial neutral hydrogen are emitting tremendous amounts of 21-cm radiation. But that radiation was emitted in the distant past, well over 13 billion years ago. As it has traveled through the cosmic distances, all those billions of light-years on its way to our eager telescopes, it has experienced the redshift effects of our expanding Universe.

By the time that dark age 21-cm radiation reaches us, it has stretched by a factor of 10, turning the neutral hydrogen signal into radio waves with wavelengths of around 2 meters.

The astronomy

Humans have become rather fond of radio transmissions in the past century. Unfortunately, the peak of this primordial signal from the dark ages sits right below the FM dial of your radio, which pretty much makes it impossible to detect from Earth. Our emissions are simply too loud, too noisy, and too difficult to remove. Teams of astronomers have devised clever ways to reduce or eliminate interference, featuring arrays scattered around the most desolate deserts in the world, but they have not been able to confirm the detection of a signal.

So those astronomers have turned in desperation to the quietest desert they can think of: the far side of the Moon.

It wasn’t until 1959 when the Soviet Luna 3 probe gave us our first glimpse of the Moon’s far side, and it wasn’t until 2019 when the Chang’e 4 mission made the first soft landing. Compared to the near side, and especially low-Earth orbit, there is very little human activity there. We’ve had more active missions on the surface of Mars than on the lunar far side.

And that makes the far side of the Moon the ideal location for a dark-age-hunting radio telescope, free from human interference and noise.

Ideas abound to make this a possibility. The first serious attempt was DARE, the Dark Ages Radio Explorer. Rather than attempting the audacious goal of building an actual telescope on the surface, DARE was a NASA-funded concept to develop an observatory (and when it comes to radio astronomy, “observatory” can be as a simple as a single antenna) to orbit the Moon and take data when it’s on the opposite side as the Earth.

For various bureaucratic reasons, NASA didn’t develop the DARE concept further. But creative astronomers have put forward even bolder proposals.

The FarView concept, for example, is a proposed radio telescope array that would dwarf anything on the Earth. It would be sensitive to frequency ranges between 5 and 40 MHz, allowing it to target the dark ages and the birth of the first stars. The proposed design contains 100,000 individual elements, with each element consisting of a single, simple dipole antenna, dispersed over a staggering 200 square kilometers. It would be infeasible to deliver that many antennae directly to the surface of the Moon. Instead, we’d have to build them, mining lunar regolith and turning it into the necessary components.

The design of this array is what’s called an interferometer. Instead of a single big dish, the individual antennae collect data on their own and then correlate all their signals together later. The effective resolution of an interferometer is the same as a single dish as big as the widest distance among the elements. The downside of an interferometer is that most of the incoming radiation just hits dirt (or in this case, lunar regolith), so the interferometer has to collect a lot of data to build up a decent signal.

Attempting these kinds of observations on the Earth requires constant maintenance and cleaning to remove radio interference and have essentially sunk all attempts to measure the dark ages. But a lunar-based interferometer will have all the time in the world it needs, providing a much cleaner and easier-to-analyze stream of data.

If you’re not in the mood for building 100,000 antennae on the Moon’s surface, then another proposal seeks to use the Moon’s natural features—namely, its craters. If you squint hard enough, they kind of look like radio dishes already. The idea behind the project, named the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, is to find a suitable crater and use it as the support structure for a gigantic, kilometer-wide telescope.

This idea isn’t without precedent. Both the beloved Arecibo and the newcomer FAST observatories used depressions in the natural landscape of Puerto Rico and China, respectively, to take most of the load off of the engineering to make their giant dishes. The Lunar Telescope would be larger than both of those combined, and it would be tuned to hunt for dark ages radio signals that we can’t observe using Earth-based observatories because they simply bounce off the Earth’s ionosphere (even before we have to worry about any additional human interference). Essentially, the only way that humanity can access those wavelengths is by going beyond our ionosphere, and the far side of the Moon is the best place to park an observatory.

The engineering

The engineering challenges we need to overcome to achieve these scientific dreams are not small. So far, humanity has only placed a single soft-landed mission on the distant side of the Moon, and both of these proposals require an immense upgrade to our capabilities. That’s exactly why both far-side concepts were funded by NIAC, NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, which gives grants to researchers who need time to flesh out high-risk, high-reward ideas.

With NIAC funds, the designers of the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, led by Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have already thought of the challenges they will need to overcome to make the mission a success. Their mission leans heavily on another JPL concept, the DuAxel, which consists of a rover that can split into two single-axel rovers connected by a tether.

To build the telescope, several DuAxels are sent to the crater. One of each pair “sits” to anchor itself on the crater wall, while another one crawls down the slope. At the center, they are met with a telescope lander that has deployed guide wires and the wire mesh frame of the telescope (again, it helps for assembling purposes that radio dishes are just strings of metal in various arrangements). The pairs on the crater rim then hoist their companions back up, unfolding the mesh and lofting the receiver above the dish.

The FarView observatory is a much more capable instrument—if deployed, it would be the largest radio interferometer ever built—but it’s also much more challenging. Led by Ronald Polidan of Lunar Resources, Inc., it relies on in-situ manufacturing processes. Autonomous vehicles would dig up regolith, process and refine it, and spit out all the components that make an interferometer work: the 100,000 individual antennae, the kilometers of cabling to run among them, the solar arrays to power everything during lunar daylight, and batteries to store energy for round-the-lunar-clock observing.

If that sounds intense, it’s because it is, and it doesn’t stop there. An astronomical telescope is more than a data collection device. It also needs to crunch some numbers and get that precious information back to a human to actually study it. That means that any kind of far side observing platform, especially the kinds that will ingest truly massive amounts of data such as these proposals, would need to make one of two choices.

Choice one is to perform most of the data correlation and processing on the lunar surface, sending back only highly refined products to Earth for further analysis. Achieving that would require landing, installing, and running what is essentially a supercomputer on the Moon, which comes with its own weight, robustness, and power requirements.

The other choice is to keep the installation as lightweight as possible and send the raw data back to Earthbound machines to handle the bulk of the processing and analysis tasks. This kind of data throughput is outright impossible with current technology but could be achieved with experimental laser-based communication strategies.

The future

Astronomical observatories on the far side of the Moon face a bit of a catch-22. To deploy and run a world-class facility, either embedded in a crater or strung out over the landscape, we need some serious lunar manufacturing capabilities. But those same capabilities come with all the annoying radio fuzz that already bedevil Earth-based radio astronomy.

Perhaps the best solution is to open up the Moon to commercial exploitation but maintain the far side as a sort of out-world nature preserve, owned by no company or nation, left to scientists to study and use as a platform for pristine observations of all kinds.

It will take humanity several generations, if not more, to develop the capabilities needed to finally build far-side observatories. But it will be worth it, as those facilities will open up the unseen Universe for our hungry eyes, allowing us to pierce the ancient fog of our Universe’s past, revealing the machinations of hydrogen in the dark ages, the birth of the first stars, and the emergence of the first galaxies. It will be a fountain of cosmological and astrophysical data, the richest possible source of information about the history of the Universe.

Ever since Galileo ground and polished his first lenses and through the innovations that led to the explosion of digital cameras, astronomy has a storied tradition of turning the technological triumphs needed to achieve science goals into the foundations of various everyday devices that make life on Earth much better. If we're looking for reasons to industrialize and inhabit the Moon, the noble goal of pursuing a better understanding of the Universe makes for a fine motivation. And we’ll all be better off for it.

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More than 45 million people in the US are fans of bowling, with national competitions awarding millions of dollars. Bowlers usually rely on instinct and experience, earned through lots and lots of practice, to boost their strike percentage. A team of physicists has come up with a mathematical model to better predict ball trajectories, outlined in a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances. The resulting equations take into account such factors as the composition and resulting pattern of the oil used on bowling lanes, as well as the inevitable asymmetries of bowling balls and player variability.

The authors already had a strong interest in bowling. Three are regular bowlers and quite skilled at the sport; a fourth, Curtis Hooper of Longborough University in the UK, is a coach for Team England at the European Youth Championships. Hooper has been studying the physics of bowling for several years, including an analysis of the 2017 Weber Cup, as well as papers devising mathematical models for the application of lane conditioners and oil patterns in bowling.

The calculations involved in such research are very complicated because there are so many variables that can affect a ball's trajectory after being thrown. Case in point: the thin layer of oil that is applied to bowling lanes, which Hooper found can vary widely in volume and shape among different venues, plus the lack of uniformity in applying the layer, which creates an uneven friction surface.

Per the authors, most research to date has relied on statistically analyzing empirical data, such as a 2018 report by the US Bowling Congress that looked at data generated by 37 bowlers. (Hooper relied on ball-tracking data for his 2017 Weber Cup analysis.) A 2009 analysis showed that the optimal location for the ball to strike the headpin is about 6 centimeters off-center, while the optimal entry angle for the ball to hit is about 6 degrees. However, such an approach struggles to account for the inevitable player variability. No bowler hits their target 100 percent of the time, and per Hooper et al., while the best professionals can come within 0.1 degrees from the optimal launch angle, this slight variation can nonetheless result in a difference of several centimeters down-lane.

Simulation for success

With this latest paper, Hooper and his co-authors have built on that prior work to create a simulation for successful target strategies bowlers might use to increase their strike percentage. Their resulting model takes into account starting position, ball speed, axis rotation, axis tilt, angular velocity, and yes, the effects of that pesky oil layer on the lanes.

"Predicting the motion of the pins (and thus strike chance) after the initial impact between the ball and head pin accurately is a very difficult problem due to many features, such as the shape of the pin, differences in the properties of the pins (center of gravity, base radius, mass, etc.), and differences in the position of the pins when each full set of pins is initially set," Hooper told Ars. "Whilst this would be an interesting problem to study, we decided in this work to couple the results of our model with data collected from a laboratory test that investigated the effect of entry angle and impact position on strike percentage."

The resulting model uses a set of six differential equations relating to a rotating rigid body to show the best conditions for a strike. For instance, there are two phases of the ball's motion: a sliding phase, where friction is low, which accounts for most of the ball's travel; and a pure rolling phase, where no more torque is applied and the ball travels in a straight line toward the pins. The model can take all the relevant inputs that affect a bowling ball's motion and accurately calculate the trajectory to determine the ideal path for a strike.

As for player variability, it turns out there is an area that has the highest chance of a strike, and this is where the oil pattern can have an impact, thanks to varying friction between the center of the lane and the gutter. "If the bowler misses slightly to the right, the higher friction near the gutter would accelerate the ball to the left," the authors wrote. "Similarly, the lower friction in the center means that a shot that misses slightly to the left will not hook early." Experienced bowlers may already know this, but the model should be helpful to those relatively new to the game seeking to make adjustments to improve their strike percentage.

Hooper et al. hope to further improve the accuracy of their model to take into account such factors as uneven bowling lanes. "Talking to the elite level bowlers about this work will help us to understand what shape of ball paths they are looking for when they compete, and if what our model predicts is close to where they would bowl on a given oil pattern in a competitive setting," said Hooper. "The model would also be helpful to illustrate to bowlers (of all levels) what happens when they miss their intended shot, not only in terms of direction, but by an increase/decrease in axis rotation or speed."

AIP Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1063/5.0247761  (About DOIs).

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One of SpaceX's Starlink satellites appears five times in this view on Google Earth.  

Credit: Google Earth

Dig deep on Google Earth and you'll inevitably find a surprise or two. Maybe you're looking at far-flung islands in the middle of an ocean or checking in on something closer to home.

A few years ago, online sleuths found an image of a B-2 stealth bomber in flight over Missouri. The aircraft is smeared in the image because it was in motion, while the farm fields below appear as crisp as any other view on Google Earth.

There's something else that now appears on Google Earth. Zoom in over rural North Texas, and you'll find a satellite. It appears five times in different colors, each projected over wooded bottomlands in a remote wildlife refuge about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Dallas.

Satellites in low-Earth orbit soar up to 40 times higher than a B-2 bomber and travel about 30 times faster. But there are more than 9,300 active satellites currently in orbit, and thousands more space debris objects, compared to 19 operational B-2 bombers in the Air Force's inventory.

Relative velocity

Someone first shared Google Earth's satellite capture last week on Reddit. The identity of the satellite hasn't been confirmed, but its appearance is similar to that of a SpaceX Starlink satellite, specifically a Starlink V2 Mini, with two solar panels spanning some 100 feet (30 meters) end to end. There are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites in space today, more than all other satellite constellations combined, so it wouldn't be surprising that the first Google Earth capture of another spacecraft in orbit would show a Starlink.

Google Earth data indicates that the image was taken on November 30, 2024, by a high-resolution Pleiades observation satellite owned by Airbus. Another Reddit user suggested the satellite could be a Chinese Earth-imaging spacecraft named Ziyuan 3-02, which was flying in the same area as the Pleiades satellite at the time.

Regardless of the identity of the satellite, this image is remarkable for several reasons.

First, despite so many satellites flying in space, it's still rare to see a real picture—not just an artist's illustration—of what one actually looks like in orbit. For example, SpaceX has released photos of Starlink satellites in launch configuration, where dozens of the spacecraft are stacked together to fit inside the payload compartment of the Falcon 9 rocket. But there are fewer well-resolved views of a satellite in its operational environment, with solar arrays extended like the wings of a bird.

This is changing as commercial companies place more and more imaging satellites in orbit. Several companies provide "non-Earth imaging" services by repurposing Earth observation cameras to view other objects in space. These views can reveal information that can be useful in military or corporate espionage.

Secondly, the Google Earth capture offers a tangible depiction of a satellite's speed. An object in low-Earth orbit must travel at more than 17,000 mph (more than 27,000 km per hour) to keep from falling back into the atmosphere.

While the B-2's motion caused it to appear a little smeared in the Google Earth image a few years ago, the satellite's velocity created a different artifact. The satellite appears five times in different colors, which tells us something about how the image was made. Airbus' Pleiades satellites take pictures in multiple spectral bands: blue, green, red, panchromatic, and near-infrared.

At lower left, the black outline of the satellite is the near-infrared capture. Moving up, you can see the satellite in red, blue, and green, followed by the panchromatic, or black-and-white, snapshot with the sharpest resolution. Typically, the Pleiades satellites record these images a split-second apart and combine the colors to generate an accurate representation of what the human eye might see. But this doesn't work so well for a target moving at nearly 5 miles per second.

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the man of death. Although this does not sound like a good moniker, it is: Ramakrishnan is one of the world’s most eminent scientists in the fields of structural biology and cellular processes related to aging and death. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his discovery of the structure of the ribosome, a crucial cellular machine responsible for gene expression.

In addition to being a leading researcher, Ramakrishnan is also a prolific author. After the enormous success of The Gene Machine, a memoir in which he recounts his human and scientific journey, he published the mighty Why We Die, a book—as its name suggests—dedicated precisely to illustrating the dynamics that regulate aging and which, progressively and inexorably, lead to death.

Ramakrishnan was recently in Italy, in Milan, where he gave a lecture at the second edition of the Milan Longevity Summit, the most important Italian event dedicated to longevity and psycho-physical well-being, organized by BrainCircle Italia. It was an opportunity to meet him and ask him a few questions. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: Professor Ramakrishnan, the crucial question in your book is why we die. But exactly what is death?

Venki Ramakrishnan: By death, we mean the irreversible loss of the ability to function as a coherent individual. It is the result of the failure of a critical system or apparatus, for example, heart, brain, lung, or kidney failure. In this sense there is an apparent paradox: When our organism, as a whole, is alive, millions of cells within us are constantly dying, and we do not even realize it. On the other hand, at the time of death, most of the cells in our bodies are still alive, and entire organs are still functioning and can be donated to people in need of transplantation. But at that point the body has lost the ability to function as a whole. In this sense, it is therefore important to distinguish between cell death and death of the individual.

Speaking of death and aging, you say in your most recent book that you “wanted to offer an objective look at our current understanding of the two phenomena.” What was the biggest surprise or most deeply held belief that you had to reconsider while writing and researching this work?

There have been several surprises, actually. One is that death, contrary to what one might think, is not programmed by our genes. Evolution does not care how long we live, but merely selects the ability to pass on our genes, a process known as “fitness” in evolutionary biology. Thus, the traits that are selected are those that help us survive childhood and reproduce. And it is these traits, later in life, that cause aging and decline.

Another curious finding was the fact that aging is not simply due to wear and tear on cells. Wear and tear happens constantly in all living things, yet different species have very different lifespans. Instead, lifespan is the result of a balance between the expenditure of resources needed to keep the organism functioning and repairing it and those needed to make it grow, mature, and keep it healthy until it reproduces and nurtures offspring.

Do you think there is an aspect of the biology of aging that is still deeply misunderstood by the general public?

Certainly the indefinite extension of life. Although in principle there are no laws or constraints that prevent us from living much longer than we do currently, great longevity or “eternal youth” are still far off, and very significant obstacles to increasing our maximum life expectancy remain.

We must also beware of the pseudoscience—and business—around the concepts of “anti-aging” or the “reversal of aging.” These are often baseless concepts, unsupported by hard evidence, even though they may use language that sounds scientific. Unfortunately, we are all afraid of growing old and dying, so we are very sensitive to any claim that promises to help us avoid it.

A famous scene in the movie Frankenstein Junior shows a student asking Professor Frankenstein about some experiments with worms, and the lecturer replies that “a worm, with very few exceptions, is not a human being.” Yet a whole chapter of Why We Die is called “Lessons from a Humble Worm.” What do we have to learn from worms?

Science has always studied fundamental processes by using model organisms, including worms, fruit flies, and even yeast and bacteria. Of course, the closer these species are to us, the better, which is why drug trials are first conducted on mice and even monkeys and chimpanzees. But we can learn a lot from organisms like the worm. Many things discovered in worms have counterparts in humans. However, we cannot directly extrapolate every result. For example, humans with some of the same mutations that cause the longevity of worms turn out to have serious problems, such as growth defects.

What do you think are the social and ethical implications of our desire to live longer?

Ever since we became aware of our mortality, we have desired to defeat aging and death. However, our individual desires may conflict with what is best for society. A society in which fertility rates are very low and lifespans are very high will be a stagnant society, with very slow generational turnover, and probably much less dynamic and creative. The Nobel Prize-winning South American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who recently passed away, expressed it best: “Old age on the one hand terrifies us, but when we feel anxious, it is important to remember how terrible it would be to live forever. If eternity were guaranteed, all the incentives and illusions of life would vanish. This thought can help us live old age in a better way.”

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

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Similar to Microsoft, Google Cloud also faces outage issues like these from time to time and towards the end of last month, that is what had happened, as Google's uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system failed to deliver the uninterrupted power that it was built for, leading to near-six and a half hour outage. The problem occurred in the "us-east5-c" zone, which is in Columbus, Ohio, and the zone comprised systems built on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors.

Google has explained when and why it happened in its support article and has also detailed the scale of the issue:

On Saturday, 29 March 2025, multiple Google Cloud Services in the us-east5-c zone experienced degraded service or unavailability for a duration of 6 hours and 10 minutes.

 

..

 

The root cause of the service disruption was a loss of utility power in the affected zone. This power outage triggered a cascading failure within the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system responsible for maintaining power to the zone during such events. The UPS system, which relies on batteries to bridge the gap between utility power loss and generator power activation, experienced a critical battery failure.

 

This failure rendered the UPS unable to perform its core function of ensuring continuous power to the system. As a direct consequence of the UPS failure, virtual machine instances within the affected zone lost power and went offline, resulting in service downtime for customers.

 

The power outage and subsequent UPS failure also triggered a series of secondary issues, including packet loss within the us-east5-c zone, which impacted network communication and performance. Additionally, a limited number of storage disks within the zone became unavailable during the outage.

Google has also explained how it fixed the issue:

Google engineers diverted traffic away from the impacted location to partially mitigate impact for some services that did not have zonal resource dependencies. Engineers bypassed the failed UPS and restored power via generator by 14:49 US/Pacific on Saturday, 29 March.

 

The majority of Google Cloud services recovered shortly thereafter. A few services experienced longer restoration times as manual actions were required in some cases to complete full recovery.

Credit where credit's due, the tech giant has thoroughly apologised for the incident to its Cloud customers and has also outlined the steps it has taken to prevent such an issue in the future:

To our Google Cloud customers whose services were impacted during this disruption, we sincerely apologize. This is not the level of quality and reliability we strive to offer you, and we are taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability.

 

...

 

Google is committed to preventing a repeat of this issue in the future and is completing the following actions:

 

• Harden cluster power failure and recovery path to achieve a predictable and faster time-to-serving after power is restored.
• Audit systems that did not automatically failover and close any gaps that prevented this function.
• Work with our uninterruptible power supply (UPS) vendor to understand and remediate issues in the battery backup system.

 

Google is committed to quickly and continually improving our technology and operations to prevent service disruptions. We appreciate your patience and apologize again for the impact to your organization. We thank you for your business.

You can find full details about the problem in the support article here on Google's Cloud status website.

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Was the James Webb Space Telescope worth it?

Well, $10 billion is a lot of money. Even when spread over a couple of decades, that's still a huge chunk of NASA's annual science budget. (And given the recent Trump administration attack on NASA's science budget, money is about to get a whole lot tighter.)

However, it is difficult to put a price on advancing our species' understanding of the natural world and the wide Universe we're swimming in. And Webb is doing an amazing job of that.

In 2009, NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission to make infrared observations. This was the latest in a line of space-based infrared observatories, and it cost about 3 percent as much as the Webb telescope.

Two infrared views of NGC 1514. At left is an observation from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NASA-JPL, Caltech, UCLA, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC)

Today's photo concerns the planetary nebula NGC 1514. In 2010, using the WISE telescope, NASA project scientist Mike Ressler discovered "rings" around the planetary nebula. Now, thanks to Webb, the rings—which are likely composed of small dust grains, heated by ultraviolet light from a white dwarf star—can be seen clearly. And, oh my, they're spectacular.

The clarity in the Webb photo, compared to what came before, is remarkable. So, is seeing the Universe in a new light worth $10 billion? I certainly think so, but I'm writing a weekly story called the Tuesday Telescope, so it's safe to say I am biased.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC)

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Mars is back on the agenda.

During his address to a joint session of Congress in March, President Donald Trump said the United States "will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars."

What does this mean? Manifest destiny is the belief, which was particularly widespread in 1800s America, that US settlers were destined to expand westward across North America. Similarly, then, the Trump administration believes it is the manifest destiny of Americans to settle Mars. And he wants his administration to take steps toward accomplishing that goal.

Should the US Prioritize Settling Mars?

But should we really do this?

I recently participated in a debate with Shannon Stirone, a distinguished science writer, on this topic. The debate was sponsored by Open to Debate, and professionally moderated by Emmy award-winning journalist John Donvan. Spoiler alert: I argued in favor of settlement. I hope you learned as much as I did.

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The Li-ion batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric cars are usually packed in rigid, sealed enclosures that prevent stresses from damaging their components and keep air from coming into contact with their flammable and toxic electrolytes. It’s hard to use batteries like this in soft robots or wearables, so a team of scientists at the University California, Berkeley built a flexible, non-toxic, jelly-like battery that could survive bending, twisting, and even cutting with a razor.

While flexible batteries using hydrogel electrolytes have been achieved before, they came with significant drawbacks. “All such batteries could [only] operate [for] a short time, sometimes a few hours, sometimes a few days,” says Liwei Lin, a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study. The battery built by his team endured 500 complete charge cycles—about as many as the batteries in most smartphones are designed for.

Power in water

“Current-day batteries require a rigid package because the electrolyte they use is explosive, and one of the things we wanted to make was a battery that would be safe to operate without this rigid package,” Lin told Ars. Unfortunately, flexible packaging made of polymers or other stretchable materials can be easily penetrated by air or water, which will react with standard electrolytes, generating lots of heat, potentially resulting in fires and explosions. This is why, in 2017, scientists started to experiment with quasi-solid-state hydrogel electrolytes.

These hydrogels were made of a polymer net that gave them their shape, crosslinkers like borax or hydrogen bonds that held this net together, a liquid phase made of water, and salt or other electrolyte additives providing ions that moved through the watery gel as the battery charged or discharged.

But hydrogels like that had their own fair share of issues. The first was a fairly narrow electrochemical stability window—a safe zone of voltage the battery can be exposed to. “This really limits how much voltage your battery can output,” says Peisheng He, a researcher at UC Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center and lead author of the study. “Nowadays, batteries usually operate at 3.3 volts, so their stability window must be higher than that, probably four volts, something like that.” Water, which was the basis of these hydrogel electrolytes, typically broke down into hydrogen and oxygen when exposed to around 1.2 volts. That problem was solved by using highly concentrated salt water loaded with highly fluorinated lithium salts, which made it less likely to break down. But this led the researchers straight into safety issues, as fluorinated lithium salts are highly toxic to humans.

The challenge Lin, He, and their colleagues set for themselves was making a hydrogel battery with a wide electrochemical window—ideally above 3 volts—that would not cause severe chemical burns when damaged.

Water-scarce hydrogels

The chemistry of the battery they made started with a polymer that has both positive and negative charges (these are termed “zwitterionic”) as the structural net. Water molecules form hydrogen bonds with any charged parts, while lithium ions are attracted to its negatively charged parts. This way, the zwitterionic polymer could bind water tightly enough to prevent it from splitting at higher voltages while still releasing lithium ions when needed. The team then used acrylic acid as the gel’s crosslinker and an electrolyte with a fluorine-free lithium salt to provide lithium ions.

The salt also played an additional role: It pulled water from the air. The usual way of getting the “hydro” part into a hydrogel is soaking the crosslinked, hydrophilic polymer in water; it will typically reach 80 percent water content. Lin, He, and their colleagues didn’t want their hydrogel to contain that much water because of the water-splitting issue. So they just left it to absorb water from ambient moisture.

The result was a water-scarce hydrogel electrolyte that contained only 19 percent water and remained stable in a normal room humidity of 50 percent or so. Once the electrolyte was ready, the team added electrodes and built a fully functional battery powering a printed circuit with a few LED lights. The battery could work for over a month without sealed packaging and operate at over 3.1 volts without much water splitting—a voltage close to that used by commercial batteries.

Despite this success, they started inflicting all sorts of punishment on it.

Self-healing soft batteries

The soft, jelly-like battery could power the LEDs when it was twisted 180 degrees, bent, punctured with a needle, and cut with a razor. It could even self-heal and get back to 90 percent of its original capacity after the team cut it in half, although this required putting it back together and warming it in an oven. Because the electrolyte reached its equilibrium state in ambient air, it didn’t degrade due to air exposure as other hydrogel electrolytes did and remained functional after 500 complete charge cycles.

There were some drawbacks, though. A commercial battery designed for 500 cycles, in principle, should retain 80 percent of its capacity once those 500 cycles are done. Lin and He’s soft battery retained around 60 percent, which leaves lots of room for improvement. Another problem was the energy density. “When you compare this with state-of-the-art batteries we have today, we achieved roughly one-tenth of their capacity,” He says. “So, I think definitely we can try to optimize more towards energy density. Depending on the application, we may sacrifice some properties, like self-healing.”

Lin, however, thinks that the relatively low energy density does not tell the full story. “Your smartwatch is powered by a battery, but a band for this watch today performs only the mechanical function,” Lin says. “If you can replace the band with our battery, you have more area, more volume to work with. Instead of needing a recharge once a day, it could perhaps work for, like, a week.”

Science Advances, 2025.  DOI: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu3711

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Drug discovery

The first benefit that Google says quantum computers are expected to deliver is drug discovery, leading to better health outcomes. With the technology, researchers will be able to test different drug candidates with their targets and other biological molecules, helping to create more effective medicines.

Google recently published a research paper with Boehringer Ingelheim that shows quantum computers will be able to more accurately simulate Cytochrome P450, a key enzyme at determining drug effectiveness, due to its role in breaking down drugs in the bloodstream.

Improved batteries

Another way that Google expects quantum computers to benefit us is through the development of improved batteries. These are important for cleaning up transportation such as electric cars and buses, as well as energy grids as excess energy can be stored for the times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

To improve batteries, Google envisions quantum computers assisting in the design of new materials. It has already worked with the chemical company BASF to determine that quantum computers will be able to simulate Lithium Nickel Oxide (LNO) which could improve industrial production processes and lead to better batteries. Right now, LNO is difficult to produce, so this holds work in the area back. One of the main benefits is that it has a smaller environmental footprint than lithium cobalt oxide, which is more commonly used.

Fusion power

The third and final area that Google said quantum computers will benefit is energy production. Today, clean renewable energy means solar or wind power, but in the future, it will mean fusion power. The technology for fusion reactors is still being figured out, but Google believes quantum computers will be used to design reactors to unlock fusion power.

Current computer models can be inaccurate, according to Google, and they need to be run for billions of CPU hours. The search giant has collaborated with Sandia National Laboratories to show that quantum algorithms that run on fault-tolerant quantum computers, could “more efficiently simulate the mechanisms needed for sustained fusion reactions.”

The introduction of science-focused artificial intelligence models has already sped up drug and materials discovery, so when coupled with quantum computers, the discoveries that are made are likely to accelerate even more. Happy World Quantum Day!

Source: Google

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The pacemaker, which is "smaller than a grain of rice," is made for temporary pacing needs. It is accompanied by a soft, flexible, wireless wearable device that is attached to the patient’s chest. This wearable monitors heart activity and uses light pulses to activate the pacemaker whenever an irregular heartbeat is detected. These light signals penetrate through skin, bone, and muscle to ensure consistent pacing.

The most notable feature of the pacemaker is its ability to dissolve once its function is complete. Composed entirely of biocompatible materials, the device naturally breaks down in the body’s biofluids, eliminating the need for surgical removal.

“We have developed what is, to our knowledge, the world’s smallest pacemaker,” said John A. Rogers, a bioelectronics researcher at Northwestern who led the development. “There’s a crucial need for temporary pacemakers in the context of pediatric heart surgeries, and that’s a use case where size miniaturization is incredibly important. In terms of the device load on the body — the smaller, the better.”

The pacemaker’s design is particularly beneficial for newborns, whose small, delicate hearts require precise and minimally invasive solutions. Igor Efimov, an experimental cardiologist at Northwestern and co-lead of the study, highlighted this application. “Our major motivation was children,” Efimov stated. “About 1% of children are born with congenital heart defects — regardless of whether they live in a low-resource or high-resource country. The good news is that these children only need temporary pacing after a surgery. In about seven days or so, most patients’ hearts will self-repair. But those seven days are absolutely critical. Now, we can place this tiny pacemaker on a child’s heart and stimulate it with a soft, gentle, wearable device. And no additional surgery is necessary to remove it.”

The study demonstrated the pacemaker's effectiveness across multiple tests involving both large and small animal models, as well as human hearts from deceased organ donors. This work builds upon a previous collaboration between Rogers and Efimov, during which they developed the first dissolvable device for temporary heart pacing. Temporary pacemakers are often required after surgeries, either as a bridge to permanent devices or to aid recovery by restoring a normal heart rate.

The team hopes their work will address critical needs for patients requiring short-term cardiac support, particularly newborns recovering from surgery.

Source: Northwestern University (link1, link2), Nature

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Led by Takumi Kagawa and Masashi Kato, the study found that exposing the inner ear to sound waves for just one minute alleviates discomfort such as dizziness and nausea in people reading in moving vehicles. These findings, published in Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, offer a potential new approach for managing motion sickness.

“Our study demonstrated that short-term stimulation using a unique sound called 'sound spice®' alleviates symptoms of motion sickness, such as nausea and dizziness,” said Kagawa. “The effective sound level falls within the range of everyday environmental noise exposure, suggesting that the sound technology is both effective and safe.”

This research builds on recent evidence showing that stimulating the inner ear with sound can improve balance. The team identified a 100 Hz test tone (mid-bass) frequency as optimal for activating the vestibular system, the part of the inner ear that controls balance and spatial orientation. Kato explained the mechanism behind the device, stating, “Vibrations at the unique sound stimulate the otolithic organs in the inner ear, which detect linear acceleration and gravity. This suggests that a unique sound stimulation can broadly activate the vestibular system, which is responsible for maintaining balance and spatial orientation.”

The researchers tested the device by exposing participants to the sound and then inducing motion sickness using swings, driving simulators, and car rides. Symptoms were measured through postural control tests, ECG readings, and Motion Sickness Assessment Questionnaires. Exposure to the sound before testing was found to enhance sympathetic nerve activation, which is often disrupted in motion sickness cases. Participants reported reduced symptoms, including lightheadedness and nausea.

“These results suggest that activation of sympathetic nerves, which are often dysregulated in motion sickness, was objectively improved by the unique sound exposure,” Kato explained.

The team also emphasized the safety of the technology. “The health risk of short-term exposure to our unique sound is minimal,” said Kagawa. “Given that the stimulus level is well below workplace noise safety standards, this stimulation is expected to be safe when used properly.”

Their findings suggest a safe and effective way to address motion sickness during travel, potentially benefiting millions of people worldwide. The researchers aim to further refine the technology and expand its application to various travel scenarios, including air and sea travel.

Source: Nagoya University, J-STAGE | Image via Depositphotos

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Frustrated by the company’s business practices, users on the platform flooded its posts with backlash, ultimately prompting Adobe to delete all of its content.

“Hey, we’re Adobe! We’re here to connect with the artists, designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life,” read Adobe’s first post which has since been deleted. “What’s fueling your creativity right now?”

It was an innocuous enough post that Adobe sent out on Tuesday (April but as Futurism reports, it provoked the ire of Bluesky users who immediately began airing their grievances at the company.

“I assume you’ll be charging us monthly to read your posts,” one user wrote in reference to Adobe’s subscription model.

On the same day, Adobe set up a Bluesky account for Photoshop. That too was bombarded with negative comments.

“Go back to the fascist-owned site where they enjoy supporting AI-generated art like your brand does,” wrote Evlyn Moreau.

“Y’all keep raising your prices for a product that keeps getting worse,” wrote another user.

As of today (Thursday), both Adobe and the Photoshop accounts remain on Bluesky but both of their opening posts have been removed. Something that Bluesky users rejoiced in.

“Adobe deleting their first BlueSky post because they realize that the artist community pretty much universally hates them now is extremely funny,” writes Betsy Bauer.

“Adobe just deleted their post with 1.6k angry comments from artists and creators roasting them,” adds Tokori.

Why Are People Hating On Adobe?

Adobe’s unpopularity can be traced back to a decision it made over 10 years ago when it shifted from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing.

Since then, price hikes and an embrace of artificial intelligence have all added to the vitriol many photographers and creatives direct toward the company.

“The past few years of minimal communication with the community at large followed by the tidal wave of bad press over the past six months has left Adobe’s standing with many photographers in shambles,” PetaPixel’s editor-in-chief Jaron Schnieder wrote last year.

“Adobe couldn’t explain why it let its once excellent relationship with photographers and media lapse, only that it is sorry that happened.”

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Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We're on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX's blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations in this week's Rocket Report.

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.

So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls "kinetic launch." But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company's CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.

Traditional versus kinetic ... The planned constellation, named Meridian, is an opportunity for SpinLaunch to diversify away from being solely a launch company, according to David Wrenn, the company's CEO. We've observed this in a number of companies that started out as rocket developers before branching out to satellite manufacturing or space services. Wrenn said SpinLaunch could loft all of the Meridian satellites on a single large conventional rocket, or perhaps two medium-lift rockets, and then maintain the constellation with its own kinetic launch system. A satellite communications network presents a better opportunity for profit, Wrenn said. "The launch market is relatively small compared to the economic potential of satellite communication," he said. "Launch has generally been more of a cost center than a profit center. Satcom will be a much larger piece of the overall industry."

Peter Beck suggests Electron is here to stay. The conventional wisdom is that the small launch vehicle business isn't a big moneymaker. There is really only one company, Rocket Lab, that has gained traction in selling dedicated rides to orbit for small satellites. Rocket Lab's launcher, Electron, can place payloads of up to a few hundred pounds into orbit. As soon as Rocket Lab had some success, SpaceX began launching rideshare missions on its much larger Falcon 9 rocket, cobbling together dozens of satellites on a single vehicle to spread the cost of the mission among many customers. This offers customers a lower price point than buying a dedicated launch on Electron. But Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO, says his company has found a successful market providing dedicated launches for small satellites, despite price pressure from SpaceX, Space News reports. "Dedicated small launch is a real market, and it should not be confused with rideshare," he argued. "It’s totally different."

No man's land ... Some small satellite companies that can afford the extra cost of a dedicated launch realize the value of controlling their schedule and orbit, traits that a dedicated launch offers over a rideshare, Beck said. It's easy to blame SpaceX for undercutting the prices of Rocket Lab and other players in this segment of the launch business, but Beck said companies that have failed or withdrawn from the small launch market didn't have a good business plan, a good product, or good engineering. He added that the capacity of the Electron vehicle is well-suited for dedicated launch, whereas slightly larger rockets in the one-ton-to-orbit class—a category that includes Firefly Aerospace's Alpha and Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rockets—are an ill fit. The one-ton performance range is "no man's land" in the market, Beck said. "It’s too small to be a useful rideshare mission, and it’s too big to be a useful dedicated rocket" for smallsats. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ULA scrubs first full-on Kuiper launch. A band of offshore thunderstorms near Florida's Space Coast on Wednesday night forced United Launch Alliance to scrub a launch attempt of the first of dozens of missions on behalf of its largest commercial customer, Amazon, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission will use an Atlas V rocket to deploy 27 satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper network. It's the first launch of what will eventually be more than 3,200 operational Kuiper satellites beaming broadband connectivity from space, a market currently dominated by SpaceX's Starlink. As of Thursday, ULA hadn't confirmed a new launch date, but airspace warning notices released by the FAA suggest the next attempt might occur Monday, April 14.

What's a few more days? ... This mission has been a long time coming. Amazon announced the Kuiper megaconstellation in 2019, and the company says it's investing at least $10 billion in the project (the real number may be double that). Problems in manufacturing the Kuiper satellites, which Amazon is building in-house, delayed the program's first full-on launch by a couple of years. Amazon launched a pair of prototype satellites in 2023, but the operational versions are different, and this mission fills the capacity of ULA's Atlas V rocket. Amazon has booked more than 80 launches with ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin, and SpaceX to populate the Kuiper network. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Space Force swaps ULA for SpaceX. For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance's launch schedule, Ars reports. Space Systems Command, which oversees the military's launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA's Vulcan rocket to SpaceX's Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force's fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world. The move allows the GPS satellite to launch as soon as the end of May, the Space Force said. The military executed a similar rocket swap for a GPS mission that launched on a Falcon 9 in December.

Making ULA whole ... The Space Force formally certified ULA's Vulcan rocket for national security missions last month, so Vulcan may finally be on the cusp of delivering for the military. But there are several military payloads in the queue to launch on Vulcan before GPS III SV-08, which was already completed and in storage at its Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado. Meanwhile, SpaceX is regularly launching Falcon 9 rockets with ample capacity to add the GPS mission to the manifest. In exchange for losing the contract to launch this particular GPS satellite, the Space Force swapped a future GPS mission that was assigned to SpaceX to fly on ULA's Vulcan instead.

Russia launches a former Navy SEAL to space. Jonny Kim, a former Navy SEAL, Harvard Medical School graduate, and now a NASA astronaut, blasted off with two cosmonaut crewmates aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket early Tuesday, CBS News reports. Three hours later, Kim and his Russian crewmates—Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky—chased down the International Space Station and moved in for a picture-perfect docking aboard their Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft. "It was the trip of a lifetime and an honor to be here," Kim told flight controllers during a traditional post-docking video conference.

Rotating back to Earth ... Ryzhikov, Zubritsky, and Kim joined a crew of seven living aboard the International Space Station, temporarily raising the lab's crew complement to 10 people. The new station residents are replacing an outgoing Soyuz crew—Alexey Ovchinin, Ivan Wagner, and Don Pettit—who launched to the ISS last September and who plan to return to Earth aboard their own spacecraft April 19 to wrap up a 219-day stay in space. This flight continues the practice of launching US astronauts on Russian Soyuz missions, part of a barter agreement between NASA and the Russian space agency that also reserves a seat on SpaceX Dragon missions for Russian cosmonauts.

China is littering in LEO. China’s construction of a pair of communications megaconstellations could cloud low Earth orbit with large spent rocket stages for decades or beyond, Space News reports. Launches for the government’s Guowang and Shanghai-backed but more commercially oriented Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation began in the second half of 2024, with each planned to consist of over 10,000 satellites, demanding more than a thousand launches in the coming years. Placing this number of satellites is enough to cause concern about space debris because China hasn't disclosed its plans for removing the spacecraft from orbit at the end of their missions. It turns out there's another big worry: upper stages.

An orbital time bomb ... While Western launch providers typically deorbit their upper stages after dropping off megaconstellation satellites in space, China does not. This means China is leaving rockets in orbits high enough to persist in space for more than a century, according to Jim Shell, a space domain awareness and orbital debris expert at Novarum Tech. Space News reported on Shell's commentary in a social media post, where he wrote that orbital debris mass in low-Earth orbit "will be dominated by PRC [People's Republic of China] upper stages in short order unless something changes (sigh)." So far, China has launched five dedicated missions to deliver 90 Qianfan satellites into orbit. Four of these missions used China's Long March 6A rocket, with an upper stage that has a history of breaking up in orbit, exacerbating the space debris problem. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX wins another lunar lander launch deal. Intuitive Machines has selected a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch a lunar delivery mission scheduled for 2027, the Houston Chronicle reports. The upcoming IM-4 mission will carry six NASA payloads, including a European Space Agency-led drill suite designed to search for water at the lunar south pole. It will also include the launch of two lunar data relay satellites that support NASA’s so-called Near Space Network Services program. This will be the fourth lunar lander mission for Houston-based Intuitive Machines under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Falcon 9 has the inside track ... SpaceX almost certainly offered Intuitive Machines the best deal for this launch. The flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket is reliable and inexpensive compared to competitors and has already launched two Intuitive Machines missions, with a third one set to fly late this year. However, there's another factor that made SpaceX a shoe-in for this contract. SpaceX has outfitted one of its launch pads in Florida with a unique cryogenic loading system to pump liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the Intuitive Machines lunar lander as it sits on top of its rocket just before liftoff. The lander from Intuitive Machines uses these super-cold propellants to feed its main engine, and SpaceX's infrastructure for loading it makes the Falcon 9 rocket the clear choice for launching it.

Time may finally be running out for SLS. Jared Isaacman, President Trump's nominee for NASA administrator, said Wednesday in a Senate confirmation hearing that he wants the space agency to pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars at the same time, an effort that will undoubtedly require major changes to how NASA spends its money. My colleague Eric Berger was in Washington for the hearing and reported on it for Ars. Senators repeatedly sought Isaacman's opinion on the Space Launch System, the NASA heavy-lifter designed to send astronauts to the Moon. The next SLS mission, Artemis II, is slated to launch a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon next year. NASA's official plans call for the Artemis III mission to launch on an SLS rocket later this decade and attempt a landing at the Moon's south pole.

Limited runway ... Isaacman sounded as if he were on board with flying the Artemis II mission as envisioned—no surprise, then, that the four Artemis II astronauts were in the audience—and said he wanted to get a crew of Artemis III to the lunar surface as quickly as possible. But he questioned why it has taken NASA so long, and at such great expense, to get its deep space human exploration plans moving. In one notable exchange, Isaacman said NASA’s current architecture for the Artemis lunar plans, based on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, is probably not the ideal “long-term” solution to NASA’s deep space transportation plans. The smart reading of this is that Isaacman may be willing to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions as conceived, given that much of the hardware is already built. But everything that comes after this, including SLS rocket upgrades and the Lunar Gateway, could be on the chopping block.

Welcome to the club, Blue Origin. Finally, the Space Force has signaled it's ready to trust Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, for launching the military's most precious satellites, Ars reports. Blue Origin received a contract on April 4 to launch seven national security missions for the Space Force between 2027 and 2032, an opening that could pave the way for more launch deals in the future. These missions will launch on Blue Origin's heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which had a successful debut test flight in January. The Space Force hasn't certified New Glenn for national security launches, but military officials expect to do so sometime next year. Blue Origin joins SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the Space Force's mix of most-trusted launch providers.

A different class ... The contract Blue Origin received last week covers launch services for the Space Force's most critical space missions, requiring rocket certification and a heavy dose of military oversight to ensure reliability. Blue Origin was already eligible to launch a separate batch of missions the Space Force set aside to fly on newer rockets. The military is more tolerant of risk on these lower-priority missions, which include launches of "cookie-cutter" satellites for the Pentagon's large fleet of missile-tracking satellites and a range of experimental payloads.

Why is SpaceX winning so many Space Force contracts? In less than a week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk's space company the Pentagon's leading launch provider, replacing United Launch Alliance in the top position. Then, the Space Force assigned most of this year's most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX. As we mentioned earlier in the Rocket Report, the military also swapped a ULA rocket for a SpaceX launch vehicle for an upcoming GPS mission. So, is SpaceX's main competitor worried Elon Musk is tipping the playing field for lucrative government contracts by cozying up to President Trump?

It's all good, man ... Tory Bruno, ULA's chief executive, doesn't seem too worried in his public statements, Ars reports. In a roundtable with reporters this week at the annual Space Symposium conference in Colorado, Bruno was asked about Musk's ties with Trump. "We have not been impacted by our competitor's position advising the president, certainly not yet," Bruno said. "I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we're behaving that way." The reason Bruno can say Musk's involvement in the Trump administration so far hasn't affected ULA is simple. SpaceX is cheaper and has a ready-made line of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets available to launch the Pentagon's satellites. ULA's Vulcan rocket is now certified to launch military payloads, but it reached this important milestone years behind schedule.

Two Texas lawmakers are still fighting the last war. NASA has a lot to figure out in the next couple of years. Moon or Mars? Should, or when should, the Space Launch System be canceled? Can the agency absorb a potential 50 percent cut to its science budget? If Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz get their way, NASA can add moving a space shuttle to its list. The Lone Star State's two Republican senators introduced the "Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act" on Thursday, CollectSpace reports. If passed by Congress and signed into law, the bill would direct NASA to take the space shuttle Discovery from the national collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and transport it to Space Center Houston, a museum and visitor attraction next to Johnson Space Center, home to mission control and NASA's astronaut training base. Discovery has been on display at the Smithsonian since 2012. NASA awarded museums in California, Florida, and New York the other three surviving shuttle orbiters.

Dollars and nonsense ... Moving a space shuttle from Virginia to Texas would be a logistical nightmare, cost an untold amount of money, and would create a distraction for NASA when its focus should be on future space exploration. In a statement, Cruz said Houston deserves one of NASA's space shuttles because of the city's "unique relationship" with the program. Cornyn alleged in a statement that the Obama administration blocked Houston from receiving a space shuttle for political reasons. NASA's inspector general found no evidence of this. On the contrary, transferring a space shuttle to Texas now would be an unequivocal example of political influence. The Boeing 747s that NASA used to move space shuttles across the country are no longer flightworthy, and NASA scrapped the handling equipment needed to prepare a shuttle for transport. Moving the shuttle by land or sea would come with its own challenges. "I can easily see this costing a billion dollars," Dennis Jenkins, a former shuttle engineer who directed NASA's shuttle transition and retirement program more than a decade ago, told CollectSpace in an interview. On a personal note, the presentation of Discovery at the Smithsonian is remarkable to see in person, with aerospace icons like the Concorde and the SR-71 spy plane under the same roof. Space Center Houston can't match that.

Next three launches

April 12: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-17 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 01:15 UTC

April 12: Falcon 9 | NROL-192 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 12:17 UTC

April 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-73 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 01:59 UTC

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The battery, which is about the size of a small cube, was tested using two radioactive materials: cesium-137 and cobalt-60. Cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear energy, produced a small amount of power—288 nanowatts. Cobalt-60, a stronger material, generated 1.5 microwatts of power, which is enough to operate tiny sensors. Though these amounts are very small compared to the electricity we use at home, researchers believe the technology could be scaled up to produce more power.

This battery is designed for use in places like nuclear waste storage facilities or in systems used for space exploration and underwater research. It is not meant for regular public use. The good news is that the battery itself doesn’t contain radioactive materials, making it safe to touch even though it uses radiation.

The researchers found that the size and shape of the crystals inside the battery affect how much power it can produce. Bigger crystals can absorb more radiation and make more light, while larger solar cells can turn more of that light into electricity.

Scaling up this battery to make it powerful enough for bigger uses will take more work. Manufacturing it on a large scale could be expensive. However, researchers see great potential in this technology, especially for situations where routine maintenance is difficult or impossible. These batteries could last a long time without polluting their surroundings.

The study was published in the journal Optical Materials: X, and researchers feel this is only the beginning. They hope future experiments will lead to better designs and more powerful prototypes. The work was supported by U.S. government agencies focused on nuclear security and energy efficiency.

Source: Ohio State University, ScienceDirect

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

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

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

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend