In 2023, we reported on the unveiling of the first full-size 3D digital scan of the remains of the RMS Titanic—a "digital twin" that captured the wreckage in unprecedented detail. Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions conducted the scans over a six-week expedition. That project is the subject of the new National Geographic documentary Titanic: The Digital Resurrection, detailing several fascinating initial findings from experts' ongoing analysis of that full-size scan.

Titanic met its doom just four days into the Atlantic crossing, roughly 375 miles (600 kilometers) south of Newfoundland. At 11:40 pm ship's time on April 14, 1912, Titanic hit that infamous iceberg and began taking on water, flooding five of its 16 watertight compartments, thereby sealing its fate. More than 1,500 passengers and crew perished; only around 710 of those on board survived.

Titanic remained undiscovered at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean until an expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard reached the wreck on September 1, 1985. The ship split apart as it sank, with the bow and stern sections lying roughly one-third of a mile apart. The bow proved to be surprisingly intact, while the stern showed severe structural damage, likely flattened from the impact as it hit the ocean floor. There is a debris field spanning a 5×3-mile area, filled with furniture fragments, dinnerware, shoes and boots, and other personal items.

The joint mission by Magellan and Atlantic Productions deployed two submersibles nicknamed Romeo and Juliet to map every millimeter of the wreck, including the debris field spanning some three miles. The result was a whopping 16 terabytes of data, along with over 715,000 still images and 4K video footage. That raw data was then processed to create the 3D digital twin. The resolution is so good, one can make out part of the serial number on one of the propellers.

"I've seen the wreck in person from a submersible, and I've also studied the products of multiple expeditions—everything from the original black-and-white imagery from the 1985 expedition to the most modern, high-def 3D imagery," deep ocean explorer Parks Stephenson told Ars. "This still managed to blow me away with its immense scale and detail."

The Juliet ROV scans the bow railing of the Titanic wreck site.

Magellan Limited/Atlantic Productions

 

Simon Benson, Stephen Payne, and Jeom Kee Paik discuss a simulation of the Titanic sinking.

National Geographic/Gary Moyes

 

Simon Benson examines blueprints of the RMS Titanic.

National Geographic/Gary Moyes

 

The NatGeo series focuses on some of the fresh insights gained from analyzing the digital scan, enabling Titanic researchers like Stephenson to test key details from eyewitness accounts. For instance, some passengers reported ice coming into their cabins after the collision. The scan shows there is a broken porthole that could account for those reports.

One of the clearest portions of the scan is Titanic's enormous boiler rooms right at the rear bow section where the ship snapped in half. Eyewitness accounts reported that the ship's lights were still on right up until the sinking, thanks to the tireless efforts of Joseph Bell and his team of engineers, all of whom perished. The boilers show up as concave on the digital replica of Titanic, and one of the valves is in an open position, supporting those accounts.

The documentary spends a significant chunk of time on a new simulation of the actual sinking, taking into account the ship's original blueprints, as well as information on speed, direction, and position. Researchers at University College London were also able to extrapolate how the flooding progressed. Furthermore, a substantial portion of the bow hit the ocean floor with so much force that much of it remains buried under mud. Romeo's scans of the debris field scattered across the ocean floor enabled researchers to reconstruct the damage to the buried portion.

Titanic was famously designed to stay afloat if up to four of its watertight compartments flooded. But the ship struck the iceberg from the side, causing a series of punctures along the hull across 18 feet, affecting six of the compartments. Some of those holes were quite small, about the size of a piece of paper, but water could nonetheless seep in and eventually flood the compartments. So the analysis confirmed the testimony of naval architect Edward Wilding—who helped design Titanic—as to how a ship touted as unsinkable could have met such a fate. And as Wilding hypothesized, the simulations showed that had Titanic hit the iceberg head-on, she would have stayed afloat.

These are the kinds of insights that can be gleaned from the 3D digital model, according to Atlantic Productions CEO Anthony Geffen, who produced the NatGeo series. "It's not really a replica. It is a digital twin, down to the last rivet," he told Ars. "That's the only way that you can start real research. The detail here is what we've never had. It's like a crime scene. If you can see what the evidence is, in the context of where it is, you can actually piece together what happened. You can extrapolate what you can't see as well. Maybe we can't physically go through the sand or the silt, but we can simulate anything because we've actually got the real thing."

Ars caught up with Stephenson and Geffen to learn more.

A CGI illustration of the bow of the Titanic as it sinks into the ocean.

National Geographic

 

A CGI illustration of the compartments of the Titanic.

National Geographic

 

A CGI illustration of the Titanic hitting the iceberg that caused it to sink

National Geographic

 

A CGI illustration of the stern of the Titanic as it sinks.

National Geographic

 

A CGI illustration of the bow of the Titanic crashing onto the sea floor.

National Geographic

 

Ars Technica: What is so unique and memorable about experiencing the full-size 3D scan of Titanic, especially for those lucky enough to have seen the actual wreckage first-hand via submersible?

Parks Stephenson: When you're in the submersible, you are restricted to a 7-inch viewport and as far as your light can travel, which is less than 100 meters or so. If you have a camera attached to the exterior of the submersible, you can only get what comes into the frame of the camera. In order to get the context, you have to stitch it all together somehow, and, even then, you still have human bias that tends to make the wreck look more like the original Titanic of 1912 than it actually does today. So in addition to seeing it full-scale and well-lit wherever you looked, able to wander around the wreck site, you're also seeing it for the first time as a purely data-driven product that has no human bias. As an analyst, this is an analytical dream come true.

Ars Technica: One of the most visually arresting images from James Cameron's blockbuster film Titanic was the ship's stern sticking straight up out of the water after breaking apart from the bow. That detail was drawn from eyewitness accounts, but a 2023 computer simulation called it into question. What might account for this discrepancy? 

Parks Stephenson: One thing that's not included in most pictures of Titanic sinking is the port heel that she had as she's going under. Most of them show her sinking on an even keel. So when she broke with about a 10–12-degree port heel that we've reconstructed from eyewitness testimony, that stern would tend to then roll over on her side and go under that way. The eyewitness testimony talks about the stern sticking up as a finger pointing to the sky. If you even take a shallow angle and look at it from different directions—if you put it in a 3D environment and put lifeboats around it and see the perspective of each lifeboat—there is a perspective where it does look like she's sticking up like a finger in the sky.

Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, metallurgist Jennifer Hooper, and master mariner Captain Chris Hearn find 

evidence exonerating First Officer William Murdoch, long accused of abandoning his post.

This points to a larger thing: the Titanic narrative as we know it today can be challenged. I would go as far as to say that most of what we know about Titanic now is wrong. With all of the human eyewitnesses having passed away, the wreck is our only remaining witness to the disaster. This photogrammetry scan is providing all kinds of new evidence that will help us reconstruct that timeline and get closer to the truth.

Ars Technica: What more are you hoping to learn about Titanic's sinking going forward? And how might those lessons apply more broadly?

Parks Stephenson: The data gathered in this 2022 expedition yielded more new information that could be put into this program. There's enough material already to have a second show. There are new indicators about the condition of the wreck and how long she's going to be with us and what happens to these wrecks in the deep ocean environment. I've already had a direct application of this. My dives to Titanic led me to another shipwreck, which led me to my current position as executive director of a museum ship in Louisiana, the USS Kidd.

She's now in dry dock, and there's a lot that I'm understanding about some of the corrosion issues that we experienced with that ship based on corrosion experiments that have been conducted at the Titanic wreck sites—specifically how metal acts underwater over time if it's been stressed on the surface. It corrodes differently than just metal that's been submerged. There's all kinds of applications for this information. This is a new ecosystem that has taken root in Titanic. I would say between my dive in 2005 and 2019, I saw an explosion of life over that 14-year period. It's its own ecosystem now. It belongs more to the creatures down there than it does to us anymore.

The bow of the Titanic Digital Twin.

Magellan Limited/Atlantic Productions

 

A shark tooth fob, pocket watch, and boar tusk bangle in the debris field of the Titanic Digital Twin scan materials.

Magellan Limited/Atlantic Productions

 

The Titanic Digital Twin shows the boilers in the hull at the breaking point of the ship.

Magellan Limited/Atlantic Productions

 

An illustration of the boiler room flooding on the Titanic.

National Geographic

 

An illustration of the crew on the Titanic stoking the boilers.

National Geographic

 

As far as Titanic itself is concerned, this is key to establishing the wreck site, which is one of the world's largest archeological sites, as an archeological site that follows archeological rigor and standards. This underwater technology—that Titanic has accelerated because of its popularity—is the way of the future for deep-ocean exploration. And the deep ocean is where our future is. It's where green technology is going to continue to get its raw elements and minerals from. If we don't do it responsibly, we could screw up the ocean bottom in ways that would destroy our atmosphere faster than all the cars on Earth could do. So it's not just for the Titanic story, it's for the future of deep-ocean exploration.

Anthony Geffen: This is the beginning of the work on the digital scan. It's a world first. Nothing's ever been done like this under the ocean before. This film looks at the first set of things [we've learned], and they're very substantial. But what's exciting about the digital twin is, we'll be able to take it to location-based experiences where the public will be able to engage with the digital twin themselves, walk on the ocean floor. Headset technology will allow the audience to do what Parks did. I think that's really important for citizen science. I also think the next generation is going to engage with the story differently. New tech and new platforms are going to be the way the next generation understands the Titanic. Any kid, anywhere on the planet, will be able to walk in and engage with the story. I think that's really powerful.

Titanic: The Digital Resurrection premieres on April 11, 2025, on National Geographic. It will be available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on April 12, 2025.

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The booming popularity of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs for weight loss has led to a flurry of companies vying to make new and improved anti-obesity medications.

One of those is Boston-based Syntis Bio, which is working on a daily pill that mimics the effects of gastric bypass—no actual surgery required. Today, the company announced early data from animals and a small group of human volunteers showing that its approach is safe and may be able to suppress hunger. The company presented the findings Thursday at the European Congress on Obesity and Weight Management.

“We're at a stage with obesity treatment where it's important for us to figure out, how do we now tune it to be more effective?” says Rahul Dhanda, Syntis Bio’s CEO and cofounder.

A poll conducted in April and May of 2024 found that around 12 percent of Americans have tried a GLP-1 drug such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, or Mounjaro—a number that has likely only grown over the past year. But many people eventually stop using these drugs. Cost and insurance coverage is one factor. Another is that GLP-1s can cause nausea, vomiting, and other unpleasant side effects. And some patients would prefer a pill over a weekly injection.

Syntis is aiming to develop another option for people looking to lose weight. The company’s drug is designed to redirect the absorption of nutrients from the beginning of the small intestine to its end. The effect is similar to gastric bypass, in which surgeons make the stomach smaller and shorten the small intestine. As a result, food bypasses much of the small intestine. The procedure changes how the body absorbs food, and leaves people feeling fuller from eating less.

Gastric bypass is a type of bariatric surgery, which an estimated 280,000 people received in 2022. But fewer people are turning to surgery with the advent of new anti-obesity medications. A study published last year in JAMA Open Network found that as prescriptions for GLP-1s skyrocketed between 2022 and 2023, rates of bariatric surgery dropped 25.6 percent.

The drug Syntis is working on does not actually shorten the intestine, like gastric bypass does. Instead, it creates a temporary coating in the upper part of the small intestine, blocking the absorption of nutrients there. This moves nutrients down to the lower part of the small intestine, where satiety hormones—including GLP-1—are triggered.

It does this with two main ingredients: dopamine, a small molecule best known for its relation to the brain, and a tiny amount of hydrogen peroxide. When this combination reaches the small intestine, it comes into contact with a naturally occurring enzyme called catalase. The job of catalase is to break down hydrogen peroxide, which is harmful to the body in high amounts, into water and oxygen. The process converts the dopamine into polydopamine, a biocompatible polymer. Within minutes, a thin film of polydopamine forms that coats the lining of the small intestine. The cells in this lining turn over quickly, so the coating is only temporary. It’s designed to last around 24 hours.

The drug is based on research conducted at MIT by Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and mechanical engineer, and Robert Langer, a chemical engineer who has launched more than two dozen biotech companies.

The two discovered the mechanism when working on a way to develop liquid drug formulations that could be given to children. They soon realized they could make this temporary synthetic coating more or less permeable, to either enhance absorption or slow it down. That latter ability was appealing as a treatment for obesity.

“This material is something you would take as a capsule or liquid, but the next day it's gone because of the natural turnover of our mucosal surface in the GI tract,” Traverso says. He and Langer cofounded Syntis with Dhanda in 2022. He likens this coating to what mussels and other shellfish use to stick to rocks or the ocean floor.

In the results Syntis announced, the drug was delivered in a liquid form via a tube directly to the small intestine so that researchers could check that the polymer coating formed as expected. A tablet form has already been tested in pigs and dogs, and it’s what Syntis plans to test in future human studies.

In rats, the drug produced a consistent 1 percent weekly weight loss over a six-week study period while preserving 100 percent of lean muscle mass.

In a first-in-human pilot study of nine participants, the drug was safe with no adverse effects. Tissue samples taken from the intestine were used to confirm that the coating formed and was also cleared from the body within 24 hours. The study wasn’t designed to assess weight loss, but blood testing showed that after the drug was given, glucose levels and the “hunger hormone” ghrelin were lower while the levels of leptin, an appetite-regulating hormone, were higher.

“When nutrients are redirected to later in the intestine, you're activating pathways that lead towards satiety, energy expenditure, and overall healthy, sustainable weight loss,” Dhanda says.

Syntis Bio’s findings in animals also hint at the drug’s potential for weight loss without compromising muscle mass, one of the concerns with current GLP-1 drugs. While weight loss in general is associated with numerous health benefits, there’s growing evidence that the kind of drastic weight loss that GLP-1s induce can also lead to a loss of lean muscle mass.

Louis Aronne, an obesity medicine specialist and professor of metabolic research at Weill-Cornell Medical College, says that while GLP-1s are wildly popular, they may not be right for everyone. He predicts that in the not-so-distant future there will be many drugs for obesity and treatment will be more personalized. “I think Syntis’ compound fits in perfectly as a treatment that could be used early on. It’s a kind of thing you could use as a first-line medication,” he says. Arrone serves as a clinical adviser to the company.

Vladimir Kushnir, professor of medicine and director of bariatric endoscopy at Washington University in St. Louis, who isn’t involved with Syntis, says the early pilot data is encouraging, but it’s hard to draw any conclusions from such a small study. He expects that the drug will make people feel fuller but could also have some of the same side effects as gastric bypass surgery. “My anticipation is that this is going to have some digestive side effects like bloating and abdominal cramping, as well as potentially some diarrhea and nausea once it gets into a bigger study,” he says.

It’s early days for this novel technique, but if it proves effective, it could one day be an alternative or add-on drug to GLP-1 medications.

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Even the tiniest of living things are capable of some amazing forms of locomotion, and some come with highly sophisticated sensor suites and manage to source their energy from the environment. Attempts to approach this sort of flexibility with robotics have taken two forms. One involves making tiny robots modeled on animal behavior. The other involves converting a living creature into a robot. So far, either approach has involved giving up a lot. You're either only implementing a few of life's features in the robot or shutting off most of life's features when taking over an insect.

But a team of researchers at Harvard has recognized that there are some behaviors that are so instinctual that it's possible to induce animals to act as if they were robotic. Or mostly robotic, at least—the fruit flies the researchers used would occasionally go their own way, despite strong inducements to stay with the program.

Smell the light

The first bit of behavior involved Drosophila's response to moving visual stimuli. If placed in an area where the fly would see a visual pattern that rotates from left to right, the fly will turn to the right in an attempt to keep the pattern stable. This allowed a projector system to "steer" the flies as they walked across an enclosure (despite their names, fruit flies tend to spend a lot of their time walking). By rotating the pattern back and forth, the researchers could steer the flies between two locations in the enclosure with about 94 percent accuracy.

But flies respond to far more than just visual cues; they'll also move toward sources of odorants, orienting themselves based on whether the signal is stronger in their left or right antenna. The researchers engineered some flies so that two types of light-sensitive ion channels were made in the antenna, allowing red and blue light to trigger the same nerve signals as an odorant would. They then covered one antenna with a dye that would absorb red light and the other with one that would absorb only blue.

Depending on whether the flies were exposed to red light, blue light, or both, they'd turn right, turn left, or move in a straight line.

This wasn't quite as effective, with the accuracy of fly navigation dropping to about 80 percent. But past research has identified a set of neurons in the fly's brain that boosted the fly's attention to olfactory signals. So the researchers also put a light-activated ion channel in those, essentially telling the fly that it should pay more attention to signals from its antenna. That restored navigational accuracy to nearly 95 percent.

And that was enough to program a series of light patterns, triggered by a camera that tracked the flies' progress, that caused them to spell out "HELLO WORLD." The total time involved to complete the full sequence averaged over 15 minutes. In additional experiments, the team showed that they could also get the flies to navigate a maze and added an additional light-sensitive ion channel that allowed them to stop and start the flies.

Not quite robotic

Given that each fly could act a bit like a writing implement, the researchers started experimenting with multiple pens, showing that it's possible to coordinate multiple flies at the same time. They also took a group of flies and directed each individually, switching them between a smiley-face pattern and a straight-line formation.

Finally, the researchers placed a ball in the enclosure and guided the flies to it, finding that they'd interact with the ball and move it around. Once the fly started interacting with the ball, the researchers could direct the fly to move it, sometimes for over a meter. There was nothing about the ball that was likely to be of interest to the fly, and the fly didn't receive any reward for moving it.

In fact, there were a number of indications that the flies, while largely driven by stereotypical responses to specific stimuli, weren't entirely slaves to instinct. For starters, there was the fact that none of the experiments reached 100 percent accuracy. In addition, when multiple flies were being guided through an experiment, they tended to wander off course more often when they were close to another fly, suggesting that they could change their response to one stimulus if faced with a competing one.

All of which is to say that these animals can respond a lot like robots most of the time, but they definitely aren't robotic. There's a big difference between using electronics (even to run an AI model) and using a brain. Still, the research team argues that there are potential uses for remote-controlled flies and determined that the flies can potentially carry a milligram of stuff, about the same as their own body weight. That's probably enough for some simple sensors and electronics. Obviously, the optical control system will be kept separate.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2426180122  (About DOIs).

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Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world, counting many scientists among its fans. Naturally those scientists are sometimes drawn to study their beloved beverage from various angles with an eye toward achieving the perfect cup.

While espresso has received the lion's share of such attention, physicists at the University of Pennsylvania have investigated the physics behind brewing so-called "pour-over" coffee, in which hot water is poured over coffee grounds in a filter within a funnel-shaped cone and allowed to percolate and drip into a cup below. The trick is to pour the water from as high as possible without letting the jet of water break up upon impact with the grounds, according to their new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

In 2020, we reported on a mathematical model for brewing the perfect cup of espresso with minimal waste. Many variables can affect the quality of a steaming cup of espresso, including so-called "channeling" during the brewing process, in which the water doesn't seep uniformly through the grounds but branches off in various preferential paths instead. This significantly reduces the extraction yield (EY)—the fraction of coffee that dissolves into the final beverage—and thus the quality of the final brew. That, in turn, depends on controlling water flow and pressure as the liquid percolates through the coffee grounds.

That model was based on how lithium ions propagate through a battery's electrodes, akin to how caffeine molecules dissolve from coffee grounds. Conclusion: The most reproducible thing you can do is use fewer coffee beans and opt for a coarser grind with a bit less water; brew time was largely irrelevant. Three years later, the same team showed how adding a single squirt of water to coffee beans before grinding can significantly reduce the static electric charge on the resulting grounds. This, in turn, reduces clumping during brewing, yielding less waste and the strong, consistent flow needed to produce a tasty cup of espresso.

And just last month at a physics conference, scientists presented insights into the underlying physics of channeling that will further help coffee lovers achieve more consistent results when brewing espresso. They found that channeling adversely affected extraction yields but did not impact the rate at which water flows through the espresso puck.

Art of the grind

There have been far fewer studies focusing on increasing extraction yields for plain-old pour-over coffee, according to the authors of this latest paper. The fundamental elements are the coffee grounds, a smooth laminar water flow, and a funnel-shaped cone to hold the filter. The quality of the resulting cup of coffee is dependent on such variables as the amount of coffee used, the jet radius, the pour height, and the flow velocity, all of which have an impact on how the water jet interacts with the bed of coffee grounds. Ideally, you want efficient mixing to get a richer cup.

From a physics standpoint, we're talking about a complex interplay between a liquid jet and a granular bed of coffee grounds. And granular materials are prone to avalanches. While prior research has looked at water jets and granular avalanches separately, "much less is known about water jets impinging on a liquid surface with a granular material underneath," the authors wrote. "Moreover, there are relatively few studies that directly visualize the granular particles interacting with multiphase flows."

To learn more, the authors conducted several experiments. They made pour-over coffee in the lab, analyzing the coffee grounds with a high-resolution camera to get a distribution of particle size, then measuring the total dissolved solids in the brewed coffee. They also simulated this brewing process using silica gel particles as a substitute for the coffee grounds and a transparent glass funnel at a 60-degree incline as a coffee cone filter, illuminated by lasers. Once again, high-speed cameras captured the dynamics of the interplay between the gel particles and the water jets.

Based on their findings, the authors recommend pouring hot water over your coffee grounds slowly to give the beans more time immersed in the water. But pour the water too slowly and the resulting jet will stick to the spout (the "teapot effect") and there won't be sufficient mixing of the grounds; they'll just settle to the bottom instead, decreasing extraction yield. “If you have a thin jet, then it tends to break up into droplets,” said co-author Margot Young. “That’s what you want to avoid in these pour-overs, because that means the jet cannot mix the coffee grounds effectively.”

That's where increasing the height from which you pour comes in. This imparts more energy from gravity, per the authors, increasing the mixing of the granular coffee grounds. But again, there's such a thing as pouring from too great a height, causing the water jet to break apart. The ideal height is no more than 50 centimeters (about 20 inches) above the filter. The classic goosenecked tea kettle turns out to be ideal for achieving that optimal height. Future research might explore the effects of varying the grain size of the coffee grounds.

Increasing extraction yields and, by extension, reducing how much coffee grounds one uses matters because it is becoming increasingly difficult to cultivate the most common species of coffee because of ongoing climate change. “Coffee is getting harder to grow, and so, because of that, prices for coffee will likely increase in coming years,” co-author Arnold Mathijssen told New Scientist. “The idea for this research was really to see if we could help do something by reducing the amount of coffee beans that are needed while still keeping the same amount of extraction, so that you get the same strength of coffee.”

But the potential applications aren't limited to brewing coffee. The authors note that this same liquid jet/submerged granular bed interplay is also involved in soil erosion from waterfalls, for example, as well as wastewater treatment—using liquid jets to aerate wastewater to enhance biodegradation of organic matter—and dam scouring, where the solid ground behind a dam is slowly worn away by water jets. "Although dams operate on a much larger scale, they may undergo similar dynamics, and finding ways to decrease the jet height in dams may decrease erosion and elongate dam health," they wrote.

Physics of Fluids, 2025. DOI: 10.1063/5.0257924 (About DOIs).

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Hatsushima is not a particularly busy station, relative to Japanese rail commuting as a whole. It serves a town (Arida) of about 25,000, known for mandarin oranges and scabbardfish, that is shrinking in population, like most of Japan. Its station sees between one to three trains per hour at its stop, helping about 530 riders find their way. Its wooden station was due for replacement, and the replacement could be smaller.

The replacement, it turned out, could also be a trial for industrial-scale 3D-printing of custom rail shelters. Serendix, a construction firm that previously 3D-printed 538-square-foot homes for about $38,000, built a shelter for Hatsushima in about seven days, as shown at The New York Times. The fabricated shelter was shipped in four parts by rail, then pieced together in a span that the site Futurism says is "just under three hours," but which the Times, seemingly present at the scene, pegs at six. It was in place by the first train's arrival at 5:45 am.

Either number of hours is a marked decrease from the days or weeks you might expect for a new rail station to be constructed. In one overnight, teams assembled a shelter that is 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) tall and 10 square meters (32 square feet) in area. It's not actually in use yet, as it needs ticket machines and finishing, but is expected to operate by July, according to the Japan Times.

The structure itself is made of mortar, layered like dull-green frosting by a 3D-printing nozzle, reinforced by steel and framed at its edges by concrete. The result is a building that has "earthquake resistance similar to that of reinforced concrete houses," according to West Japan Railway (JR West), and costing about half of what the shelter would cost to build with traditional reinforced concrete. It also has a mandarin orange and scabbardfish embossed into its sides.

The rail company told the Times that it hoped this kind of construction could keep remote stations active at lower costs and with fewer workers.

“We believe that the significance of this project lies in the fact that the total number of people required will be reduced greatly,” Ryo Kawamoto, president of JR West's venture capital arm, told The New York Times.

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The skies around Dallas are about to get a lot more interesting. No, DFW airport isn't planning any more expansions, nor does American Airlines have any more retro liveries to debut. This will be something different, something liable to make all the excitement around the supposed New Jersey drones look a bit quaint.

Zipline is launching its airborne delivery service for real, rolling it out in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Mesquite ahead of a gradual spread that, if all goes according to plan, will also see its craft landing in Seattle before the end of the year. These automated drones can be loaded in seconds, carry small packages for miles, and deposit them with pinpoint accuracy at the end of a retractable tether.

It looks and sounds like the future, but this launch has been a decade in the making. Zipline has already flown more than 1.4 million deliveries and covered over 100 million miles, yet it feels like things are just getting started.

The ranch

When Zipline called me and invited me out for a tour of a drone delivery testing facility hidden in the hills north of San Francisco, I was naturally intrigued, but I had no idea what to expect. Shipping logistics facilities tend to be dark and dreary spaces, with automated machinery stacked high on angular shelves within massive buildings presenting all the visual charm of a concrete paver.

Zipline's facility is a bit different. It's utterly stunning, situated among the pastures of a ranch that sprawls over nearly 7,000 acres of the kind of verdant, rolling terrain that has drawn nature lovers to Northern California for centuries.

Zipline's contribution to the landscape consists of a few shipping container-sized prefab office spaces, a series of tents, and some tall, metal structures that look like a stand of wireform trees. The fruit hanging from their aluminum branches are clusters of white drones, or at least what we'd call "drones."

But the folks at Zipline don't seem to like that term. Everyone I spoke with referred to the various craft hovering, buzzing, or gliding overhead as aircraft. That's for good reason.

Not your average UAV

Go buy a drone at an electronics retailer, something from DJI perhaps, and you'll have to abide by a series of regulations about how high and how far to fly it. Two of the most important rules: Never fly near an airport, and never let the thing out of your sight.

Zipline's aircraft are much more comprehensive machines, able to fly for miles and miles. By necessity, they must fly well beyond the range of any human operator, or what's called "beyond visual line of sight," or BVLOS. In 2023, Zipline was the first commercial operator to get clearance for BVLOS flights.

Zipline's aircraft operate under a series of FAA classifications—specifically, part 107, part 135, and the upcoming part 108, which will formalize BVLOS operation. The uncrewed aircraft, which are able to operate as such, navigate through controlled airspace, and even near airports, with the help of FAA-mandated transponder data as well as onboard sensors that can detect the presence of an approaching aircraft and automatically avoid it.

In fact, just about everything about Zipline's aircraft is automatic. Onboard sensors sample the air through pitot tubes, detecting bad weather. The craft use this data to reroute themselves around the problem, then report back to save subsequent flights the hassle.

Wind speed and direction are also calculated, ensuring that deliveries are dropped with accuracy. Once the things are in the air, even the Zipline operators aren't sure which way they'll fly, only that they'll figure out the right way to get the package there and return safely.

Zipline actually operates two separate aircraft that are suited for different mission types. The aircraft clinging to the aluminum trees, the type that will be exploring the skies over Dallas soon, are internally called Platform 2, or P2, and they're actually two aircraft in one.

A P2 drone can hover in place using five propellers and take off vertically before seamlessly transitioning into efficient forward flight. When it reaches its destination, doors on the bottom open, and a second aircraft emerges. This baby craft, called a "Zip," drops down on a tether.

Fins ensure the tethered craft stays facing into the wind while a small propeller at the rear keeps it from blowing off-target. When it touches the ground, its doors pop open, gently depositing a package from a cargo cavity that's big enough for about four loaves of bread. Maximum payload capacity is eight pounds, and payloads can be delivered up to about 10 miles away.

Where there's a P2, there must be a P1, and while Zipline's first aircraft serves much the same purpose, it does so in a very different way. The P1 is a fixed-wing aircraft, looking for all the world like a hobbyist's radio-controlled model, just bigger and way more expensive.

The P1 launches into the sky like a glider, courtesy of a high-torque winch that slings it aloft before its electric prop takes over. It can fly for over 120 miles on a charge before dropping its cargo, a package that glides to the ground via parachute.

The P1 slows momentarily during the drop and then buzzes back up to full speed dramatically before turning for home. There's no gentle, vertical landing here. It instead cruises precisely toward a wire suspended high in the air. An instant before impact, it noses up, exposing a metal hook to the wire, which stops the thing instantly.

In naval aviator parlance, it's an OK three-wire every time, and thanks to hot-swappable batteries, a P1 can be back in the air in just minutes. This feature has helped the company perform millions of successful deliveries, many carrying lifesaving supplies.

From Muhanga to Mesquite

The first deployment from the company that would become Zipline was in 2016 in Muhanga, Rwanda, beginning with the goal of delivering vaccines and other medical supplies quickly and reliably across the untamed expanses of Africa. Eric Watson, now head of systems and safety engineering at Zipline, was part of that initial crew.

"Our mission is to enable access to instant logistics to everyone in the world," he said. "We started with one of the most visceral pain points, of being able to go to a place, operating in remote parts where access to medicine was a problem."

It proved to be an incredible proving ground for the technology, but this wasn't just some beta test designed to deliver greater ROI. Zipline already has success in a more important area: delivering lifesaving medicine. The company's drones deliver things like vaccines, anti-venoms, and plasma. A 2023 study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that Zipline's blood delivery service reduced deaths from postpartum hemorrhage by 51 percent.

That sort of promise attracted Lauren Lacey to the company. She's Zipline's head of integration quality and manufacturing engineering. A former engineer at Sandia Labs, where she spent a decade hardening America's military assets, Lacey has brought that expertise to whipping Zipline's aircraft into shape.

Lacey walked me through the 11,000-square-foot Bay Area facility she and her team have turned into a stress-testing house of horrors for uncrewed aircraft. I witnessed everything from latches being subjected to 120° F heat while bathed in ultra-fine dust to a giant magnetic resonance device capable of rattling a circuit board with 70 Gs of force.

It's all in the pursuit of creating an aircraft that can survive 10,000 deliveries. The various test chambers can replicate upward of 2,500 tests per day, helping the Zipline team iterate quickly and not only add strength but peel away unneeded mass, too.

"Every single gram that we put on the aircraft is one less that we can deliver to the customer," Lacey said.

Now zipping

Zipline already has a small test presence in Arkansas, a pilot program with Walmart, but its rollout today is a big step forward. Once added to the system, customers can make orders through a dedicated Zipline app. Walmart is the only partner for now, but the company plans to offer more products on the retail and healthcare front, including restaurant food deliveries.

The app will show Walmart products eligible for this sort of delivery, calculating weight and volume to ensure that your order isn't too big. The P2's eight-pound payload may seem restrictive, but Jeff Bezos, in touting Amazon's own future drone delivery program, previously said that 86 percent of the company's deliveries are five pounds or less.

Amazon suspended its prototype drone program last year for software updates but is flying again in pilot programs in Texas and Arizona. The company has not provided an update on the number of flights lately, but the most recent figures were fewer than 10,000 drone deliveries. For comparison, Zipline currently completes thousands per day. Another future competitor, Alphabet-backed Wing, has flown nearly a half-million deliveries in the US and abroad.

A Zipline P2 uncrewed aircraft undergoing final assembly at the company's California facility. The center control 

board is riddled with redundant sensors. An orange parachute is there in case of emergency.

Tim Stevens

 

The Zip cargo carrier that nests inside the P2 sits inside a mockup storefront at Zipline's testing facility. Its carbon 

fiber-lined cargo compartment can carry up to eight pounds of goods.

Tim Stevens

Others are vying for a piece of the airborne delivery pie, too, but nobody I spoke with at Zipline seems worried. From what I could see from my visit, they have reason for confidence. The winds on that ranch in California were so strong that towering dust devils were dancing between the disaffected cattle during my visit. Despite that, the drones flew fast and true, and my requested delivery of bandages and medicine was safely and quickly deposited on the ground just a few feet from my own feet.

It felt like magic, yes, but more importantly, it was one of the most disruptive demonstrations I've seen. While the tech isn't ideally suited for every situation, it may help cut down on the delivery trucks that are increasingly clogging rural roads, all while getting more things to more people who need them, and doing it emissions-free.

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In a secret location in the United States, two white wolves are lounging in the grass in a sunny, roughly one-acre enclosure. It’s early spring and a chill wind blows through bare trees nearby. The humans in the enclosure are wearing their winter jackets. With their thick, shaggy fur, the 5-month-old wolves are better adapted to the cold.

One of the humans is Ben Lamm, founder and CEO of Dallas-based startup Colossal Biosciences. He has invited WIRED to be among the first to see the wolves. The animals, he says, are dire wolves, which went extinct more than 10,000 years ago. A large canine species that once roamed the Americas, dire wolves coexisted with other Ice Age megafauna such as saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and woolly mammoths. The company claims it’s the first time an animal has ever been de-extincted.

The wolves, still pups, saunter around the enclosure, unaware that they’re in the wrong time period. The Game of Thrones series popularized the dire wolf as the emblem of the noble and doomed House Stark, and now Colossal claims to have brought it—or at least something that looks like a dire wolf—back to life.

Lamm points out the characteristics that make these animals dire wolves: more pronounced shoulders, a slightly wider head, and thicker haunches than modern-day gray wolves. They’re supposed to have larger jaws, too, but we don’t get close enough to find out. At 5 months, they’re already 80 pounds and are expected to get bigger than gray wolves. And of course, they’re white. Cue Jon Snow.

Lamm, a serial entrepreneur, cofounded Colossal in 2021 to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and other extinct animals. Sort of. Colossal isn’t directly cloning preserved DNA from prehistoric animals, à la Jurassic Park. Instead, it’s editing the genes of present-day relatives so that they look and act like their extinct predecessors.

“Not only can we identify ancient genes and predict what they do, we can engineer them into cell lines, and we can successfully and healthily create them, and bring them back, which is awesome,” Lamm says once we get inside after viewing the wolves. The company, which recently unveiled a “woolly mouse,” has raised $435 million and says it is now worth $10.2 billion.

Colossal has made three dire wolves so far and plans to make a total of seven or eight, according to Lamm. The wolves that WIRED glimpsed, Romulus and Remus, were born in October. (They’re named after the twin brothers from Roman mythology who were nursed as infants by a she-wolf). A third dire wolf, Khaleesi—a nod to Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen—was born in January.

Colossal’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, was on a work trip to the UK when the first dire wolf litter was born. She woke up to the news that the two males had arrived. “I saw the text messages and I was like, ‘I can’t believe I wasn’t awake for this,’” she says. For the birth of Khaleesi, she was there in person. Although the company refers to Romulus and Remus as coming from the same litter, that’s not quite accurate. The two wolves are genetically identical but were carried and birthed by different mothers, Shapiro confirmed over email.

“One of the arguments in favor of working on this is that it brings people to a place of awe,” she says. “The idea that you can see a species we drove to extinction that we now have brought back from extinction can give people a reframing of how we think about the biodiversity crisis.”

Before she joined Colossal as a staff member, Shapiro was a scientific adviser to the company. It was during a company meeting in Dallas while she was an adviser that the idea of bringing back the dire wolf first came up. In 2021 Shapiro had coauthored a paper that attempted to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the wolves by sequencing genomes from five different fossils. At the time, Shapiro was a professor at UC Santa Cruz—a post she still holds alongside her role at Colossal.

For this de-extinction project, Shapiro and her colleagues returned to two dire wolf fossils sequenced in that original paper: A 13,000-year-old tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho. The scientists extracted and sequenced the ancient DNA from the two fossils, assembling it into a genome that Shapiro says contains 500 times more data than the previous analysis.

This new analysis might also change our understanding of the dire wolf’s evolutionary history. Scientists previously thought that dire wolves diverged from their shared ancestor with gray wolves around 5.7 million years ago, making the extinct wolves genetically closer to jackals than gray wolves. But the Colossal analysis, Shapiro says, found that dire wolves were the product of interbreeding between two different wolf lineages that took place between 2.5 and 3.5 million years ago. Shapiro says that she and the authors of the original paper are planning to release a new paper that incorporates the new data from the Colossal analysis.

Studying the dire wolf’s genome also allowed the Colossal team to figure out which features distinguished the ancient wolf from its modern relatives. They settled on traits involving size, musculature, hair color, hair texture, hair length, and coat patterning. They then used gene editing to alter the genome of cells from the dire wolf’s closest living relative, the gray wolf. In total the company made 20 unique edits to 14 genes in the gray wolf genome. Of those, 15 were meant to reproduce extinct dire wolf gene variants. Colossal claims it’s a record number of unique genetic edits done to any animal.

But the dire wolf’s genome is still almost identical to that of the gray wolf. This raises a tricky question: Are these wolves really dire wolves or just gene-edited gray wolves? Lamm, of course, says the animals are dire wolves. “We call them dire wolves,” he says. “What’s interesting is that speciation is an area where scientists can’t seem to agree.” A species is often defined by a combination of genetic and physically visible characteristics, including teeth and the shape, size, and color of their body.

George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard University who cofounded the company with Lamm, says the goal is to eventually produce an animal with the full genome of an extinct dire wolf. “In the meantime, we're prioritizing all the traits that actually define the species,” he says.

Shapiro, too, says the edits are significant enough to call the new animals dire wolves. “If we can look at this animal and see what it’s doing, and it looks like a dire wolf and acts like a dire wolf, I’m going to call it a dire wolf. And my colleagues who are taxonomists will disagree with me.”

David Jachowski, a professor of conservation at Clemson University in South Carolina, says that there’s “inherently some subjectivity” when it comes to defining species and that the role an animal plays in its ecosystem may be as important as its genetics. There’s also a “tremendous marketing value to wildlife conservation” to declare a species de-extinct, says Jachowski, who did not know specific details about the dire wolf project.

To make the dire wolf, Colossal started with blood drawn from a gray wolf. Working on a type of blood cell called an epithelial progenitor cell, the team edited the DNA so that it more closely matched the genome of the dire wolf. They then took the genetic material from this cell and placed it into the egg cell of a domesticated dog that had had its genetic material removed. Once that egg cell had developed into an embryo, it was implanted into a surrogate dog.

It took eight surrogates and an average of 45 embryos per surrogate to get the dire wolf pups. Two surrogates gave birth to Romulus and Remus, and a third produced Khaleesi. Five of the embryo transfers did not result in successful pregnancies. A second female was born in January alongside Khaleesi, but she died after 10 days from an infection of the intestine.

In a less flashy but perhaps more ecologically significant advance, Colossal says it has used its new cloning technique to produce four red wolves, one of the most critically endangered species in the US. Red wolves were once common throughout the Eastern and South Central US, but intensive predator control programs and habitat loss have decimated their numbers. The species almost went extinct in the 1960s. As of this February, fewer than 20 wild red wolves are left in North Carolina. Approximately 270 are in captive breeding programs across the US with the intention of those animals being reintroduced in the wild.

One of the challenges of rebuilding their numbers is maintaining genetic diversity in the population. All the red wolves alive today, both captive and rewilded, descend from just 12 founder individuals. Genetic diversity gives a species a better chance at survival. It boosts their ability to reproduce and helps them adapt to environmental changes. As a species’ numbers dwindle, so does its genetic diversity. And even if it rebounds, genetic variation doesn’t return.

The red wolves that Colossal cloned include a female and three males from three different founder individuals. Adding those animals to the captive breeding population would increase the number of founding lineages by 25 percent, the company says.

With traditional cloning, researchers take a tissue biopsy, usually from the skin, from an animal they want to copy. They remove the DNA from one of those cells into an egg that has had its own DNA-containing nucleus removed. After developing into an embryo in a test-tube, it’s implanted into the womb of a female surrogate animal. It’s the same technique that was used to create Dolly the sheep.

Instead of a tissue sample, Colossal’s new method relies on a blood draw. The company isolated expandable endothelial progenitor cells from the blood of red wolves to make their clones. Matt James, chief animal officer at Colossal, says this less-invasive technique means less recovery time for the animal being cloned. Using blood cells is also theoretically a quicker and easier way of securing the genetic material for cloning.

“It opens up more pathways for biobanking, and biobanking is probably our best insurance policy against extinction,” says James. “Right now, we need to begin banking as much biodiversity as we can as we face this massive biodiversity crisis. Now we have another tool in the toolkit for that.”

The company is in talks with both the US Department of the Interior and the North Carolina government about the potential introduction of the cloned red wolves into the wild.

The three dire wolves are now living in a 2,000-acre secure ecologic preserve, which is in a different location than the small enclosure that WIRED visited. Shapiro says that Colossal is not considering rewilding the dire wolves. “We want to use this project to bring attention to the plight of gray wolves who really need our help and support right now, and thinking about what predators can do on a landscape.”

Wolf reintroduction does have a cascade of ecological benefits—wolves regulate deer and elk populations to prevent overgrazing, allowing other native plant and animal species to flourish. But the dire wolves Colossal created won’t be doing any hunting of their own. They’re fed a mix of kibble and meat from beef, horse, and deer daily.

One of Colossal’s main arguments for de-extinction has been that de-extinct species can perform the same role in an ecosystem as their extinct ancestors, potentially restoring that ecosystem back to a more balanced state. “One of the things I worry about as a wildlife conservationist is focusing on species that may be glitzy but are of a potentially low impact in terms of helping restore ecosystems,” says Jachowski.

Lamm is aware that the dire wolves his company created are glitzy. That’s the point. “I think that the pop culture aspects of the dire wolf will be sexy and fun for a lot of people, and I think that will drive awareness for wolf conservation,” he says. Which goes to show why the question of whether Colossal’s animals are dire wolves may be moot. They are wolves, altered at the genetic level by man for his own purposes—something new, and very, very old.

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Tesla’s battery range extender accessory for Cybertruck, which promised to give the electric pickup the capability to drive about 445 miles on a single charge, was removed from the online configurator over the weekend, Electrek reports.

The Cybertruck Range Extender was announced at the vehicle’s delivery event as a $16,000 add-on that appears to take up about half of the truck’s usable rear bed space. Tesla initially promised in 2019 that the tri-motor Cybertruck would go more than 500 miles on a charge for about $70,000 — and that’s without any mention of an add-on battery.

Now, the highest range Cybertruck available for order is the 325-mile dual-motor AWD model for $79,990, and the tri-motor “Cyberbeast” goes 301 miles for $99,990. Previously, Tesla promised the battery would stretch the Cybertruck’s range to 470 miles, but the estimation was downgraded in 2024.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

 

As of this writing, the battery extender is still mentioned in the Cybertruck specs section of the site, and there’s no indication that it has been cancelled altogether. But it’s not looking good for the accessory, as it was initially supposed to become available in “early 2025,” and then was delayed to “mid 2025,” and now seems to be missing in action.

Tesla has been collecting a $2,000 non-refundable fee from customers to reserve the battery extender, and it’s unclear what Tesla will do with the money if the battery doesn’t come to market.

Currently, Tesla is facing an uncertain future with sales plummeting 13 percent year over year. And the Cybertruck has not been a commercial success, reportedly selling only 50,000 units in 2024 on Tesla’s claimed one million reservations.

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The Sunbird is powered by a Dual Direct Fusion Drive (DDFD), a compact nuclear fusion engine designed to provide both thrust and electrical power for spacecraft. The DDFD operates by fusing helium-3 and deuterium, two isotopes that release energy when combined under high temperatures and pressures. Unlike traditional fusion reactors, which convert energy into electricity and then propulsion, the DDFD directly uses charged particles produced during fusion for propulsion. This approach is expected to make the system more efficient and capable of delivering higher thrust by eliminating the middleware in the energy chain.

One of the key technical specifications of the Sunbird is its high specific impulse, ranging between 10,000 and 15,000 seconds. Specific impulse is a measure of how efficiently a rocket uses its propellant, and these figures suggest that the Sunbird could achieve long-duration missions with minimal fuel consumption. The engine is also designed to produce up to 2 megawatts (MW) of electrical power, which could be used to support onboard systems or scientific instruments during missions.

The Sunbird's capabilities are ambitious. Pulsar Fusion claims that the rocket could propel a spacecraft weighing approximately 1,000 kilograms or 2,200 lbs to Pluto in just four years. For comparison, that is about the equivalent of 12 average-sized men in the USA, and the current chemical propulsion systems would likely take more than a decade to achieve the same journey.

The company also suggests that the Sunbird could halve the travel time to Mars, making it a potentially transformative technology for future interplanetary missions.

However, the project is not without its challenges. Achieving nuclear fusion in a controlled and sustainable manner is a complex task that has eluded scientists for decades. While space offers conditions that are more conducive to fusion than Earth, such as low gravity and a vacuum environment, the engineering hurdles remain significant.

Another aspect to consider is the sourcing of helium-3, a rare isotope that is not readily available on Earth. While it can be extracted from lunar regolith or other extraterrestrial sources, the logistics and costs involved in obtaining sufficient quantities for large-scale use could be a real challenge.

The Sunbird also introduces questions about safety and regulatory oversight. Nuclear propulsion systems require stringent safety measures to prevent accidents, both during launch and in space. Additionally, international regulations governing the use of nuclear technology in space are still evolving, and the deployment of such systems could face legal and diplomatic hurdles.

Pulsar Fusion plans to conduct static tests of the Sunbird's core technology this year in 2025, followed by an in-orbit demonstration in 2027. These milestones will be critical in determining the project's viability, so let's wait and watch what happens.

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

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Funnily, the antibiotic was found in a technician's garden! Scientists took soil samples from the garden and analyzed them. It was observed that a bacterium called "Paenibacillus" produces lariocidin, a type of lasso peptide. Lasso peptides are special because they have a knotted structure that makes them very stable and hard to break down. This characteristic allows lariocidin to stay active for a longer time compared to many other antibiotics.

The way lariocidin works is different from how most antibiotics attack bacteria. It targets the ribosome, which is the part of a bacterial cell responsible for making proteins. Proteins are essential for bacteria to survive and multiply. Lariocidin disrupts this process in two ways: it stops the ribosome from working properly and forces it to make mistakes when creating proteins. This combined action effectively kills the bacteria, even those that have developed resistance to other antibiotics.

This discovery highlights the value of soil as a source of new medicines. Microorganisms found in soil have evolved unique ways to defend themselves against other microbes, making them a rich resource for antibiotic development. Scientists are increasingly studying soil bacteria to find solutions to the problem of drug-resistant infections.

Antimicrobial resistance is a pressing global health issue, with drug-resistant infections causing millions of deaths annually. The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified antibiotic resistance as one of the top ten threats to public health. The development of new antibiotics is crucial to counteract this trend and ensure the effectiveness of medical treatments.

While lariocidin is exciting, it is still in the early stages of research. Scientists will need to conduct more studies to test if it is safe and effective for use in humans. They will also need to figure out how to produce it on a large scale for medical applications.

Source: Nature | Image via DepositPhotos

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

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The best method that we have for defining color is by using math. Specifically, mind-boggling mathematical models called color spaces that use geometry to assign colors as a fixed point that we can reference, ensuring the blue that I see is the same blue you see. As a creative-leaning person who can barely split a bill without a calculator app, all that math is extremely daunting.

The good news is that computing software will do all these complicated calculations for us, allowing us to rely on our eyeballs to pick whatever colors look best. The bad news is that there’s an equally daunting number of color spaces to choose from, and they’re all optimized for different tasks across web design, photography, video editing, physical printing, and more. And if you select the wrong one at any point between creating, editing, and viewing something, it can really mess with what colors are supposed to look like.

It’s a lot to absorb. Thankfully, most of us will only ever need to understand the basics, and that knowledge can be useful to everyone — not just creative professionals. Learning about it can help you buy your next phone, TV, laptop, or computer monitor, and get the most out of your viewing experience.

The first hurdle is to learn the difference between a color model, space, and gamut. A color model is the entire system used to define how a color is represented. Here are some examples:

CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key): This follows a similar concept to the color wheel theory you probably learned in art class. By combining these colors (key generally being black) in differing quantities, we can achieve colors closer to the range that can be seen by the average human eye compared to mixing red, yellow, and blue primaries together like a painter, which is its own cruder system called RYB.

Both of these systems are called “subtractive color mixing” because they’re calculated by subtracting how much light can pass through after something is added, such as dyes, inks, and paint. That’s also why paper is typically white and why printing and dyeing methods will appear more vivid when applied to the lightest possible base. This system doesn’t actually need black to work because CMY can achieve that alone by repeated layering. Including black in the system directly is useful for things like printers, however, as the amount of ink required to do so would be wasteful and turn printed paper into a soggy mess.

RGB (Red, Green, Blue): This is an additive color model used in electronic devices because it does the opposite — instead of subtracting light from a white background, it adds light in differing frequencies to a black display. Because black is the complete absence of light, this made true blacks difficult to display on, well, displays, because the entire thing needed to be blasted by a backlight, until technology like OLED was developed that provided each pixel with its own teeny light source.

HSL / HSB / HSV (Hue, Saturation, Lightness / Brightness / Value): This will be familiar to anyone who has adjusted their webcam or used a color picker on apps like Adobe Photoshop, and for good reason. While RGB is easy for machines to understand, HSL was made to be human-readable, making colors easier to manipulate to find the desired result. Hue is the tone of the color itself, measured on a wheel as degrees, with saturation measuring the intensity between fully vibrant and grayscale, and lightness / brightness / value measuring between zero percent for black and 100 percent for white.

The difference between these models may be easier to visualize. Here are some of the more common examples.

Image: The Verge / Adobe

Look across the three examples, and you can see what makes a color model a color model — there are numerous ways to make specific colors, but some methods will work better than others for certain applications, such as dyeing cloth, printing labels, or color-correcting video footage. Think of them as different journeys that all reach the same destination.

Color spaces are built on color models and define a specific range of displayable colors, often within the limitations of the applications they’re designed for, such as the display panels on computer monitors and televisions. These exist because colors really are like math — you can make a nearly infinite number of small changes to colors, but doing so would be both demanding to calculate and kind of pointless because some colors simply can’t be detected by the human eye. CIE 1931 XYZ, a color space created to replicate colors based on human perception, has since gone on to become the basis for almost every other modern color space.

But wait — if we can already plot essentially every color that we can actually see, then why don’t we just make a single color space around it that can be used for everything? Surely that would make all of this less confusing. Well, we technically could create a “universal” solution, but every color space is made for different purposes, and they impact how everything is displayed, from the shades of a website to the color grading of a TV show. We would be sacrificing the ability to optimize anything if we did.

“While it is possible to create a ‘universal color space’ this is not necessarily advisable,” Eric Chan, a fellow of digital imaging at Adobe, told The Verge. “Color spaces serve different purposes. Some are device-dependent, like displays, cameras, and printers. Some are device-independent. Some are used for interchange (e.g., between apps); some are used for editing.”

sRGB, for example, was jointly created by HP and Microsoft in 1996 and is currently the standard color space for almost everything you see on the web, providing a sensible range of colors to ensure that color is consistent across as many devices as possible.

While the entire wedge of color is mapped, color spaces will only make use of a certain portion of it.

Image: BenQ

If you’re editing a photograph that will only be posted online, then sRGB is a solid choice. But if you want to print that photograph professionally, you may choose Adobe RGB instead — another RGB-based space created by Adobe with a wider color range that can support colors achieved through CMYK printing. Another option is CIELAB, or Lab, which was designed to be a “perceptually uniform space” that’s independent of devices, meaning that coordinates used to specify the color will produce the same color wherever they are applied, making CIELAB useful for advanced color grading.

Rec.709, Rec.2100, and DCI-P3 are three more color spaces that are optimized for video and display technology. Rec.709 was created to define the color range that can be achieved by high-definition TV, while Rec.2100 is a newer, wider color standard for ultra-high definition TV, HDR, and future video technologies. DCI-P3, also known as Display P3 or just P3, was created for use in digital movie theaters and sits somewhere between the two.

The technology used across these applications can vary; to provide everyone with the best possible experience, color tools must vary, too. “My analogy is like a language,” says Chan. “Yes, it’s possible to create a ‘universal language,’ but that doesn’t necessarily make it more useful or practical than the ones we already have.”

Depending on the device you’re looking at right now, you should see some differences between this image that was saved in sRGB…

Image: Jess Weatherbed / The Verge

 

…this image saved in Adobe RGB…

Image: Jess Weatherbed / The Verge

 

…and this image saved in CMYK. 

Image: Jess Weatherbed / The Verge

 

Gamut comes into the mix when we measure just how capable something actually is at displaying every color within a space. By definition, a gamut is just a range, displayed as a percentage that represents how much of a color space can be captured by a device.

If you’ve purchased a computer display recently, you may have seen that a percentage of color spaces will be advertised with the product. The BenQ PD3225U Designer Monitor can cover 98 percent of P3, 99 percent of sRGB, and 99 percent of Rec.709, for example, while the much cheaper Dell S2425HS only specifies that it can cover 99 percent of sRGB. That can give us a quick indication of how good a display is for certain creative tasks — if sRGB is higher than P3, then it’ll be better for graphic designers than video editors, for example, but gamut itself can have diminishing returns.

“Wider is better, but only to a point,” says Chan. “In terms of TV resolution, the jump from VGA to HD was huge and obvious to most people. The move from HD to 4K is less noticeable. The move from 4K to 8K is even less noticeable for most people. Related to wider color space is higher dynamic range (HDR). In my view, this is more easily noticeable to most people, compared to a purely wider gamut.”

You can think of it like frame rates — you can only go so high before you stop noticing the benefit. While color spaces like OKLCH exist that provide wider gamut support than sRGB, it would need far greater support across displays and web software before it can rival the current standard, and sRGB is still plenty sufficient for most applications.

This is all just scratching the surface of how color is displayed. Luckily, the layperson won’t need to understand all that much because technical color work isn’t designed for them, and even people in design industries typically only have to learn about the spaces specific to their job. The rest of us can let computers do the hard part and appreciate that a lot of work happens behind the scenes to bring more color to the world around us.

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The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future given a complete knowledge of the present. His thought experiment marked the height of optimism about what physicists might forecast. Since then, reality has repeatedly humbled their ambitions to understand it.

One blow came in the early 1900s with the discovery of quantum mechanics. Whenever quantum particles are not being measured, they inhabit a fundamentally fuzzy realm of possibilities. They don’t have a precise position for a demon to know.

Another came later that century, when physicists realized how much “chaotic” systems amplified any uncertainties. A demon might be able to predict the weather in 50 years, but only with an infinite knowledge of the present all the way down to every beat of every butterfly’s wing.

In recent years, a third limitation has been percolating through physics—in some ways the most dramatic yet. Physicists have found it in collections of quantum particles, along with classical systems like swirling ocean currents. Known as undecidability, it goes beyond chaos. Even a demon with perfect knowledge of a system’s state would be unable to fully grasp its future.

“I give you God’s view,” said Toby Cubitt, a physicist turned computer scientist at University College London and part of the vanguard of the current charge into the unknowable, and “you still can’t predict what it’s going to do.”

Eva Miranda, a mathematician at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Spain, calls undecidability a “next-level chaotic thing.”

Undecidability means that certain questions simply cannot be answered. It’s an unfamiliar message for physicists, but it’s one that mathematicians and computer scientists know well. More than a century ago, they rigorously established that there are mathematical questions that can never be answered, true statements that can never be proved. Now physicists are connecting those unknowable mathematical systems with an increasing number of physical ones and thereby beginning to map out the hard boundary of knowability in their field as well.

These examples “place major limitations on what we humans can come up with,” said David Wolpert, a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute who studies the limits of knowledge but was not involved in the recent work. “And they are inviolable.”

The Blackest of Boxes

A striking example of unknowability came to physics in 1990 when Cris Moore, then a graduate student at Cornell University, designed an undecidable machine with a single moving part.

His setup—which was purely theoretical—resembled a highly customizable pinball machine. Imagine a box, open at the bottom. A player would fill the box with bumpers, move the launcher to any position along the bottom of the box, and fire a pinball into the interior. The contraption was relatively simple. But as the ball ricocheted around, it was secretly performing a computation.

Moore had become fascinated with computation after reading Gödel, Escher, Bach, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book about systems that reference themselves. The system that most captured his imagination was an imaginary device that had launched the field of computer science, the Turing machine.

Defined by the mathematician Alan Turing in a landmark 1936 paper, the Turing machine consisted of a head that could move up and down an infinitely long tape, reading and writing 0s and 1s in a series of steps according to a handful of simple rules telling it what to do. One Turing machine, following one set of rules, might read two numbers and print their product. Another, following a different set of rules, might read one number and print its square root. In this way, a Turing machine could be designed to execute any sequence of mathematical and logical operations. Today we would say that a Turing machine executes an “algorithm,” and many (but not all) physicists consider Turing machines to define the limits of calculation itself, whether performed by computer, human or demon.

Moore recognized the seeds of Turing machine behavior in the subject of his graduate studies: chaos. In a chaotic system, no detail is small enough to ignore. Adjusting the position of a butterfly in Brazil by a millimeter, in one infamous metaphor, could mean the difference between a typhoon striking Tokyo and a tornado tearing through Tennessee. Uncertainty that starts off as a rounding error eventually grows so large that it engulfs the entire calculation. In chaotic systems, this growth can be represented as movement across a written-out number: Ignorance in the one-tenths place spreads left, eventually moving across the decimal point to become ignorance in the tens place.

Moore designed his pinball machine to complete the analogy to the Turing machine. The starting position of the pinball represents the data on the tape being fed into the Turing machine. Crucially (and unrealistically), the player must be able to adjust the ball’s starting location with infinite precision, meaning that specifying the ball’s location requires a number with an endless procession of numerals after the decimal point. Only in such a number could Moore encode the data of an infinitely long Turing tape.

Then the arrangement of bumpers steers the ball to new positions in a way that corresponds to reading and writing on some Turing machine’s tape. Certain curved bumpers shift the tape one way, making the data stored in distant decimal places more significant in a way reminiscent of chaotic systems, while oppositely curved bumpers do the reverse. The ball’s exit from the bottom of the box marks the end of the computation, with the final location as the result.

Moore equipped his pinball machine setup with the flexibility of a computer—one arrangement of bumpers might calculate the first thousand digits of pi, and another might compute the best next move in a game of chess. But in doing so, he also infused it with an attribute that we might not typically associate with computers: unpredictability.

Some algorithms stop, outputting a result. But others run forever. (Consider a program tasked with printing the final digit of pi.) Is there a procedure, Turing asked, that can examine any program and determine whether it will stop? This question became known as the halting problem.

Turing showed that no such procedure exists by considering what it would mean if it did. If one machine could predict the behavior of another, you could easily modify the first machine—the one that predicts behavior—to run forever when the other machine halts. And vice versa: It halts when the other machine runs forever. Then—and here’s the mind-bending part—Turing imagined feeding a description of this tweaked prediction machine into itself. If the machine stops, it also runs forever. And if it runs forever, it also stops. Since neither option could be, Turing concluded, the prediction machine itself must not exist.

(His finding was intimately related to a groundbreaking result from 1931, when the logician Kurt Gödel developed a similar way of feeding a self-referential paradox into a rigorous mathematical framework. Gödel proved that mathematical statements exist whose truth cannot be established.)

In short, Turing proved that solving the halting problem was impossible. The only general way to know if an algorithm stops is to run it for as long as you can. If it stops, you have your answer. But if it doesn’t, you’ll never know whether it truly runs forever, or whether it would have stopped if you’d just waited a bit longer.

“We know that there are these kinds of initial states that we cannot predict ahead of time what it’s going to do,” Wolpert said.

Since Moore had designed his box to mimic any Turing machine, it too could behave in unpredictable ways. The exit of the ball marks the end of a calculation, so the question of whether any particular arrangement of bumpers will trap the ball or steer it to the exit must also be undecidable. “Really, any question about the long-term dynamics of these more elaborate maps is undecidable,” Moore said.

Moore’s pinball machine went beyond ordinary chaos. A tornado forecaster can’t say exactly where a tornado will touch down for two reasons: the forecaster’s ignorance of the precise position of every Brazilian butterfly, and limited computing power. But Moore’s pinball machine featured a more fundamental form of unpredictability. Even for someone with complete knowledge of the machine and unlimited computing power, certain questions regarding its fate remain unanswerable.

“This is a bit more dramatic,” said David Pérez-García, a mathematician at the Complutense University of Madrid. “Even with infinite resources, you cannot even write the program that solves the problem.”

Other researchers have previously come up with systems that act like Turing machines—notably checkerboard grids with squares flickering on and off depending on the colors of their neighbors. But these systems were abstract and intricate. Moore crafted a Turing machine out of a simple apparatus you could imagine sitting in a lab. It was a vivid demonstration that a system obeying nothing more than high school physics could have an unpredictable nature.

“It’s a bit shocking that it’s undecidable,” said Cubitt, who lectured about Moore’s machine after it captured his imagination as a graduate student. “It’s literally a single particle bouncing around a box.”

After getting his doctorate in physics, Cubitt shifted into mathematics and computer science. But he never forgot the pinball machine, and how computer science put limits on the machine’s physics. He wondered whether undecidability touched any physics problems that really matter. Over the last decade, he has discovered that it does.

Modern Mystery Materials

Cubitt put undecidability on a collision course with large quantum systems in 2012.

He, Pérez-García, and their colleague Michael Wolf had gotten together for coffee during a conference in the Austrian Alps to debate whether a niche problem might be undecidable. When Wolf suggested they put that problem aside and instead tackle the decidability of one of the biggest problems in quantum physics, not even he suspected they might actually succeed.

“It started as a joke. Then we started to cook up ideas,” Pérez-García said.

Wolf proposed targeting a defining property of every quantum system called the spectral gap, which refers to how much energy it takes to jostle a system out of its lowest energy state. If it takes some oomph to do this, a system is “gapped.” If it can become excited at any moment, without any infusion of energy, it is “gapless.” The spectral gap determines the color that shines from a neon sign, what a material will do when you remove all heat from it, and—in a different context—what the mass of the proton should be. In many cases, physicists can calculate the spectral gap for a specific atom or material. In many other cases, they can’t. A million-dollar prize awaits anyone who can rigorously prove from first principles that the proton should have a positive mass.

Cubitt, Wolf, and Pérez-García aimed high. They sought to prove or disprove the existence of a single strategy—a universal algorithm—that would tell you whether anything from a proton to a sheet of aluminum had a spectral gap or not. To do so, they resorted to the same approach Moore had used with his pinball machine: They devised a fictitious quantum material that could be set up to act like any Turing machine. They hoped to rewrite the spectral gap problem as the halting problem in disguise.

Over the next three years they churned out 144 pages of dense mathematics, combining a handful of major results from the previous half-century of math and physics. The extremely rough idea was to use the quantum particles in a flat material—a grid of atoms, basically—as a stand-in for the Turing machine’s tape.

Because this was a quantum material, the particles could exist in a superposition of multiple states at the same time—a quantum combination of different possible configurations of the material. The researchers used this feature to capture the different steps of the calculation. They set up the superposition so that one of these possible configurations represented the initial state of the Turing machine, another configuration represented the first step of the calculation, another represented the second step, and so on.

Finally, using techniques from quantum computing, they fiddled with the interactions between the particles so that if the superposition represented a calculation that halted, the material would have an energy gap. And if the computation continued forever, the material had no gap. In a paper published in Nature in 2015, they proved that the spectral gap problem is equivalent to the halting problem—and therefore undecidable. If someone handed you some complete description of the material’s particles, it would either have a gap or not. But calculating this property mathematically, from the way the particles interact, couldn’t be done, even if you had a quantum supercomputer from the year 3000.

In 2020, Pérez-García, Cubitt, and other collaborators repeated the proof for a chain of particles (as opposed to a grid). And last year, Cubitt, James Purcell, and Zhi Li further extended the setup to devise a material that, when subjected to a magnetic field that grows increasingly intense, will transition from one phase of matter to another at an unpredictable moment.

Their research program inspired other groups. In 2021, Naoto Shiraishi, then at Gakushuin University in Japan, and Keiji Matsumoto of Japan’s National Institute of Informatics dreamt up a similarly bizarre material, in which it was impossible to predict whether energy would “thermalize,” or spread evenly throughout the substance.

None of these results mean that we can’t predict specific properties of specific materials. Theorists might be able to calculate, for example, copper’s energy gap, or even whether all metals thermalize under certain conditions. But the research does prove that no master method works for all materials.

Said Shiraishi: “If you think too generally, you will fail.”

Fluids That Compute

Researchers have recently found an assortment of new limits on predictability outside quantum physics too.

Miranda of UPC has spent the last few years trying to work out whether liquids can act as computers. In 2014, the mathematician Terence Tao pointed out that if they could, perhaps a fluid could be programmed to slosh in just the right way to bring forth a tsunami of unlimited violence. Such a tsunami would be unphysical, since no wave can accommodate infinite energy in the real world. And so anyone who found such an algorithm would prove that the theory of fluids, called the Navier-Stokes equations, predicts impossibilities—another million-dollar problem.

Along with Robert Cardona, Daniel Peralta-Salas, and Francisco Presas, Miranda started with a fluid obeying simpler equations. They converted a Turing machine’s tape into a location on a plane (akin to the bottom of Moore’s pinball box). As the Turing machine ticks along, this point on the plane jumps around. Then, with a series of geometric transformations, they were able to turn the hopping of this point into the smooth current of a fluid flowing through 3D space (albeit a weird one curled into a doughnut in its center). To illustrate the idea over Zoom, Miranda pulled out a rubber duck from behind her computer.

“While the trajectory of the point in the water—it could be a duck—is moving around, this is the same as the tape of your Turing machine advancing somehow,” she said.

And with Turing machines comes undecidability. In this case, a calculation that halts corresponds to a current that carries a duck to some specific region, while a never-ending calculation corresponds to a duck that forever avoids that spot. So deciding a duck’s ultimate fate, the group showed in a 2021 publication, was impossible.

Computing in Reality

While these systems have physically implausible features that would stop an experimentalist from building them, even as blueprints they show that computers and their undecidable problems are deeply woven into the fabric of physics.

“We live in a universe where you can build computers,” Moore told me over Zoom on a sunny December afternoon from his backyard garden in Santa Fe. “Computation is everywhere.”

Even if someone attempted to build one of the machines depicted in these blueprints, however, researchers point out that undecidability is a feature of physical theories and cannot literally exist in real experiments. Only idealized systems that involve infinity—an infinitely long tape, an infinitely extensive grid of particles, an infinitely divisible space for placing pinballs and rubber ducks—can be truly undecidable. No one knows whether reality contains these sorts of infinities, but experiments definitely don’t. Every object on a lab bench has a finite number of molecules, and every measured location has a final decimal place. We can, in principle, completely understand these finite systems by systematically listing every possible configuration of their parts. So because humans can’t interact with the infinite, some researchers consider undecidability to be of limited practical significance.

“There is no such thing as perfect knowledge, because you cannot touch it,” said Karl Svozil, a retired physicist associated with the Vienna University of Technology in Austria.

“These are very important results. They are very, very profound,” Wolpert said. “But they also ultimately have no implications for humans.”

Other physicists, however, emphasize that infinite theories are a close—and essential—approximation of the real world. Climate scientists and meteorologists run computer simulations that treat the ocean as if it were a continuous fluid, because no one can analyze the ocean molecule by molecule. They need the infinite to help make sense of the finite. In that sense, some researchers consider infinity—and undecidability—to be an unavoidable aspect of our reality.

“It’s sort of solipsistic to say: ‘There are no infinite problems because ultimately life is finite,’” Moore said.

And so physicists must accept a new obstacle in their quest to acquire the foresight of Laplace’s demon. They could conceivably work out all the laws that describe the universe, just as they have worked out all the laws that describe pinball machines, quantum materials, and the trajectories of rubber ducks. But they’re learning that those laws aren’t guaranteed to provide shortcuts that allow theorists to fast-forward a system’s behavior and foresee all aspects of its fate. The universe knows what to do and will continue to evolve with time, but its behavior appears to be rich enough that certain aspects of its future may remain forever hidden to the theorists who ponder it. They will have to be satisfied with being able to discover where those impenetrable pockets lie.

“You’re trying to discover something about the way the universe or mathematics works,” Cubitt said. “The fact that it’s unsolvable, and you can prove that, is an answer.”

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

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The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats. According to the company’s founders, including Harvard and MIT professor George Church, these advances take Colossal a big step closer to their goal of using mammoths to combat climate change by restoring Arctic grassland ecosystems. Church also claims that Colossal’s woolly mammoth program will help protect endangered species like the Asian elephant, saying “we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

In other words, the scientific advances Colossal makes in their lab will result in positive changes from the tropics to the Arctic, from the soil to the atmosphere.

Colossal’s Jurassic Park-like ambitions have captured the imagination of the public and investors, bringing its latest valuation to $10 billion. And the company’s research does seem to be resulting in some technical advances. But I’d argue that the broader effort to de-extinct the mammoth is—as far as conservation efforts go—incredibly misguided. Ultimately, Colossal’s efforts won’t end up being about helping wild elephants or saving the climate. They’ll be about creating creatures for human spectacle, with insufficient attention to the costs and opportunity costs to human and animal life.

Shaky evidence

The Colossal website explains how they believe resurrected mammoths could help fight climate change: “cold-tolerant elephant mammoth hybrids grazing the grasslands… [will] scrape away layers of snow, so that the cold air can reach the soil.” This will reportedly help prevent permafrost from melting, blocking the release of greenhouse gasses currently trapped in the soil. Furthermore, by knocking down trees and maintaining grasslands, Colossal says, mammoths will help slow snowmelt, ensuring Arctic ecosystems absorb less sunlight.

Conservationists often claim that the reason to save charismatic species is that they are necessary for the sound functioning of the ecosystems that support humankind. Perhaps the most well-known of these stories is about the ecological changes wolves drove when they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Through some 25 peer-reviewed papers, two ecologists claimed to demonstrate that the reappearance of wolves in Yellowstone changed the behavior of elk, causing them to spend less time browsing the saplings of trees near rivers. This led to a chain of cause and effect (a trophic cascade) that affected beavers, birds, and even the flow of the river. A YouTube video on the phenomenon called “How Wolves Change Rivers” has been viewed more than 45 million times.

But other scientists were unable to replicate these findings—they discovered that the original statistics were flawed, and that human hunters likely contributed to elk population declines in Yellowstone.Ultimately, a 2019 review of the evidence by a team of researchers concluded that “the most robust science suggests trophic cascades are not evident in Yellowstone.” Similar ecological claims about tigers and sharks as apex predators also fail to withstand scientific scrutiny.

Elephants—widely described as “keystone species”—are also stars of a host of similar ecological stories. Many are featured on the Colossal website, including one of the most common claims about the role elephants play in seed dispersal. “Across all environments,” reads the website, “elephant dung filled with seeds serve to spread plants […] boosting the overall health of the ecosystem.” But would the disappearance of elephants really result in major changes in plant life? After all, some of the world’s grandest forests (like the Amazon) have survived for millennia after the disappearance of mammoth-sized megafauna.

For my PhD research in northeast India, I tried to systematically measure how important Asian elephants were for seed dispersal compared to other animals in the ecosystem; our team’s work, published in five peer-reviewed ecological journals (reviewed here), does find that elephants are uniquely good at dispersing the seeds of a few large-fruited species. But we also found that domestic cattle and macaques disperse some species’ seeds quite well, and that 80 percent of seeds dispersed in elephant dung end up eaten by ants. After several years of study, I cannot say with confidence that the forests where I worked would be drastically different in the absence of elephants.

The evidence for how living elephants affect carbon sequestration is also quite mixed. On the one hand, one paper finds that African forest elephants knock down softwood trees, making way for hardwood trees that sequester more carbon. But on the other hand, many more researchers looking at African savannas have found that elephants knock down lots of trees, converting forests into savannas and reducing carbon sequestration.

Colossal’s website offers links to peer-reviewed research that support their suppositions on the ecological role of woolly mammoths. A key study offers intriguing evidence that keeping large herbivores—reindeer, Yakutian horses, moose, musk ox, European bison, yaks, and cold-adapted sheep—at artificially high levels in a tussock grassland helped achieve colder ground temperatures, ostensibly protecting permafrost. But the study raises lots of questions: is it possible to boost these herbivores’ populations across the whole northern latitudes? If so, why do we need mammoths at all—why not just use species that already exist, which would surely be cheaper?

Plus, as ecologist Michelle Mack noted, as the winters warm due to climate change, too much trampling or sweeping away of snow could have the opposite effect, helping warm the soils underneath more quickly—if so, mammoths could be worse for the climate, not better.

All this is to say that ecosystems are diverse and messy, and those of us working in functional ecology don’t always discover consistent patterns. Researchers in the field often struggle to find robust evidence for how a living species affects modern-day ecosystems—surely it is far harder to understand how a creature extinct for around 10,000 years shaped its environment? And harder still to predict how it would shape tomorrow’s ecosystems? In effect, Colossal’s ecological narrative relies on that difficulty. But just because claims about the distant past are harder to fact-check doesn’t mean they are more likely to be true.

Ethical blind spots

Colossal’s website spells out 10 steps for mammoth resurrection. Steps nine and 10 are: “implant the early embryo into the healthy Asian or African elephant surrogates,” and “care for the surrogates in a world-class conservation facility for the duration of the gestation and afterward.”

Colossal’s cavalier plans to use captive elephants as surrogates for mammoth calves illustrate an old problem in modern wildlife conservation: indifference towards individual animal suffering. Leading international conservation NGOs lack animal welfare policies that would push conservationists to ask whether the costs of interventions in terms of animal welfare outweigh the biodiversity benefits. Over the years, that absence has resulted in a range of questionable decisions.

Colossal’s efforts take this apathy towards individual animals into hyperdrive. Despite society’s thousands of years of experience with Asian elephants, conservationists struggle to breed them in captivity. Asian elephants in modern zoo facilities suffer from infertility and lose their calves to stillbirth and infanticides almost twice as often as elephants in semi-wild conditions. Such problems will almost certainly be compounded when scientists try to have elephants deliver babies created in the lab, with a hodge podge of features from Asian elephants and mammoths.

Even in the best-case scenario, there would likely be many, many failed efforts to produce a viable organism before Colossal gets to a herd that can survive. This necessarily trial-and-error process could lead to incredible suffering for both elephant mothers and mammoth calves along the way. Elephants in the wild have been observed experiencing heartbreaking grief when their calves die, sometimes carrying their babies’ corpses for days—a grief the mother elephants might very well be subjected to as they are separated from their calves or find themselves unable to keep their chimeric offspring alive.

For the calves that do survive, their edited genomes could lead to chronic conditions, and the ancient mammoth gut microbiome might be impossible to resurrect, leading to digestive dysfunction. Then there will likely be social problems. Research finds that Asian elephants in Western zoos don’t live as long as wild elephants, and elephant researchers often bemoan the limited space, stimulation, and companionship available to elephants in captivity. These problems will surely also plague surviving animals.

Introduction to the wild will probably result in even more suffering: elephant experts recommend against introducing captive animals “that have had no natural foraging experience at all” to the wild as they are likely to experience “significant hardship.” Modern elephants survive not just through instinct, but through culture—matriarch-led herds teach calves what to eat and how to survive, providing a nurturing environment. We have good reason to believe mammoths also needed cultural instruction to survive. How many elephant/mammoth chimeras will suffer false starts and tragic deaths in the punishing Arctic without the social conditions that allowed them to thrive millennia ago?

Opportunity costs

If Colossal (or Colossal’s investors) really wish to foster Asian elephant conservation or combat climate change, they have many better options. The opportunity costs are especially striking for Asian elephant conservation: while over a trillion dollars is spent combatting climate change annually, the funds available to address the myriad of problems facing wild Asian elephants are far smaller. Take the example of India, the country with the largest population of wild Asian elephants in the world (estimated at 27,000) in a sea of 1.4 billion human beings.

Indians generally revere elephants and tolerate a great deal of hardship to enable coexistence—about 500 humans are killed due to human-elephant conflict annually there. But as a middle-income country continuing to struggle with widespread poverty, the federal government typically budgets less than $4M for Project Elephant, its flagship elephant conservation program. That’s less than $200 per wild elephant and 1/2000th as much as Colossal has raised so far. India’s conservation NGOs generally have even smaller budgets for their elephant work. The result is that conservationists are a decade behindwhere they expected to be in mapping where elephants range.

With Colossal’s budget, Asian elephant conservation NGOs could tackle the real threats to the survival of elephants: human-elephant conflict, loss of habitat and connectivity, poaching, and the spread of invasive plants unpalatable to elephants. Some conservationists are exploring creative schemes to help keep people and elephants safe from each other. There are also community-based efforts toremove invasive species like Lantana camara and restore native vegetation. Funds could enable development of an AI-powered system that allows the automated identification and monitoring of individual elephants. There is also a need for improved compensation schemes to ensure those who lose crops or property to wild elephants are made whole again.

As a US-based synthetic biology company, Colossal could also use its employees’ skills much more effectively to fight climate change. Perhaps they could genetically engineer trees and shrubs to sequester more carbon. Or Colossal could help us learn to produce meat from modified microbes or cultivated lines of cow, pig, and chicken cells, developing alternative proteins that could more efficiently feed the planet, protecting wildlife habitat and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The question is whether Colossal’s leaders and supporters are willing to pivot from a project that grabs news headlines to ones that would likely make positive differences. By tempting us with the resurrection of a long-dead creature, Colossal forces us to ask: do we want conservation to be primarily about feeding an unreflective imagination? Or do we want evidence, logic, and ethics to be central to our relationships with other species? For anyone who really cares about the climate, elephants, or animals in general, de-extincting the mammoth represents a huge waste and a colossal mistake.

Nitin Sekar served as the national lead for elephant conservation at WWF India for five years and is now a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission The views presented here are his own.

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French satellite network company Eutelsat has been providing Ukraine with much-needed internet access for almost a year with the help of the German government, Reuters reports. Eutelsat’s OneWeb division operates low-orbiting satellites that communicate with terrestrial terminals for internet connectivity — similarly to rival SpaceX’s Starlink network, which has been the primary supplier of satellite internet for Ukraine’s government.

At Eutelsat’s Paris headquarters on Thursday, CEO Eva Berneke revealed that Germany has been providing the funding (of an undisclosed amount) to run the company’s satellite internet access in Ukraine. Right now, Eutelsat has less than a thousand terminals there compared to Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which has about 50,000 Starlink terminals working in the country, mostly funded by Poland and the US.

However, Berneke says Eutelsat could get 5,000 to 10,000 more into Ukraine “within weeks.” Eutelsat spokesperson Joanna Darlington tells Reuters that they are still under discussion on whether Germany or other financial sources will help with that expansion. Bernerke also said it is in talks with the EU under the EU-backed SpaceRISE consortium, where it and other members are working to build a secure satellite constellation known as IRIS².

A Eutelsat expansion couldn’t come at a more crucial time. The European Commission’s defence chief Andrius Kubilius told Reuters at a news conference on Wednesday that, in the event of “unexpected developments,” which Kubilius didn’t elaborate on, there are solutions in place in case they need alternatives to Starlink.

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With the rapid emergence of generative AI, the world is quickly evolving into a new realm and redefining how we view work. Over the past few months, Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates has shared interesting insights about how AI will impact work.

The philanthropic billionaire recently shared more insights about the impact of AI on jobs while in an exclusive interview with The Indian Express:

"We weren't born to do jobs. Jobs are an artifact of the shortage that, oh gosh, somebody better be a farmer. Okay, somebody better drive those trucks around. All of that is based in creating the human intelligence to provide a broad range of services."

"And so as you get away from that being a necessary thing, you get a lot more leisure time and it'll be people who've grown up in that world of no shortage who will have to think through."

Bill Gates admits that it'll be an uphill task to reprogram the mind to adapt to this new reality, especially for a generation that has grown up in a world rife with shortages.

However, once this feat is unlocked, the billionaire claims the society will reach a level of output, food, and medical advice that won't require everybody to work like they do today.

Interestingly, Bill Gates says humans won't be required to work as hard as they do today. Instead, they'll have the choice to dictate what machines can help out with and preserve things for themselves.

Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like without their walls, and we know what they look like when the walls are fully assembled, but we’ve never seen the wall-building process in action. “We knew the starting point and the finishing point, but had no idea what happens in between,” says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers University. He’s a co-author of the study that caught wall-building plant cells in action for the first time. And once we saw how the cell wall building worked, it looked nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.

Camera-shy builders

Plant cells without walls, known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been difficult to keep them alive under a microscope for the several hours needed for them to build walls. Plant cells are also very light-sensitive, and most microscopy techniques require pointing a strong light source at them to get good imagery.

Then there was the issue of tracking their progress. “Cellulose is not fluorescent, so you can’t see it with traditional microscopy,” says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. “That was one of the biggest issues in the past.” The only way you can see it is if you attach a fluorescent marker to it. Unfortunately, the markers typically used to label cellulose were either bound to other compounds or were toxic to the plant cells. Given their fragility and light sensitivity, the cells simply couldn’t survive very long with toxic markers as well.

So, Lam’s team developed their own, custom-built imaging platform. The cells that star in the team’s wall-building video were protoplasts of Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant belonging to the same family as cabbage and mustard. As their shooting technique of choice, the team selected total internal reflection fluorescent microscopy (TIRFM), which illuminates only a tiny section of the sample at a time, reducing phototoxicity to manageable levels. For labelling, the team linked parts of enzymes that stick to cellulose to a non-toxic green fluorescent marker that could be used in live cells.

The setup also included a programmable LED light bulb that automatically switched off after each imaging cycle and a temperature control system that kept the cells at a steady 18° C (64° F). Once the setup was ready, the team fired it up and left the protoplasts in there for 24 hours. “This allowed us to have all the components to see the process and understand how it really works,” Lam says. And how it really works proved quite surprising.

Ordering chaos

“The idea we had about this process was that cells were continuously extruding these long polymer fibers that got assembled to form cell walls,” Chundawat told Ars. “It didn’t work like that—it was a lot more complex.” At first, very short cellulose fibers were being formed that were moved across the cell’s surface seemingly at random, as though looking for other short fibers. When those short fibers meet and engage with each other, they combine into the longer fibers that protrude from the cell like waving tentacles. Only after they bump into other fibers do they start to intertwine and assemble into the organized structure of the cell wall. “It was a two-step process. That was something we did not expect,” Chundawat says.

Seeing this process unfold led to a few unanswered questions. “Cells assemble walls from very small pieces that somehow find each other. Is it an energy-driven process that uses energy to proceed in a specific direction, or a stochastic process based on random collisions?” Lam wondered. “We don’t know, but we will find out.”

Another thing is that the time lapse only revealed the cellulose, and only after it was at the surface of the protoplasts. There are many enzymes involved in cellulose biosynthesis and export that Lam’s team missed on tape. The next steps, the team indicates, will include recording the process in 3D with fluorescent tags attached to other chemicals and enzymes. That should let us figure out which specific proteins regulate the cellulose biosynthesis process that should, the researchers hope, extend the impact of their work way beyond shooting cool time lapses.

With an imaging platform capable of recording the cell wall building from start to finish, the team plans to investigate how disrupting different genes and different pathways would affect the wall assembly process. “[It’s] like in a car—by removing one piece of the system at a time, you can see how the performance is altered,” Lam says. Once the necessary genes are identified, the team hopes that fine-tuning their activity will increase biomass yield. “This way we could boost the output you get out of a hectare of land in agriculture. We could potentially make more robust crops and drive the cost of making biochemicals or biofuels down,” Chundawat claims.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads6312

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The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) is a jewel-toned hummingbird found in the neotropical lowlands of South America and the Caribbean. It shimmers blue and green in the sunlight as it flits from flower to flower, a tiny spectacle of the rainforest.

Jay Falk, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, expected to find something like that when he sought this species out in Panama. What he didn’t expect was a caterpillar in the nest of one of these birds. At least it looked like a caterpillar—it was actually a hatchling with some highly unusual camouflage.

The chick was covered in long, fine feathers similar to the urticating hairs that some caterpillars are covered in. These often toxic barbed hairs deter predators, who can suffer anything from inflammation to nausea and even death if they attack. Falk realized he was witnessing mimicry only seen in one other bird species and never before in hummingbirds. It seemed that the nestlings of this species had evolved a defense: convincing predators they were poisonous.

“An exposed nest and high rates of nest predation [probably] create strong selection pressures to reduce predation, including strategies like insect mimicry,” Falk said in a study recently published in Ecology.

Now you see me…

Since they are so small and seemingly helpless, hummingbird chicks are especially tempting to predators, which is why Falk thinks that the white-necked jacobin developed such a unique defense. It’s a form of Batesian mimicry, in which a harmless species imitates warning signals from a species that is toxic or tastes terrible.

Further observation of the nest revealed that the female hummingbird had added to its hatchling’s caterpillar camouflage by lining the nest with hairy-looking material from the seeds of balsa trees. The researchers also noticed that, whenever they approached the nest to film, the chick would move its head upward and start shaking it sideways while its feathers stood on end. It was trying to make itself look threatening.

When the research team backed off, the hummingbird chick went back to laying low in its nest. They wondered whether it behaved this way with actual predators, but eventually saw a wasp known to prey on young hummingbirds creep close to the nest. The chick displayed the same behavior it had with humans, which succeeded in scaring the wasp off.

Falk determined that the feathers, color, and head-shaking were eerily similar to the larvae of moths in the Megalopygidae and Saturniidae families, which are also endemic to the region. They might not be the mirror image of a particular species, but they appear close enough that predators would consider themselves warned.

“The behavior of the white-necked jacobin, when approached by humans and a predatory wasp, resembles the sudden ‘thrashing’ or ‘jerking’ behavior exhibited by many caterpillars in response to disturbance, including in the habitat where this bird was found,” he said regarding the same study.

…now you don’t

Could there be an alternate explanation for this hummingbird cosplaying as a caterpillar? Maybe. The researchers think it’s possible that the long feathers that appear to mimic spines may have evolved as a form of crypsis, or camouflage that helps an organism blend in with its background. The balsa tree material that's similar to the feathers obviously helped with this.

It’s also possible that a form of convergent evolution occurred. Convergent evolution is the phenomenon of unrelated organisms evolving similar adaptations because of similar environmental pressures. Another explanation for the feathers in white-necked jacobin chicks is that the birds evolved spine-like feathers to protect the softest parts of their bodies from predators.

There is a chance that the long spines and feathers may play an additional role for both caterpillars and hummingbirds. In caterpillars, the spines also function as movement sensors, which may help detect approaching predators. The long feathers in young hummingbirds, as all feathers do, may help with thermoregulation.

Where could the head-shaking behavior come from? Along with the physical camouflage and protection, it is thought to be effective in startling predators such as the wasp caught on film, giving both caterpillars and hummingbird hatchlings a greater chance of survival.

The only other bird in which this mimicry has been observed is the cinereous mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra), which has chicks that hatch with spiny, bright orange feathers that are similar to the caterpillar of a Megalopygidae species it shares a habitat with. This caterpillar is so toxic that even monkeys and snakes won’t touch it. Much like the white-necked jacobin, cinereous mourner chicks also shake their heads when threatened.

Until now, hummingbirds have drawn the most attention for their iridescent plumage and flight feathers that allow for ultrafast wingbeats. Falk thinks that further investigation into the feathers of hummingbird chicks may reveal more insights into the evolution of a built-in costume.

Ecology, 2025. DOI:  10.1002/ecy.70060

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Welcome to Edition 7.38 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX test fired a Super Heavy booster that launched in January on Thursday, in South Texas. This sets up the possibility of a reused Super Heavy rocket launching within the next several weeks, and would be an important step forward in the Starship launch program. It's also a bold step given that there is a lot riding on this Starship launch, given that the last two have failed due to propulsion issues with the rocket's upper stage.

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.

European commercial launch industry joins the space race. The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday, Ars reports. The booster's nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, ending the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular, fiery crash into the sea. However, it marked the beginning of something new in Europe as commercial startups begin launching rockets.

Learning to embrace failure ... Isar Aerospace, based in Germany, was the first in a crop of new European rocket companies to attempt an orbital launch. Isar is one of a half-dozen or so European launch startups that could fly their orbital-class rockets in the next couple of years. Of this group, Isar has raised the most money, reporting more than 400 million euros ($430 million) of fundraising, primarily from venture capital sources. We are looking forward to the European launch industry heating up after a long period of development.

PLD Space signs launch agreement with D-Orbit. The Spanish launch company, PLD Space, announced an agreement this week with an Italy-based space transportation company, D-Orbit. As part of the agreement, D-Orbit's ION orbital transfer vehicle will launch on PLD Space's forthcoming rocket, the Miura 5. Although the announcement did not specify terms of the agreement, PLD Space said it has now filled "more than 80 percent" of the launch slots on its manifest until 2027.

Waiting on the rocket ... The ION vehicle, essentially a dispenser of CubeSats, has previously flown several missions. The real question, therefore, concerns the readiness of the Miura 5 small rocket. PLD Space said it is currently ramping up serial production for the Miura 5 using technology from a prototype rocket, with the aim of starting its test flight campaign by the end of 2025. Commercial flights of Miura 5 could begin in 2026 with the objective of scaling up to 30 launches per year by 2030. We shall see about that.

China shooting for record number of launches. Early on Tuesday morning, a Long March 2D rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, Space News reports. The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, a state-owned rocket maker, announced the success of the launch, revealing the payload to be a satellite Internet technology test satellite. Tuesday’s mission was China’s 17th orbital launch of 2025, following the launch of the classified TJS-16 satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit on March 29 via a Long March 7A rocket.

Shooting for a century ... This puts the country on pace to launch 68 rockets for the year. This is in line with China's total orbital launches for each of the last three years (64, 67, and 68 launches respectively). However, Chinese space watcher Andrew Jones believes the country may attempt to go as high as 100 launches this year. This would be driven by growing commercial activity, megaconstellation projects, and new launcher development. A number of new, medium-lift and potentially reusable rockets are targeting debut flights this year, he reports.

Falcon 9 launches first crewed polar mission. Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire, Ars reports. Chun Wang, born in China and now a citizen of Malta, paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum for the opportunity to fly to space and bring three hand-picked crewmates along with him. He named his mission Fram2 in honor of the Norwegian exploration ship Fram used for polar expeditions at the turn of the 20th century.

Rocket follows an unusual trajectory ... The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center. However, instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft departed Launch Complex 39A and arced to the southeast, then turned south on a flight path hugging Florida's east coast. The unusual trajectory aligned the Falcon 9 with a perfectly polar orbit at an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, bringing the four-person crew directly over the North or South Pole every 45 minutes. They are the first humans to orbit over the poles.

Amazon targets April 9 for first Kuiper launch. As soon as next week, Amazon plans to send 27 of its satellites into low Earth orbit on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. Launch is scheduled for Wednesday, April 9, during a three-hour window that opens at noon EDT (16:00 UTC). "We've done extensive testing on the ground to prepare for this first mission, but there are some things you can only learn in flight, and this will be the first time we've flown our final satellite design and the first time we've deployed so many satellites at once," said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of Project Kuiper.

Heaviest mission launched by an Atlas ... This will be the first mission by United Launch Alliance of this year, and the company's first in nearly half a year. But officials say that will change soon. In a February interview with Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of Government and Commercial Programs, said that the upcoming launch for Amazon, dubbed Kuiper 1 by ULA and Kuiper Atlas 1 (KA-01) by Amazon, was the first of many planned for the year. "We have quite a few Kuiper Atlases planned this year, as well as Kuiper Vulcans," Wentz said. Atlas can carry 27 Kuiper satellites, and Vulcans can loft 45.

SpaceX tests previously flown Super Heavy booster. SpaceX is having trouble with Starship's upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket's enormous booster. The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds, Ars reports.

Rocket will fly on next Starship test ... This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. A reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on the next Starship launch, SpaceX confirmed Thursday. "This booster previously launched and returned on Flight 7 and 29 of its 33 Raptor engines are flight proven," the company said. "The first Super Heavy reuse will be a step towards our goal of zero-touch reflight." It is a legitimately and characteristically bold decision to refly a Starship booster on a test flight that SpaceX really needs to succeed. The next test may come late this month or more likely in May.

FAA closes big rocket mishap investigations. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) closed mishap investigations into both the SpaceX Starship flight and Blue Origin New Glenn debut that both took place on Jan. 16, Via Satellite reports. Although the FAA closed the mishap investigation regarding the January 16 Starship flight, the rocket is still grounded because there is still an open mishap investigation into the following March 7 flight. "There were no public injuries and one confirmed report of minor vehicle damage in the Turks and Caicos Islands," the FAA said in a statement on the January 16 flight.

New Glenn closed out as well ... The FAA also completed its mishap investigation of Blue Origin’s first New Glenn flight, which successfully deployed Blue Origin’s own space logistics vehicle Blue Ring. Blue Origin failed to recover the first stage booster, which triggered the mishap investigation. The first stage was not able to restart its engines, which prevented the reentry burn from occurring and caused the loss of the stage. Blue Origin has identified seven corrective actions, and the FAA will verify those have been implemented before the second mission. Blue Origin is targeting a return to flight in late spring and will attempt to land the booster again.

Artemis II one step closer to launch. The four astronauts who will fly on board NASA's Artemis II mission unveiled the patch for their historic flight on Thursday. The four astronauts who will be the first to fly to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis campaign—Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch from NASA, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen from Canada—have designed an emblem to represent their mission that references both their distant destination and the home they will return to, the space agency said. It looks great!

Here's what it means ... "This patch designates the mission as “AII,” signifying not only the second major flight of the Artemis campaign, but also an endeavor of discovery that seeks to explore for all and by all. Framed in Apollo 8’s famous Earthrise photo, the scene of the Earth and the Moon represents the dual nature of human spaceflight, both equally compelling: The Moon represents our exploration destination, focused on discovery of the unknown. The Earth represents home, focused on the perspective we gain when we look back at our shared planet and learn what it is to be uniquely human. The orbit around Earth highlights the ongoing exploration missions that have enabled Artemis to set sights on a long-term presence on the Moon and soon, Mars."

Next three launches

April 4: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-13 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 01:02 UTC

April 6: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-72 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. | 02:40 UTC

April 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-11 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 21:35 UTC

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Pew Research Center surveyed AI experts and US adults to gauge their opinion on artificial intelligence, its potential, its impact on jobs, and other aspects. The survey included over 5,400 US adults who were members of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and over 1,000 AI experts.

"The public and experts are far apart in their enthusiasm and predictions for AI. But they share similar views in wanting more personal control and worrying regulation will fall short," the think tank said.

Key findings suggest that AI experts are more likely than the general public to say that AI will positively impact the US over the next 20 years. Only 17% of US adults are positive, compared to 56% of AI experts.

Moreover, 47% of the surveyed experts say they are more excited than concerned about AI's increased use in daily life, which drops to 11% for the public. On the flip side, concerns around AI have risen since 2021, and US adults are more concerned than excited, compared to experts.

When the views of men and women are considered separately, more prominent differences are visible among AI experts than among the US public. Of the US public, 22% of men think AI will positively impact the US over the next 20 years, compared to just 12% of women. Among experts, 63% of men think that way, compared to 36% of women.

How AI will affect people's jobs is also a matter of debate and concern these days. More experts than US adults are likely to think AI technologies will benefit rather than harm them personally. Only 23% of US adults surveyed think AI will have a very or somewhat positive effect on how people do their jobs over the next 20 years, compared to 73% of experts.

Experts and the public have differing views about which jobs will be affected by AI. For instance, more experts think AI will leave fewer jobs for truckers and lawyers over the next 20 years. More US adults than experts think AI will leave fewer jobs for factory workers, musicians, teachers, and medical doctors.

Meanwhile, experts and the public largely think jobs for cashiers and journalists are at risk due to AI. Less than 30% of AI experts and US adults think jobs of mental health therapists are at risk.

However, there are some common grounds as well. Both groups have doubts about AI's role in news and elections. Only 10% of both US adults and experts think AI will have a positive impact on elections. It's worth noting that the survey was conducted last year before the 2024 US elections.

When asked in the survey, both experts and the public are worried that the US government won't go far enough to regulate AI effectively. About 55% of US adults and 57% of experts want more control over how AI is used in their personal lives.

Meanwhile, more than half of experts and US adults are also skeptical of industry efforts around responsible AI. They don't have too much or no confidence in US companies' ability to develop and use AI responsibly.

The views are even stronger when the participants' job sectors are considered. According to the survey, AI experts working at colleges and universities are far less confident in companies' efforts than their industry peers.

About 39% of those at private companies or businesses have little to no confidence that companies will develop and use AI responsibly, compared to 60% of experts in the academic sector who think that way.

While AI technologies are developing rapidly, their long-term consequences and risks are yet to be realized. This becomes more important when AI tools capable of making mistakes are readily available and companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are approaching users at an early age.

Source: Pew Research Center

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SpaceX is having trouble with Starship's upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket's enormous booster.

The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.

This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. SpaceX confirmed a reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on next Starship launch With Thursday's static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX's factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.

SpaceX said 29 of the booster's 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines are flight-proven. "The first Super Heavy reuse will be a step towards our goal of zero-touch reflight," SpaceX wrote on X.

A successful reflight of the Super Heavy booster would be an important milestone for the Starship program, while engineers struggle with problems on the rocket's upper stage, known simply as the ship.

What a difference

Super Heavy's engines are capable of producing nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts toward the Moon. Super Heavy is perhaps the most complex rocket booster ever built. It's certainly the largest. To get a sense of how big this booster is, imagine the fuselage of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet standing on end.

SpaceX has now launched eight full-scale test flights of Starship, with a Super Heavy booster and Starship's upper stage stacked together to form a rocket that towers 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. The booster portion of the rocket has performed well so far, with seven consecutive successful launches since a failure on Starship's debut flight.

Most recently, SpaceX has recovered three Super Heavy boosters in four attempts. SpaceX has a wealth of experience with recovering and reusing Falcon 9 boosters. The total number of Falcon rocket landings is now 426.

SpaceX reused a Falcon 9 booster for the first time in March 2017. This was an operational flight with a communications satellite on a mission valued at several hundred million dollars.

Ahead of the milestone Falcon 9 reflight eight years ago, SpaceX spent nearly a year refurbishing and retesting the rocket after it returned from its first mission. The rocket racked up more mileage on the ground than it did in flight, first returning to its Florida launch base on a SpaceX drone ship and then moving by truck to SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, for thorough inspections and refurbishment.

Once engineers finished that work, they transported the booster to SpaceX’s test site in McGregor, Texas, for test-firings, then finally returned the rocket to Florida for final launch preparations.

There will be no such journey for the Super Heavy booster. First of all, it's a lot more difficult to transport than the shorter, skinnier Falcon 9. Super Heavy's design also features improvements informed by lessons learned in the Falcon 9 program. This helped SpaceX get the Super Heavy on the cusp of a reflight in less than three months.

You can watch a replay of Thursday's static fire test in this video from NASASpaceflight.com.

With Starship and the Super Heavy booster, SpaceX should get more points for difficulty. Super Heavy is larger and has more engines than the Falcon 9, so theoretically, there are more things that could go wrong. And instead of touching down with landing legs at a separate location, SpaceX uses mechanical arms to catch Starship's booster as it returns to the launch pad.

This approach should allow engineers to rapidly reuse Super Heavy boosters. Eventually, SpaceX will do the same with Starships returning from orbit.

Still investigating

At the same time that engineers are taking steps forward with the Super Heavy booster, the other big piece of Starship is holding up SpaceX's launch cadence in Texas. The upper stage, or ship, failed at roughly the same point in flight on SpaceX's two most recent test flights in January and in March.

These test flights were the first use of an upgraded, larger ship known as Block 2 or Version 2. On both flights, Starship lost power from its engines and tumbled out of control roughly eight minutes after liftoff, breaking apart and dropping fiery debris near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The failures prevented SpaceX from testing Starship's upgraded heat shield, one of the most significant upgrades introduced with Block 2. The plan for both flights was to send Starship on a trajectory through space halfway around the world, then perform a guided reentry over the Indian Ocean, targeting a pinpoint splashdown northwest of Australia. A successful reentry and splashdown at sea could give SpaceX officials confidence to attempt a full orbital flight of Starship, culminating in a catch at the launch site in Texas.

Instead, SpaceX repeated the same launch profile from the January mission on the following flight in March. The company will likely do the same on Flight 9, the next Starship launch.

SpaceX has closed out the investigation into the accident that cut short the January test flight, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA announced Monday that it accepted the results of SpaceX's investigation, which determined the "probable root cause for the loss of the Starship vehicle was stronger than anticipated vibrations during flight [that] led to increased stress on, and failure of, the hardware in the propulsion system."

Ultimately, the vibrations led to a fire in the engine compartment before the engines shut down and the vehicle lost control.

The FAA said SpaceX identified and implemented 11 corrective actions to prevent the same failure from happening again. Officials haven't announced a probable root cause for the launch failure in March. The FAA said SpaceX's investigation remains open. But the circumstances and timing of the failure suggest it could share a similar underlying cause.

Whatever the case may be, Starship's back-to-back failures to start the year are a setback. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, wanted the company to launch as many as 25 Starship flights in 2025. At this point, achieving half that number might be a stretch.

This means critical tests of the ship's reentry and return to the launch site, in-orbit refueling capability, and the first Starship missions to deploy larger versions of SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites are on hold. Earlier this year, Musk suggested the Starship refueling demonstration would slip into 2026, which isn't good news for NASA.

The US space agency has multibillion-dollar contracts with SpaceX to develop a version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon's south pole as part of the Artemis lunar program. For those missions, SpaceX must launch around 10 (the exact number remains unclear) Starship refueling flights to low-Earth orbit to top off the propellant tanks for the ship before it heads to the Moon.

This will require not just a thorough demonstration of SpaceX's refueling architecture but also recovery and reuse of boosters and ships to maintain a launch rate fast enough to complete all of the refueling flights over a period of a few weeks to a few months.

SpaceX hasn't released a schedule for the next Starship flight, but it's probably at least a month away. The ship assigned to the next test flight is still in its factory at Starbase. Its next move will be to roll out to a test stand for its own engine firing, then SpaceX will likely move it back to the factory for inspections and finishing touches. Then, SpaceX will roll the ship to the launch pad, where crews will raise it on top of the Super Heavy booster in the final days before liftoff.

Updated on April 3 with SpaceX's confirmation that Booster 14 will launch on Starship Flight 9.

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US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us.

In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that "experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public" and "far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years" (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent).

The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that "they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life." They're much more likely (51 percent) to say they're more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI.

Colleen McClain, a senior researcher for Pew Research Center, told Ars that a lack of studies examining "how the public's views lined up or did not line up with expert views" prompted the survey. Pew has spent the past four years surveying the public, observing that Americans have gradually grown more aware of AI and its potential.

But the new survey found that as awareness grows, "the US public has become more concerned over recent years." They're especially worried about deepfakes, misinformation, job displacement, and bias. It suggests that many Americans still feel very unsure about what AI is, what it can do, and how it might affect them. Pew expected that the experts' perspective was a missing piece of the puzzle when it came to parsing public opinion amid ongoing debates about how AI fits into society today.

To find US-based experts, Pew scoured AI conferences for "individuals who demonstrate expertise via their work or research in artificial intelligence or related fields" and created a list of authors and presenters. These conferences "covered topics including research and development, application, business, policy, social science, identity and ethics," featuring AI experts from industry and academia, as well as government and nonprofits.

While Pew could not ensure the sample was nationally representative of all experts in the AI field—which is very broad and hard to define—the survey represents a first step in gleaning how the people most committed to advancing AI view emerging technologies today.

Everyone agrees feds can’t be trusted to govern AI

Notably, Pew also found some common ground. Small percentages of each group expect AI will have a positive impact on news and elections, with most flagging concerns in these areas. And more than half of both sides agreed that they want more control over AI and do not trust the government to regulate AI—predicting that the US will be too lax. "They are also largely skeptical of industry efforts around responsible AI," Pew's survey said.

Last month, the White House fielded public comments for an AI Action Plan that will reveal to the public how the Trump administration intends to regulate AI. Among those who submitted comments was the nonprofit the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which urged that more transparency and accountability are needed, as well as more public input. CDT recommended that the Trump administration seek public input and "evaluate and address risks to people’s privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and safety."

In response to Pew's survey—which was conducted prior to Donald Trump's election win last year—CDT CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens told Ars that "AI’s widespread adoption is contingent on user trust. Just as traffic lanes and seat belts help people drive faster, well-tailored laws and norms will help people know what AI tools they can rely on in their daily lives. Without those safeguards, it’s no wonder the public is skeptical."

Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, told Ars that the public and experts likely agree on regulation for a combination of reasons—because distrust in government broadly is a common sentiment and experts commonly expect the government to lack a sufficient understanding of technologies. And while "diversity is under attack" in government currently, it will be necessary for officials to incorporate diverse views on AI since "worldviews do get baked into" AI technologies, Hanna said, and that can affect people's lives.

Pew's survey found that experts and the public agreed that currently, "men’s views are better represented in AI design than the views of women." University of Washington linguistics professor Emily Bender suggested that to break that pattern, the US needs to be more genuine about including more perspectives in AI development at a time when big tech companies are ditching DEI initiatives.

"I think the through line is that these technologies are built to maintain the status quo and represent it as the norm," Bender told Ars. "What we really need is to move to a situation where the point of building this technology is for communities who are using it for their own purposes, have control over it, and decide when and how and where to use it."

Americans using AI more than they know, experts say

In a book due out this May, The AI Con, which provides guidance for policymaking and examines the human costs of profit-fueled corporate AI interests, Hanna and Bender work to help the public better understand AI's potential for good and bad. On their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, they hope to further public scholarship, not to ensure the public is aligned with AI experts, but to help people form their own opinions about AI.

"We're trying to help people learn how to ask specific questions and understand automation in its context and sort of say, well, what's being automated and why?" Bender told Ars.

Bender and Hanna suggested that the goal shouldn't be seeking alignment and total agreement but fielding a diversity of opinions from all sides of society that would ensure that AI makers truly understand how to plug AI into various industries and communities.

"I think that there are folks out there, including us, who are trying to help people understand that everyone's expertise in their own field of work and personal relationships is really valuable," Bender said. "And the lens through which we should be evaluating any technology that somebody's trying to sell us is 'how does this actually work for me, for my community, and if I'm using it, or it's being used on me.'"

Although it's too late for the public to weigh in on the AI Action Plan, Pew plans to continue monitoring public opinion of AI to help "everyday Americans' voices" be included in these broader debates, McClain told Ars. Without more public awareness, AI experts threaten to dominate debates, potentially pushing views on policymakers that do not reflect the greater public's feelings or readiness for AI adoption.

That could quickly become a problem for many people who do not see the AI writing on the wall, Pew's survey suggested, since experts surveyed believe that Americans are already using AI more often than they think they are. Nearly 80 percent of experts responded that people likely use "AI almost constantly or several times a day," where only 27 percent of the public "think they interact with AI at this rate."

"New developments and tools evolve at a rapid pace, it's going to be important to continue tracking public feelings about these and tracking public awareness," McClain told Ars.

Americans do not expect AI to make them happy

Among both the general public and AI experts, women were more likely to be wary of AI than men, Pew's survey found, with the gender divide between the random expert sample even wider than the public sample.

The expert sample is not representative of the AI field, as Bender points out to Ars that AI is not a "thing" or even "a coherent set of technologies," and an expert in one area doesn't necessarily understand other areas. But still, Pew noted the key takeaway and conducted in-depth interviews to find out more about why men and women are or are not excited about AI.

"I think, broadly, some of the things that excite me are things like applications that can save people a lot of time from repetitive and mundane tasks," one male expert respondent said, describing his excitement about automating workflows.

A female respondent expressed concerns about biometrics collected at airports, noting, "Where’s that data going? How is it being housed? Where is it being used for? Where is my consent? Can I really, truly say no, I don’t want my picture taken, but what is the consequence of me saying that and still trying to make it to my flight at home?”

But the "starkest" difference the survey found was in how AI experts and the public expect AI to impact jobs and the economy.

The public is "more anxious than experts about job loss," Pew's survey said. Where 73 percent of experts said that "AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on how people do their jobs over the next 20 years," that share dropped to 23 percent among US adults. And while 69 percent of experts think the economy will benefit from AI, just 21 percent of US adults predict the same. What's more, "few in the public think AI will outperform humans on any of the tasks" the Pew survey explored, including parole decisions, medical diagnoses, hiring decisions, driving, providing customer service, or writing a song.

"Even as medical care is the one area in which the public is most optimistic about AI’s impact, experts are 40 percentage points more likely than the general population to believe it will positively affect medical care" (84 percent vs. 44 percent), Pew found.

Bender told Ars that pretending AI experts know best is likely problematic because "AI experts don't know very much about how people who work in other fields do their jobs, and the people who do those jobs are the ones who know what that's about."

Further, because the survey lumps together experts who build the technology and experts who study its societal impacts, it may be "obscuring some very different takes on the technology in a way that is also gendered" since "women tend to be clustered in the critical technology studies areas." Hanna guessed the woman describing concerns about biometrics above is likely an example.

Hanna said the survey is still helpful because it recruits a body of expertise to begin analyzing how views differ within the field and with the public. It perhaps helps push back against extreme narratives from tech leaders making "ridiculous" statements about a future that amounts to "fully automated communism," Hanna said, or predicting AI doomsdays.

For Americans, the future of AI apparently looks bleak, not because it possibly spells the end of the world but because 83 percent don't think it will make them more productive and 94 percent believe it won't make them any happier. Only 13 percent of Americans think they'll ever get to a point where they trust AI to make a decision for them.

Hanna told Ars that in some sectors, AI is already being used as an excuse not to hire more workers, and "even though that work is still there, it is being shoddily done, and it's possible that those people are being hired back at a fraction of their wage to look, and their work looks much more like gig work rather than more stable careers."

By contrast, one female AI expert quoted in Pew's survey expressed excitement about AI despite how it may impact her job.

“I’m excited about further automation of code, even though a lot of my job is software engineering, so that’s in competition with my job. I am excited about making the process even simpler than it is right now," she said. "In general, I think of AI as helping people along jobs. So I think of the biggest outcome is automation of processes that feel very slow and feel like they don't necessarily require full brain power, being automated by AI.”

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A study released on Wednesday finds that a live-virus vaccine that limits shingles symptoms was associated with a drop in the risk for dementia when it was introduced. The work took advantage of the fact that the National Health Service Wales made the vaccine available with a very specific age limit, essentially creating two populations, vaccinated and unvaccinated, separated by a single date. And these populations showed a sharp divide in how often they were diagnosed with dementia, despite having little in the way of other differences in health issues or treatments.

What a day

This study didn't come out of nowhere. There have been a number of hints recently that members of the herpesvirus family that can infect nerve cells are associated with dementia. That group includes Varicella zoster, the virus that causes both chicken pox and—potentially many years after— shingles, an extremely painful rash. And over the past couple of years, observational studies have suggested that the vaccine against shingles may have a protective effect.

But it's extremely difficult to do a clinical trial given that the onset of dementia may happen decades after most people first receive the shingles vaccine. That's why the use of NHS Wales data was critical. When the first attenuated virus vaccine for shingles became available, it was offered to a subset of the Welsh population. Those who were born on or after September 2, 1933, were eligible to receive the vaccine. Anyone older than that was permanently ineligible.

(The UK NHS considers things like the cost/benefit of treatments, and likely took into account the potential impact of the side effects on the elderly in making this decision.)

This created what's termed a natural experiment, in that the populations born a few weeks on either side of this data should be roughly equivalent in terms of health risks and cumulative exposure. The only real difference is whether or not they were likely to get the vaccine. And health records indicated that only 0.01 percent of those in the ineligible group did, while nearly half of those eligible received it.

So residents of Wales born on either side of the dividing date were matched according to their use of preventative health services, past diagnoses, and educational level. The incidence of dementia was then compared between people on either side of September 2, 1933. As a first step, the researchers confirmed that the vaccine was effective at reducing the incidence of shingles, with numbers similar to those in the vaccine's clinical trials.

Overall, being eligible for the vaccine was associated with a 1.3 percent reduction in the absolute risk of a dementia diagnosis. That translates to an 8.5 percent reduction of relative risk; when scaled to account for the fact that fewer than half of those eligible received the vaccine, that works out to be a 20 percent reduction in relative risk, which is pretty substantial.

To make sure that it was real, the researchers repeated the analysis using a difference-in-difference approach and came up with roughly the same numbers. That also eliminates the possibility that people who came in for health care (for shingles or some other condition) were more likely to incidentally receive a dementia diagnosis. They also compared the before-and-after populations in terms of a collection of common health outcomes and found that none of those showed any change in the two populations. And nothing else related to NHS policy was changed based on the September 2 date.

Separately, in a draft manuscript the researchers posted on the Med arXiv, the researchers find a similar effect when using UK HNS data to search for a protective effect of the shingles vaccines when it comes to deaths diagnosed to result from dementia. So by all indications, the effect was real.

What’s going on?

The researchers suggest three potential explanations. One of them is the obvious: Suppressing the reactivation of the varicella zoster virus reduces dementia onset. But it's also possible that the effect is indirect—that dementia is associated with immune activity, and the vaccine alters that in some way. Finally, there's the possibility that being treated for shingles could promote the onset of dementia or increase the frequency of diagnoses.

The last question was fairly easy to answer. The researchers note yet again that other chronic diagnoses show a change at around the critical date. And they also adjusted their analysis to control for the frequency of medical care. The subgroup that interacted with the NHS most often showed roughly the same protection by the vaccine as the group as a whole did. Finally, the researchers note that shingles diagnosis and treatment didn't increase the probability of dementia diagnoses.

In contrast, there is some evidence that the effect is related to the activation of the virus. People who experienced multiple shingles events were more likely to receive a dementia diagnosis. And people who received an antiviral treatment in response to shingles had a reduced incidence of dementia.

But there were also differences that suggest the immune response in general may be involved. Those who are prone to autoimmune or allergic responses (which are more common in women) showed a greater protection from the vaccine, as did women. These effects aren't large, but they may provide a hint that there's something more than a specific response to one virus.

Following up on these results, however, will be complicated. While most people associate the onset of dementia in the elderly with Alzheimer's, there are a number of distinct dementia diagnoses, often with risk factors and underlying biology that only partly overlap. In many cases, there's no easy way to distinguish between some of them. So there's the chance that these results represent an even stronger effect that's specific to a subset of the known dementias.

But at least from a medical perspective, it doesn't really matter. The vaccine is highly effective at preventing severe cases of shingles, and it seems to significantly reduce the frequency of dementia. There is even less reason to avoid getting it.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08800-x  (About DOIs).

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Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are tremendously fond of fermented foodstuffs. Technically, it's the yeast they crave, produced by yummy rotting fruit, but they can consume quite a lot of ethanol as a result of that fruity diet. Yes, fruit flies have ultra-fast metabolisms, the better to burn off the booze, but they can still get falling-down drunk—so much so, that randy inebriated male fruit flies have been known to court other males by mistake and fail to mate successfully.

Then again, apparently adding alcohol to their food increases the production of sex pheromones in male fruit flies, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That, in turn, makes them more attractive to the females of the species.

"We show a direct and positive effect of alcohol consumption on the mating success of male flies," said co-author Ian Keesey of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "The effect is caused by the fact that alcohol, especially methanol, increases the production of sex pheromones. This in turn makes alcoholic males more attractive to females and ensures a higher mating success rate, whereas the success of drunken male humans with females is likely to be questionable."

Fruit flies are the workhorses of modern genetics research, used to study everything from cancer to sleep disorders. They make excellent model systems because they share so many genes with humans, plus they are cheap, easy to breed, and can be genetically altered easily. Many years ago, I had the privilege of visiting the University of California, San Francisco laboratory of behavior geneticist Ulrike Heberlein, who spent years getting fruit flies drunk in an "Inebriometer" to learn about the various genes that influence alcohol tolerance. (Heberlein is now scientific program director and laboratory head at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus.)

Driven to drink?

For instance, Heberlein co-authored a 2012 paper discussing experimental results that suggested romantic rejection (i.e., "social defeat") could drive male fruit flies to drink. She paired virgin males with females who had already mated for an hour at a time, three times a day, for four straight days. (Mated females will vehemently reject advances from other males, often aggressively so.) Then the males were placed in an alcohol-drinking assay, where they would drink more than twice as much alcohol as male fruit flies in the control group who had successfully mated.

In terms of a mechanism, the rejection seems to decrease levels of a neuropeptide in the brain, which increases after mating, leading Heberlein et al. to conclude that drinking the ethanol activates reward centers in the fruit fly brain. The end goal is to find equivalent mechanisms in the human brain to guide future interventions into human drug and alcohol addiction and abuse.

While their latest findings are generally consistent with this and other fruit fly studies, Keesey and his co-authors offer an alternative hypothesis to explain these alcohol-related behaviors in fruit flies. They concluded that fruit flies "are attracted to ethanol (and methanol) not as a means to cope with the negative psychological effects of mate rejection, but rather that flies are driven toward these alcohols to increase their chances for subsequent mating success," they wrote. In other words, rejected male fruit flies chug down alcohol as a strategy to get girls to like them.

The researchers studied the behavioral responses of male fruit flies using an experimental apparatus called a Flywalk, in which 15 fruit flies in individual glass tubes lined up in parallel were exposed to odors (including ethanol and methanol) and monitored for their responses to those odors. They also employed imaging techniques to visualize what was happening in those tiny fruit fly brains.

The results: In keeping with prior research, male fruit flies who had not yet mated were more drawn to alcohol. Those that consumed methanol showed a marked increase in the levels of pheromones known to be involved with the elaborate fruit fly courtship rituals. And males who had access to natural sources of methanol, like fermented oranges, were more successful in attracting females than males who did not. Of course, when it comes to alcohol, there can be too much of a good thing. Keesey et al. also found that too much methanol can kill the flies.

"What is unique about our results is that we found not just one, but three neural circuits that we were able to show actually balance each other in terms of this risk assessment, that is, attraction and aversion," said Keesey. "This means that the flies have a control mechanism that allows them to get all the benefits of alcohol consumption without risking alcohol intoxication. That different neural pathways with opposite valence for the same odor are combined to balance attraction and aversion based on physiological state is a rarity."

So male fruit flies, essentially, know when they've reached the optimal level of inebriation to attract more females and successfully mate, before they become so intoxicated that they repulse the females, or approach other males by mistake.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi9683  (About DOIs).

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In early 2024, the bird influenza that had been spreading across the globe for nearly three decades did something wholly unexpected: It showed up in dairy cows in the Texas Panhandle.

A dangerous bird flu, in other words, was suddenly circulating in mammals—mammals with which people have ongoing, extensive contact. “Holy cow,” says Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “This is how pandemics start.”

This bird flu, which scientists call highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1, is already at panzootic—animal pandemic—status, killing birds in every continent except for Australia. Around the world, it has also affected diverse mammals including cats, goats, mink, tigers, seals, and dolphins. Thus far, the United States is the only nation with H5N1 in cows; it’s shown up in dairies in at least 17 states.

In all of known history, “This is the largest animal disease outbreak we’ve ever had,” says Maurice Pitesky, a veterinary researcher at the University of California, Davis.

The virus, which emerged nearly three decades ago, is now creating upheaval in the poultry and dairy industries and making economic and political waves due to the fluctuating price of eggs. But there’s more at risk here than grocery-store sticker shock. As it has journeyed around the world on the wings of migrating birds, the virus has infected more than 960 people since 2003, killing roughly half of them. Since the start of 2024, it’s infected dozens of people in the United States—mainly farm workers—and it killed its first person stateside in January of 2025.

So far, H5N1 flu hasn’t acquired the key trick of passing with ease from person to person, which is what could enable a human pandemic. For now, both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization rate the public health risk as low. But the situation could change.

“The thing about this virus is, every time we think we know what’s going to happen, it does something totally unexpected,” says Michelle Wille, a virus ecologist at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne, Australia. “And that’s the only consistent thing I can say about it.”

One and done—or a “nasty bastard”

Biologically, H5N1 isn’t so different from any other influenza A virus — the type that resides mainly in wild birds, as well as bats, and has occasionally jumped into human populations. It contains eight pieces of genetic material encoding 11 known proteins. Two proteins, the “H” and the “N” ones, stud the virus’s exterior. H stands for hemagglutinin: It sticks to a cell’s sugars so the virus can gain entry. N is for neuraminidase: It allows newborn viral particles to exit the cell.

Influenza viruses share the same basic structure, but diversity within their genes and proteins means

that they can mutate and morph to infect different hosts and evade immune defenses.

Credit: ttsz via Getty

But there’s lots of possible variety. The influenza A virus has at least 19 options for the H protein and 11 for the N protein, most of which are present in the various flu strains infecting wild waterfowl. H5N1 flu has version 5 of the H protein and version 1 of the N protein.

There are also variants for the other genes. If two different flu viruses meet in a cell that they’ve both infected, they can swap genes back and forth, creating new kinds of flu offspring.

Thus, all sorts of influenza A viruses infect the guts of wild waterfowl, usually without harm to the birds. But the viruses can cause trouble if they move into other creatures.

A few decades ago, scientists thought they had a handle on what would happen if some bird influenza A virus spilled over into other species. In domestic poultry, it could turn nasty, but it was generally a “one-and-done” situation, says Bryan Richards, emerging disease coordinator at the US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. What happened in past instances was that all the farm birds would die, the virus would run out of hosts—the end.

And the leap from birds to humans is not easily made. Scientists had long assumed that to infect people, an avian influenza A virus would have to trade genes with another virus in an intermediate species, like a pig, to adapt to mammalian biology.

So back in 1996, when domestic geese in Guangdong province, China, came down with H5N1, it was hardly cause for worldwide alarm.

But a year later, in Hong Kong, a 3-year-old boy died after suffering high fever and pneumonia. It took experts from around the world three months to identify the virus. At first, no one believed it was H5N1, says Robert Webster, a virologist and emeritus professor at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, who led one of the teams that made the ID. A virus with an H5 was supposed to be a chicken virus. But this H5N1 infected 18 people and killed six of them.

“This was a nasty bastard,” says Webster.

Webster and other experts descended on Hong Kong, where they protected themselves by inhaling inactivated H5N1 virus obtained from that first case, as Webster recounts in the Annual Review of Virology. They learned that the boy’s family had visited a live bird market, and testing identified more H5N1-infected birds in those markets and on farms. It had apparently arrived in ducks from China.

“What blew everyone’s mind, in 1997, was that humans clearly got infected with the avian virus, skipping the pig step,” says Friedrich.

Hong Kong killed all the poultry. That particular viral lineage was snuffed out.

Baffled by viral curveballs

But its parent, back in mainland China, remained. And the vast viral lineage it spawned would continue to defy scientists’ expectations. “This wasn’t the one-and-done,” says Richards. “The virus keeps throwing curveballs.”

H5N1 spread from farm to farm. It continued to infect people, usually those in very close contact with their domestic birds. Then, in 2005, the virus lobbed another curveball: It spilled back into wild birds, by now in a form altered enough to be deadly to them—killing thousands of bar-headed geese, gulls, and great cormorants in China’s Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve. “That,” says Richards, “set the stage for where we are today.”

More birds, likely both wild and domestic, brought H5N1 into Europe and Africa. Through genetic mixing and matching, H5 hooked up with other partners, like N8, for a time. In late 2014, migratory birds brought H5N8 from Asia to the Pacific Coast of North America, where H5 also hooked up with an N2, and the outbreak spread across several states before fizzling out.

The virus continued to spread in Asia, Europe, and Africa, usually as H5N8, with a bit of H5N6. In 2020, reports of H5-containing virus infections in wild and domestic birds started to rise. A new variant of the H5 gene, called 2.3.4.4b, was first spotted in the Netherlands. Viruses carrying this H5 seem to have a particular ability to cross over and infect mammals, says Friedrich.

By 2021, the 2.3.4.4b variety of H5 was back with a form of N1. “From there, we started seeing this mass spread event,” says Wille. The virus arrived in North America in late 2021, this time to stay.

The panzootic had begun.

Avian flu’s H5 gene has evolved as it spread throughout the world. Explore the trends for yourself

at the site of the pathogen-tracking Nextstrain project.

Credit: Nextstrain.org

Imperfect biosecurity

As birds migrate south for the winter, they bring H5N1 to poultry farms. Most infected chickens will die, and the primary defense is culling. In the US, more than 166 million chickens have been culled since 2022, though a lull in cases led egg prices to drop in early March 2025.

To prevent spread, biosecurity has become the key watchword. For poultry farmers, that means a variety of things such as limiting human interaction with flocks, washing hands and boots, and wearing face masks. But the virus just keeps spilling over from wild birds into farmers’ flocks. Part of the problem, Pitesky says, is that poultry farms are often located near water sources, like lagoons and rain ponds, where migrating birds roost overnight, putting wild and domestic animals in close proximity. It’s a gut virus in wild birds, and it spreads easily through their feces.

In February 2025, the US Department of Agriculture announced allocation of up to $1 billion in additional funds to combat highly pathogenic avian flu, including support for biosecurity, financial relief for farmers and vaccine research. Companies have designed bird vaccines against H5-containing highly pathogenic avian influenza for a couple of decades, updating them as the virus evolved. The USDA announced in January 2025 that it would update its stockpile of vaccines for chickens, and Zoetis of Parsippany, New Jersey, recently created an updated version. It’s based on a strain that was circulating in 2022 and has continued to do so, says senior vice president for global biologics research and development Mahesh Kumar, who works in Zoetis’ Kalamazoo, Michigan, facility.

The vaccine is effective at preventing symptoms and death, but does not prevent infection or viral transmission, Kumar says. Zoetis’ past vaccines have been used in a handful of other nations for poultry and one even was used by the US Fish & Wildlife Service to protect California condors in 2023.

In early 2025, the USDA granted Zoetis a conditional license for that new formula, but this preliminary licensure is just a step along the way to use, not permission to market or sell the vaccine widely. In fact, the US has never allowed widespread poultry vaccination for highly pathogenic avian flu, though poultry receive a number of other vaccines.

As farmers were forced to cull infected flocks, supplies of eggs were limited and prices climbed.

Credit: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sign-lets-shoppers-know-about-possible-egg-shortages-at-a-news-photo/2192208914

There are concerns that vaccination could push the virus to mutate faster. But the big issue blocking vaccination is that doing so could limit international poultry trade, and the US is a major exporter of live poultry. A vaccinated animal could carry the virus without symptoms, and many nations don’t want birds that might be invisibly carrying H5N1.

To get around that problem, Zoetis’ vaccine has a twist. In preparing inactivated virus, the scientists used the N2 neuraminidase, instead of the N1 that H5 has recently buddied up with. That provides a way to check whether birds have antibodies that would indicate they’ve been exposed to the vaccine’s N2, to the real virus’s N1, or to both.

Still, it is uncertain whether the US would ever broadly deploy an avian flu vaccine. Pitesky says that much of the power rests with farmers who raise broiler chickens for meat and export; broilers make up about two-thirds of US poultry sales. If the broiler farmers aren’t on board, he believes it’s unlikely the USDA would promote vaccination. The decision might end up being made at a state-by-state level, depending on regional poultry industries, suggests Rocio Crespo, a veterinary researcher at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Kumar says Zoetis could turn stockpiled materials into ready-to-use vaccine in two months or less, depending on how close to finished form the vaccine is in storage. “We want to be ready,” he says.

Spillover to dairies

And now the poultry industry’s catastrophe has become the dairy industry’s problem, too. The virus’s 2024 appearance in Texas dairies was a surprise for flu experts: “The literature suggested that dairy cows don’t get influenza A’s,” says Pitesky — but, “as the joke goes, cows don’t read the literature.” Dairies were caught off guard, without the guidelines and support systems that exist for poultry. And by some reports, they’ve been slow to adopt biosecurity measures.

Cows infected with H5N1 usually survive, though they must be taken out of the regular population and spend weeks in a hospital barn. Inflammation in their udders, or mastitis, turns their milk thick and yellowish; splashes of contaminated milk in the milking parlors create potential for the virus to move from animal to animal. (One study suggested that more widespread or respiratory infection does not occur, and there’s no sign yet that beef cattle have been affected.)

The USDA now requires the 48 contiguous states to test milk for H5N1. That testing identified two new spillovers of H5N1 into dairy herds, in Nevada and Arizona, reported in February of 2025.

Dairy parlors, such as this one featuring a rotating platform, create plenty of opportunity for the flu virus to spread via infected milk.

Credit: stockbusters via Getty

And, worryingly, that virus was a different version than the one that infected cows in 2024. That 2024 spillover featured an H5N1 with a particular collection of flu gene sequences, still H5 2.3.4.4b, called B3.13. But flu viruses evolve rapidly, and that H5 2.3.4.4b has shuffled genes with other viruses more than once, creating lots of variants and subvariants. More recently, another variant called D1.1 has been spreading in wild birds. While B3.13 still accounts for most cattle infections, it’s D1.1 that hopped into dairies in early 2025.

The long-term implications for cattle of D1.1, and avian flu in general, aren’t yet clear. “We’re really hoping this has just been a unique set of circumstances and that we don’t get any more spillover events,” says Jamie Jonker, chief science officer of the National Milk Producers Federation in Arlington, Virginia. But, he adds, “we’d like a vaccine to be in the toolbox and to understand how it can be used.” Zoetis and other companies are working on H5N1 vaccines for cows, though it’s too soon to know if and how such vaccines would be deployed.

Even with vaccines, though, “we may not be able to put out this fire,” says Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “It appears, to many of us, that these viruses are going to be endemic, or we say ‘enzootic,’ for a long time.”

People on the safe side—for now

What kind of risk does all this pose for people? Gray has studied a number of viruses in cattle and other animals, and he says that while spillovers from one species to another are common, it’s rare that a virus adapts to spread easily in the new species. As of spring 2025, there are no confirmed cases of human-to-human H5N1 transmission in the United States.

“It’s not like in the movies,” Gray says. “It’s going to take continual spillover events for it to get a foothold.” But it can happen, as it did in 2009, when an H1N1 influenza A virus with a novel mix of genes jumped from pigs into people, where it then spread widely. This caused a pandemic, killing an estimated 123,000 to 203,000 people worldwide, a death toll grossly eclipsed by the more than 7 million who died of Covid-19.

To become adept at infecting humans, the virus would have to change the structure of its hemagglutinin. Its current version sticks to a specific arrangement of sugars on the surface of bird cells. The birdlike sugar arrangement is found in cow udders, explaining the mastitis.

Humans do have this birdlike sugar arrangement, but it’s buried deep in the lungs, making the virus hard to catch and hard to spread to another person. It’s also present in human eyes, which could explain why pinkeye was the most common clinical sign in people who caught bird flu in the US in 2024 (many also experienced fever and respiratory symptoms). But for ongoing person-to-person transmission through coughs, sneezes and sniffles, researchers think H5N1 would have to mutate to recognize a sugar arrangement found in the human upper respiratory tract — the nose, nasal cavity, sinuses, mouth, throat and voice box.

It would also have to make changes to the protein that copies its genes, the viral polymerase. This polymerase would need to switch from working well with bird proteins to working well with human ones. It has done that, to some extent: Some versions of H5N1 have acquired relevant mutations that help it replicate in mammal cells. But as of spring 2025, none of the viruses that have jumped from cows to humans have hemagglutinin mutations that are predicted to support person-to-person transmission, Friedrich says.

H5N1 could either evolve on its own, or trade genes with another human-infecting flu. The latter possibility is particularly concerning at times of high rates of seasonal flu, such as during the 2024-25 winter. The more flu virus floating around, the more chances for two kinds to meet in the same cell in the same animal and exchange genes, to birth something new and potentially dangerous.

Factors beyond the virus itself influence pandemic risk, too. “There are a lot of things that have to align, not only on the virus side, but also on the people side,” says Valerie Le Sage, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh who cowrote an overview of barriers to flu transmission in the 2023 Annual Review of Virology.

One of them is disease history. From recent experiments with ferrets, which get and transmit the virus similarly to the way people do, Le Sage suspects that people who’ve had flu before — that’s most people over the age of 5 — might have enough immunity to stifle the worst consequences of H5N1 flu. In her experiments, ferrets earlier exposed to the 2009 H1N1 swine flu were protected from the worst symptoms and death when later exposed to H5N1 from Texas cattle. Ferrets that were just given H5N1 flu got sick and died. “I can’t tell you exactly how long this protection lasts, but it is nice to see,” says Le Sage.

Also good news is the observation that the virus isn’t hitting anywhere near the reported 50 percent mortality rate in recent US infections. Such rates are imperfect calculations, Friedrich notes, as they are based on people who were sick enough to get tested for H5N1; people who didn’t get very ill would not be tallied as survivors. That would artificially inflate the death rate, though it’s unclear how much this has affected calculations. Asymptomatic infections may not be uncommon, at least in current US cases: A recent CDC study found that three dairy veterinarians had antibodies to H5N1, indicating they’d been infected, but had never noticed symptoms.

The other gene variants that H5N1 has acquired also seem to be a factor, and here the news may be less good. The earlier B3.13 virus seemed to cause mild infections, says David Hamer, a public health epidemiologist at the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. From 2024 through spring 2025, the CDC had tracked 70 H5N1 cases, of any type, in the US, and most have been mild. The one person who died was over 65 and had underlying health conditions — but he also had the newer D1.1 strain, as did a teen in Canada who became severely ill.

Although it’s not fully clear what D1.1 means for people, it could be bad news, speculates Friedrich. “I have this gut feeling, and colleagues of mine do too, that something about the D1.1 genotype may be more permissive for mutations that adapt the virus to humans,” he says.

Issues of trust, and a matter of time

For the general public, the main advice experts offer is to not consume raw milk or undercooked poultry products. Though no human infections from raw milk or undercooked food have been reported to the CDC as of spring 2025, the virus may have been transmitted via raw poultry products in a small number of cases in Southeast Asia, and it has infected cats that drank unpasteurized milk. Pasteurization kills the virus; so does cooking of eggs, chicken and beef.

The US does have some protections ready, including a stockpile of personal protective equipment, antiviral medication — Tamiflu reportedly works on this virus — and the ingredients for making human vaccines. Those ingredients include virus bits, as well as chemicals that help stimulate the immune system. These are stored in bulk, and could be assembled into ready-to-use vaccine doses within weeks to months.

Although those vaccine materials were designed using versions of H5N1 flu from the early 2000s, a recent study suggests that they create an antibody response to the newer 2.3.4.4b versions that have spread globally since 2020, and include both B3.13 and the newly circulating D1.1. Scientists are also working on updated vaccines that would more closely match the virus circulating now.

Social factors could also influence the detection of, and response to, a potential pandemic. Many farm workers are undocumented immigrants, making many reluctant to be screened or seek medical attention. “The population we should be surveilling the most is the population we’re probably not surveilling at a robust enough level,” says Pitesky.

And Friedrich notes the great paradox of the Covid-19 pandemic: It spawned a society that’s less prepared to manage the next outbreak. “The pandemic eroded public trust in science,” he says. “There has been a backlash against the power of public health agencies to do what they need to do to control an outbreak.”

In early 2025, publication of a CDC report on H5N1 flu spreading from cattle to people was delayed. USDA personnel working on bird flu response were laid off; the department later struggled to reinstate them. And $590 million in funding for an RNA-based vaccine (of the kind that proved successful during the Covid pandemic) was put under review. The changes continue, with resignation of a top vaccine official within the US Food and Drug Administration in March and movements starting in April to lay off thousands of federal health workers.

A steep toll on wildlife

Regardless of whether H5N1 jumps from person to person sooner, later or never, it’s raging in wild animals. In the US, thousands of birds of more than 160 native species, including mallards, sparrows, pigeons and bald eagles, have been infected. So have hundreds of mammals of more than two dozen native species, including raccoons, bears and opossums. Some of these get sick, and some die.

Many of these infections are “dead ends,” Richards notes: They don’t pass the virus on. It’s mainly far-flying ducks that have done that.

By late 2022, H5N1 had entered South America and was thundering down the continent’s Pacific coast. “It then traveled the 6,000-kilometer spine of South America in six months, so that’s very fast for a virus that’s not assisted by planes,” says Wille. It hit the tip of South America and jumped to Antarctica.

En route, it killed 40 percent of Peruvian pelicans, at least 24,000 South American sea lions and more than 17,000 southern elephant seal pups.

Wild birds have been affected around the world, and even waterbirds, which normally harbor influenza A without symptoms, have suffered. Though a full census is lacking, individual examples are sobering. The population of great skuas, found primarily in Scotland, is down by a reported 75 percent. An outbreak in California condors in 2023 killed 21 animals, in a species with fewer than 1,000 in existence. “An event like that could change the course of a species,” says Wille. “Are they going to come back or not?”

H5N1 hasn’t reached Australia or New Zealand, but Wille thinks it’s just a matter of time. For the world, the future of this virus, with its propensity to defy expectations, is up in the air. “I think we’re on the precipice of something,” says Wille. “What that something is, I’m not sure.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

Knowable Magazine, 2025. DOI: 10.1146/knowable-040125-1. (About DOIs)

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axolotls are critically endangered. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, these aquatic monsters—a national symbol that features on Mexico’s 50 peso bills, and which were once considered divine entities, the “twins” of the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl—are at “extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.”

The figures tell it best. In 1998 there were 6,000 axolotls per square kilometer in their natural habitat, the district of Xochimilco in the south of Mexico City. By 2004, that figure had fallen to just 1,000, and by 2008 it was only 100. A 2014 census of Mexico’s wild axolotl population found only 36 of the creatures. Now, a decade later, a new survey is underway. Xochimilco is home to the remnants of a vast canal network built by the Aztecs, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though the district is facing ecological deterioration as a result of increasing urbanization.

Everything indicates that for the axolotl, the countdown to extinction continues. But there is one last hope. Scientists from the Ecological Restoration Laboratory at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who are in charge of the axolotl census, are seeking to reverse this trend and conserve one of the oldest terrestrial vertebrates on the planet.

“The objective of the census is to know the current status of the axolotl population,” says Luis Zambrano, project leader and founder of the Ecological Restoration Laboratory. Public sightings are important, he says, but to be sure of their existence in the wild, there needs to be evidence. Armed with confirmation that axolotls are still present in Xochimilco, and with an estimate of how many, the researchers then plan to run campaigns to combat misinformation about the species and to guide conservation, and also to bolster the wild population by releasing reared individuals. The final results of this survey will be published in the first half of 2025, and a new count is planned for 2026.

WIRED witnessed firsthand how scientists Vania Mendoza, Viviam Crespo, and Paola Cervantes—together with local villagers, like Basilio Rodríguez—conducted the census. They used traditional fishing techniques together with innovative methods such as environmental DNA analysis, where a species can be traced by hunting for DNA that it sheds into its surrounding habitat.

The surveying takes place at dawn in Xochimilco, one of the last vestiges of the ancient lake system of the Basin of Mexico, where plant and animal species that modernity has erased from other parts of Mexico City still survive. It’s a magical oasis in the monster capital that looks like something out of a Mexican fairy tale, where herons and pelicans are heard as the sun comes up. As we travel through the landscape on a wooden raft, we see that the lake is still filled with chinampas, artificial agricultural islands first developed in pre-Hispanic times and which amazed the first Spaniards who came to these lands.

The axolotl has four legs, a long tail, and is nocturnal and carnivorous. They appear in four different colors: wild axolotls have a blackish-brown hue, while mutant variants include leucistic (white with dark eyes), white albino, and golden albino. “So far, we haven’t found any axolotls; however, DNA analysis offers a chance,” says Paola Cervantes, a graduate in earth sciences and part of the UNAM team for this year’s census.

Meanwhile, Basilio Rodríguez, a former fisherman and farmer from the area, prepares his homemade cast net and looks for signs of the amphibian. “They breathe every five minutes,” Rodríguez explains. "When they come up to breathe, it makes a kind of ripple; if they’re hunting, small bubbles form in a straight line." That’s his signal.

It’s 8:00 am and the sun is already beating down on Rodríguez’s face. He is floating off the right-angled corner of a chinampa, a site that hints at an ancient urban order based on a network of canals.

But this delicate trace of history is flanked on all sides by the oppressive signs of modernity. By 8:10 dogs are barking, while the music of mariachi and banda bands can be heard in the distance; nearby, soccer fields have replaced some of the old chinampas. The water here doesn’t seem to flow, nor is it very clear. Rodríguez finds no trace of bubbles from the axolotl, the “water transformer.” Even so, he throws his net into the basin. With little hope, he pulls it in. And he moves the raft again with the oar, then carefully pulls the nylon line again. But there is only mud, lilies, and a couple of tiny fish. Rodríguez does not give up and casts again.

UNAM researchers have identified the three main causes of the imminent extinction of these water monsters: the first was the introduction of carp and tilapia, which quickly became pests because fishing was banned in Xochimilco (carp eat axolotl eggs, and tilapia eat juveniles; and then they compete with the adult amphibians for food). The second problem is pollution. Having analyzed water pollution, the team realized that the amphibians prefer places where the water quality is better. The third is the stress humans cause axolotls, especially through noise and light. When they are stressed, they get sick very quickly, and if they get sick, they quickly die.

“The high density of tilapia we have detected worsens the situation of the axolotl, whose critical state reflects the deterioration of Xochimilco, an ecosystem vital to the quality of life in Mexico City,” says Vania Mendoza Solís, codirector of the census and a master’s student in marine sciences and limnology, the study of lakes. She has a special interest in the Xochimilco canals. “I grew up here,” she says.

“Axolotls thrive at 18 degrees Celsius, with very good water quality. They are evening-active animals, and food is very important. Many studies have been done to identify what they need and like,” says Horacio Mena, who coordinates the axolotl colony at UNAM’s Institute of Biology. This project aims to rear these endangered amphibians away from Xochimilco, and then release them into their natural habitat.

Mena has to carefully select the axolotl specimens that will be released. “From the outset, the idea is to ensure that they have genetics as similar as possible to the native axolotls. I also have to ensure their size, morphology, and health, and they have to be resistant to stress, because you’re going to challenge the organism with a new environment. They also have to have tried a variety of foods,” he explains. The reintroduced axolotls initially come from the quarry at Ciudad Universitaria, UNAM’s main campus, where there are artificial lakes, and then move to the colony at the Institute of Biology, and later to the chinampa in Xochimilco.

Rodríguez alerts us, saying that he has found what he calls “a sign of an axolotl.” He’s not holding a specimen, but a gelatinous substance obtained from a net. “This was possibly an axolotl egg, but the tilapia ate it, leaving only the placenta. That means we’re close to an axolotl.” This, though, is the closest we will come to finding one.

Conservationists aren’t the only ones interested in these amphibians. The axolotl is the vertebrate with the greatest known regenerative capacity—it can replace its limbs, tail, and gills after amputation, in addition to regenerating vital organs such as the brain and heart, as well as highly specialized tissues, including nerves (whose regeneration is limited in mammals such as humans). This extraordinary ability has made the axolotl a key model for scientific research, driving studies into the molecular mechanisms of regeneration, aging, and the regulation of the genome. While the wild axolotl population may only number a few dozen, there are hundreds of thousands of the creatures kept as pets or in research labs.

Out in the wild, the image of the axolotl largely persists in memory and in the records of history. Way back in the 16th century, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún described it in his General History of the Things of New Spain: “There are some little animals in the water called axolotls. They have feet and hands like lizards, and a tail like an eel, and a body too. They have a very wide mouth and barbs on their necks. They are very good to eat. They are food for the lords.” But today, more than a delicacy, they are a symbol of resistance, a vestige of an ecosystem struggling to survive.

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

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