There are a remarkable number of commercial fusion power startups, considering that it's a technology that's built a reputation for being perpetually beyond the horizon. Many of them focus on radically new technologies for heating and compressing plasmas, or fusing unusual combinations of isotopes. These technologies are often difficult to evaluate—they can clearly generate hot plasmas, but it's tough to determine whether they can get hot enough, often enough to produce usable amounts of power.

On the other end of the spectrum are a handful of companies that are trying to commercialize designs that have been extensively studied in the academic world. And there have been some interesting signs of progress here. Recently, Commonwealth Fusion, which is building a demonstration tokamak in Massachussets, started construction of the cooling system that will keep its magnets superconducting. And two companies that are hoping to build a stellarator did some important validation of their concepts.

Doing donuts

A tokamak is a donut-shaped fusion chamber that relies on intense magnetic fields to compress and control the plasma within it. A number of tokamaks have been built over the years, but the big one that is expected to produce more energy than required to run it, ITER, has faced many delays and now isn't expected to achieve its potential until the 2040s. Back in 2015, however, some physicists calculated that high-temperature superconductors would allow ITER-style performance in a far smaller and easier-to-build package. That idea was commercialized as Commonwealth Fusion.

The company is currently trying to build an ITER equivalent: a tokamak that can achieve fusion but isn't large enough and lacks some critical hardware needed to generate electricity from that reaction. The planned facility, SPARC, is already in progress, with most of the supporting facility in place and superconducting magnets being constructed. But in late March, the company took a major step by installing the first component of the tokamak itself, the cryostat base, which will support the hardware that keeps its magnets cool.

Alex Creely, Commonwealth Fusion's tokamak operations director and SPARC's chief engineer, told Ars that the cryostat's materials have to be chosen to be capable of handling temperatures in the area of 20 Kelvin, and be able to tolerate neutron exposure. Fortunately, stainless steel is still up to the task. It will also be part of a structure that has to handle an extreme temperature gradient. Creely said that it only takes about 30 centimeters to go from the hundreds of millions of degrees C of the plasma down to about 1,000° C, after which it becomes relatively simple to reach cryostat temperatures.

He said that construction is expected to wrap up about a year from now, after which there will be about a year of commissioning the hardware, with fusion experiments planned for 2027. And, while ITER may be facing ongoing delays, Creely said that it was critical for keeping Commonwealth on a tight schedule. Not only is most of the physics of SPARC the same as that of ITER, but some of the hardware will be as well. "We've learned a lot from their supply chain development," Creely said. "So some of the same vendors that are supplying components for the ITER tokamak, we are also working with those same vendors, which has been great."

Great in the sense that Commonwealth is now on track to see plasma well in advance of ITER. "Seeing all of this go from a bunch of sketches or boxes on slides—clip art effectively—to real metal and concrete that's all coming together," Creely said. "You're transitioning from building the facility, building the plant around the tokamak to actually starting to build the tokamak itself. That is an awesome milestone."

Seeing stars?

The plasma inside a tokamak is dynamic, meaning that it requires a lot of magnetic intervention to keep it stable, and fusion comes in pulses. There's an alternative approach called a stellarator, which produces an extremely complex magnetic field that can support a simpler, stable plasma and steady fusion. As implemented by the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Germany, this meant a series of complex-shaped magnets manufactured with extremely low tolerance for deviation. But a couple of companies have decided they're up for the challenge.

One of those, Type One Energy, has basically reached the stage that launched Commonwealth Fusion: It has made a detailed case for the physics underlying its stellarator design. In this instance, the case may even be considerably more detailed: six peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Plasma Physics. The papers detail the structural design, the behavior of the plasma within it, handling of the helium produced by fusion, generation of tritium from the neutrons produced, and obtaining heat from the whole thing.

The company is partnering with Oak Ridge National Lab and the Tennessee Valley Authority to build a demonstration reactor on the site of a former fossil fuel power plant. (It's also cooperating with Commonwealth on magnet development.) As with the SPARC tokamak, this will be a mix of technology demonstration and learning experience, rather than a functioning power plant.

Another company that's pursuing a stellarator design is called Thea Energy. Brian Berzin, its CEO, told Ars that the company's focus is on simplifying the geometry of the magnets needed for a stellarator and is using software to get them to produce an equivalent magnetic field. "The complexity of this device has always been really, really limiting," he said, referring to the stellarator. "That's what we're really focused on: How can you make simpler hardware? Our way of allowing for simpler hardware is using really, really complicated software, which is something that has taken over the world."

He said that the simplicity of the hardware will be helpful for an operational power plant, since it allows them to build multiple identical segments as spares, so things can be swapped out and replaced when maintenance is needed.

Like Commonwealth Fusion, Thea Energy is using high-temperature superconductors to build its magnets, with a flat array of smaller magnets substituting for the three-dimensional magnets used at Wendelstein. "We are able to really precisely recreate those magnetic fields required for accelerator, but without any wiggly, complicated, precise, expensive, costly, time-consuming hardware," Berzin said. And the company recently released a preprint of some testing with the magnet array.

Thea is also planning on building a test stellarator. In its case, however, it's going to be using deuterium-deuterium fusion, which is much less efficient than deuterium-tritium that will be needed for a power plant. But Berzin said that the design will incorporate a layer of lithium that will form tritium when bombarded by neutrons from the stellarator. If things go according to plan, the reactor will validate Thea's design and be a fuel source for the rest of the industry.

Of course, nobody will operate a fusion power plant until sometime in the next decade—probably about at the same time that we might expect some of the first small modular fission plants to be built. Given the vast expansion in renewable production that is in progress, it's difficult to predict what the energy market will look like at that point. So, these test reactors will be built in a very uncertain environment. But that uncertainty hasn't stopped these companies from pursuing fusion.

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As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as its thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move Starliner in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

"I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore said in an interview. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't."

Starliner astronauts meet with the media

On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both.

A lot of the questions concerned the politically messy end of the mission, in which the Trump White House claimed it had rescued the astronauts after they were stranded by the Biden administration. This was not true, but it is also not a question that active astronauts are going to answer. They have too much respect for the agency and the White House that appoints its leadership. They are trained not to speak out of school. As Wilmore said repeatedly on Monday, "I can't speak to any of that. Nor would I."

And so when Ars met with Wilmore at the end of the day—it was his final interview, scheduled for 4:55 to 5:05 pm in a small studio at Johnson Space Center—politics was not on the menu. Instead, I wanted to know the real story, the heretofore untold story of what it was really like to fly Starliner. After all, the problems with the spacecraft's propulsion system precipitated all the other events—the decision to fly Starliner home without crew, the reshuffling of the Crew-9 mission, and their recent return in March after nine months in space.

I have known Wilmore a little bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket, from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight. We blew through the 10-minute interview slot and ended up talking for nearly half an hour.

It's a hell of a story.

Launch and a cold night

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft faced multiple delays before the vehicle's first crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5, 2024. These included a faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket's upper stage, and then a helium leak inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.

The valve issue, in early May, stood the mission down long enough that Wilmore asked to fly back to Houston for additional time in a flight simulator, to keep his skills fresh. Finally, with fine weather, the Starliner Crew Flight Test took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marked the first human launch on the Atlas V rocket, which had a new Centaur upper stage with two engines.

Suni Williams' first night on Starliner was quite cold.

Credit: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas

Sunita "Suni" Williams: "Oh man, the launch was awesome. Both of us looked at each other like, 'Wow, this is going just perfectly.' So, the ride to space and the orbit insertion burn, all perfect."

Barry "Butch" Wilmore: "In simulations, there's always a deviation. Little deviations in your trajectory. And during the launch on Shuttle STS-129 many years ago, and Soyuz, there's the similar type of deviations that you see in this trajectory. I mean, it's always correcting back. But this ULA Atlas was dead on the center. I mean, it was exactly in the crosshairs, all the way. It was much different than what I'd expected or experienced in the past. It was exhilarating. It was fantastic. Yeah, it really was. The dual-engine Centaur did have a surge. I'm not sure ULA knew about it, but it was obvious to us. We were the first to ride it. Initially we asked, 'Should that be doing that? This surging?' But after a while it was kind of soothing. And again, we were flying right down the middle."

After Starliner separated from the Atlas V rocket, Williams and Wilmore performed several maneuvering tests, and put the vehicle through its paces. Starliner performed exceptionally well during these initial tests on day one.

Wilmore: "The precision, the ability to control to the exact point that I wanted, was great. There was very little, almost imperceptible cross-control. I've never given a handling qualities rating of "one," which was part of a measurement system. To take a qualitative test and make a quantitative assessment. I've never given a one, ever, in any test I've ever done, because nothing's ever deserved a one. Boy, I was tempted in some of the tests we did. I didn't give a one, but it was pretty amazing."

Following these tests, the crew attempted to sleep for several hours ahead of their all-important approach and docking with the International Space Station on the flight's second day. More so even than launch or landing, the most challenging part of this mission, which would stress Starliner's handling capabilities as well as its navigation system, would come as it approached the orbiting laboratory.

Williams: "The night that we spent there in the spacecraft, it was a little chilly. We had traded off some of our clothes to bring up some equipment up to the space station. So, I had this small T-shirt thing, long-sleeve T-shirt, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm cold.' Butch is like, 'I'm cold, too.' So, we ended up actually putting our boots on, and then I put my spacesuit on. And then he's like, maybe I want mine too. So, we both actually got in our spacesuits. It might just be because there were two people in there."

Starliner was designed to fly four people to the International Space Station for six-month stays in orbit. But for this initial test flight, there were just two people, which meant less body heat. Wilmore estimated that it was about 50° Fahrenheit in the cabin.

Wilmore: "It was definitely low 50s, if not cooler. When you're hustling and bustling, and doing things, all the tests we were doing after launch, we didn't notice it until we slowed down. We purposely didn't take sleeping bags. I was just going to bungee myself to the bulkhead. I had a sweatshirt and some sweatpants, and I thought, I'm going to be fine. No, it was frigid. And I even got inside my space suit, put the boots on and everything, gloves, the whole thing. And it was still cold."

Time to dock with the space station

After a few hours of fitful sleep, Wilmore decided to get up and start working to get his blood pumping. He reviewed the flight plan and knew this was going to be a big day. Wilmore had been concerned about the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. There are 28 of them. Around the perimeter of Starliner's service module, at the aft of the vehicle, there are four "doghouses" equally spaced around the vehicle. Each of these doghouses contains seven small thrusters for maneuvering. In each doghouse, two thrusters are aft-facing, two are forward-facing, and three are in different radial directions (see an image of a doghouse, with the cover removed, here). For docking, these thrusters are essential. There had been some problems with their performance during an uncrewed flight test to the space station in May 2022, and Wilmore had been concerned those issues might crop up again.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is pictured docked to the International Space Station. One of the four doghouses is visible on the service module.

Credit: NASA

Wilmore: "Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. (This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing's Defense, Space, and Security division). Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we'd had failures on the OFT missions. You don't get the hardware back. (Starliner's service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you're just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, 'Okay, it must've been FOD,' (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that's what concerns me the most. Because, in my mind I'm thinking, if we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we're in space and can't control it. That's what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster."

When vehicles approach the space station, they use two imaginary lines to help guide their approach. These are the R-bar, which is a line connecting the space station to the center of Earth. The "R" stands for radius. Then there is the V-bar, which is the velocity vector of the space station. Due to thruster issues, as Starliner neared the V-bar about 260 meters (850 feet) from the space station, Wilmore had to take manual control of the vehicle.

Wilmore: "As we get closer to the V-bar, we lose our second thruster. So now we're single fault tolerance for the loss of 6DOF control. You understand that?"

Here things get a little more complicated if you've never piloted anything. When Wilmore refers to 6DOF control he means six degrees or freedom, that is the six different movements possible in three-dimensional space: forward/back, up/down, left/right, yaw, pitch, and roll. With Starliner's four doghouses and their various thrusters, a pilot is able to control the spacecraft's movement across these six degrees of freedom. But as Starliner got to within a few hundred meters of the station, a second thruster failed. The condition of being "single fault" tolerant means that the vehicle could sustain just one more thruster failure before being at risk of losing full control of Starliner's movement. This would necessitate a mandatory abort of the docking attempt.

Wilmore: "We're single fault tolerant, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we're supposed to leave the space station.' Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule, because we've lost two thrusters. We didn't know why. They just dropped."

The heroes in Mission Control

As part of the Commercial Crew program, the two companies providing transportation services for NASA, SpaceX and Boeing, got to decide who would fly their spacecraft. SpaceX chose to operate its Dragon vehicles out of a control center at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Boeing chose to contract with NASA's Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston, to fly Starliner. So at this point the vehicle is under the purview of a Flight Director named Ed Van Cise. This was the capstone mission of his 15-year career as a NASA flight director.

Wilmore: "Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That's a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, 'What do you think?' they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control."

From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA's webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues, and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point.

Wilmore: "We acquired the V-bar, and I took over manual control. And then we lose the third thruster. Now, again, they're all in the same direction. And I'm picturing these thrusters that we're losing. We lost two bottom thrusters. You can lose four thrusters, if they're top and bottom, but you still got the two on this side, you can still maneuver. But if you lose thrusters in off-orthogonal, the bottom and the port, and you've only got starboard and top, you can't control that. It's off-axis. So I'm parsing all this out in my mind, because I understand the system. And we lose two of the bottom thrusters. We've lost a port thruster. And now we're zero-fault tolerant. We're already past the point where we were supposed to leave, and now we're zero-fault tolerant and I'm manual control. And, oh my, the control is sluggish. Compared to the first day, it is not the same spacecraft. Am I able to maintain control? I am. But it is not the same."

At this point in the interview, Wilmore went into some wonderful detail.

Wilmore: "And this is the part I'm sure you haven't heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we've lost 6DOF control. We can't maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes. But I'm thinking, the F-18 is a fly-by-wire. You put control into the stick, and the throttle, and it sends the signal to the computer. The computer goes, 'Okay, he wants to do that, let's throw that out aileron a bit. Let's throw that stabilizer a bit. Let's pull the rudder there.' And it's going to maintain balanced flight. I have not even had a reason to think, how does Starliner do this, to maintain a balance?"

This is a very precarious situation we’re in

Essentially, Wilmore cannot fully control Starliner any longer. But simply abandoning the docking attempt is not a palatable solution. Just as the thrusters are needed to control the vehicle during the docking process, they're also necessary to position Starliner for its deorbit burn and reentry to Earth's atmosphere. So in Wilmore's mind, he is contemplating whether it is riskier to to approach the space station, or to try to fly back to Earth. Williams was worrying the same thing.

Williams: "There was a lot of unsaid communication like, 'Hey, this is a very precarious situation we're in.' I think both of us overwhelmingly felt like it would be really nice to dock to that space station that's right in front of us. We knew that they (Mission Control) were working really hard to be able to keep communication with us, and then be able to send commands. We were both thinking, what if we lose communication with the ground? So, NORDO Con Ops (this means flying a vehicle without a radio), and we didn't talk about it too much, but we already had synced in our mind that we should go to the space station. This is our place that we need to probably go to, to have a conversation because we don't know exactly what is happening, and why the thrusters are falling off, and what the solution would be."

Wilmore: "I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point. I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't. So there we are, loss of 6DOF control, four aft thrusters down, and I'm visualizing orbital mechanics. The space station is nose down. So we're not exactly level with the station, but below it. If you're below the station, you're moving faster. That's orbital mechanics. It's going to make you move away from the station. So I'm doing all of this in my mind. I don't know what control I have. What if I lose another thruster? What if we lose comm? What am I going to do?"

One of the other challenges at this point, in addition to holding his position relative to the space station, was keeping Starliner's nose pointed directly at the orbital laboratory.

Williams: "Starliner is based on a vision system that looks at the space station and uses the space station as a frame of reference. So, if we had started to fall off and lose that, which there's a plus or minus that we can have; we didn't lose the station ever, but we did start to deviate a little bit. I think both of us were getting a little bit nervous then, because the system would've automatically aborted us."

After Starliner lost four of its 28 reaction control system thrusters, Van Cise and this team in Houston decided the best chance for success was resetting the failed thrusters. This is, effectively, a fancy way of turning off your computer and rebooting it to try to fix the problem. But it meant Wilmore had to go hands-off from Starliner's controls. Imagine that. You're drifting away from the space station, trying to maintain your position. The station is your only real lifeline, because if you lose the ability to dock, the chance of coming back in one piece is quite low. And now you're being told to take your hands off the controls.

Wilmore: "That was not easy to do. I have lived rendezvous orbital dynamics going back decades. (Wilmore is one of only two active NASA astronauts who has experience piloting the space shuttle). Ray Bigonesse is our rendezvous officer. What a motivated individual. Primarily him, but me as well, we worked to develop this manual rendezvous capability over the years. He's a volunteer fireman, and he said, 'Hey, I'm coming off shift at 5:30 Saturday morning, will you meet me in the sim?' So we'd meet on Saturdays. We never got to the point of saying lose four thrusters. Who would've thought that, in the same direction? But we're in there training, doing things, playing around. That was the preparation."

All of this training meant Wilmore felt like he was in the best position to fly Starliner, and did not relish the thought of giving up control. But finally, when he thought the spacecraft was temporarily stable enough, Wilmore called down to Mission Control, "Hands off." Almost immediately, flight controllers sent a signal to override Starliner's flight computer, and to fire the thrusters that had been turned off. Two of the four thrusters came back online.

Wilmore: "Now we're back to single-fault tolerant. But then we lose a fifth jet. What if we'd have lost that fifth jet while those other four were still down? I have no idea what would've happened. I attribute to the providence of Lord getting those two jets back before that fifth one failed. So we're down to zero-fault tolerant again. I can still maintain control. Again, sluggish. Not only was the control different on the visual, what inputs and what it looked like, but we could hear it. The valve opening and closing. When a thruster would fire it was like a machine gun."

We’re probably not flying home in Starliner

Mission Control decides that it wants to try to recover the failed thrusters again. After Wilmore takes his hands off the controls, this process recovers all but one of them. At this point, the vehicle can be flown autonomously, as it was intended to be. When asked to give up control of the vehicle for its final approach to the station, Wilmore said he was apprehensive about doing so. He was concerned that if the system went into automation mode, it may not be possible to get it back in manual mode. After all that had happened, he wanted to make sure he could take control of Starliner again.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams landed in a Crew Dragon spacecraft in March. Dolphins were among their greeters.

Credit: NASA

Wilmore: "I was very apprehensive. In earlier sims, I had even told the flight directors, 'If we get in a situation where I got to give it back to auto, I may not.' And they understood. Because if I've got a mode that's working, I don't want to give it up. But because we got those jets back, I thought, 'Okay, we're only down one.' All this is going through my mind in real time. And I gave it back. And of course, we docked."

Williams: "I was super happy. If you remember from the video, when we came into the space station, I did this little happy dance. One, of course, just because I love being in space and am happy to be on the space station and great friends up there. Two, just really happy that Starliner docked to the space station. My feeling at that point in time was like, 'Oh, phew, let's just take a breather and try to understand what happened.' There's really great people on our team. Our team is huge. The commercial crew program, NASA and Boeing engineers, were all working hard to try and understand, to try to decide what we might need to do to get us to come back in that spacecraft. At that point, we also knew it was going to take a little while. Everything in this business takes a little while, like you know, because you want to cross the T's and dot the I's and make sure. I think the decision at the end of the summer was the right decision. We didn't have all the T's crossed, we didn't have all the I's dotted. So do we take that risk where we don't need to?"

Wilmore added that he felt pretty confident, in the aftermath of docking to the space station, that Starliner probably would not be their ride home.

Wilmore: "I was thinking, we might not come home in the spacecraft. We might not. And one of the first phone calls I made was to Vincent LaCourt, the ISS flight director, who was one of the ones that made the call about waiving the flight rule. I said, 'Okay, what about this spacecraft, is it our safe haven?'"

It was unlikely to happen, but if some catastrophic space station emergency occurred while Wilmore and Williams were in orbit, what were they supposed to do? Should they retreat to Starliner for an emergency departure, or cram into one of the other vehicles on station, for which they did not have seats or spacesuits? LaCourt said they should use Starliner as a safe haven for the time being. Therein followed a long series of meetings and discussions about Starliner's suitability for flying crew back to Earth. Publicly, NASA and Boeing expressed confidence in Starliner's safe return with crew. But Williams and Wilmore, who had just made that harrowing ride, felt differently.

Wilmore: "I was very skeptical, just because of what we'd experienced. I just didn't see that we could make it. I was hopeful that we could, but it would've been really tough to get there, to where we could say, 'Yeah, we can come back.'"

And so, they did not.

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Google announced its intention to unify its generative AI efforts under the Gemini brand at the tail end of 2023, and it has been full steam ahead ever since. In 2025, Google Assistant is being phased out and replaced with Gemini. As Google, Amazon, and others move toward a world in which all virtual assistants are based on generative AI, it's reasonable to consider if this is actually a good idea. Despite promises of "smarter" AI and ever-increasing token limits, these robots still have a fundamental flaw that may make them bad assistants: They lie.

They don't set out to lie, of course, because they don't know what a "lie" is. These systems attempt to generate the most plausible next token to build an output. Because of this, generative AI is non-deterministic—you can't predict the output, and even running the same prompt multiple times will offer varying responses.

This can look impressively like thinking sometimes, but it also leads to frequent hallucinations. That's why the iPhone said Luigi Mangione was dead and Google told people to put glue on pizza. GenAI proponents like Google and Apple have been trying to curb the chaos of confabulations, but this may always be a problem because of the nature of the underlying technology.

Even if a generative AI assistant is right most of the time—and we are reaching that point—an occasional hallucination can still screw up your day. And yet, Google has moved with relentless efficiency to wedge generative AI into every one of its products, which is why we're all watching Assistant wither and die in favor of Gemini.

Trust but verify

I'm not deeply committed to Assistant—it's missing a lot of functionality, and sometimes the bugs can be so frustrating that I regret even engaging with it. However, I'm almost certain I'll miss it once it's gone. Assistant is great at basic things like setting timers and sending messages, and it does so without a fuss. These are things that Gemini, in spite of all its cloud-based processing muscle, still screws up. For anything more complex or important, Gemini is worse than inefficient—it's untrustworthy.

Google leverages the theoretical power of generative AI to give Gemini access to data across multiple apps. When it works, this can be very handy. For example, you can ask Gemini to check your email for a specific message, extract data, and pass it to another app. I was excited about this functionality at first, but in practice, it makes me miss the way Assistant would just fail without wasting my time.

I was reminded of this issue recently when I asked Gemini to dig up a shipment tracking number from an email—something I do fairly often. It appeared to work just fine, with the robot citing the correct email and spitting out a long string of numbers. I didn't realize anything was amiss until I tried to look up the tracking number. It didn't work in Google's search-based tracker, and going to the US Postal Service website yielded an error.

That's when it dawned on me: The tracking number wasn't a tracking number; it was a confabulation. It was a believable one, too. The number was about the right length, and like all USPS tracking numbers, it started with a nine. I could have looked up the tracking number myself in a fraction of the time it took to root out Gemini's mistake, which is very, very frustrating. Gemini appeared confident that it had completed the task I had given it, but getting mad at the chatbot wouldn't do any good—it can't understand my anger any more than it can understand the nature of my original query.

At this point, I would kill for Assistant's "Sorry, I don't understand."

This is just one of many similar incidents I've had with Gemini over the last year—I can't count how many times Gemini has added calendar events to the wrong day or put incorrect data in a note. In fairness, Gemini usually gets these tasks right, but its mechanical imagination wanders often enough that its utility as an assistant is suspect. Assistant just couldn't do a lot of things, but it didn't waste my time acting like it could. Gemini is more insidious, claiming to have solved my problem when, in fact, it's sending me down a rabbit hole to fix its mistakes. If a human assistant operated like this, I would have to conclude they were incompetent or openly malicious.

Like all generative AI firms, Google includes a disclaimer on Gemini that it can make mistakes and users should double-check its work. If I'm using Gemini for anything even remotely important, you can bet I'm scrutinizing what it does. Maybe that's viable for some tasks, but at that point, I might as well do things myself.

Google has a case to make at I/O

When Google was all-in with Assistant, it created an expansive toolkit for developers to build integrations and conversational experiments with the system. Now, devs are starting from scratch in the Gemini era as Google pushes to sunset Assistant by the end of the year. Google placed a big bet on Gemini improving, and everyone will be looking for evidence of that improvement at Google I/O.

This is, of course, not a surprise. Right from the start, Gemini has been pushing Assistant to the side. When Google released the Gemini app for Android, you couldn't even install it without disabling Assistant on your phone.

Google's annual I/O event is ostensibly for developers, and many of the attendees, both virtual and physical, will remember when Assistant was core to Google's strategy. Many of them probably spent time working with the Assistant dev tools, but Google will be pitching Gemini even harder this year.

Anyone who's plugged into Google's platform can attest that Gemini has been a long road. Google couldn't wait to make it everyone's assistant, even though it was lacking features compared to Google Assistant. Google has been moving quickly as it tries to catch up to OpenAI, releasing new Gemini models so quickly that it can be hard to keep up. Some of them, like the new experimental version of 2.5 Pro, are beginning to show noticeable vibe improvements. But is Gemini trustworthy enough to manage my calendar or email? Not yet.

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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.

The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). 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.

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. SpaceX likely charged between $100 million and $200 million for the flight. Chun made his fortune as a crypto pioneer, co-founding F2Pool, once the world's largest bitcoin mining company. He named his mission Fram2 in honor of the Norwegian exploration ship Fram used for polar expeditions at the turn of the 20th century.

No one saw Earth's poles from space in the more than 400 human spaceflight missions preceding Fram2. The closest any crew mission has gotten to the poles was the Soviet Union's Vostok 6 mission in 1963, when Valentina Tereshkova's spacecraft reached a latitude of 65.1 degrees.

Something new

Chun didn't want to pay for a mission to repeat the well-trodden path to the International Space Station, or fly in a higher-altitude orbit as SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission did last year with billionaire commander Jared Isaacman and three crewmates. He wanted to try something new.

"Jared spent a lot of effort trying to fly as high as possible because he has a pilot background," Chun said in response to a question from Ars. "But here on this mission, we have a group of polar explorers. We will do this from an explorer's perspective. I don’t want to repeat the same mission profile again and again. I have less interest in flying to ISS because every previous mission flies to the ISS again, again and again."
Chun was inspired by Isaacman's first foray into orbit on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021. That was the first fully commercial human spaceflight to low-Earth orbit without any significant government involvement. Isaacman is President Trump's nominee to become the next NASA administrator.

"So, if we do not challenge Jared, if we do not repeat the previous mission, where else we can go given our current hardware we have in 2025? What Dragon can do is to fly into low-Earth orbit, and there is a big bunch of area in low-Earth orbit that hasn’t been explored."

Chun is a prolific traveler, logging each flight in great detail with his social media posts. Less than an hour before liftoff Monday night, he posted on X: "36th flight of 2025: SpaceX Fram2 from LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, via the South Pole and the North Pole, to Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles or Oceanside. Crew Dragon C207 'Resilience.' This is my 1,000th flight of all time."

The Fram2 mission will last between three-and-a-half and five-and-a-half days, ending with a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California.

Chun takes the role of mission commander for Fram2. Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian filmmaker and cinematographer, is the vehicle commander. During launch, she monitored the progress of the ascent on the Dragon spacecraft's touchscreen displays. The vehicle's pilot is Rabea Rogge, a robotics researcher from Germany. Mission specialist Eric Philips of Australia rounds out the crew. He is a veteran polar explorer and guide who has completed dozens of ski expeditions to the North and South Poles.

All four crew members share an interest in adventure and polar exploration. Mikkelsen lives on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago inside the Arctic Circle. Before going to space, she worked on feature films, David Attenborough nature documentaries, and an immersive 3D concert experience with Queen, among other projects.

Now, she's in command of the Dragon spacecraft as it loops some 267 miles (430 kilometers) over the poles, traveling at nearly 5 miles per second. "I call it the last frontier of unexplored territory in low-Earth orbit," Mikkelsen said.

The firsts of Fram2

Fram2 is breaking new ground in other areas, too. It's the first human spaceflight mission to low-Earth orbit without a trained pilot onboard, and the first crewed spaceflight without an American, Russian, or Chinese astronaut.

Later this week, Fram2 will become SpaceX's first Crew Dragon mission to splash down off the West Coast. SpaceX announced last year it would relocate its fleet of recovery ships from Florida to California, allowing Dragon capsules to return to the Pacific.

This move will resolve concerns about Dragon's unpressurized trunk section reentering the atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner. All Crew Dragon flights to date—Fram2 is SpaceX's 17th crew mission—jettisoned the disposable trunk in orbit before reentry and splashdown off the coast of Florida.

The trunk lacks a propulsion system, so atmospheric drag pulls it out of orbit several weeks or months later. The reentry of the trunk is unpredictable, and a few missions have scattered debris over land. With the switch to the West Coast, SpaceX will keep the trunk attached to the Dragon capsule until just before reentry, when it will cast away the trunk to fall into the remote Pacific Ocean.

Chun and his crewmates hope to view Antarctica and the North Pole through Dragon's windows. With ideal viewing conditions, astronauts on the ISS occasionally capture images showing the edges of Greenland and Antarctica at oblique angles. Satellites flying over the poles routinely observe the poles, but Fram2 will offer Dragon's four-person crew the human experience.

"Fram2 isn’t just about going to space, it’s about pushing boundaries and sharing knowledge," Chun said.

Mikkelsen will use her expertise to shoot immersive, 3D imagery from Dragon. She got an assist on camera settings from NASA astronaut Don Pettit, a master of spaceflight photography who currently resides on the ISS.

"I'm looking forward to being the first human in history to be able to point my camera at the North Pole and South Pole from space," Mikkelsen said. "There will be a lot of specific moments, specifically focusing on the aurora. This is also a mission where people on the ground on planet Earth can attend, and we've reached out to 2.2 million auroral citizen scientists. Anyone can join, where you go outside and if there is aurora where you live, you note where you live, and you register on the SolarMaX mission website, and you will take a photo of the aurora at the same time as we in Fram2 fly over the aurora."

Mikkelsen built mockups of the Dragon spacecraft to practice her shooting method. Now in space, Mikkelsen has a finite time period to complete her photography.

"Being a cinematographer in space is not easy," she said. "It is not like filming on planet Earth, and it's quite comparable to being a cinematographer in the North Pole region, where it is exceptionally hazardous to work. Battery life is extremely hard to maintain when you work in the cold in the polar regions, and we actually have a limit for how much battery power we can safely bring with us in Dragon."

The Fram2 astronauts carry with them 22 experiments from eight countries, primarily addressing physiological and psychological questions like the brain's response to the space environment, astronaut cognition and crew cohesion, and measure the crew's radiation exposure. On balance, a trajectory like Fram2's path over the poles will subject the astronauts to higher radiation levels than the International Space Station.

"These... experiments really deal with two questions, I would say," said Rogge, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. "One is, 'How does the human adapt to extreme environments? In our case, it’s space. But we have a lot of studies that are looking at comparing space to other extreme environments. That could be the polar environments, which we are very familiar with. That could be even COVID as an extreme isolation environment, right? The goal is to learn how we can best operate.

"And the second question really is also about accessibility because right now, I think the stereotype of an astronaut is that you have to be this super-human, medically perfect," Rogge said. "But we should really flip this question and be like, 'OK, how do we design for living and working in space for everyone?"

In this vein, Fram2's crew will test a "portable gym" for exercise inside Dragon. The space station has large exercise devices that won't fit inside the limited volume of Dragon. Fram2 carries a Starlink laser terminal to link up with SpaceX's broadband network and provide high-speed Internet to the crew.

The mission will also grow mushrooms in space for the first time. "They’re not the ones you’re thinking," Philips quipped.

Fram2 is SpaceX's third all-private crew missions, following Isaacman's two commercial flights in 2021 and 2024. Isaacman is an experienced pilot of high-performance aircraft, and in some ways, fits the mold of a professional NASA astronaut.

With Fram2, SpaceX is flying a crew of space enthusiasts and polar explorers who are used to working in extreme environments. But none came to SpaceX with proficiencies in human spaceflight.

"From a crew training perspective, we've really started to refine how do we train four folks that have no traditional background in spaceflight to get ready for a mission," said Jon Edwards, SpaceX's vice president of Falcon and Dragon programs. "We figured out, how do we train these extraordinary individuals to hop in a capsule, get flung at 17,500 miles per hour under 1 million pounds of propellant, and be calm about it."

Being calm about it. From her station in the commander's seat of the Dragon spacecraft named Resilience—Mikkelsen rattled off the standard radio callouts, noting milestones throughout Fram2's climb into space. If all goes according to plan, the entire flight will be automated from liftoff through splashdown.

"Dragon is an autonomous vehicle, and we need to understand how she talks to us," Mikkelsen said before the launch. "Resilience, to me, she is a female, and she is going to have her own personality, and we are learning how to navigate the systems. We are learning how to set her up to best way possible operate autonomously, and we know that we have Mission Control with us at all times."

Chun pitched his idea for a polar orbit mission to SpaceX a few weeks after he traveled to South Texas to witness the first test flight of the company's enormous Starship rocket, intended to be the eventual replacement for Falcon 9 and Dragon. SpaceX announced the Fram2 mission last August, when the crew was already well into training.

SpaceX fitted the Dragon spacecraft with a cupola window, the same one that flew on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, to provide the astronauts more expansive views than they would get through the capsule's smaller porthole windows.

From space, Rogge hopes to spot some of the research stations that dot the frozen landscape of Antarctica. But the crew won't get a clear view of the South Pole itself, the home of a National Science Foundation research station. Fram2 was supposed to launch before the end of last year, when it would have soared over Antarctica when the Sun was highest in the sky and casting long shadows across the icepack.

Now, a couple of weeks after the autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere, the Sun has set on the South Pole until September.

"We're on the dark side of the equinox. We don't really have that opportunity," Philips said. "I did actually apply to the National Science Foundation to see if they could light the station up with everything that they've got, so that we could have the opportunity to see it, but that wasn't granted."

But there are plenty more sights to see. "We're orbiting over the North and South Poles. The Earth is slowly rotating underneath us, (so) we will fly over every part of Earth."

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We're back! A long-time reader and subscriber recently mentioned in the Ars Forums that they "kind of" missed the Daily Telescope posts that I used to write in 2023 and 2024. Although I would have preferred that everyone desperately missed the Daily Telescope, I appreciate the sentiment. I really do.

I initially stopped writing these posts about a year ago because it just became too much to commit to writing one thing every day. I mean, I could have done it. But doing so on the daily crossed over the line from enjoyable to drudgery, and one of the best things about working for Ars is that it tends very much toward the enjoyable side. Anyway, writing one of these posts on a weekly basis feels more sustainable. I guess we'll find out!

Today's image comes to you all the way from Mars. One of the most powerful tools on NASA's Perseverance rover is the WATSON camera attached to the end of the rover's robotic arm. In the fine tradition of tortured acronyms at the space agency, WATSON stands for Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. And because of course it is, WATSON is located on the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument. Seriously, NASA must stand for Not Another Screwball Acronym.

This photograph shows the WATSON camera taking a close-up image of a rock on Mars (here's the rock, by the way). The raw image from NASA was processed by Kevin M. Gill, who runs an exceptional Bluesky account and has a great Flickr page worth checking out. The detail is excellent.

Speaking of Perseverance, the rover has now been operating on the surface of Mars for more than four years. It's a reminder that although things may seem pretty messed up here on Earth, there's some rad stuff going on elsewhere in the Solar System.

Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kevin M. Gill

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection of such stories. March's list includes fascinating papers on such topics as how the brain responds to speaking Klingon (or Dothraki, or Navi), the discovery of creepy preclassic Salvadoran puppets, the effectiveness of "dazzle camouflage," and how male blue-lined octopuses manage not to be cannibalized by their chosen mates.

Wind Cave’s rocks fluoresce under black light

South Dakota's Wind Cave gets its name from the flow of air moving continually through its many passages and equalizing the atmospheric pressure between the air inside and outside—almost like the cave is "breathing." Its rock and mineral formations also boast a unique chemistry that fluoresces when exposed to black light, according to talks presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego. That fluorescence could shed light on how life can thrive in extreme environments, including that of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

University of Northern Iowa astrobiologist Joshua Sebree and several students have been mapping new areas of Wind Cave (as well as other caves in the US), recording the passages, rock formations, minerals, and lifeforms they encounter in the process. They noticed that under UV light, certain parts of Wind Cave took on otherworldly hues, thanks to different concentrations of organic and inorganic fossilized chemical compounds. Those areas seem to indicate where water once flowed, carrying minerals into the cave from the surface 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, according to their analysis of the fluorescent spectra. Sebree et al. found that Wind Cave was likely carved out by waters rich in manganese, producing zebra stripes that glow pink under UV light, revealing the calcites that grew within as a result of those waters.

The physics of swing-top beer bottles

So-called kitchen science is all the rage these days, with champagne, wine, and beer being particularly favorite subjects for experimentation. German physicist Max Koch of the University of Goettingen is as passionate about home brewing as he is about fluid dynamics. So naturally, Koch became fascinated by the distinctive "pop and slosh" sounds produced whenever he opened one of his home-brewed swing-top beer bottles. His experiments used a high-speed camera to capture the acoustics and underlying physics, augmented by audio recording and computer simulations.

Rather than producing a single shockwave, Koch and his co-authors discovered that the unique sound occurs because popping the lid produces a vibrating standing wave, thanks to condensation within the bottleneck, according to a paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids. They were surprised to find that the frequency of the pop was significantly lower than the resonance produced by blowing across the open bottle top, which they attributed to the sudden expansion of the carbon dioxide and a strong cooling effect that reduces sound speed. The sloshing is due to the bottle's motion, and it's possible that the lid hitting the glass after popping could produce more bubbles and hence gushing.

Physics of Fluids, 2025. DOI: 10.1063/5.0248739  (About DOIs).

How effective was WWI “dazzle paint”?

During World War I, ships were often painted with complex geometric shapes in contrasting and intersecting colors, dubbed "dazzle camouflage" and usually attributed to British marine artist Norman Wilkinson. The objective was to confuse enemy U-boat captains trying to determine the speed and direction of those ships, and a 1919 study seemed to support that hypothesis. Aston University researchers have revisited that original study and concluded that the horizon effect—in which ships viewed from a distance seem to be traveling along the horizon—is a more effective means of confusing enemy combatants, according to a paper published in the journal i-Perception.

The author of the 1919 study was an MIT marine engineering student named Leo Blodgett, who painted model ships in those geometric patterns and observed them with a model periscope in a mechanical test theater to see if he could determine whether an observer's perception of the direction of travel was markedly different from the actual direction. He concluded that this was indeed the case and therefore dazzle paint was effective.

But according to the Aston scientists, Blodgett's experiment did not have a solid control condition to warrant such a conclusion. So they revisited his 105-year-old data and ran their own version of Blodgett's experiment, comparing results from his photographs showing the original dazzle camouflage with versions that had the camouflage patterns edited out. The results: the dazzle camouflage did work via a twist on perspective, but it was a small effect. The horizon effect had a much stronger confounding effect.

i-Perception, 2025. DOI: 10.1177/20416695241312316  (About DOIs).

Early Salvadoran clay puppets

Archaeologists excavating the San Isidro pyramid in El Salvador have discovered five carved clay figurines dating back to around 400 BCE that may have been controlled with string like modern marionettes. Such "Bolinas" figures have also been found at a Mayan burial site in Guatemala, suggesting the two areas may have shared culture and civilization, according to a paper published in the journal Antiquity.

Three of the puppets were about a foot tall, with the other two measuring about 18 centimeters. The larger ones had adjustable heads connected to their bodies via matching sockets. The carved faces feature tongues, tattoos, and facial expressions that shift depending on the viewing angle: fearful when viewed from below and grinning from above, for example. The authors suggest that these puppets weren't used as toys, but as "clay actors" in ritualistic funeral performances. "The universal impetus for creating scaled-down humanoid figures appears to be mimetic—that is, imbuing these handheld objects with deeper meanings that are readily decoded by the intended audience," they concluded, although the shared cultural "code" for interpreting those meanings has been lost.

Antiquity, 2025. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.37  (About DOIs).

This is your brain on Esperanto and Klingon

J.R.R. Tolkien invented two Elvish languages (Quenya and Sindarin) when writing The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Star Trek has Klingon, the Avatar films have Na'vi, and Game of Thrones boasts two constructed languages, or conlangs: Dothraki and High Valyrian. There are even hardcore fans who have diligently become proficient in those invented languages. And apparently conlangs activate the same parts of the brain as their native tongues, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

MIT neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko previously spearheaded studies on how the brain responds to stimuli that share certain language features—music, gestures, facial expressions, and computer programming languages like Python. None seemed to engage the language-processing areas of the brain. Curious about what makes natural language unique, Fedorenko et al. turned to conlangs. They organized a weekend conference featuring conlang creators as speakers and invited people fluent in Esperanto, Klingon, Na'vi, Dothraki, and High Valyrian to participate. They scanned 44 conlang speakers with fMRI as they listened to sentences in both their chosen conlang and their native tongue, performing nonlinguistic tasks as a control.

The results: The same language regions lit up regardless of whether they were speaking in their chosen conlang or native natural language. This helped the group determine that language responses appear to be driven in part by how they convey meaning about the interior and exterior world—objects, properties of objects, events, etc. Python, by contrast, is highly symbolic and abstract, disconnected from the everyday "real" world we experience. The group next plans to study how the brain responds to a different conlang called Lojban, created in the 1990s, to learn more about which language features activate the brain's language centers.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2313473122  (About DOIs).

Venom as a protective strategy for male octopuses

Sexual cannibalism—in which a female of the species consumes the male after copulating—is a very real thing in nature, seen in insect species like mantises and spiders, certain crustaceans and gastropods, and even certain species of octopus. Case in point: the blue-lined octopus (Hapalochlaena fasciata), a tiny creature found in shallow waters whose venom can be quite deadly, especially to humans. The females of the species might be the size of golf balls, but they are nonetheless significantly larger than the males and have a tendency to eat their mates.

Fortunately, the males have developed an effective defense strategy, according to a paper published in the journal Current Biology: They inject their chosen females with tetrodotoxin (a venom also produced by pufferfish) just before mating, temporarily paralyzing the females so the males can avoid being eaten. Scientists at the University of Queensland studied the behavior of mating blue-lined octopuses in the lab and noticed that males would bite the females near the aorta as the mating ritual commenced, flooding their systems with the venom.

This immobilized the females for the duration of the mating sessions (which lasted between 40 and 75 minutes); they largely stopped breathing, turned pale, and did not respond to visual stimuli during that time. The males actually increased their respiration rate as they used a specialized mating arm to deposit their sperm into the females' oviducts to fertilize the eggs. The effects of the venom eventually wore off sufficiently for the females to push the males away without suffering any permanent effects. The authors suggest that female blue-lined octopuses may have evolved a tolerance to tetrodotoxin, ensuring they survive to lay their eggs and propagate the species.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.027  (About DOIs).

Rubber hand illusion alleviates pain

One of the many strange things to come out of 21st-century neuroscience is the so-called rubber hand illusion, in which a subject’s hand is hidden and replaced by a rubber hand in the position where the real hand would be. When both the real and fake hands are stroked simultaneously, subjects respond as if the rubber hand were part of their body. Threaten the rubber hand by attempting to stab it with a dagger, for instance, and the participants exhibit an involuntary startle or fear response. It’s the combination of visual and tactile feedback that does it, and it only takes a few seconds for the illusion to kick in. And it's not a purely psychological effect; there have been measurable physiological responses as well.

Scientists in Bochum, Germany, have now shown that the rubber hand illusion can also alleviate pain, according to a paper published in the journal Pain Reports. They recruited 34 right-handed subjects, evaluated their individual pain thresholds, then placed the subjects' left hands behind a screen. A left rubber hand was placed in front of the subjects, which could be lit from below with red light. Then heat was applied at different temperatures to the hidden hand, while red light increased on the visible rubber hand. Subjects were asked to rate their pain in response.

The results: subjects' perception of pain decreased noticeably when the rubber hand illusion was used, compared to control conditions. The authors don't yet know what the underlying mechanism might be but suggest it could be related to visual analgesia, in which pain is considered less intense if someone can see the part of the body that is being hurt.

Pain Reports, 2025. DOI: 10.1097/PR9.0000000000001252  (About DOIs).

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2024 was "a year of growth," according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that's not an entirely good thing.

The company, which offers fire detection and suppression systems based on thermal and optical imaging, smoke analytics, and human verification, releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60 percent increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.

Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.

Lots of things could cause fires in the waste stream, long before lithium-ion batteries became common: "Fireworks, pool chemicals, hot (barbecue) briquettes," writes Ryan Fogelman, CEO of Fire Rover, in an email to Ars. But lithium-ion batteries pose a growing problem, as the number of devices with batteries increases, consumer education and disposal choices remain limited, and batteries remain a very easy-to-miss, troublesome occupant of the waste stream.

All batteries that make it into waste streams are potentially hazardous, as they have so many ways of being set off: puncturing, vibration, overheating, short-circuiting, crushing, internal cell failure, overcharging, or inherent manufacturing flaws, among others. Fire Rover's report notes that the media often portrays batteries as "spontaneously" catching fire. In reality, the very nature of waste handling makes it almost impossible to ensure that no battery will face hazards in handling, the report notes. Tiny batteries can be packed into the most disposable of items—even paper marketing materials handed out at conferences.

Fogelman estimates, based on his experience and some assumptions, that about half of the fires he's tracking originate with batteries. Roughly $2.5 billion of loss to facilities and infrastructure came from fires last year, divided between traditional hazards and batteries, he writes.

Ars previously covered a likely lithium-ion caused fire in a suburban Chicago truck that spread to the truck's compressed natural gas (CNG) tanks, causing an explosion that injured firefighters and damaged nearby homes. Fire Rover also adds a February 2025 fire in a Camden, New Jersey, scrapyard, caused by a battery "wrongly delivered to EMR and undetectably concealed within scrap metal," according to the company, requiring more than 15 fire companies' response and damaging the site and putting nearby residents out of their homes.

The vape effect

Batteries as a whole are a growing concern, but there's a reason Fire Rover's report has an image of an exploding electronic vape pen on its cover, with the superimposed message "We are at war 2024." Fogelman sees a notable shift in publicly reported fire data—not from Fire Rover's own detection, but from news and other reports and sources—from the 2016–2021 period to 2022–2024. Something is causing this shift, and Fogelman's most likely culprit is e-cigarettes, vapes, and other battery-powered nicotine devices.

Vapes are perhaps the most effective single thing the e-waste and recycling industries could target. If everybody knew how to dispose of vapes properly, at sites that can safely handle them, there could be a reduction in risk.

But that safe, evenly distributed vape disposal network does not exist. As previously noted, you can make a rather powerful e-bike from the vapes left behind at a festival in the UK. In the US, the EPA directs people to bring their e-cigarettes to household hazardous waste (HHW) sites or pick-up events, which are "typically" free.

"Not only are their batteries being improperly discarded in waste and recycling bins, but the vape industry has done the bare minimum to invest in the technology needed to address the 1.2 billion vapes entering our waste and recycling streams annually," the report states.

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Oh, ExoMars, what a long, strange trip it has been. Are you ever going to go to space?

The ExoMars mission represents Europe's third attempt to land successfully on Mars, and at a cost of more than $1.3 billion. there is a lot riding on its success. But success is far from assured for a mission that has been whipsawed by geopolitical tensions, budget cuts, and an ever-changing architecture over the last 20 years.

The latest news, announced Sunday, is that Airbus will design and build the lander that will carry the ExoMars down to the surface of Mars. The mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028 on a US rocket. But there have been so many twists and turns in the ExoMars story that it's very difficult to know what will ultimately happen.

Let's go back to the beginning.

Decades in the making

Nearly two decades have passed since the European Space Agency formally committed to funding the ExoMars mission at a ministerial meeting in December 2005. It was to be an international partnership, with an ExoMars launch in 2011 on Russian Soyuz 2-1b rocket. NASA would contribute an exobiology instrument, data relay services from an orbiter around Mars, and technical support for the spacecraft's design.

As Mars discussions between the European Space Agency and NASA deepened in 2008 and 2009, the mission's launch vehicle changed to an Atlas V rocket built by US-based United Launch Alliance. Then, just months later, plans changed again when the European Space Agency partnered with Russia's Roscosmos to launch ExoMars on a Proton rocket.

Four years later, citing budget issues and cost overruns with the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA ended its participation in ExoMars. This was a bitter decision for European space policy officials to swallow, and it pushed them to strengthen ties to Roscosmos. The Russians became major partners, contributing not just a launch vehicle but also providing the critical entry, descent, and landing vehicle that would carry ExoMars down to the surface of Mars.

Then more traditional problems began to hamper the ExoMars mission. Namely, it ran into budgetary and technical problems. A launch date that had already slipped from 2011 to 2018 moved again, to 2020. In the run-up to a launch attempt, testing of the mission's parachutes did not go well. There were successive failures during tests in 2019. By that time, NASA had started to offer some technical help with the parachutes.

More delays

In March 2020, the European Space Agency finally made it official: There would be another delay. The launch of the mission was moving to the next Mars launch window in 2022. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be the final straw in pushing back the launch date.

As the opening of the Mars window neared in 2022, with the mission in a final state of preparations, Russia invaded Ukraine. European officials were understandably uncomfortable proceeding jointly with Russia on the project, and in July, they officially terminated work with Russia. Dmitry Rogozin, then the director of Roscomos, responded with an angry message on this Telegram account, calling ESA chief Josef Aschbacher an "irresponsible bureaucrat."

Russia's war against Ukraine—at least at the time—led to a strengthening of ties between Europe and the United States across a number of fronts, including space. Cooperation on the ExoMars was put back on the table. NASA agreed to contribute a rocket for the mission, an engine for the descent module with adjustable thrust, and radioactive heating units. All in all, it was a rather extraordinary resurrection of the mission by European officials, and it was nice to see NASA helping to save the day.

All of this brings us to this weekend's announcement. The European Space Agency announced that Airbus will design and build the landing platform for the ExoMars mission and its Rosalind Franklin rover. This will include the landing structure, the large propulsion system used in the final braking thrust, and the gear to stabilize the lander once on the surface.

"Getting the Rosalind Franklin rover onto the surface of Mars is a huge international challenge and the culmination of more than 20 years’ work," said Kata Escott, managing director at Airbus Defence and Space UK, as part of the new announcement.

What happens next?

But will this be the final word?

Airbus is building at least the third iteration of a lander for ExoMars, and delays are undoubtedly possible ahead of a launch. Two previous European landing attempts, Beagle 2 in 2003 and Schiaparelli in 2016, ultimately failed. There will be a lot of effort to make sure this one works. The 2028 Mars launch window opens in December of that year and runs into early 2029.

Then there are the international partnerships, which have treated the ExoMars program so badly.

The Trump administration is poised to push NASA's exploration program to focus on Mars, and that will likely entail sending SpaceX Starships to the red planet with increasing frequency. SpaceX is aiming for the 2026 launch window for Mars and certainly will be targeting one or more Starships for late 2028. Will NASA, citing redundancy with Starship missions, pull the plug on ExoMars again?

With ExoMars, the only certainty is to expect the unexpected.

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The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday. 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, punctuating the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular fiery crash into the sea.

If officials at Isar Aerospace were able to pick the outcome of their first test flight, it wouldn't be this. However, the result has precedent. The first launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket in 2006 ended in similar fashion.

"Today, we know twice as much about our launch system as yesterday before launch," Daniel Metzler, Isar's co-founder and CEO, wrote on X early Monday. "Can't beat flight testing. Ploughing through lots of data now."

Isar Aerospace, based in Germany, is the first in a crop of new European rocket companies to attempt an orbital launch. If all went according to plan, Isar's Spectrum rocket would have arced to the north from Andøya Spaceport in Norway and reached a polar orbit.

But officials knew there was only a low chance of reaching orbit on the first flight. For this reason, Isar did not fly any customer payloads on the Spectrum rocket, designed to deliver up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload mass to low-Earth orbit.

Duck and cover

The launch began with liftoff from Andøya Spaceport at 12:30 pm local time (6:30 am EDT, or 10:30 UTC). The rocket's nine engines, burning a mix of liquid propane and liquid oxygen, throttled up to generate more than 150,000 pounds (675 kilonewtons) of thrust as Spectrum began a vertical climb from the launch pad.

The first visual sign of trouble appeared about 15 seconds later as the 92-foot-tall (28-meter) rocket started to wobble on its axis. The exhaust plume from Spectrum's main engines also appeared to oscillate, suggesting that the rocket's steering system was trying to keep it on track.

After a brief struggle, the rocket lost control and somersaulted, the engines shut down, and the vehicle fell into the sea about 40 seconds after launch. With its propellant tanks nearly full, the rocket's impact created a brilliant fireball and mushroom cloud over the craggy snow-covered landscape of Andøya, which means "island of the ducks" in Norwegian.

There were no injuries, and Isar said its seaside launch pad was intact following the accident. This was the first orbital launch attempt from a launch pad in Western Europe.

A livestream of the test flight provided by Isar and its media partner, NASASpaceflight.com, showed the Spectrum rocket as it lifted off and lost control but cut away before impact. The livestream ended a few moments later.

Within a few hours, Isar and NASASpaceflight released several replays of the launch, including a drone view that captured the entirety of Spectrum's 40-second flight. This showed a degree of transparency other launch companies should emulate.

You can watch a replay of the live launch webcast in the YouTube stream embedded here.

"Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success," Metzler said in a press release. "We demonstrated that we can not only design and build but also launch rockets. I could not be prouder of our entire team for working so hard over the past seven years to reach this important milestone."

Metzler founded Isar Aerospace in 2018 with two classmates at Technical University of Munich. 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 (about $430 million at today's exchange rates) of fundraising, primarily from venture capital sources.

The European Space Agency, the German government, and the NATO Innovation Fund have also invested in Isar Aerospace. ESA and other institutions want to foster Europe's nascent private launch industry to offer an alternative to Arianespace, the continent's sole operational launch provider, which operates the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets developed with billions of euros of government funding.

Last week, ESA released a solicitation to industry for the European Launcher Challenge, the agency's first competition to award commercial service contracts to European launch companies. This is a step toward jump-starting Europe's commercial launch industry, similar to the way NASA was the anchor customer for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft some 15 years ago. Isar Aerospace is one of the top contenders in the competition.

In a post-flight press briefing, Isar officials said the company is building the second and third Spectrum rockets at its factory near Munich but didn't offer a timeline for when it might launch again. The launch site apparently escaped significant damage, which should help expedite Isar's recovery.

"Today, we laid the foundation to cater to the rising global demand for flexible satellite launch services. Now it’s time to analyze all data, learn, iterate, and be back on the launch pad as soon as possible," he said.

Success or failure?

Isar declared the launch a success in its public statements, but was it?

As Metzler said Monday, Isar's engineers are chewing on oodles of data. With just 30 seconds of powered flight, the company has more information about the performance of its rocket than any other European launch provider, apart from Arianespace.

And first flights are risky. By one common measure, around half of the inaugural flights of new orbital-class rockets end prematurely, before they reach orbital velocity. The recent success rate of debut flights of privately developed rockets is even lower.

That's why Isar didn't put a customer's satellite onboard the first Spectrum rocket. The "payload" on Sunday's launch was the data. It would have been more difficult to characterize the outcome of Sunday's flight in a favorable light if the rocket had come crashing down directly on its launch pad. A rebuild of the launch site would have set Isar back by months or years.

Officials from ESA offered words of support after Isar's first launch.

"A test flight is exactly that: a test to gather data, learn and improve," said Josef Aschbacher, ESA's director general, in a statement. "Everything Isar Aerospace achieved today is remarkable, and they will have lots of data to analyze. I applaud the teams for getting this far and I am confident that we will see the next Spectrum on the launch pad ready for test flight 2 liftoff soon."

Robert Habeck, Germany's vice chancellor and economy minister, said Europe's "unhindered access to space is strategically crucial."

"With the first launch of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket, Germany has impressively demonstrated that it is an important location for the development of innovative space technologies," Habeck wrote on LinkedIn. "The first flight provided important data and experience for the rocket's next flight... Isar Aerospace can and will make a decisive contribution to securing Europe's independent access to space!"

The Spectrum rocket is the largest launch vehicle primarily built in Germany, supplanting the V-2 missile from World War II.

In the last few months, European government officials have emphasized their desire to break free of relying on other countries for defense and space technology. Europe was a longtime customer for Russia's Soyuz rocket, but the partnership ended in 2022 with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Delays in the debut of the Ariane 6 rocket and failures with the smaller Vega rocket forced European governments to sign contracts with SpaceX to launch several scientific and security-related satellites.

Metzler, Isar's chief executive, was asked last year what he would consider a successful inaugural flight of Spectrum.

"For me, the first flight will be a success if we don’t blow up the launch site," he said at the Handelsblatt innovation conference. "That would probably be the thing that would set us back the most in terms of technology and time."

This tempering of expectations sounds remarkably similar to statements made by Elon Musk about SpaceX's first flight of the Starship rocket in 2023.

By this measure, Isar officials can be content with Sunday's result. The company is modeling its test strategy on SpaceX's iterative development cycle, where engineers test early, make fixes, and fly again. This is in stark contrast to the way Europe has traditionally developed rockets. The alternative to Isar's approach could be to "spend 15 years researching, doing simulations, and then getting it right the first time," Metzler said.

With the first launch of Spectrum, Isar has tested the rocket. Now, it's time to make fixes and fly again. That, Isar's leaders argue, will be the real measure of success.

"We’re super happy," Metzler said in a press call after Sunday's flight. "It’s a time for people to be proud of, and for Europe, frankly, also to be proud of."

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The Rosalind Franklin rover is a key component in the ExoMars programme from ESA. The rover will be tasked with exploring the Martian surface to look for signs of ancient life, such as fossilized microbes. It will help unlock unknown answers around climate shifts and extraterrestrial life and has a unique component: a 2-metre drill that can dig below the surface in its search.

Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock DBE said:

"The British-built Rosalind Franklin rover will give us vital insight into the history of Mars. This type of information from other planets can give us a better understanding of our own place in space and our planetary evolution.

 

With its unique design that enables it to acquire samples at depth of up to 2 metres, we may get answers to some of the fundamental questions we ask about Mars. Drilling to this depth allows us to look for life away from the hostile Martian surface where radiation is likely to kill life as we know it.

 

Samples gathered by the Rosalind Franklin rover may help us answer the age old question “Are we alone in the Universe?"

Aside from the scientific benefits, this contract will create around 200 high-skilled jobs in the space sector and attract international investment that will contribute to the economic growth of the UK. The technology itself, once developed, will also be useful for tasks on Earth, including in nuclear power plants and the deep ocean.

The ExoMars mission originally included Russia’s Roscosmos as a partner. It was originally going to design a lander for the rover called ‘Little Cossack’. Unfortunately, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ESA decided to pause the programme to find a new party to develop the lander; this is now Airbus UK’s job.

To date, there is no definitive evidence that life exists or ever existed on Mars. Hopefully, by sending the Rosalind Franklin rover there, we can finally get some answers to this long-standing question.

Source: UK Government

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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected the largest organic (carbon-containing) molecules ever found on the red planet. The discovery is one of the most significant findings in the search for evidence of past life on Mars. This is because, on Earth at least, relatively complex, long-chain carbon molecules are involved in biology. These molecules could actually be fragments of fatty acids, which are found in, for example, the membranes surrounding biological cells.

Scientists think that, if life ever emerged on Mars, it was probably microbial in nature. Because microbes are so small, it’s difficult to be definitive about any potential evidence for life found on Mars. Such evidence needs more powerful scientific instruments that are too large to be put on a rover.

The organic molecules found by Curiosity consist of carbon atoms linked in long chains, with other elements bonded to them, like hydrogen and oxygen. They come from a 3.7-billion-year-old rock dubbed Cumberland, encountered by the rover at a presumed dried-up lakebed in Mars’s Gale Crater. Scientists used the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument on the NASA rover to make their discovery.

Scientists were actually looking for evidence of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins and therefore key components of life as we know it. But this unexpected finding is almost as exciting. The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Among the molecules were decane, which has 10 carbon atoms and 22 hydrogen atoms, and dodecane, with 12 carbons and 26 hydrogen atoms. These are known as alkanes, which fall under the umbrella of the chemical compounds known as hydrocarbons.

It’s an exciting time in the search for life on Mars. In March this year, scientists presented evidence of features in a different rock sampled elsewhere on Mars by the Perseverance rover. These features, dubbed “leopard spots” and “poppy seeds,” could have been produced by the action of microbial life in the distant past, or not. The findings were presented at a US conference and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The Mars Sample Return mission, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, offers hope that samples of rock collected and stored by Perseverance could be brought to Earth for study in laboratories. The powerful instruments available in terrestrial labs could finally confirm whether or not there is clear evidence for past life on Mars. However, in 2023, an independent review board criticised increases in Mars Sample Return’s budget. This prompted the agencies to rethink how the mission could be carried out. They are currently studying two revised options.

Signs of life?

Cumberland was found in a region of Gale Crater called Yellowknife Bay. This area contains rock formations that look suspiciously like those formed when sediment builds up at the bottom of a lake. One of Curiosity’s scientific goals is to examine the prospect that past conditions on Mars would have been suitable for the development of life, so an ancient lakebed is the perfect place to look for them.

The researchers think that the alkane molecules may once have been components of more complex fatty acid molecules. On Earth, fatty acids are components of fats and oils. They are produced through biological activity in processes that help form cell membranes, for example. The suggested presence of fatty acids in this rock sample has been around for several years, but the new paper details the full evidence.

Fatty acids are long, linear hydrocarbon molecules with a carboxyl group (COOH) at one end and a methyl group (CH3) at the other, forming a chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms.

A fat molecule consists of two main components: glycerol and fatty acids. Glycerol is an alcohol molecule with three carbon atoms, five hydrogens, and three hydroxyl (chemically bonded oxygen and hydrogen, OH) groups. Fatty acids may have 4-36 carbon atoms; however, most of them have 12-18. The longest carbon chains found in Cumberland are 12 atoms long.

Organic molecules preserved in ancient Martian rocks provide a critical record of the past habitability of Mars and could be chemical biosignatures (signs that life was once there).

The sample from Cumberland has been analyzed by the Sam instrument many times, using different experimental techniques, and has shown evidence of clay minerals, as well as the first (smaller and simpler) organic molecules found on Mars, back in 2015. These included several classes of chlorinated and sulphur-containing organic compounds in Gale crater sedimentary rocks, with chemical structures of up to six carbon atoms. The new discovery doubles the number of carbon atoms found in a single molecule on Mars.

The alkane molecules are significant in the search for biosignatures on Mars, but how they actually formed remains unclear. They could also be derived through geological or other chemical mechanisms that do not involve fatty acids or life. These are known as abiotic sources. However, the fact that they exist intact today in samples that have been exposed to a harsh environment for many millions of years gives astrobiologists (scientists who study the possibility of life beyond Earth) hope that evidence of ancient life might still be detectable today.

It is possible the sample contains even longer chain organic molecules. It may also contain more complex molecules that are indicative of life, rather than geological processes. Unfortunately, Sam is not capable of detecting those, so the next step is to deliver Martian rock and soil to more capable laboratories on the Earth. Mars Sample Return would do this with the samples already gathered by the Perseverance Mars rover. All that’s needed now is the budget.

Derek Ward-Thompson, Professor of Astrophysics, University of Central Lancashire, and Megan Argo, Senior Lecturer in Astronomy, University of Central Lancashire. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Imagine working with special cameras that capture light your eyes can't even see—ultraviolet rays that cause sunburn, infrared heat signatures that reveal hidden writing, or specific wavelengths that plants use for photosynthesis. Or perhaps using a special camera designed to distinguish the subtle visible differences that make paint colors appear just right under specific lighting. Scientists and engineers do this every day, and they're drowning in the resulting data.

A new compression format called Spectral JPEG XL might finally solve this growing problem in scientific visualization and computer graphics. Researchers Alban Fichet and Christoph Peters of Intel Corporation detailed the format in a recent paper published in the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT). It tackles a serious bottleneck for industries working with these specialized images. These spectral files can contain 30, 100, or more data points per pixel, causing file sizes to balloon into multi-gigabyte territory—making them unwieldy to store and analyze.

When we think of digital images, we typically imagine files that store just three colors: red, green, and blue (RGB). This works well for everyday photos, but capturing the true color and behavior of light requires much more detail. Spectral images aim for this higher fidelity by recording light's intensity not just in broad RGB categories, but across dozens or even hundreds of narrow, specific wavelength bands. This detailed information primarily spans the visible spectrum and often extends into near-infrared and near-ultraviolet regions crucial for simulating how materials interact with light accurately.

Unlike standard RGB images with their three channels, these files store information across numerous channels, each representing the intensity of light within a very specific, narrow band of wavelengths. The paper discusses working with spectral images containing 31 distinct channels and even shows examples with as many as 81 spectral bands.

These channels often need to capture a much wider range of brightness values than typical photos. To handle this, spectral images frequently use high-precision formats like 16-bit or 32-bit floating-point numbers for each channel, enabling High Dynamic Range (HDR) data capture. This is a far cry from standard 8-bit images and is key for accurately representing things like the intense brightness of light sources alongside darker scene elements.

Exploring a world beyond RGB

Why would anyone need this level of wavelength detail in an image? There are many reasons. Car manufacturers want to predict exactly how paint will look under different lighting. Scientists use spectral imaging to identify materials by their unique light signatures. And rendering specialists need it to accurately simulate real-world optical effects like dispersion (rainbows from prisms, for example) and fluorescence.

For instance, past Ars Technica coverage has highlighted how astronomers analyzed spectral emission lines from a gamma-ray burst to identify chemicals in the explosion, how physicists reconstructed original colors in pioneering 19th century photographs, and how multispectral imaging revealed hidden, centuries-old text and annotations on medieval manuscripts like the Voynich Manuscript, sometimes even uncovering the identities of past readers or scribes through faint surface etchings.

The current standard format for storing this kind of data, OpenEXR, wasn't designed with these massive spectral requirements in mind. Even with built-in lossless compression methods like ZIP, the files remain unwieldy for practical work as these methods struggle with the large number of spectral channels.

Spectral JPEG XL utilizes a technique used with human-visible images, a math trick called a discrete cosine transform (DCT), to make these massive files smaller. Instead of storing the exact light intensity at every single wavelength (which creates huge files), it transforms this information into a different form.

Think of it like this: When you look at a rainbow's color transition, you don't need to record every possible wavelength to understand what you see. The DCT works by converting these smooth wavelength patterns into a set of wave-like patterns (frequency coefficients) that, when added together, re-create the original spectral information.

It's similar to how MP3 works for music—rather than storing every tiny vibration in a sound wave, MP3 keeps the important frequency patterns that our ears can detect and discards the rest. Here, Spectral JPEG XL keeps the important patterns that define how light interacts with materials and compresses the less critical details.

Importantly, it then applies a weighting step, dividing higher-frequency spectral coefficients by the overall brightness (the DC component), allowing less important data to be compressed more aggressively. That is then fed into the codec, and rather than inventing a completely new file type, the method uses the compression engine and features of the standardized JPEG XL image format to store the specially prepared spectral data.

Making spectral images easier to work with

According to the researchers, the massive file sizes of spectral images have reportedly been a real barrier to adoption in industries that would benefit from their accuracy. Smaller files mean faster transfer times, reduced storage costs, and the ability to work with these images more interactively without specialized hardware.

The results reported by the researchers seem impressive—with their technique, spectral image files shrink by 10 to 60 times compared to standard OpenEXR lossless compression, bringing them down to sizes comparable to regular high-quality photos. They also preserve key OpenEXR features like metadata and high dynamic range support.

While some information is sacrificed in the compression process—making this a "lossy" format—the researchers designed it to discard the least noticeable details first, focusing compression artifacts in the less important high-frequency spectral details to preserve important visual information.

Of course, there are some limitations. Translating these research results into widespread practical use hinges on the continued development and refinement of the software tools that handle JPEG XL encoding and decoding. Like many cutting-edge formats, the initial software implementations may need further development to fully unlock every feature. It's a work in progress.

And while Spectral JPEG XL dramatically reduces file sizes, its lossy approach may pose drawbacks for some scientific applications. Some researchers working with spectral data might readily accept the trade-off for the practical benefits of smaller files and faster processing. Others handling particularly sensitive measurements might need to seek alternative methods of storage.

For now, the new technique remains primarily of interest to specialized fields like scientific visualization and high-end rendering. However, as industries from automotive design to medical imaging continue generating larger spectral datasets, compression techniques like this could help make those massive files more practical to work with.

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More than half a year after an empty Starliner spacecraft safely landed in a New Mexico desert, NASA and Boeing still have not decided whether the vehicle's next flight will carry any astronauts.

In an update this week, the US space agency said it is still working through the process to certify Starliner for human missions. Whether it carries cargo or humans, Starliner's next flight will not occur until late this year or, more likely, sometime in 2026.

Two things stand out in the new information provided by NASA. First, there remains a lot of work left to do this year before Starliner will fly again, including extensive testing of the vehicle's propulsion system. And secondly, it is becoming clear that Starliner will only ever fly a handful of missions to the space station, if that, before the orbiting laboratory is retired.

Long line of tests

Several issues marred Starliner's first crew flight to the space station last June, but the most serious of these was the failure of multiple maneuvering thrusters. Concerns about these thrusters prompted NASA to fly Starliner's crew, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, home on a Crew Dragon vehicle instead. They safely landed earlier this month.

Starliner returned autonomously in early September. Since then, NASA and Boeing have been reviewing data from the test flight. (Unfortunately, the errant thrusters were located on the service module of the spacecraft, which is jettisoned before reentry and was not recovered.)

Although engineers from NASA and Boeing have worked through more than 70 percent of the observations and anomalies that occurred during Starliner's flight, the propulsion system issues remain unresolved.

To address these issues, NASA said it is finalizing a test campaign that will take place this spring and summer. "Testing at White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico will include integrated firing of key Starliner thrusters within a single service module doghouse to validate detailed thermal models and inform potential propulsion and spacecraft thermal protection system upgrades, as well as operational solutions for future flights," the agency said in its update this week.

As far as those potential solutions go, one option is the installation of thermal barriers to better control temperatures and prevent overheating observed during Starliner's last two spaceflights. Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said the agency will have a better idea of when Starliner will fly again after these tests and analyses are complete.

"We’ll continue to work through certification toward the end of this year and then go figure out where Starliner fits best in the schedule for the International Space Station and its crew and cargo missions," Stich said. "It is likely to be in the timeframe of late this calendar year or early next year for the next Starliner flight."

Cargo or crew?

NASA has not determined whether such a mission will carry cargo or crew. The agency's update said that it will depend on the operational needs of the station. However, it seems clear that if there are still some unresolved questions about the propulsion system issues, NASA may opt for what would essentially be another test flight of Starliner that also brings cargo to the space station.

A cargo flight would, effectively, be the fourth test flight of Starliner, dating back to its first mission in December 2019.

NASA's update this week did answer one question that had been hanging over the Starliner program. Although Boeing has taken losses in excess of $2 billion on its fixed-price contract with NASA, the company now appears committed to seeing the certification process through. NASA likely has applied pressure for Boeing's ongoing participation as the space agency desires to have two crew transportation providers to the space station.

Yet time is running out for Boeing to make a considerable impact on crew flights to the International Space Station, which is due to be retired in 2030. Assuming an operational crew flight in 2026—which seems far from a certainty—Starliner would likely fly four, or at the very most five, crewed missions to the space station. The initial contracts that NASA signed with SpaceX and Boeing for crew transportation services more than a decade ago had options for as many as six crew rotation flights to the station after certification.

To date, NASA has only given Boeing "Authority To Proceed" for three of its six potential operational Starliner missions. This milestone is a decision point in contracting lingo where the customer—in this case, NASA—places a firm order for a deliverable. NASA has extended SpaceX's commercial crew contract to cover as many as 14 Dragon missions with astronauts.

SpaceX, in fact, has now launched 10 operational crew missions to the station. On Thursday, NASA announced the crew for SpaceX's 11th mission, Crew-11, which will launch no earlier than July. Among the astronauts were two people previously assigned to Starliner's first operational mission, NASA's Mike Fincke and Japanese Mission Specialist Kimiya Yui.

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NASA and Boeing are preparing the Starliner for its next flight after technical issues left the spacecraft unable to ferry its astronauts back to Earth for months. On Thursday, NASA announced that it’s working with Boeing to “resolve Starliner’s in-flight anomalies” before a crewed flight that could take place later this year or in early 2026.

The Boeing Starliner took off successfully for the first time last June, bringing Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station for what was supposed to be about a week. However, issues with the Starliner’s thruster, valve, and helium systems led NASA to bring the Starliner back to Earth in September, while Williams and Wilmore returned aboard SpaceX’s Crew-9 earlier this month.

NASA and Boeing have been analyzing postflight data since Starliner’s return, saying they will continue investigating the “major in-flight propulsion system anomalies.” They plan to test the “firing of key Starliner thrusters” and will also continue testing a new helium system seal.

“Once we get through these planned test campaigns, we will have a better idea of when we can go fly the next Boeing flight,” Steve Stich, the manager at NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a statement.

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Welcome to Edition 7.37 of the Rocket Report! It's been interesting to watch how quickly European officials have embraced ensuring they have a space launch capability independent of other countries. A few years ago, European government satellites regularly launched on Russian Soyuz rockets, and more recently on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets from the United States. Russia is now non grata in European government circles, and the Trump administration is widening the trans-Atlantic rift. European leaders have cited the Trump administration and its close association with Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, as prime reasons to support sovereign access to space, a capability currently offered only by Arianespace. If European nations can reform how they treat their commercial space companies, there's enough ambition, know-how, and money in Europe to foster a competitive launch industry.

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

Isar Aerospace aims for weekend launch. A German startup named Isar Aerospace will try to launch its first rocket Saturday, aiming to become the first in a wave of new European launch companies to reach orbit, Ars reports. The Spectrum rocket consists of two stages, stands about 92 feet (28 meters) tall, and can haul payloads up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) into low-Earth orbit. Based in Munich, Isar was founded by three university graduate students in 2018. Isar scrubbed a launch attempt Monday due to unfavorable winds at the launch site in Norway.

From the Arctic ... Notably, this will be the first orbital launch attempt from a launch pad in Western Europe. The French-run Guiana Space Center in South America is the primary spaceport for European rockets. Virgin Orbit staged an airborne launch attempt from an airport in the United Kingdom in 2023, and the Plesetsk Cosmodrome is located in European Russia. The launch site for Isar is named Andøya Spaceport, located about 650 miles (1,050 kilometers) north of Oslo, inside the Arctic Circle. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A chance for competition in Europe. The European Space Agency is inviting proposals to inject competition into the European launch market, an important step toward fostering a dynamic multiplayer industry officials hope one day will mimic that of the United States, Ars reports. The near-term plan for the European Launcher Challenge is for ESA to select companies for service contracts to transport ESA and other European government payloads to orbit from 2026 through 2030. A second component of the challenge is for companies to perform at least one demonstration of an upgraded launch vehicle by 2028. The competition is open to any European company working in the launch business.

Challenging the status quo ... This is a major change from how ESA has historically procured launch services. Arianespace has been the only European launch provider available to ESA and other European institutions for more than 40 years. But there are private companies across Europe at various stages of developing their own small launchers, and potentially larger rockets, in the years ahead. With the European Launcher Challenge, ESA will provide each of the winners up to 169 million euros ($182 million), a significant cash infusion that officials hope will shepherd Europe's nascent private launch industry toward liftoff. Companies like Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, MaiaSpace, and PLD Space are among the contenders for ESA contracts.

Rocket Lab launches eight satellites. Rocket Lab launched eight satellites Wednesday for a German company that is expanding its constellation to detect and track wildfires, Space News reports. An Electron rocket lifted off from New Zealand and completed deploying its payload of eight CubeSats for OroraTech about 55 minutes later, placing them into Sun-synchronous orbits at an altitude of about 341 miles (550 kilometers). This was Rocket Lab's fifth launch of the year, and the third in less than two weeks.

Fire goggles ... OroraTech launched three satellites before this mission, fusing data from those satellites and government missions to detect and track wildfires. The new satellites are designed to fill a gap in coverage in the afternoon, a peak time for wildfire formation and spread. OroraTech plans to launch eight more satellites later this year. Wildfire monitoring from space is becoming a new application for satellite technology. Last month, OroraTech partnered with Spire for a contract to build a CubeSat constellation called WildFireSat for the Canadian Space Agency. Google is backing FireSat, another constellation of more than 50 satellites to be deployed in the coming years to detect and track wildfires. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Should Britain have a sovereign launch capability? A UK House of Lords special inquiry committee has heard from industry experts on the importance of fostering a sovereign launch capability, European Spaceflight reports. On Monday, witnesses from the UK space industry testified that the nation shouldn't rely on others, particularly the United States, to put satellites into orbit. "The idea that we will be able to do it through America… certainly in today’s, you know, the last 50 days, I think is very, very doubtful. The UK needs access to space," said Scott Hammond, deputy CEO of SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland.

Looking inward ... A representative from one of the most promising UK launch startups agreed. “Most people who are looking to launch are beholden to the United States solutions or services that are there,” said Alan Thompson, head of government affairs at Skyrora. “Without having our own home-based or UK-based service provider, we risk not having that voice and not being able to undertake all these experiments or be able to manifest ourselves better in space." The UK is the only nation to abandon an independent launch capability after putting a satellite into orbit. The British government canceled the Black Arrow rocket in the early 1970s, citing financial reasons. A handful of companies, including Skyrora, is working to restore the orbital launch business to the UK.

This rocket engine CEO faces some salacious allegations. The Independent published what it described as an exclusive report Monday describing a lawsuit filed against the CEO of RocketStar, a New York-based company that says its mission is "improving upon the engines that power us to the stars." Christopher Craddock is accused of plundering investor funds to underwrite pricey jaunts to Europe, jewelry for his wife, child support payments, and, according to the company’s largest investor, "airline tickets for international call girls to join him for clandestine weekends in Miami," The Independent reports. Craddock established RocketStar in 2014 after financial regulators barred him from working on Wall Street over a raft of alleged violations.

Go big or go home ... The $6 million lawsuit filed by former CEO Michael Mojtahedi alleges RocketStar “is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme… [that] has been predicated on Craddock’s ability to con new people each time the company has run out of money." On its website, RocketStar says its work focuses on aerospike rocket engines and a "FireStar Fusion Drive, the world's first electric propulsion device enhanced with nuclear fusion." These are tantalizing technologies that have proven elusive for other rocket companies. RocketStar's attorney told The Independent: “The company denies the allegations and looks forward to vindicating itself in court."

Another record for SpaceX. Last Thursday, SpaceX launched a batch of clandestine SpaceX-built surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Spaceflight Now reports. This was the latest in a series of flights populating the NRO's constellation of low-Earth orbit reconnaissance satellites. What was unique about this mission was its use of a Falcon 9 first stage booster that flew to space just nine days prior with a NASA astronomy satellite. The successful launch broke the record for the shortest span between flights of the same Falcon 9 booster, besting a 13.5-day turnaround in November 2024.

A mind-boggling number of launches ... This flight also marked the 450th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket since its debut in 2010, and the 139th within a 365-day period, despite suffering its first mission failure in nearly 10 years and a handful of other glitches. SpaceX's launch pace is unprecedented in the history of the space industry. No one else is even close. In the last Rocket Report I authored, I wrote that SpaceX's steamroller no longer seems to be rolling downhill. That may be the case as the growth in the Falcon 9 launch cadence has slowed, but it's hard for me to see anyone else matching SpaceX's launch rate until at least the 2030s.

Rocket Lab and Stoke Space find an on-ramp. Space Systems Command announced Thursday that it selected Rocket Lab and Stoke Space to join the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. The contracts have a maximum value of $5.6 billion, and the Space Force will dole out "task orders" for individual missions as they near launch. Rocket Lab and Stoke Space join SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin as eligible launch providers for lower-priority national security satellites, a segment of missions known as Phase 3 Lane 1 in the parlance of the Space Force. For these missions, the Space Force won't require certification of the rockets, as the military does for higher-value missions in the so-called "Lane 2" segment. However, Rocket Lab and Stoke Space must complete at least one successful flight of their new Neutron and Nova rockets before they are cleared to launch national security payloads.

Stoked at Stoke ... This is a big win for Rocket Lab and Stoke. For Rocket Lab, it bolsters the business case for the medium-class Neutron rocket it is developing for flights from Wallops Island, Virginia. Neutron will be partially reusable with a recoverable first stage. But Rocket Lab already has a proven track record with its smaller Electron launch vehicle. Stoke hasn't launched anything, and it has lofty ambitions for a fully reusable two-stage rocket called Nova. This is a huge vote of confidence in Stoke. When the Space Force released its invitation for an on-ramp to the NSSL program last year, it said bidders must show a "credible plan for a first launch by December 2025." Smart money is that neither company will launch its rockets by the end of this year, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Falcon 9 deploys spy satellite. Monday afternoon, a SpaceX Falcon 9 took flight from Florida's Space Coast and delivered a national security payload designed, built, and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office into orbit, Florida Today reports. Like almost all NRO missions, details about the payload are classified. The mission codename was NROL-69, and the launch came three-and-a-half days after SpaceX launched another NRO mission from California. While we have some idea of what SpaceX launched from California last week, the payload for the NROL-69 mission is a mystery.

Space sleuthing ... There's an online community of dedicated skywatchers who regularly track satellites as they sail overhead around dawn and dusk. The US government doesn't publish the exact orbital parameters for its classified spy satellites (they used to), but civilian trackers coordinate with one another, and through a series of observations, they can produce a pretty good estimate of a spacecraft's orbit. Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness, is one of the best at this, using publicly available information about the flight path of a launch to estimate when the satellite will fly overhead. He and three other observers in Europe managed to locate the NROL-69 payload just two days after the launch, plotting the object in an orbit between 700 and 1,500 kilometers at an inclination of 64.1 degrees to the equator. Analysts speculated this mission might carry a pair of naval surveillance spacecraft, but this orbit doesn't match up well with any known constellations of NRO satellites.

NASA continues with Artemis II preps. Late Saturday night, technicians at Kennedy Space Center in Florida moved the core stage for NASA's second Space Launch System rocket into position between the vehicle's two solid-fueled boosters, Ars reports. Working inside the iconic 52-story-tall Vehicle Assembly Building, ground teams used heavy-duty cranes to first lift the butterscotch orange core stage from its cradle, then rotate it to a vertical orientation and lift it into a high bay, where it was lowered into position on a mobile launch platform. The 212-foot-tall (65-meter) core stage is the largest single hardware element for the Artemis II mission, which will send a team of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth as soon as next year.

Looking like a go ... With this milestone, the slow march toward launch continues. A few months ago, some well-informed people in the space community thought there was a real possibility the Trump administration could quickly cancel NASA's Space Launch System, the high-priced heavy-lifter designed to send astronauts from the Earth to the Moon. The most immediate possibility involved terminating the SLS program before it flies with Artemis II. This possibility appears to have been overcome by circumstances. The rockets most often mentioned as stand-ins for the Space Launch System—SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn—aren't likely to be cleared for crew missions for at least several years. The long-term future of the Space Launch System remains in doubt.

Space Force says Vulcan is good to go. The US Space Force on Wednesday announced that it has certified United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to conduct national security missions, Ars reports. "Assured access to space is a core function of the Space Force and a critical element of national security," said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space, in a news release. "Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems." The formal announcement closes a yearslong process that has seen multiple delays in the development of the Vulcan rocket, as well as two anomalies in recent years that were a further setback to certification.

Multiple options ... This certification allows ULA's Vulcan to launch the military's most sensitive national security missions, a separate lot from those Rocket Lab and Stoke Space are now eligible for (as we report in a separate Rocket Report entry). It elevates Vulcan to launch these missions alongside SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Vulcan will not be the next rocket that the company launches, however. First up is one of the company's remaining Atlas V boosters, carrying Project Kuiper broadband satellites for Amazon. This launch could occur in April, although ULA has not set a date. This will be followed by the first Vulcan national security launch, which the Space Force says could occur during the coming "summer."

Next three launches

March 29: Spectrum | "Going Full Spectrum" | Andøya Spaceport, Norway | 11:30 UTC

March 29: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 16:05 UTC

March 30: Alpha | LM-400 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13:37 UTC

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The first ever fatal crash involving a fully driverless vehicle occurred in San Francisco on January 19. The driverless vehicle belonged to Waymo, but the crash was not Waymo’s fault.

Here’s what happened: A Waymo with no driver or passengers stopped for a red light. Another car stopped behind the Waymo. Then, according to Waymo, a human-driven SUV rear-ended the other vehicles at high speed, causing a six-car pileup that killed one person and injured five others. Someone’s dog also died in the crash.

Another major Waymo crash occurred in October in San Francisco. Once again, a driverless Waymo was stopped for a red light. According to Waymo, a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction crossed the double yellow line and crashed into an SUV that was stopped to the Waymo’s left. The force of the impact shoved the SUV into the Waymo. One person was seriously injured.

These two incidents produced worse injuries than any other Waymo crash in the last nine months. But in other respects, they were typical Waymo crashes. Most Waymo crashes involve a Waymo vehicle scrupulously following the rules while a human driver flouts them, speeding, running red lights, careening out of their lanes, and so forth.

Waymo’s service will only grow in the coming months and years. So Waymo will inevitably be involved in more crashes—including some crashes that cause serious injuries and even death.

But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.

Federal regulations require Waymo to report all significant crashes, whether or not the Waymo vehicle was at fault—indeed, whether or not the Waymo is even moving at the time of the crash. I’ve spent the last few days poring over Waymo’s crash reports from the last nine months. Let’s dig in.

Examining Waymo’s safety record since July

Last September, I analyzed Waymo crashes through June 2024. So this section will focus on crashes between July 2024 and February 2025. During that period, Waymo reported 38 crashes that were serious enough to either cause an (alleged) injury or an airbag deployment.

In my view, only one of these crashes was clearly Waymo’s fault. Waymo may have been responsible for three other crashes—there wasn’t enough information to say for certain. The remaining 34 crashes seemed to be mostly or entirely the fault of others:

• The two serious crashes I mentioned at the start of this article are among 16 crashes where another vehicle crashed into a stationary Waymo (or caused a multi-car pileup involving a stationary Waymo). This included 10 rear-end crashes, three side-swipe crashes, and three crashes where a vehicle coming from the opposite direction crossed the center line.
• Another eight crashes involved another car (or in one case a bicycle) rear-ending a moving Waymo.
• A further five crashes involved another vehicle veering into a Waymo’s right of way. This included a car running a red light, a scooter running a red light, and a car running a stop sign.
• Three crashes occurred while Waymo was dropping a passenger off. The passenger opened the door and hit a passing car or bicycle. Waymo has a “Safe Exit” program to alert passengers and prevent this kind of crash, but it’s not foolproof.

There were two incidents where it seems like no crash happened at all:

• In one incident, Waymo says that its vehicle “slowed and moved slightly to the left within its lane, preparing to change lanes due to a stopped truck ahead.” This apparently spooked an SUV driver in the next lane, who jerked the wheel to the left and ran into the opposite curb. Waymo says its vehicle never left its lane or made contact with the SUV.
• In another incident, a pedestrian walked in front of a stopped Waymo. The Waymo began moving after the pedestrian had passed, but then the pedestrian “turned around and approached the Waymo AV.” According to Waymo, the pedestrian “may have made contact with the driver side of the Waymo AV” and “later claimed to have a minor injury.” Waymo’s report stops just short of calling this pedestrian a liar.

So that’s a total of 34 crashes. I don’t want to make categorical statements about these crashes because in most cases, I only have Waymo’s side of the story. But it doesn’t seem like Waymo was at fault in any of them.

There was one crash where Waymo clearly seemed to be at fault: In December, a Waymo in Los Angeles ran into a plastic crate, pushing it into the path of a scooter in the next lane. The scooterist hit the crate and fell down. Waymo doesn’t know whether the person riding the scooter was injured.

I had trouble judging the final three crashes, all of which involved another vehicle making an unprotected left turn across a Waymo’s lane of travel. In two of these cases, Waymo says its vehicle slammed on the brakes but couldn’t stop in time to avoid a crash. In the third case, the other vehicle hit the Waymo from the side. Waymo’s summaries make it sound like the other car was at fault in all three cases, but I don’t feel like I have enough information to make a definite judgment.

Even if we assume all three of these crashes were Waymo’s fault, that would still mean that a large majority of the 38 serious crashes were not Waymo’s fault. And as we’ll see, Waymo vehicles are involved in many fewer serious crashes than human-driven vehicles.

Waymos get in fewer crashes than human drivers

Another way to evaluate the safety of Waymo vehicles is by comparing their per-mile crash rate to human drivers. Waymo has been regularly publishing data about this over the last couple of years. Its most recent release came last week, when Waymo updated its safety data hub to cover crashes through the end of 2024.

Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.

Using human crash data, Waymo estimated that human drivers on the same roads would get into 78 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag. By comparison, Waymo’s driverless vehicles only got into 13 airbag crashes. That represents an 83 percent reduction in airbag crashes relative to typical human drivers.

This is slightly worse than last September, when Waymo estimated an 84 percent reduction in airbag crashes over Waymo’s first 21 million miles.

Over the same 44 million miles, Waymo estimates that human drivers would get into 190 crashes serious enough to cause an injury. Instead, Waymo only got in 36 injury-causing crashes across San Francisco or Phoenix. That’s an 81 percent reduction in injury-causing crashes.

This is a significant improvement over last September, when Waymo estimated its cars had 73 percent fewer injury-causing crashes over its first 21 million driverless miles.

Insurance claims against Waymo are about 90 percent lower

The above analysis counts all crashes, whether or not Waymo’s technology was at fault. Things look even better for Waymo if we focus on crashes where Waymo was determined to be responsible for a crash.

To assess this, Waymo co-authored a study in December with the insurance giant Swiss Re. It focused on crashes that led to successful insurance claims against Waymo. This data seems particularly credible because third parties, not Waymo, decide when a crash is serious enough to file an insurance claim. And claims adjusters, not Waymo, decide whether to hold Waymo responsible for a crash.

But one downside is that it takes a few months for insurance claims to be filed. So the December report focused on crashes that occurred through July 2024.

Waymo had completed 25 million driverless miles by July 2024. And by the end of November 2024, Waymo had faced only two potentially successful claims for bodily injury. Both claims are pending, which means they could still be resolved in Waymo’s favor.

One of them was this crash that I described at the beginning of my September article about Waymo’s safety record:

On a Friday evening last November, police chased a silver sedan across the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The fleeing vehicle entered San Francisco and went careening through the city’s crowded streets. At the intersection of 11th and Folsom streets, it sideswiped the fronts of two other vehicles, veered onto a sidewalk, and hit two pedestrians.

 

According to a local news story, both pedestrians were taken to the hospital, with one suffering major injuries. The driver of the silver sedan was injured, as was a passenger in one of the other vehicles. No one was injured in the third car, a driverless Waymo robotaxi.

It seems unlikely that an insurance adjuster will ultimately hold Waymo responsible for these injuries.

The other pending injury claim doesn’t seem like a slam dunk, either. In that case, another vehicle steered into a bike lane before crashing into a Waymo as it was making a left turn.

But let’s assume that both crashes are judged to be Waymo’s fault. That would still be a strong overall safety record.

Based on insurance industry records, Waymo and Swiss Re estimate that human drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix would generate about 26 successful bodily injury claims over 25 million miles of driving. So even if both of the pending claims against Waymo succeed, two injuries represent a more than 90 percent reduction in successful injury claims relative to typical human drivers.

The reduction in property damage claims is almost as dramatic. Waymo’s vehicles generated nine successful or pending property damage claims over its first 25 million miles. Waymo and Swiss Re estimate that human drivers in the same geographic areas would have generated 78 property damage claims. So Waymo generated 88 percent fewer property damage claims than typical human drivers.

Timothy B. Lee was on staff at Ars Technica from 2017 to 2021. Today he writes Understanding AI, a newsletter that explores how AI works and how it's changing our world. You can subscribe here.

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Three weeks ago, NASA revealed that a shipping container protecting a Cygnus spacecraft sustained "damage" while traveling to the launch site in Florida.

Built by Northrop Grumman, Cygnus is one of two Western spacecraft currently capable of delivering food, water, experiments, and other supplies to the International Space Station. This particular Cygnus mission, NG-22, had been scheduled for June. As part of its statement in early March, the space agency said it was evaluating the NG-22 Cygnus cargo supply mission along with Northrop.

On Wednesday, after a query from Ars Technica, the space agency acknowledged that the Cygnus spacecraft designated for NG-22 is too damaged to fly, at least in the near term.

Loading up Dragon

"Following initial evaluation, there also is damage to the cargo module," the agency said in a statement. "The International Space Station Program will continue working with Northrop Grumman to assess whether the Cygnus cargo module is able to safely fly to the space station on a future flight." That future flight, NG-23, will launch no earlier than this fall.

As a result, NASA is modifying the cargo on its next cargo flight to the space station, the 32nd SpaceX Cargo Dragon mission, due to launch in April. The agency says it will "add more consumable supplies and food to help ensure sufficient reserves of supplies aboard the station" to the Dragon vehicle.

As it mulls stopgap measures, one option available to NASA may be to try to slot in a cargo mission on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. After the propulsion issues experienced on Starliner's first crew flight to the space station last June, NASA is still evaluating whether the vehicle can be certified for an operational crew mission, or whether it would be better to perform an uncrewed test flight.

In such a scenario, Starliner could ferry cargo to the space station. However, Starliner would be competing with SpaceX crew missions for docking ports, and there would be limited time frames when the vehicle could fly.

Limited options amid development delays

NASA also has Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spacecraft on its internal schedule for a May launch this year. This is a new vehicle intended to carry cargo to the space station under the agency's Commercial Cargo program. However, that spacecraft is not yet ready for its debut flight, nor is there a Vulcan rocket available within the next several months to launch it. A Dream Chaser mission later this year remains possible, if unlikely.

All of the roads for cargo supply, therefore, lead back to Dragon. As a result of Dream Chaser's delays, Starliner's problems, and the dropped Cygnus, NASA is now almost entirely reliant on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to get its astronauts to the space station and to feed them.

Crew Dragon remains the only vehicle certified by NASA for human flights to the station. On the cargo side, Northrop Grumman is developing a new rocket with Firefly, but in the meantime, has been using the Falcon 9 to launch Cygnus. With Cygnus now sidelined for at least half a year, every non-Russian vehicle flying to the space station will be built by SpaceX.

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An eruption of measles is spreading quickly in Kansas, with cases doubling in a week and spreading to three new counties, some with vaccination coverage among kindergartners at pitiful levels as low as 41 percent. Coverage of 95 percent or greater is thought to protect communities from onward spread of the extremely contagious virus.

In an update Wednesday, March 26, Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) reported 23 measles cases across six counties—up from 10 cases across three counties on March 21. The 23 people ill with the dangerous virus are mostly children, including six who are 0 to 4 years old, nine who are 5 to 10, three who are 11 to 13, three who are 14 to 17, and two adults between the ages of 25 and 44. Fortunately, none of the cases have been hospitalized so far, and there have been no deaths.

Twenty of the 23 cases were unvaccinated. One case was "not age appropriately vaccinated," one was "age appropriately vaccinated," and the remaining case's vaccination status is pending.

Children should get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6, prior to starting kindergarten. Two doses are 97 percent effective against measles, offering lifelong protection.

The cases now span the counties of Grant, Gray, Haskell, Kiowa, Morton, and Stevens, all in the southwest corner of the state. Many of the counties have areas with extremely low vaccination rates. Haskell, which has reported 4 of the 23 cases, has two school districts, both with low vaccination coverage: Satanta with only 85 percent of kindergartners being up to date on their MMR vaccines in the 2023–2024 school year, and Sublette with just 41 percent. Likewise, Gray County includes school districts Cimarron-Ensign with 63 percent and Ingalls with 60 percent. Two other districts in the county had unreported vaccination rates.

The cases in Kansas are likely part of the mushrooming outbreak that began in West Texas in late January. On March 13, Kansas reported a single measles case, the first the state had seen since 2018. The nine cases reported last week had ties to that original case.

Spreading infections and misinformation

On Wednesday, KDHE Communications Director Jill Bronaugh told Ars Technica over email that the department has found a genetic link between the first Kansas case and the cases in West Texas, which has similarly spread swiftly in under-vaccinated communities and also spilled over to New Mexico and Oklahoma.

"While genetic sequencing of the first Kansas case reported is consistent with an epidemiological link to the Texas and New Mexico outbreaks, the source of exposure is still unknown," Bronaugh told Ars.

Bronaugh added that KDHE, along with local health departments, is continuing to work to track down people who may have been exposed to measles in affected counties.

In Texas, meanwhile, the latest outbreak count has hit 327 across 15 counties, mostly children and almost entirely unvaccinated. Forty cases have been hospitalized, and one death has been reported—a 6-year-old unvaccinated girl who had no underlying health conditions.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that as measles continues to spread, parents have continued to eschew vaccines and instead embraced "alternative" treatments, including vitamin A, which has been touted by anti-vaccine advocate and current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Vitamin A accumulates in the body and can be toxic with large doses or extended use. Texas doctors told the Times that they've now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who had been given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.

"I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks," one doctor told the Times.

In New Mexico, cases are up to 43, with two hospitalizations and one death in an unvaccinated adult who did not seek medical care. In Oklahoma, officials have identified nine cases, with no hospitalizations or deaths so far.

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The US Space Force on Wednesday announced that it has certified United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to conduct national security missions.

"Assured access to space is a core function of the Space Force and a critical element of national security," said Brig. Gen. Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space, in a news release. "Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems."

The formal announcement closes a yearslong process that has seen multiple delays in the development of the Vulcan rocket, as well as two anomalies in recent years that were a further setback to certification.

The first of these, an explosion on a test stand in northern Alabama during the spring of 2023, delayed the first test flight of Vulcan by several months. Then, in October 2024, during the second test flight of the rocket, a nozzle on one of the Vulcan's two side-mounted boosters failed.

A cumbersome process

This nozzle issue, more than five months ago, compounded the extensive paperwork needed to certify Vulcan for the US Department of Defense's most sensitive missions. The military has several options for companies to certify their rockets depending on the number of flights completed, which could be two, three, or more. The fewer the flights, the more paperwork and review that must be done. For Vulcan, this process entailed:

• 52 certification criteria
• more than 180 discrete tasks
• 2 certification flight demonstrations
• 60 payload interface requirement verifications
• 18 subsystem design and test reviews
• 114 hardware and software audits

That sounds like a lot of work, but at least the military's rules and regulations are straightforward and simple to navigate, right? Anyway, the certification process is complete, elevating United Launch Alliance to fly national security missions alongside SpaceX with its fleet of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

As for the booster anomaly issue, United Launch Alliance chief Tory Bruno recently explained that it was due to a manufacturing defect. "We have isolated the root cause and made appropriate corrective actions," he said, which were confirmed in a static-fire test of a motor at a Northrop test site in Utah in February. "So we are back continuing to fabricate hardware and, at least initially, screening for what that root cause was."

Atlas up next

Vulcan will not be the next rocket that the company launches, however. First up is one of the company's remaining Atlas 5 boosters, carrying Project Kuiper broadband satellites for Amazon. This launch could occur in April, although United Launch has not set a date. This will be followed by the first two Vulcan national security launches, USSF-106 and USSF-87. According to the Space Force, the first of these could occur during the coming "summer."

Now that United Launch Alliance has completed the certification process, the next step is accelerating the launch cadence of the vehicle. Before this year, Bruno said the company aimed to launch two dozen rockets in 2025 (a mix of Atlases and Vulcans), but has since reduced that estimate to about a dozen. Even this number seems aspirational should Vulcan not fly its initial mission before this summer.

Last year, a senior Air Force official expressed concern about the ability of United Launch Alliance to scale up its manufacturing capabilities and reach a high cadence of launches. Bruno and other company officials have said that it would be doable after the certification process is complete. Now, we're about to find out.

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Generative AI has revolutionized how humans view everything in the world, including work. Aside from the security and privacy concerns riddling its rapid progression, job security continues to be a pain in the neck for most professionals.

Multiple reports suggest that coding has a high affinity to be automated by AI. Even Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates claims AI will eventually replace humans for most things. However, he predicts three professions are seemingly in the clear and away from AI's chopping block, including biologists, coders, and energy experts.

As AI becomes more advanced, especially with the recent emergence of reasoning models, can we really believe it will eventually gain consciousness?

As it stands, AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy claims there's a 99.999999% probability the technology will end humanity.

However, Nobel Prize winner and theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose indicates that AI will not become conscious. The British professor based his claims on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

I'm not a conceptual mathematician, so I turned to Microsoft Copilot for aid. According to Copilot:

"Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is a groundbreaking idea in mathematics and logic. Here's a simple way to think about it:

“Where is everybody!?”

It was around 1950. UFO mania had recently ramped up across the world, with dozens of reported sightings of strange flying machines fueling rampant speculation regarding their origins.

The eminent physicist Enrico Fermi was visiting his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that summer, and the mealtime conversation turned to the subject of UFOs. Very quickly, the assembled physicists realized that if UFOs were alien machines, that meant it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light. Otherwise, those alien craft would have never made it here.

At first, Fermi boisterously participated in the conversation, offering his usual keen insights. But soon, he fell silent, withdrawing into his own ruminations. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but Fermi stayed quiet.

Sometime later, long after the group had largely forgotten about the issue of UFOs, Fermi sat up and blurted out: “But where is everybody!?”

Every scientist at that table immediately knew what he meant.

That central question—where is everybody?—is now known as the Fermi Paradox in his honor. And while he wasn't the first person to wonder about the nature of other intelligent civilizations, he was the first to give the idea a modern spin.

The paradox arises from a seemingly innocent line of rational thinking that leads to an incorrect conclusion. It goes like this. We’re not special. We live on just another rocky planet around a ho-hum star in an unspectacular arm of an average spiral galaxy. There’s nothing incredibly unique or exotic about our physical circumstances.

And here we are. Alive. Intelligent. (Almost) spacefaring.

Nature tends not to do things just once. If we’re here and on the cusp of exploding into space, and there are hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, trillions of galaxies in the Universe, and billions of years to play around with, the Universe should be teeming with alien civilizations. We should see evidence for them everywhere we look, the same way we see any other common process played out again and again in the cosmos.

And yet we’ve got nothing. No artificial signals in our radio receivers. No mega-engineering projects reshaping other solar systems. No artifacts embedded in our planet or any others. As far as we can tell, we are alone. To the limits of our observations, we are the only living creatures, the only intelligent civilization, to inhabit the cosmos.

So what gives? Something must be wrong with the chain of reasoning. Even though every step sounds sane and reasonable, it leads to a conclusion that flies in the face of the evidence. Hence, a paradox.

Doomsaying with Robin

Decades later, the economist Robin Hanson was mulling over Fermi’s paradox and came to an uncomfortable conclusion. Maybe we’re alone because essentially nobody ever makes it. Maybe there’s some unavoidable barrier between the origin of intelligent life and said life setting off to explore the galaxy.

The position of this Great Filter, as he named it, is critically important as we contemplate the future of humanity. If the Filter is behind us, in our past, then we are one of the few lucky ones to survive in an otherwise lonely universe. If it’s in front of us, in our future, then we likely do not have much time left as a species (at least, a spacefaring one).

The key point of the Great Filter argument is that Fermi’s Paradox is not really a paradox. Instead, there is a false assumption baked into the chain of reasoning. The assumption is that because life is probably common, intelligent, spacefaring life is also common. Take that assumption away and Fermi’s argument breaks down, resolving the paradox. But how do we square the claim that intelligent life is rare with the solid argument that there’s nothing special happening here on Earth?

It comes down to a game of numbers. Intelligent life doesn’t have to be outright impossible. In fact, it can’t be—we’re here, and we’ve already begun taking our first steps into space. It just has to be so deeply rare that we shouldn’t expect to see any evidence for it elsewhere, despite decades of searching. So the game is to start with the plausible assumption of abundant life, then find a way to whittle that down to as close to zero as we can get it.

Hanson pointed out that life requires many steps to reach spacefaring status—especially the kind of spacefaring status that would get you noticed by nascent astronomers across the Universe. First off, life needs a place to call home. As far as we know, that means a rocky world with lots of liquid water, a decent atmosphere, and a stable star.

Second, life has to… well, become alive. There’s some secret sauce that turns an odd collection of prebiotic compounds and molecules into self-reproducing structures that undergo Darwinian evolution.

Once established, life has to go through a series of steps where it increases in complexity. On the Earth, this progression likely started with simple reproductive molecules like RNA. Life then figured out how to encapsulate itself as single-celled microbes. It figured out sex and exploded into a variety of multicellular forms. Some billions of years later, some of that multicellular life figured out how to be reasonably smart and start using tools to manipulate and control its environment. In our case, the birds figured it out first, but then the primates took it to another level.

Those smart, tool-using creatures then conceived of machines to take them into the edge of space. The last step is for that space-faring species to really go for it, sending themselves or their robotic emissaries far and wide, colonizing every available corner of the galaxy, and if they are sufficiently motivated, the Universe. Or, if they’re not quite in the mood for galactic colonization, then at least making some other signs of their presence, like blasting out galaxy-wide radio transmissions, modifying every star they come across, or engaging in a fair bit of mega-engineering.

For the Great Filter to work, one or more of these steps must be incredibly hard. It could be just one step, a cataclysmic cliff that species have an impossible time getting around. Or it could be a series of Lesser Filters that, taken together, create a labyrinth of steps that species can’t escape. No matter what, though, getting to the galactic stage has to be hard. So hard that any wannabe starfarers get snuffed out in the cradle.

So where is the Filter? Is it early on, with the development of life itself? Is it somewhere in the middle, on the long march to intelligence? Is it at the end, when going from simple orbital jaunts leads to lengthy interstellar excursions?

Considering that our own species is right at the very edge, at the last stage before galactic explosion, the question of the Great Filter takes on an existential edge. Have we already gotten through it safely, or are we counting down to the ending of our species?

Waltzing with microbes

To decide on the location of the Great Filter (or collection of Lesser Filters), we don’t have a lot of evidence to go on. Just us, our evolutionary heritage, and our meager astronomical observations. But even those slim lines can give us some insights.

We know from observations that the basic ingredients of life are ridiculously common. The Universe is perfectly capable of producing oxygen, carbon, and water in great abundance and then combining them into basic biochemicals. And as we continue to expand our catalog of exoplanets, we’re beginning to learn that potentially life-bearing worlds are a dime a dozen. Heck, even our nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri, plays host to a small terrestrial world in its habitable zone.

So when it comes to the very first step on the list of potential roadblocks, we can probably cross that off the list. Homes for life, if not life itself, are very popular.

But what about the magic of abiogenesis? We only have one known example of this happening in the entire Universe, but there is something interesting about the timing. Life on Earth appeared pretty much as soon as it could, right after (astronomically speaking) the crust cooled and the oceans formed. So we can reasonably argue that once the conditions are right, life starts to do its thing.

The next series of steps, going from basic life that has just figured out how to reproduce to complex life that can launch itself into space, is a different story. Again, going from our one single example of life on Earth, we see that it took a really, really long time for that to happen.

In fact, humanity probably represents the Earth’s last shot. In just a few hundred million years, the Sun will grow too hot. Our oceans will boil, and we will turn into another Venus. So while life got started in Earth’s first chapter, intelligent life didn’t appear until its last.

So maybe that’s it. That’s the Great Filter: achieving intelligence. In that case, woohoo! We made it! Pop the champagne. We’re one of the extremely rare, lucky species that survived the Filter, and we have nothing but the stars in our future.

Flirting with disaster

Or not. We really don’t know. We only have evidence for life on one planet. If we ever see signs of microbes in the dust of Mars or buried under the ice sheets of the outer moons, that might be a hopeful sign that we’ve made it through—that life is common but intelligence is not.

But the Great Filter may not be done with us yet. For the foreseeable future, humanity lives balanced on the edge of a knife. To go and spread among the stars, we must develop the technology to acquire, store, and harness vast amounts of energy. But that same technological need carries with it existential risk; the same harnessed energies that can propel our species to the stars can grind us into the dust.

Already, we are haunted by the specters of nuclear warfare and uncontrollable climate change. It might be that neither would kill us completely (hopefully), but they would definitely put a long-term damper on our space ambitions.

The more we expand and establish ourselves on other worlds, the safer we’ll be, simply because of the numbers. At some stage, we’ll reach a tipping point, where the long-term survival of our species is all but guaranteed. The loss of a planet would be a tragedy, but it wouldn't be the end of our entire civilization. The path to getting there, however, is a treacherous one we’ll have to tread carefully.

Surviving with ourselves

But “everybody is going to die” isn’t necessarily the end result of the Great Filter, even if it does lie in our future. We see no evidence for any intelligent civilizations in the Universe. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. One possible resolution to Fermi’s Paradox is that aliens really are out there, but they're invisible to us.

Maybe the Universe could be teeming with advanced aliens who just… prefer to stay home. Maybe our current phase of accelerated technological growth is just that: a phase. It doesn’t necessarily end with a galaxy-spanning civilization. Not every culture on Earth, either throughout history or even right now, values constant expansion, consumption, exploration, and innovation. Maybe we’ll touch the edge of space and decide that our home planet is just fine, thank you very much. In that case, we shouldn’t expect to see evidence for aliens, because stay-at-homers don’t really make themselves noticeable.

Maybe colonizing space is exceptionally difficult, far more difficult than we could possibly imagine. It seems that the speed of light really is the ultimate limit, and no bit of clever physics can ever get around it. Other stars are painfully far away, and the energies needed to travel to them in any meaningful way are beyond even our wildest reckoning. We could work to advance our technologies for thousands of years and still barely make our presence known in the wider galactic scene.

In fact, the filter might simply be detection. A super-advanced civilization could persist for millions of years and spread to a bubble a hundred light-years across… and we may not have the technology to find it.

There are, of course, arguments that we should still see evidence for aliens somewhere. All it takes is one hyper-expansionist species to litter the whole galaxy with their technological detritus. Ultimately, given the current lack of evidence in any direction, the resolution to Fermi’s Paradox, and our response to the argument of the Great Filter, is one of personal preference.

If you think humanity is headed on a dark path, then you’re probably inclined to believe that the Filter is in our (near) future. If you think we have a shot at redemption and harmony, then you might think the Filter is safely behind us. If you look up at the night sky and don’t want to be alone in the Universe, you likely believe there’s some other resolution to Fermi’s famous question.

But no matter what, as we continue to scan the silent heavens above us, we are forced to ask the same question again and again. Where is everybody?

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Extropic is not a normal startup. But then, these are hardly normal times.

The company is developing a radical new kind of computer chip that harnesses the thermodynamic fluctuations that naturally occur within electronic circuits—and which are normally a headache for engineers—using them to perform highly efficient calculations with probabilities.

This chip might well find some takers as AI giants search for ever more computer power to build AI models that perform artificial reasoning, and as we all worry about AI’s incredible energy demands.

Extropic has now shared more details of its probabilistic hardware with WIRED, as well as results that show it is on track to build something that could indeed offer an alternative to conventional silicon in many datacenters. The company aims to deliver a chip that is three to four orders of magnitude more efficient than today’s hardware, a feat that would make a sizable dent in future emissions.

I wrote about Extropic’s strange backstory for WIRED’s special issue on the Frontiers of Computing. My piece explores the remarkable technological, political, and cultural currents that led to the company’s founding. But it’s well worth taking a closer look at Extropic’s technology.

A technical document provided to me by Extropic includes a signal from an oscilloscope (an instrument that measures electronic voltage over time) showing a probabilistic bit or p-bit in action. A conventional computer bit is fixed as either a one or a zero. A p-bit has a certain probability of being in either state and the oscilloscope image shows a p-bit flipping between 1 and 0. The crucial thing is that Extropic can control the probability that the bit will be in either state at any point in time. And by engineering interactions between several such p-bits it is possible to perform more complex probabilistic computations.

“This signal on the oscilloscope may seem simple at first glance, but it demonstrates a key building block for our platform, representing the birth of the world’s first scalable, mass-manufacturable, and energy-efficient probabilistic computing platform,” says Guillaume Verdon, CEO of Extropic and the man behind the wildly popular, provocative, and sometimes controversial online persona Based Beff Jezos.

One of Extropic’s innovations is a way of controlling thermodynamic effects in conventional silicon to perform calculations without extreme cooling. Efforts to compute thermodynamically have traditionally relied on superconducting electronic circuits, but Verdon and his cofounder, Trevor McCourt, are using fluctuations of electric charge in regular silicon instead.

Extropic says its hardware is perfect for running Monte Carlo simulations, a class of computation that involves sampling probabilities that is widely used in areas like finance, biology, and AI. These computations are important for building reasoning models like OpenAI o3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking from Google.

“The reality is that the most computationally-hungry workloads are Monte Carlo simulations,” Verdon says. “We are not just interested in AI, but also applications in simulations of stochastic systems in high-performance computing at large.”

Extropic’s founders concede that the idea of taking on Nvidia and other chipmakers might seem, on the face of it, absolutely insane. Nvidia’s chips are still the best for training AI, and switching to a completely alien architecture would be costly and time consuming.

But we are at a unique moment when AI companies need so much computer power for AI that they are building datacenters next to nuclear power stations, when nation states are set to spend wild amounts on AI, and when the technology’s environmental impact is only getting worse. Perhaps, given all this, it is more nuts not to try to reinvent how computers work.

Do you think Extropic has a chance to challenge Nvidia’s chip dominance? Share your thoughts by emailing hello@wired.com or in the comments section below.

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In recent years, the US military has made much of a concept known as tactically responsive launch. This essentially means that if there is some rapidly developing threat in space—say an adversary takes out a key national defense satellite—the military would like the capability to rapidly fuel a satellite on Earth, mate it to a rocket, and launch it into space.

The US Space Force first demonstrated this tactically responsive capability with a launch on Firefly's Alpha rocket in 2023. As part of this "Victus Nox" test flight, a satellite was encapsulated into a payload fairing and mated to the rocket and completed all final launch preparations within 27 hours.

But what if there were an even faster way to respond? That's the vision behind a new, $60 million federal award to a new space company named Gravitics for a concept called an orbital carrier.

"In many ways it's kind of like what an aircraft carrier does," said Jon Goff, director of advanced concepts for the Seattle-based company.

Shielding satellites

In interviews about the concept with Ars, company officials were fairly vague about specific details of what orbital carriers will be able to do. A news release published on Wednesday morning, highlighting the Strategic Funding Increase, or STRATFI grant from the United States Space Force, also lacks specifics. The Space Force would prefer to keep the vehicle's operational capabilities under wraps.

But in general, the idea is to provide an unpressurized module in which one or more satellites can be pre-positioned in orbit.

Such a module would isolate the satellites from the space environment, sparing their batteries and sensitive electronics from harsh thermal cycles every 90 minutes, and provide some shielding from radiation. In addition, the orbital carrier would obfuscate the satellites inside from observation by other nations or hostile actors in space. Then, when a satellite is needed, it can be deployed into multiple orbits by the carrier.

A demonstration mission is possible as early as 2026, although Gravitics and the Space Force have shared no specific timeline.

Habitats for humans, too

Gravitics was founded in 2021 to build large structures in space for habitation or other purposes, and its name reflects a long-term desire to provide artificial gravity.

The company's initial product is a module with a 4-meter diameter that can provide power and pressurized volume. It is already working with Axiom Space to support its operations and could work with other space station companies. With the new federal award, the company is now moving into national defense applications as well.

"The vision is space superiority," said Colin Doughan, chief executive officer of Gravitics. "We think that vision is very compatible with both a Department of Defense product line as well as a commercial one. Orbital carriers, in their broadest sense, are really based off of the same vehicle. One is in an unpressurized state to be able to provide these mobility capabilities to the DOD, and one is in a pressurized state to be able to provide logistics services, station expansion options, power supplementation for station operations."

Gravitics is also doing preliminary work on a larger module 7.6 meters in diameter, known as "StarMax." This has included pressure testing. A single StarMax module would have a pressurized volume of 400 cubic meters, which is about 40 percent the size of the entire International Space Station.

Such a vehicle would, in theory, be large enough to deploy TIE Fighters. That's a joke—we think.

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In the early 1920s, a trio of scientists sat down for a break at Rothamsted agricultural research station in Hertfordshire, UK. One of them, a statistician by the name of Ronald Fisher, poured a cup of tea, then offered it to his colleague Muriel Bristol, an algae specialist who would later have the plant C. muriella named after her. Bristol refused, as she liked to put the milk in before the tea. Fisher was skeptical. Surely it didn’t matter? Yes, she said, it did. A cup with milk poured first tasted better.

“Let’s test her,” chipped in the third scientist, who also happened to be Bristol’s fiancé. That raised the question of how to assess her tasting abilities. They would need to make sure she was given both types of tea, so she could make a fair comparison. They settled on pouring several cups, some tea-then-milk and others milk-then-tea, then getting her to try them one at a time. But there were still a couple of problems. Bristol might try to anticipate the sequence they’d chosen, which meant cups needed to arrive in a genuinely random order. And even if the ordering was random, she might get a few correct by chance. So there would need to be enough cups to ensure this was sufficiently unlikely.

Fisher realized that if they gave her six cups—three with milk first and three with milk second—there were 20 different ways they could be randomly ordered. Therefore, if she simply guessed, one in 20 times she’d get all six correct. What about using eight cups instead? In this situation, Fisher calculated there were 70 possible combinations, meaning there was a one in 70—or 1.4 percent—probability she’d get the sequence right by sheer luck. This was the experiment they decided to run with Bristol. They poured eight cups, four of each type, and got her to test them in a random order. She named the four she preferred, and the four she disliked, then they compared her conclusions with the true pattern. She’d got all eight correct.

The reason for Bristol’s success was ultimately down to chemistry. In 2008, the Royal Society of Chemistry reported that tea-then-milk will give the milk a more burnt flavour. “If milk is poured into hot tea, individual drops separate from the bulk of the milk and come into contact with the high temperatures of the tea for enough time for significant denaturation to occur,” they noted. “This is much less likely to happen if hot water is added to the milk.”

Fisher later described the tea-tasting experiment in a 1935 book titled simply The Design of Experiments. Among other things, the book summarized the crucial techniques they’d pioneered in that Rothamsted tea room. One was the importance of randomization; it wouldn’t have been a rigorous test of Bristol’s ability if the ordering of the cups was somehow predictable. Another was how to arrive at a scientific conclusion. Fisher’s basic statistical recipe was simple: start with an initial theory—he called it the “null hypothesis”—then test it against data. In the Rothamsted tea room, Fisher’s null hypothesis had been that Bristol couldn’t tell the difference between tea-then-milk and milk-then-tea. Her success in the resulting experiment showed Fisher had good reason to discard his null hypothesis.

But what if she’d only got seven out of eight correct? Or six, or five? Would that mean the null hypothesis was correct and she couldn’t tell the difference at all? According to Fisher, the answer was no. “It should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation,” he later wrote. “Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.” If Bristol had got one or two wrong, it didn’t necessarily mean she had zero ability to distinguish milk order. It just meant the experiment hadn’t provided strong enough evidence to reject Fisher’s initial view that it made no difference.

If Fisher wanted experiments to challenge null hypotheses, he needed to decide where to set the line. Statistical findings have traditionally been deemed “significant” if the probability of obtaining a result that extreme by chance (i.e. the p-value) is less than 5 percent. But why did a p-value of 5 percent become such a popular threshold?

It came down to a combination of copyright and convenience. In a 1908 paper, the statistician William Sealy Gosset had investigated how randomness in data could influence data analysis, with the paper containing pages of statistical tables on the influence of randomness. Fisher was keen to draw upon this research, but was cautious about lifting the copyrighted tables directly. So instead he reframed them, and found that a suitable p-value for determining statistical significance suggested by the work—of around 4.6 percent—lined up neatly with some calculations he had already been doing. It was easy to round it up to 5 percent.

When Muriel Bristol picked those cups, there was a 1.4 percent chance she would get that many correct. In Fisher’s eyes, this provided “significant” evidence that his null hypothesis was wrong. As he would later put it, a p-value below 5 percent meant “either an exceptionally rare chance has occurred or the theory is not true.”

The statistical comparison used in that tea-room experiment would become known as “Fisher’s exact test,” but not everyone was convinced Fisher had got his approach exactly right. In his experiments, Fisher was interested in testing whether the null hypothesis was wrong, not in deciding which hypothesis was correct. Suppose Muriel Bristol had got a couple of cups wrong. On balance, should we conclude that she couldn’t tell the difference? Or that she could? As we’ve seen, Fisher’s test dodges making a choice in this situation; it doesn’t come to any conclusion.

Statisticians Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson (the son of Karl Pearson, who first coined the p-value) didn’t think this was good enough. If they started with two hypotheses—such as whether someone can or can’t tell the difference between cups of tea—they didn’t want a method that refuses to choose. According to Neyman and Pearson, researchers need a way to decide which hypothesis to accept and which to reject.

This decision-based attitude to statistics is analogous to the approach taken in legal cases. Much like legal decisions, Neyman and Pearson’s approach requires us to decide on the burden of proof: faced with a particular piece of evidence, how skeptical should we be? If we’re easily persuaded, we’ll end up accepting many hypotheses, whether or not they’re true. In contrast, if we set the bar for evidence very high, we’ll throw out most hypotheses that are false, but also disregard many that are true.

To deal with this trade-off, Neyman and Pearson introduced two concepts that would go on to plague statistics students: type I and type II errors. The first error occurs when we incorrectly accept the false hypothesis; the second happens when we incorrectly reject the true hypothesis.

Consider the Blackstone ratio, which suggests that it’s better to have 10 guilty people incorrectly released than have one innocent person imprisoned. In essence, the ratio is saying that, when it comes to criminal justice, the chance of a type I error should be 10 times smaller than the chance of a type II error. In medical studies, a ratio 4 is commonly used instead: the popular threshold for a type I error is a probability of 5 percent (thanks to Fisher) but 20 percent for a type II error. We don’t want to miss a treatment that works, but we really don’t want to conclude that a treatment works when it doesn’t.

Fisher did not take Neyman and Pearson’s criticisms well. In response, he called their methods “childish” and “absurdly academic.” In particular, Fisher disagreed with the idea of deciding between two hypotheses, rather than calculating the “significance” of available evidence, as he’d proposed. Whereas a decision is final, his significance tests gave only a provisional opinion, which could be later revised. Even so, Fisher’s appeal for an open scientific mind was somewhat undermined by his insistence that researchers should use a 5 percent cutoff for a “significant” p-value, and his claim that he would “ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level.”

Acrimony would give way to decades of ambiguity, as textbooks gradually muddled together Fisher’s null hypothesis testing with Neyman and Pearson’s decision-based approach. A nuanced debate over how to interpret evidence, with discussion of statistical reasoning and design of experiments, instead became a set of fixed rules for students to follow.

Mainstream scientific research would come to rely on simplistic p-value thresholds and true-or-false decisions about hypotheses. In this role-learned world, experimental effects were either present or they were not. Medicines either worked or they didn’t. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that major medical journals finally started breaking free of these habits.

Ironically, much of the shift can be traced back to an idea that Neyman coined in the early 1930s. With economies struggling in the Great Depression, he’d noticed there was growing demand for statistical insights into the lives of populations. Unfortunately, there were limited resources available for governments to study these problems. Politicians wanted results in months—or even weeks—and there wasn’t enough time or money for a comprehensive study. As a result, statisticians had to rely on sampling a small subset of the population. This was an opportunity to develop some new statistical ideas. Suppose we want to estimate a particular value, like the proportion of the population who have children. If we sampled 100 adults at random and none of them are parents, what does this suggest about the country as a whole? We can’t say definitively that nobody has a child, because if we sampled a different group of 100 adults, we might find some parents. We therefore need a way of measuring how confident we should be about our estimate. This is where Neyman’s innovation came in. He showed that we can calculate a “confidence interval” for a sample which tells us how often we should expect the true population value to lie in a certain range.

Confidence intervals can be a slippery concept, given they require us to interpret tangible real-life data by imagining many other hypothetical samples being collected. Like those type I and type II errors, Neyman’s confidence intervals address an important question, just in a way that often perplexes students and researchers. Despite these conceptual hurdles, there is value in having a measurement that can capture the uncertainty in a study. It’s often tempting—particularly in media and politics—to focus on a single average value. A single value might feel more confident and precise, but ultimately it is an illusory conclusion. In some of our public-facing epidemiological analysis, my colleagues and I have therefore chosen to report only the confidence intervals, to avoid misplaced attention falling on specific values.

Since the 1980s, medical journals have put more focus on confidence intervals rather than standalone true-or-false claims. However, habits can be hard to break. The relationship between confidence intervals and p-values hasn’t helped. Suppose our null hypothesis is that a treatment has zero effect. If our estimated 95 percent confidence interval for the effect doesn’t contain zero, then the p-value will be less than 5 percent, and based on Fisher’s approach, we will reject the null hypothesis. As a result, medical papers are often less interested in the uncertainty interval itself, and instead more interested in the values it does—or doesn’t—contain. Medicine might be trying to move beyond Fisher, but the influence of his arbitrary 5 percent cutoff remains.

Excerpt adapted from Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty, by Adam Kucharski. Published by Profile Books on March 20, 2025, in the UK.

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