Welcome to Edition 8.40 of the Rocket Report! One of the remarkable things about SpaceX is that, after a quarter of a century and becoming the most important launch company of this era, it remains a disruptive force. Even though the Falcon 9 is the most used rocket of the world, and groundbreaking in its reuse capabilities, SpaceX is actively seeking to make it obsolete with the Starship program. Stephen has a great story in this week’s newsletter highlighting the fact that we’re probably past the peak of the Falcon era of flight.

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

Firefly readies for upgraded Alpha rocket launch. Firefly Aerospace plans to debut the upgraded version of its Alpha rocket late this summer, Space News reports. In a May 4 earnings call about the company’s first-quarter financial results, Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, confirmed the company was moving ahead with the Alpha Block 2 rocket after a successful return to flight of the original version of the vehicle in March.

Block 2 coming for you … The company announced the Block 2 version of Alpha in January, with stretched first and second stages and upgrades to avionics, batteries, and its thermal protection system. The company said the upgrades were intended to improve the reliability of the vehicle, which suffered two failures and two partial failures in its first six launches. He did not disclose the customer for the Flight 8 mission, but said the company was planning two more launches after that this year.

Orbex was losing nearly $3 million a month. Orbex, the rocket company behind plans for the Sutherland Spaceport in Scotland, collapsed earlier this year after failing to secure fresh funding, The Northern Times reports. According to the filing lodged at the end of April, the company was losing around 2 million pounds ($2.7 million) a month before entering administration in February. By that point, total losses had reached about 73 million pounds ($100 million).

No buyers … The filing shows Orbex had 163 staff and had been working on two rocket systems: the Prime micro-launch vehicle, which was in development, and a larger system called Proxima, still at the design stage. In 2025, Orbex attempted to raise additional capital through a Series D funding round, but this was unsuccessful. Earlier this year, as many as 69 parties expressed interest in buying Orbex, but all discussions fell through.

Rocket Lab posts record revenue. In its first-quarter financial results for 2026, Rocket Lab reported a record revenue level of more than $200 million. This was a 63 percent increase over the first quarter of last year. The publicly traded company also said it had a $2.2 billion backlog and has $2 billion in liquidity that will enable it to make further acquisitions. During the first quarter the company completed its acquisition of Mynaric AG, a leading provider of laser optical communications terminals.

Lots of launch contracts … The company said it signed 31 new Electron and HASTE contracts during the quarter, plus five new dedicated Neutron launches. Rocket Lab has now sold more launches in Q1 2026 than in the full year of 2025. From all appearances, Rocket Lab is continuing to grow as both a formidable launch and space services company.

Have we passed peak Falcon 9? It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to, Ars reports. The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a manifestation of SpaceX’s eagerness to shift focus to the much larger Starship rocket, an enabler of what the company wants to do in space: missions to land on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, and next-gen Starlink. Elon Musk’s SpaceX conducted 165 launches with the Falcon 9 rocket (no Falcon Heavy missions) last year, up from 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024 and 96 Falcon flights in 2023.

Moving away from one of two Florida launch pads … The company plans “maybe 140, 145-ish” Falcon launches in 2026, according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. The changes are most apparent at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Until last December, SpaceX launched Falcon 9s with regularity from two pads on Florida’s Space Coast—one at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and another a few miles to the south on military property at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX is transitioning the site at Kennedy, known as Launch Complex-39A, to launch Starships. LC-39A is out of the rotation for Falcon 9 launches.

ESA may move launch from Vega C to Ariane 6. In October 2024, the European Space Agency awarded OHB a 280 million euro contract to develop and build a pair of satellites for its Harmony mission. European Spaceflight recently looked into how this payload will reach orbit. ESA confirmed Vega C as the mission’s baseline launch vehicle during a presentation given by Project Manager Florence Hélière at the agency’s Living Planet Symposium in June 2025. Hélière explained that both satellites would be launched in 2029 aboard a single Vega C Block 2, which features the P160C booster upgrade. She also indicated that cost constraints had helped shape the decision to select a single Vega C launch for both satellites.

P160C upgrade when? … However, last month, ESA published an RFI inviting Arianespace to provide “non-binding information on Ariane 62 launch services for the Harmony mission in Q4 2029 / Q1 2030.” This suggests that ESA may be concerned about whether Vega C Block 2 will be available in time to support the launch. In January 2026, an ESA spokesperson told the publication that there was no urgency to complete the P160C upgrade for Vega C.

Armstrong prize goes to SpaceX reusable team. Purdue University awarded its inaugural Neil Armstrong Space Prize to the Falcon 9 Booster Landing Team for its work to develop the reusable first stage of the rocket. The eponymous award honors aerospace pioneer and Purdue graduate Neil Armstrong (BS aeronautical engineering ’55, honorary doctorate ’70).

Chosen for impact to humanity … The Falcon 9 team was chosen from a long list of impressive nominees. “In the end, the deciding factor was what we felt like was the team’s impact to humanity,” said Dan Dumbacher, chair of the Neil Armstrong Space Prize selection committee. “Their work has had a very clear impact and a very visible impact.” Hard to disagree with that.

Chinese firm pursues aerodynamic recovery. Chinese commercial launch startup Nayuta Space has completed consecutive Pre-A financing rounds to support development of its unconventional Xuanniao-R rocket concept, Space News reports. The two-stage, 70-meter-long, 3.8m-diameter Xuanniao-R launcher features an aerodynamic deceleration and horizontal landing approach to reusability, with Nayuta targeting a debut test flight of the Xuanniao-R in the first half of 2027.

Probably not going to meet that target … While Nayuta Space claims its aerodynamic deceleration approach can reduce the dependence on a launcher engines’ reignition, propulsive braking, and high-precision control capabilities for vertical recovery, the approach will demand new aerodynamic structures, bringing challenges, including increased weight and complexity. The size of the launcher, the novel and unproven approach, and uncertain funding levels suggest that the 2027 timeline for a debut flight is very ambitious.

New record set for safe booster landings. On Tuesday, SpaceX launched another routine Falcon 9 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, putting yet another batch of Starlink v2-mini satellites into orbit. It was the 611th successful recovery overall of a Falcon booster.

That’s a lot of landings … However, a writer at NASASpaceflight.com, Alex Alcantarilla Romera, noted that this actually represents a significant milestone. With this landing, SpaceX has set a record for consecutive successful booster landings at 268. This matters because with its Starship program, SpaceX ultimately aims to land humans back on Earth via vertical landing, and demonstrating a sustained record of success with this method builds confidence in this technology.

Starship nearing Flight 12. SpaceX on Thursday conducted a 15-second test firing of the Super Heavy booster stage for its Starship launch vehicle, and it appeared to go well based on independent videos of the test. This was a critical test in the campaign to ready the newest iteration of Starship, V3, for its debut launch. SpaceX has not announced a launch date, but mid-May appears possible.

More testing ahead … Next up for the company is moving the Starship upper stage to the launch site at Starbase, Texas. There, the vehicles will be integrated into a full stack and will likely undergo further testing before a launch attempt. Starship V3 is needed to begin demonstrating in-orbit refueling, an enabling capability for turning Starship into a human-rated Moon lander for NASA’s Artemis program.

South Texas residents sue over Starship noise. As SpaceX prepares for the first flight of V3 of its Starship vehicle, the company is facing a new legal challenge from local residents who claim its launches damage their homes, Space News reports. The environmental impacts of Starship launches from Starbase, located on the Gulf Coast of Texas near the Mexico border, have been scrutinized for years. SpaceX has secured environmental approvals from the federal government for Starship launches, although some local residents as well as environmental advocates have opposed the launches.

Concerned about intense engine noise … The latest salvo in that debate was a lawsuit filed in US District Court in the Southern District of Texas on April 30 by dozens of residents against SpaceX. In the suit, they claim their homes suffered damage from previous Starship launches. The plaintiffs, who primarily live in the cities of Port Isabel and South Padre Island, the two closest communities to Starbase, argue that the intense engine noise of both Starship’s liftoff and the return of the Super Heavy booster, along with sonic booms, caused damage to their homes. The complaint does not give specific examples of the damage.

Next three launches

May 11: Long March 7 | Tianzhou 10 | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 00:14 UTC

May 11: Falcon 9 | NROL-172 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 22:28 UTC

May 12: Long March 6A | Unknown payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 11:55 UTC

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Posted Saturday 9 May 2026 at 7:12 am AEST (my time).

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Last fall, we featured an extensive interview with Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that give rise to its worst aspects: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive voices. He wasn’t optimistic about social media’s future.

Törnberg’s research showed that, while numerous platform-level intervention strategies have been proposed to combat these issues, none are likely to be effective. And it’s not the fault of much-hated algorithms, non-chronological feeds, or our human proclivity for seeking out negativity. Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media. So we’re probably doomed to endless toxic feedback loops unless someone hits upon a brilliant fundamental redesign that manages to change those dynamics.

Törnberg has been very busy since then, producing two new papers and one new preprint building on this realization that social media is structured quite differently than the physical world, with unexpected downstream consequences. The first new paper, published in PLoS ONE, specifically focused on the echo chamber effect, using the same combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs)—essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior.

Those simulated users were randomly programmed to either hold an opinion or its opposite and then interact randomly with selected members of a simulated online community. And if the proportion of community members who disagreed with those simulated users exceeded a given threshold, those agents were programmed to leave and join a different online community.

Filter bubbles: Not a culprit, but a cure

Consistent with last year’s results, echo chambers emerge naturally from the basic architecture of social media platforms. “One surprising finding is the fact that we get echo chambers even without any filter bubbles, even if people really love being in diverse spaces,” said Törnberg. “You don’t need an algorithmic nudge. You can still get these highly segregated spaces. The other surprising finding is that filter bubbles, which have been blamed for homogeneity, can be a cure.”

It doesn’t take much to destabilize or stabilize the system, Törnberg found. Even if the threshold for disagreement was quite low, disagreements were amplified to the point that each random interaction was increasingly likely to exceed the threshold. More and more users were pushed to relocate until what was once a community with a solid diversity of opinion rapidly became polarized and/or overly homogenous.

Conversely, if just 10 percent of users in a given social media community largely agree with your stances, you will be more tolerant toward diverse opinions that contradict your own. “There’s a certain chance that some users will end up in communities where it’s very homogenous and 99 percent of users are disagreeing with them,” said Törnberg. “That will cause them to leave, and you get this feedback effect just because of the structure of interaction. But if you have a filter bubble effect, where everyone is shown 10 percent of their own type, that creates a possibility for you to find the people who you agree with within the community. And that stabilizes the entire dynamics so it doesn’t tip over to one side or the other and become extreme or overly homogenous.”

Törnberg found some confirmation of those dynamics when he analyzed an actual online echo chamber: the subreddit r/MensRights. He found that members of the subreddit were more likely to leave if their posts diverged too far, linguistically, from the community’s center of gravity.

“Who are the users leaving the community?” said Törnberg. “The users that are more ideologically distant are more likely to leave. So it captures the same mechanism of feedback dynamics, where the community becomes more homogenous and more extreme because users leave—[and they leave] because they feel it’s becoming too homogenous and extreme. Eventually it tips over to one direction. And of course, as the community becomes more extreme, there’s this boiling the frog effect where the users who stay are influenced by the community and become more extreme.”

In principle, it could be possible to exploit these feedback effects to preserve viewpoint diversity—but there are caveats. “Ultimately, it’s about changing the fundamental rules of what people are seeing and being mindful of the feedback effects that always play out in any complex system,” said Törnberg. “That being said, do I want to tell [Mark] Zuckerberg to implement more filter bubbles on Facebook? I think I’d want a little bit more evidence before going that far. But it does highlight that we need to have a little more humility when it comes to our design of these systems and what the downstream consequences are. We tend to maybe think one step ahead, but miss the fact that these are highly complex systems, full of feedback effects that often do the exact opposite of what you intend.”

The “botification” of social media

For his second new paper, published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media (JQD:DM), Törnberg relied on nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies surveys, covering US citizens from all 50 states and Washington, DC. The objective was to learn more about shifting trends in how people were using (or not using) social media across all platforms, demographics, and political affiliations.

Törnberg found that visits and posting activity on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X—what one might consider legacy social media platforms—showed marked declines. However, “My sense is that the number of posts on Twitter and Facebook has probably not really declined despite the fact that the number of people posting—humans who are alive and have a pulse—has dropped by 50 percent, because of the rise of AI and LLMs and the botification of those platforms,” said Törnberg.

Most social media platforms slightly shifted politically to the right, although they remained Democratic-leaning on balance—except for Twitter/X. In that case, “The engagement behavior was a 72 percentage point shift to the right, which is just insane,” said Törnberg. “It used to be that the more you posted on Twitter, there was a slight correlation with how much you liked the Democrats and how much you disliked Republicans—how effectively polarized you were to the left. Now it’s very strongly and very clearly correlated with hating Democrats and liking Republicans. So the graph appropriately becomes an X, which I guess is exactly what [Elon Musk] paid for.”

Meanwhile, on Facebook, posting behavior is correlated on both sides of the partisan divide and has more to do with how active the most partisan users are, prompting casual users to disengage so that those louder voices dominate, making the platform narrower and more ideologically extreme. “The more you’re effectively polarized, the more you post on Facebook,” said Törnberg. “That’s the social media prism or the fun house mirror of social media in action, because the most extreme voices are the voices that tend to post, and also they tend to become more visible because of the engagement algorithms.”

Reddit and TikTok were outliers, showing modest growth instead of decline. Törnberg thinks TikTok’s growth, in particular, indicates another interesting shift. “I think that there is a general transition from the text-based, interaction-based social media to this more fully algorithmic video, short video form,” he said. “So is it even a social media anymore? We tend to put TikTok and Instagram in the same basket as Twitter/X. I don’t think that really makes sense because we’re seeing a shift away from one form of social media to a new form of media platform that is fundamentally different.”

Is it even “social media” anymore?

That shift is the focus of a new preprint that Törnberg co-authored with University of Amsterdam colleague Richard Rogers. “When we talk about social media, there are certain assumptions about what it is,” said Törnberg. “It’s user-generated, and there’s a platform that organizes interaction, but the platform cannot produce content on its own. So instead the platform allows people to connect with each other, and it just provides infrastructure for that. The [terms] social network and social media is almost synonymous. Those describe pre-algorithm Twitter circa 2012 quite well.”

Now that more and more users are disengaging and often leaving those platforms entirely, the AI bots are moving in, often at the instigation of the social media platforms themselves. “We don’t need the users anymore,” said Törnberg of the reasoning behind such decisions. “We don’t need them to generate content. We can generate our own content and we can automate the users. So there’s a splintering of what used to be social media.”

Törnberg identified three new kinds of emerging online media platforms, starting with private or semi-private group chats like WhatsApp. “The social part has just moved into these private group chat features,” he said. Then there other protected communities like Substack, often organized around a certain influential leader, “where there are more boundaries to joining in such a way that bots doesn’t make sense. The dynamic and logic of those places are very different from social media and much more driven by parasocial relationships.”

The second category is what Törnberg calls algorithmic broadcasting media, like TikTok, Instagram, and even Facebook, to a certain degree, thanks to the Reels aspect. The third is users interacting with AI chatbots. “If you look at the data, it seems like about twice as many people are talking to a chatbot versus posting on social media,” said Törnberg. “It’s coming to replace a little bit of that function of sociality that social media provided.”

While setting up smaller private spaces online might seem like a way to reproduce the local coffeehouse/public square dynamic that we all ideally wanted social media to be, Törnberg says it is not. “The local coffee shop model is geographically local,” he said. “It becomes diverse because it is constrained by geographical distance. It forces a coming together of diverse groups because there’s one coffeehouse. A WhatsApp group is a non-local space. It’s precisely the example of a system that can tip over one side or another to become an echo chamber. Just because Meta doesn’t have the platform control doesn’t mean it’s going to not turn horrible.”

“Abandoning or fleeing responsibilities is not going to be the solution to the fact that digital technology is reshaping our society,” Törnberg added. “It needs functional scaffolding and democratic systems for doing it responsibly and actually pursuing positive democratic prosocial values, which is not something that is seemingly on offer at the moment.”

Törnberg does think it’s possible to reorganize social media spaces in positive ways so that most users can find that 10 percent of other users who agree with them, thus making them more open to divergent views. And it helps that most users really do prefer more pleasant online communities, not platforms rife with toxic waste. “But then how do we shape the rules to produce those outcomes?” he said. “It’s a much harder question. How do we create spaces that are both engaging and fun to use, but that don’t go down to that dark place because of all of these feedback effects?”

BlueSky’s highly effective blocking tools, and even Twitter/X’s community notes feature, which often bridges cross-partisan divides, provide useful examples of possible solutions, if judiciously applied. “We can think of and construct similar systems,” said Törnberg. “We just need to find ways of pushing those effects to a more positive place by finding the pivot points. This is what I’m studying right now. I just don’t have an answer yet.”

PLoS, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0347207  (About DOIs).

JQD: DM, 2026. DOI: 10.51685/jqd.2026.005 .

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Posted Friday 8 May 2026 at 7:11 am AEST (my time).

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Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC is raking in record profits during the AI boom—but it is also racing to help Taiwan develop wind power and other energy alternatives to fossil fuels amid a global energy crisis.

The chipmaker has signed a 30-year corporate power purchase agreement for 100 percent of the power produced by the Hai Long offshore wind project. The deal between TSMC and Northland Power, a Canada-based global power producer, covers more than 1 gigawatt of power capacity at three offshore wind sites located off the western coast of central Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait, according to an April 30 announcement.

Once completed, the Hai Long offshore wind project would have the capacity to power the equivalent of more than 1 million Taiwanese households. The project’s wind farms began supplying power to Taiwan’s grid in 2025 and are scheduled to become fully operational by 2027.

TSMC’s move comes as many countries have scrambled to shore up energy supplies since the war in the Middle East has disrupted regional energy production and effectively halted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. When Qatar shut down natural gas production after its facilities were damaged by Iranian drone strikes in March 2026, Bloomberg reported that Taiwan’s power grid lost one-third of its usual supply of liquefied natural gas.

That started an energy crunch countdown because Taiwan relies on natural gas plants to generate about half of its electricity—and Taiwan typically has just two weeks of fuels in reserve. So far, Taiwan’s government has managed to stave off energy shortages by tapping alternative natural gas suppliers such as Australia and the United States, Reuters reported.

During an energy forum on May 6, Taiwan’s Vice Minister of Economic Affairs said that the government had secured enough oil and gas supplies to operate normally through August and possibly September, according to Taiwan News.

But the global energy crisis is also spurring the Taiwanese administration of President Lai Ching-te to accelerate efforts to develop fossil fuel alternatives, including restarting shuttered nuclear power plants and building out renewable power projects. Taiwan relies on imported fossil fuels to meet nearly 97 percent of its overall energy needs, including electricity, transport, and heating, according to the Global Taiwan Institute, a think tank based in Washington, DC.

As part of its energy diversification efforts, Taiwan has pushed to expand offshore wind power with a government plan to make 15 gigawatts of capacity available to developers by 2035. Meanwhile, TSMC has announced that it would aim for renewable energy to meet 60 percent of its global operations’ needs by 2030 and 100 percent by 2040.

TSMC plays an outsized role in shaping Taiwan’s energy future, given the energy consumption of its chip fabs. The chipmaker’s energy needs accounted for nearly 10 percent of Taiwan’s total electricity consumption in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency’s report on energy and AI.

That share could grow to nearly one-quarter of Taiwan’s overall electricity usage by 2030 as TSMC invests in more energy-intensive manufacturing to meet global AI demand for advanced chips, according to S&P Global estimates cited by Data Center Dynamics.

Beyond the Hai Long project, TSMC previously signed another power purchase agreement with the Danish renewable energy company Ørsted in 2020 for 920 megawatts of power from the Greater Changhua offshore wind farm project, which is expected to become fully operational later in 2026. The chipmaker also struck a deal with the German renewable energy developer WPD in 2021 to develop more than 1 gigawatt of onshore and offshore wind power.

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 12:58 pm AEST (my time).

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It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to.

The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a manifestation of SpaceX’s eagerness to shift focus to the much larger Starship rocket, an enabler of what the company wants to do in space: missions to land on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, and next-gen Starlink.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX conducted 165 launches with the Falcon 9 rocket (no Falcon Heavy missions) last year, up from 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024 and 96 Falcon flights in 2023. The company plans “maybe 140, 145-ish” Falcon launches in 2026, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier this year. “This year we’ll still launch a lot, but not as much,” she said. “And then we’ll tail off our launches as Starship is coming online.”

Letting off the gas

We’re beginning to see what the long, slow tail-off will look like. The changes are most apparent at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where SpaceX has launched the lion’s share of its rockets. Until last December, SpaceX launched Falcon 9s with regularity from two pads on Florida’s Space Coast—one at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and another a few miles to the south on military property at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

SpaceX is transitioning the site at Kennedy, known as Launch Complex-39A, to launch Starships. LC-39A is out of the rotation for Falcon 9 launches, although it remains available for occasional flights of the more powerful triple-core Falcon Heavy. SpaceX launched the first Falcon Heavy in a year and a half last week from LC-39A, and a handful more Falcon Heavy flights are on tap later this year.

Activity at SpaceX’s oldest launch site, Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral, is also waning. Last month, SpaceX retired one of its two Florida-based seagoing landing platforms from service for future use as a transporter to ferry Starships and Super Heavy boosters from SpaceX’s factory in South Texas to Florida. SpaceX is constructing a second Starship factory at Kennedy Space Center, but officials want to begin Starship flights from Florida before the factory is operational.

“With 39A becoming a primarily Falcon Heavy and Starship pad, we don’t actually need two operational droneships on the East Coast to maintain our Falcon manifest,” wrote Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, in a post on X last month. The other landing vessel in Florida can support a launch and recovery every four days, according to Dontchev, and some Falcon missions can return their boosters to land onshore.

But those four-day turnarounds are becoming rare at Cape Canaveral. Most SpaceX missions launch satellites for the company’s Starlink broadband constellation. The bulk of SpaceX’s Starlink missions will now depart from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, where Falcon 9s can launch from the same pad as often as every three or four days. For now, the new norm at Cape Canaveral will average about one Falcon 9 launch per week, approximately the same as SpaceX’s launch cadence at the Florida spaceport in 2023.

The Falcon 9 is not going away anytime soon. The rocket that made SpaceX the world’s most successful space company will remain operational at least as long as the International Space Station. The retirement of the ISS, previously targeted for 2030, is now unlikely to occur before 2032. The Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule are the only US vehicles available to transport crews to and from the station. The Space Force will also rely on the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy into the 2030s.

However, SpaceX will put Starship to work as soon as possible by launching upgraded Starlink Internet satellites. Eventually, SpaceX aims to tap Starship to launch nodes for an orbital data center constellation, a project forged by SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI, another Elon Musk company. NASA and SpaceX will also require an untold number of refueling launches each time Starship lands astronauts on the Moon.

File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from Space Launch Complex 4-East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

Credit: SpaceX

All in at Vandenberg

SpaceX is launching more often than ever at Vandenberg, some 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles. More than half of all of SpaceX’s launches so far this year have lifted off from the California spaceport. Last year, it was less than 40 percent, and in 2024, it was one-third. Sources tell Ars this trend is expected to continue this year, putting Vandenberg on pace to become SpaceX’s busiest launch site. It’s a remarkable turnaround for the spaceport on the hillsides of California’s Central Coast. In 2020, Vandenberg hosted just a single space launch.

Vandenberg may overtake Florida’s Space Coast—combining NASA- and military-owned launch pads—in launch activity this year, depending on how often other companies like Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance fly their rockets. The last time Vandenberg launched more rockets than Cape Canaveral was in 1987 and 1988, during the grounding of NASA’s Space Shuttle fleet after the Challenger accident.

Nearly 180 rockets took off from the Florida and California spaceports last year, including satellite launches and long-range missile tests. While those numbers may plateau or slightly decline this year, the overall trend points upward. How quickly the launch rates rise will largely hinge on when SpaceX’s Starship becomes operational.

“We see those rates potentially tripling in the near term, the next five years,” said Col. James Horne, commander of Space Launch Delta 30 at Vandenberg, in a roundtable with reporters last month.

Col. Brian Chatman, commander of the military unit overseeing Cape Canaveral’s launch range, said the Space Force is preparing for as many as 500 launches per year from Florida’s Space Coast by 2036. The growth will require new construction, access to utilities, and increased reliance on automation at the military ranges, which are responsible for ensuring public safety during rocket launches.

SpaceX aims to routinely launch Starships from multiple launch pads in Florida and Texas (it has not announced plans for a Starship pad in California), and last month, the Space Force selected Blue Origin to build a brand new launch pad for its New Glenn rocket on an undeveloped site at Vandenberg. Stoke Space and Relativity Space are building launch sites at Cape Canaveral. The only other orbital-class spaceport on federal property is at Wallops Island, Virginia, where Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, and Firefly Aerospace plan to base their rockets.

This doesn’t count privately owned spaceports, like SpaceX’s Starbase in South Texas, which operate outside the Space Force’s jurisdiction.

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 12:57 pm AEST (my time).

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The astronauts flying aboard the Artemis II mission to the Moon last month took a lot of pictures, and a few dozen of the best ones were released during and shortly afterward the flight.

But it wasn’t until last weekend that NASA released the whole trove of more than 12,000 images, dumping them onto the Gateway to Astronaut Photography. The astronauts used three different cameras on the mission: a Nikon D5, a Nikon Z9, and an iPhone 17s. There are some hits and misses in the archive, plus some new gems.

One of the early highlights during the mission was the “Hello, world” image captured by Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman as the Orion spacecraft left Earth on its outbound journey toward the Moon.

In the newly released archive, there are dozens more images from this sequence. On Wednesday, Andy Saunders—known for processing a trove of Gemini and Apollo images into gorgeous books—shared a composite of these images that he processed and animated into a stunning new visual.

The animation is sped up by a factor of 30, with the sequenced images covering 1 minute and 20 seconds in real time.

“There are 17 separate photos in the sequence—there were more, but at different exposures and Earth started to drift off-shot in some—so this was the best consecutive sequence,” Saunders told Ars via email. “I applied some color and contrast adjustments to each individual frame then animated them. They’re great resolution, so I could then zoom in on the most interesting parts.”

Those interesting parts include lightning storms, aurorae, and satellites. The latter present an interesting phenomenon: It appears the solar arrays on the satellites are visible. This seems unlikely, though, as the scale in the image means these arrays would have to be on the order of a kilometer wide, which is not the case. It is possible that the solar array’s appearance may be an optical effect due to Orion’s window.

In any case, the new imagery offers yet another stunning view of our world, which is active not just on the surface but in the heavens above.

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 6:57 am AEST (my time).

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Mexico City is one of the fastest sinking cities in the world. Now, a powerful satellite from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) confirms the accelerated advance of this silent threat that puts nearly 20 million people at risk.

The satellite designed by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), known as NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), was able to capture with unprecedented precision the magnitude and evolution of this phenomenon in different areas of the Mexican capital. The analysis is based on preliminary measurements taken from space between October 2025 and January of this year, during the dry season in Mexico City.

Their findings were captured in a map that shows how the subsurface of the metropolis is shifting. In the map, NASA identified areas with subsidence greater than 2 centimeters per month (marked in dark blue). The agency specifies that the areas marked in yellow and red could correspond to background signals (or noise) that are expected to diminish as the satellite instrument collects more data.

The image also highlights the location of Benito Juarez International Airport, located near Lake Nabor Carrillo, which operates in the middle of an area with accelerated subsidence. "Images like this confirm that the NISAR measurements are in line with expectations," said Craig Ferguson, deputy director of the project.

Mexico City sits atop the clay and lake bed of ancient Lake Texcoco. NASA explains that this process is a consequence of intense groundwater pumping and the increasing weight associated with urban development. Both factors have caused the compaction of the ancient lake soil for more than a century.

The phenomenon was first documented in 1925 by engineer Roberto Gayol. Between the 1900s and 2000s, some areas experienced a drop of nearly 35 centimeters per year, causing damage to infrastructure such as the Metro, one of the largest mass transit systems in the Americas.

A study conducted in 2024 by Dario Solano-Rojas, a remote-sensing specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, found that subsidence is not uniform. After analyzing changes in the city's elevation between 2011 and 2020, the researcher and his team concluded that subsidence rates are highly variable: While some areas register up to 50 centimeters per year, in others the phenomenon is almost imperceptible.

This creates “differential subsidence,” where the ground sinks unevenly not only across square kilometers or city blocks, but even on a meter scale. When a street, railway, or building sinks differently at one end compared to the other, its stability is compromised.

NASA's findings support this interpretation. The agency warns that “uneven and seemingly small elevation changes have added up over the decades, fracturing roads, buildings, and water lines.”

Accurately and continuously monitoring these terrain variations is fundamental for developing public policies and mitigation strategies. In this regard, NASA has demonstrated that its technology can play a key role.

NASA's Powerful NISAR Satellite

NISAR is a satellite capable of tracking changes on the Earth's surface in near real time from orbit, overcoming visibility limitations—such as cloud cover or dense vegetation—that affect optical sensors and some conventional radars.

According to the agency, this instrument—operational since July 2025—is the first to incorporate two synthetic aperture radars (SARs) at different wavelengths, allowing it to monitor Earth's land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. It also features a cylindrical reflector antenna, 12 meters wide, which facilitates the collection of highly detailed data.

"Mexico City is a well-known hot spot when it comes to subsidence, and images like this are just the beginning for NISAR. We’re going to see an influx of new discoveries from all over the world, given the unique sensing capabilities of NISAR and its consistent global coverage," said David Bekaert, project manager at the Flemish Institute for Research in Technology and a member of the science team.

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

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 6:55 am AEST (my time).

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Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA.

Researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid them for their work. They conducted three experiments, each involving several hundred people. Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable of solving the problem autonomously. When the AI helper was suddenly taken away, these people were significantly more likely to give up on the problem or flub their answers. The study suggests that widespread use of AI might boost productivity at the expense of developing foundational problem-solving skills.

“The takeaway is not that we should ban AI in education or workplaces,” says Michiel Bakker, an assistant professor at MIT involved with the study. “AI can clearly help people perform better in the moment, and that can be valuable. But we should be more careful about what kind of help AI provides, and when.”

I recently met up with Bakker, who has chaotic hair and a wide grin, on MIT’s campus. Originally from the Netherlands, he previously worked at Google DeepMind in London. He told me that a well-known essay on the way AI may disempower humans over time inspired him to think about how the technology could already be eroding people’s abilities. The essay makes for slightly bleak reading, because it suggests that disempowerment is inevitable. That said, perhaps figuring out how AI can help people develop their own mental capabilities should be part of how models are aligned with human values.

“It is fundamentally a cognitive question—about persistence, learning, and how people respond to difficulty,” Bakker tells me. “We wanted to take these broader concerns about long-term human-AI interaction and study them in a controlled experimental setting.”

The resulting study seems particularly concerning, says Bakker, because a person’s willingness to persist with problem-solving is crucial to acquiring new skills and also predicts their capacity to learn over time.

Bakker says it may be necessary to rethink how AI tools work so that—like a good human teacher—models sometimes prioritize a person’s learning over solving a problem for them. “Systems that give direct answers may have very different long-term effects from systems that scaffold, coach, or challenge the user,” Bakker says. He admits, however, that balancing this kind of “paternalistic” approach could be tricky.

AI companies do already think about the more subtle effects that their models can have on users. The sycophancy of some models—or how likely they are to agree with and patronize users—is something that OpenAI has sought to tone down with newer releases of GPT.

Putting too much faith in AI would seem especially problematic when the tools may not behave as you expect. Agentic AI systems are particularly unpredictable because they do complex chores independently and can introduce odd errors. It makes you wonder what Claude Code and Codex are doing to the skills of coders who may sometimes need to fix the bugs they introduce.

I recently got a lesson in the danger of offloading critical thinking to AI myself. I’ve been using OpenClaw (with Codex inside) as a daily helper, and I've found it to be remarkably good at solving configuration issues on Linux. Recently, however, after my Wi-Fi connection kept dropping, my AI assistant suggested running a series of commands in order to tweak the driver talking to the Wi-Fi card. The result was a machine that refused to boot no matter what I did.

Perhaps, instead of simply trying to solve the problem for me, OpenClaw should have paused to teach me how to fix the issue for myself. I might have a more capable computer—and brain—as a result.

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 6:54 am AEST (my time).

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NASA’s goal of reaching the Moon’s surface as many as 21 times over the next two and a half years will require an overhaul of the agency’s approach to buying lunar landers and success in rectifying the myriad problems that have, so far, caused three of the last four US landing attempts to falter.

It will also require improved oversight of NASA’s industrial base and better management of a supply chain that has often failed to deliver on time.

These landers are separate from NASA’s Human Landing System program, which has contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop and deliver human-rated landers to ferry crews to and from the lunar surface for the agency’s Artemis program. Alongside the crew landers, dozens of robotic and cargo landings will deliver payloads to scout for a future Moon base and demonstrate technologies for larger vehicles, mining and resource utilization, and sustained operations during the two-week-long lunar night.

“Frequent high-mass, low-cost access to the lunar surface” should be the highest priority for the early phase of the Moon base initiative, said Jacki Cortese, vice president of civil space at Blue Origin. This tracks with the roadmap NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman outlined in March, when he announced that the agency will refocus its efforts on building an outpost on the lunar surface, rather than a mini-space station thousands of miles above the Moon.

The fundamentals for high-frequency missions to the lunar surface are in place. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, announced eight years ago this week, has assembled a roster of commercial providers to design and build robotic Moon landers. Through CLPS, NASA has contracted with US companies for 13 missions since 2019. Four of them have launched, and just one has completed a fully successful landing. Four more commercial landers are under construction now for launches in the second half of this year, but as is common in the space industry, their schedules have a history of delays, and some are likely to move into 2027.

Eight years in, CLPS is still in its “infancy,” said Brad Bailey, NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration, during a recent lunar science workshop. Now, NASA is asking its lander providers, still learning to crawl, to rapidly learn to walk and run over the next two years.

Improving reliability

NASA has penciled in nine lunar landings for next year, followed by 10 in 2028. NASA and its commercial partners must pick up the pace to come anywhere close to that. Isaacman acknowledged this in a hearing last week before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science.

“We have to do more than talk,” Isaacman said. “For a very long time across all of NASA, we’ve talked a really good game but then we kind of sit and wait for our vendors and partners to deliver outcomes, and as a result we tend to be late and it tends to cost more, so how do you change that?”

One way, Isaacman said, is for NASA to offer more aid to the companies it is paying to develop Moon landers. “You start to embed subject matter experts across the supply chain to drive outcomes,” he said.

“I don’t want to sit and watch on TV as a lander tips over,” Isaacman said. “I want a high batting average here, a high probability of success. I think the way you do that is you leverage a lot of the NASA expertise, incorporate it in the supply chain, and drive the outcomes that we’re looking for.”

The framework for the CLPS program is similar to that of NASA’s Commercial Crew and Commercial Resupply Services programs, which partnered with industry to develop new crew and cargo vehicles to service the International Space Station after the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet. But there’s a key difference. With the crew and cargo programs, NASA provided government funding and personnel to directly support development and testing before purchasing operational crew and cargo transportation missions through a separate contract. With CLPS, the agency largely skipped over this phase and went straight to buying lunar landing services.

NASA’s plans for the first phase of the Moon Base program include numerous landings, heavier payloads,

communications relay networks, and radioisotope heating units to help vehicles survive the cold lunar night.

Credit: NASA

The results of NASA’s hands-off approach on CLPS are mixed, at best. In contrast, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman flew eight consecutive successful cargo missions to the ISS before each suffered a single failure in 2014 and 2015. All of SpaceX’s crew missions have been successful to date, while Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule hasn’t worked out as NASA hoped.

The early CLPS missions also have an unenviable record, with one fully successful landing, two landers that toppled over, and one spacecraft that failed to reach the Moon entirely. NASA officials knew the first few CLPS missions would be risky, with companies trying something no private enterprise had done before, and something NASA itself had not accomplished since 1972.

Aware of the hazards, NASA leaders at the start of the CLPS program likened the approach to a soccer or hockey team taking “shots on goal.” Their thinking was that numerous landing attempts would allow companies to wring out their technology and improve their chances of sticking the next landing. The program’s progress has been slow.

Today, NASA is in a race. The agency is charged with landing astronauts on the Moon before China, perhaps as soon as 2028, and following that achievement with the build-out of a permanent base near the south pole. Future CLPS missions will carry more sophisticated payloads, such as expensive rovers, hopping drones, communications relay satellites, and other pioneering tech demos that will underpin the Moon base design. If they are to succeed, NASA and its commercial partners will have to turn the page from taking shots on goal to hitting the net almost every time.

Facing this new urgency, NASA officials are eager to transition from demonstrating reliable lunar landers to delivering tangible infrastructure to the Moon’s surface. Today’s reality is that none of the lander contractors are there yet. There’s still a lot to learn about landing and operating on the Moon.

“We have very little experience operating on the Moon,” said Nujoud Merancy, NASA’s Moon base architect, in a meeting last week of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC). “Humans have lived on the Moon for less than 13 days. We have one CLPS lander that landed successfully upright, [and] three that at least made soft landings. We don’t know very much. We do not know how these systems will operate. Nothing currently is surviving the night at the south pole.”

This means NASA will need to take risks. The agency is still in an “exploratory phase,” Merancy continued. “How do we get these systems out there, test them, and learn from them? That means dissimilar systems because I don’t know which one’s going to work well.”

Technicians install solar panels on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander at the company’s headquarters in Pittsburgh.

Credit: Astrobotic

Block buys

Paradoxically, NASA must take more shots on goal in order to stop taking them. That means buying more CLPS missions—and doing so quickly. An update posted by NASA on a federal government procurement website last week signaled the agency’s intent to raise the ceiling of the CLPS contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion. There are 13 companies eligible to compete for CLPS missions, but three—Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines—have won the lion’s share of CLPS contracts to date.

This change sets the stage for NASA to order many more CLPS missions before the existing contract expires in 2028. NASA plans a follow-on contract, called CLPS 2.0, to cover robotic landings into the 2030s.

“We have to start ramping now into this higher cadence with a target of monthly landings to bring some of the things to the surface very, very soon for Moon Base,” said Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, at the LSIC meeting last week. “At the same time, we’re getting ready to do the competition for the CLPS 2.0 follow on contract.”

NASA also plans to order more than one CLPS landing mission at a time. Using a block buy scheme will allow CLPS providers to place longer-term orders for parts from their suppliers. This increased volume should help shore up the CLPS supply chain after years of late deliveries of sometimes unreliable components. Theoretically, NASA should also see a benefit with lower prices.

“NASA, six or seven years ago, set up CLPS so that NASA would buy services twice a year and one landing service for each of those opportunities,” Kearns said. “We realized later this really didn’t give an opportunity for industry to set up deep supply chains and make really advantageous price purchases for them, or develop component suppliers, maybe even for a new component that they already didn’t have.”

Eddie Seyffert, a director of civil space at Blue Origin, said companies need to become accustomed to building landers faster, going from a bespoke design for each mission to a “build to print” model.

“What we’re seeing in CLPS 1.0 is this potential for multi-mission block buys,” Seyffert said. “So we’re looking forward to seeing that in CLPS 2.0.”

Blue Origin is a player in both the CLPS and Human Landing System programs, with a pathfinder cargo lander named Endurance set to fly to the Moon later this year. It will help pave the way for a crew lander for NASA’s use on future Artemis missions.

“The development (of the cargo lander) is done,” Seyffert said. “We have great test data. We’re going to fly that later this year, and then we’re going to build to print dozens of landers to help NASA achieve its goals.”

Astrobotic, which failed on its first mission to the Moon and is now manufacturing a larger lander for its second try, also supports the idea of block buys.

“I’m really excited to now leverage a finished product and be able to utilize that over and over again,” said Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development at Astrobotic. “One of the challenges, I think, that we faced is the bespoke nature, sometimes, of mission to mission. If we can try to maintain some of these vehicle types over and over again, I think we’ll reap the benefit of all of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into getting our supply chain to be able to perform and to overcome some technical challenges that were pretty significant.”

Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander descends toward the lunar surface on March 6, 2025. The spacecraft tipped over upon touchdown.

Like Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines is planning a heavier lander after flying a smaller vehicle on its first few missions to the Moon. Its next mission, IM-3, is scheduled for launch toward the end of this year in tandem with the first node of a lunar data relay satellite constellation. Intuitive Machines aims to bounce back from its first two CLPS missions, in which the company’s landers tipped over after touchdown.

“I think what you will see is the lander design modifying slightly to become basically like a Model T Ford,” said Ben Bussey, chief scientist at Intuitive Machines.

Firefly Aerospace nailed its first attempt to land on the Moon last year. Its Blue Ghost lander returned scientific data from the lunar surface for 14 days before succumbing to the dark lunar night. Firefly’s second Blue Ghost lander is slated to launch later this year, using the same basic design as the first, but accompanied by a pair of data-relay satellites to enable a landing on the far side of the Moon.

Firefly is expanding its factory capacity in Texas to churn out more landers and transfer vehicles. The first voyage to the Moon with the Blue Ghost lander launched in January 2025, less than four years after NASA awarded the contract to Firefly, a “record-breaking timeline” for a commercial lunar mission, said Farah Zuberi, the company’s director of spacecraft mission management.

“The takeaway is that with this mission, the NASA CLPS model did what it was intended to do, which was to enable reliable access to the Moon at a fraction of the cost and schedule,” Zuberi said.

It’s now up to NASA’s other CLPS providers to show they can reach the Moon, and all of them—including Firefly—must prove they can do so repeatedly. NASA and its contractors must cut Firefly’s four-year lead time in half to ramp up to a monthly cadence in the next two years.

NASA will take a more paternalistic approach with the next round of CLPS orders. “When you are building, we need to hear the things that are slowing you down, and we’re going to try to help you with those things,” Carlos Garcia-Galan, head of NASA’s Moon base program, told representatives of the CLPS companies at last week’s LSIC meeting.

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 6:52 am AEST (my time).

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On the morning of May 5th, 1961, 37-year-old Alan Shepard woke up, ate a breakfast (consisting of a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, scrambled eggs, and orange juice), strapped into the Freedom 7 rocket, and blasted off into space, becoming the first American astronaut to do so.

Shepard’s historic flight — and the first crewed flight of Project Mercury — did two things. It demonstrated that after getting beat to space by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, America was still in the race. And it proved the United States could safely send a human into space and back, helping to restore national confidence during the Cold War. Shepard’s flight only lasted 15 minutes, but it provided enough critical information to serve as a foundation for America’s human spaceflight program in the years to come.

Sixty-five years later, the Artemis program is attempting to build off that foundation by proving that humans can not only survive in space, but also build permanent infrastructure and thrive there. The Artemis II mission, which just concluded last month, was a particular high-water mark for human spaceflight, with the crew traveling farther than anyone in the history of the space program.

There have been ups and downs, of course. We’ve lived through enough mission delays, aborted launches, and funding cuts to know that anything we do in space is still constrained by the political and financial realities of what takes place here on the ground. Commercial space companies are not riding to the rescue; their priorities are tourism, satellites, and perhaps orbital data centers. Americans are looking around at rising prices and wondering why so much money is being spent on rocket launches. It’s no longer enough to prove we can go to space. The question now is: Why do we keep going back?

We know that human spaceflight is a remarkable tool for inspiring people to pursue a STEM education. It drives students and engineers and future astronauts to try to solve some of the biggest mysteries in the universe. Ultimately, it’s a desire to explore. These photos from America’s first foray into the human spaceflight program are a good reminder of that instinct.

The original seven Project Mercury astronauts: front row, left to right, are Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, John Glenn,

and Scott Carpenter. Back row, left to right, are Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Gordon Cooper.

Photo: NASA / Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images

 

The scene is set for America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard, for his trip into space. In this diagrammed general

view of the launching site, made during tests and released by NASA, the Mercury-Redstone rocket is on its pad ready to be fired.

Photo: Bettman / Getty contributor

 

Behind the Flight Control area in Mercury Mission Control was a glass-enclosed viewing section that consisted

of two levels, with rows of chairs and standing room at the back.

Photo: NASA

 

On May 5th, 1961, only 23 days after Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first person in space, NASA

astronaut Alan Shepard launched at 9:34AM ET aboard his Freedom 7 capsule powered by a Redstone booster.

His historic flight lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds.

Photo: NASA

 

NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. participates in a test of his pressure suit in Hangar S at Cape Canaveral

Air Force Station on May 5, 1961.

Photo: NASA

 

Liftoff of the Freedom 7 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Photo: NASA

 

President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy follow on television the takeoff and space flight of astronaut Alan Shepard.

Photo: White House Photo via AP

 

Shepard’s pickup at sea after his capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.

Photo: Marka / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

 

A US Marine helicopter recovery team hoists astronaut Alan Shepard from his Mercury spacecraft after a

successful flight and splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.

Photo: Heritage Space / Heritage Images via Getty Images

 

A helicopter gently lowers a Mercury space capsule to the padded area on the deck of the USS Lake Champlain

after retrieving it at sea. Aboard the helicopter is Alan Shepard, who left the capsule while it was still in the water.

Photo: Bettmann / Getty Contributor

 

Front page of the Daily News dated May 6th, 1961.

Image: NY Daily News via Getty Images

 

Shepard eventually went back to space as commander of NASA’s Apollo 14 lunar landing mission. Here he is

holding the US flag on the Moon, February 1971, in a photo taken by lunar module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell,

whose shadow is visible in front.

Photo: Space Frontiers / Getty Images

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Posted Wednesday 6 May 2026 at 7:31 am AEST (my time).

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Are you a fan of coffee but not sure if it's good for you? Perhaps you're aware of its well-known stimulant effect but aren't sure about the other effects it has on your health. A recent study explores how regular coffee consumption influences the gut-brain axis, a bidirectional communication network that connects the digestive system with brain activity. The results reveal a highly complex interaction that goes beyond caffeine.

“Public interest in gut health has risen hugely,” said John Cryan, coauthor of the study published this week in Nature Communications. “The relationship between digestive and mental health is also increasingly being better understood, but the mechanisms behind coffee’s effects on this gut-brain axis have remained unclear.”

Scientists at APC Microbiome Ireland, a research center at the University of Cork, compared 31 healthy adults who regularly consume coffee with 31 non-coffee drinkers. According to the European Food Safety Authority, a “regular” coffee drinker is one who drinks between three and five cups a day, a safe and moderate intake for most people.

The researchers also analyzed what happened when consumers suspended their intake for two weeks and then resumed it, either with caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. This design made it possible to distinguish the effects of caffeine from the other compounds present in coffee.

“Coffee is more than just caffeine,” said Cryan in a press release, “it’s a complex dietary factor that interacts with our gut microbes, our metabolism, and even our emotional well-being. Our findings suggest that coffee, whether caffeinated or decaffeinated, can influence health in distinct but complementary ways.”

The Surprising Effects of Coffee

One of the most relevant findings was that coffee consumption modifies the composition of the intestinal microbiome. In regular drinkers, changes were detected in the abundance of certain bacteria, such as Eggerthella species and Cryptobacterium curtum, suggesting that coffee favors specific microorganisms. The former are believed to contribute to gastric and intestinal acid secretion, while the latter are involved in bile acid synthesis. APC Microbiome Ireland explains that both bacteria contribute to the elimination of harmful intestinal bacteria, preventing infections.

On the behavioral level, the study found that regular coffee drinkers showed higher levels of impulsiveness and emotional reactivity compared to those who don't partake. However, when coffee intake was suspended for two weeks, these traits decreased, along with some symptoms associated with regular consumption such as fatigue or headache in the first days of abstinence.

The reintroduction of coffee produced different effects depending on the type. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee reduced perceived stress and certain indicators of depression. However, caffeinated coffee was associated with improvements in anxiety and some aspects of attention, while decaffeinated coffee showed benefits in memory, sleep quality, and physical activity. This indicates that many effects of coffee do not depend exclusively on caffeine but on other bioactive compounds, such as polyphenols.

Another relevant aspect was the response of the immune system. Coffee consumers presented lower levels of inflammatory markers and higher levels of anti-inflammatory molecules. During the period of abstinence, some markers of inflammation increased, suggesting that coffee may have a protective effect in this area.

No considerable differences were observed between consumers and non-consumers when it came to physiological stress, as measured by the hormone cortisol. This suggests that, at least under normal conditions, coffee does not substantially alter the body's response to stress, although it may influence the subjective perception of stress, as mentioned above.

A particularly interesting finding of the study was that some effects of coffee on the microbiome and metabolism occur independently of caffeine. Even decaffeinated coffee was able to induce rapid changes in microbial composition after reintroduction. This reinforces the idea that coffee is a complex mixture of compounds with multiple biological effects.

“Our findings reveal the microbiome and nervous system responses to coffee, as well as its potential long-term benefits for a healthier microbiome,” concluded Cryan, who is a principal investigator at APC Microbiome Ireland. “Coffee could modify the activity of microbes as a whole and the metabolites they use. As the population continues to reflect on dietary changes for proper digestive balance, coffee can also be used as an additional intervention within a healthy, balanced diet.”

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

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Posted Tuesday 5 May 2026 at 7:14 am AEST (my time).

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GameStop yesterday made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $55.5 billion. GameStop claims that eBay has underperformed and spends too much on sales and marketing and argues that it would become a stronger company if it cuts costs and is combined with GameStop’s physical retail locations.

“GameStop’s ~1,600 US locations give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce,” GameStop Chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen wrote in a letter to eBay Chairman Paul Pressler.

eBay’s market capitalization is over four times larger than GameStop’s. GameStop faces skepticism about the viability of its offer but says it will obtain debt financing and pay with a mix of cash and stock.

GameStop’s proposal envisions a system in which GameStop staff inspect and verify items to be listed on eBay. “GameStop staff already inspect and grade hardware and trading cards every day. Sellers walk in, items are verified on the spot, and listings carry a trust badge,” the proposal said.

The stores will “serve as drop-off and shipping nodes,” providing “a national fulfillment network without incremental eBay capital expenditure,” GameStop said. The stores, according to GameStop’s plan, will “double as broadcasting studios. eBay supplies the inventory and the buyer base; GameStop supplies the physical footprint to compete in the live-commerce category.” This would apparently help eBay sellers use livestreaming to promote their products.

Cohen intends to become CEO of the post-merger company if eBay accepts the deal and completes it. A GameStop press release said that Cohen “owns ~9% of GameStop and receives no salary, no cash bonuses, and no golden parachute. He will be compensated solely based on the performance of the combined company.”

Doubts about GameStop’s ability to finance deal

GameStop is still chugging along five years after its meme-stock mania, though it reportedly closed about 470 stores in the US at the beginning of 2026. It also closed 590 US-based stores in 2024. As of this writing, GameStop’s stock price had fallen about 2 percent today, while eBay’s had risen about 5 percent.

Unsurprisingly, GameStop faces skepticism about its ability to finance a deal to buy a much larger company. GameStop has a market capitalization of about $11 billion, while eBay is worth about $48 billion. GameStop’s offer for eBay is $125 per share, half in cash and half in GameStop stock.

Cohen said GameStop had about $9.4 billion in cash and liquid investments as of January 31 and will fund the cash portion of the offer with “cash and liquid investments on GameStop’s balance sheet and third-party equity and debt financing.” Cohen’s letter said GameStop has “a highly-confident letter from TD Securities for up to $20 billion,” indicating that TD is confident it can arrange financing but that the debt portion of GameStop’s offer is not yet finalized.

Cohen took questions about the financing on CNBC’s Squawk Box today, but co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin said the deal math doesn’t make sense. Sorkin noted that GameStop’s market capitalization, cash, investments, and potential financing from TD add up to $40 billion, leaving a gap of $16 billion to complete the $56 billion deal.

“We’ll see what happens,” Cohen responded.

Sorkin followed up by asking where the rest of the money comes from. Cohen answered, “it’s half cash, half stock.”

Sorkin tried again, saying, “that math doesn’t get you to the price that you’re offering.” Cohen responded, “I don’t understand your question. We’re offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done.”

CNBC hosts also asked Cohen for evidence that he can grow a consumer business that can rival Amazon, given that GameStop revenue has declined sharply the past few years. GameStop’s net sales were $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2025, compared to $6 billion in 2021.

“Didn’t you guys call for GameStop’s demise multiple times? Like, it should have been bankrupt by now?” Cohen said. “Look at our financial performance. Is it better than you guys anticipated? Because you guys said it was going to be doing really, really poorly, and it’s actually doing okay.”

“Fundamentally different” business models

Describing his ambitions, Cohen said that “eBay has the second largest commerce franchise and there’s a big opportunity to do something much larger and pull costs out of the system as well as accelerate revenue growth and leveraging our physical infrastructure, our focus on collectibles. It could be a much larger business, but bringing in an entrepreneurial mindset is what I plan on doing.”

At another point, Cohen said that GameStop is in a “very difficult business” and “should have been bankrupt multiple times over, and it’s doing okay, it’s making a few bucks. eBay is in a very, very strong position but it could be in a much stronger position.”

GameStop’s press release said its $125-per-share offer amounts to a 46 percent premium over eBay’s closing price on February 4, the day GameStop started accumulating a stake in the company. GameStop’s current stake in eBay is 5 percent.

eBay confirmed that it received the offer in a press release today and said that “eBay had no discussions with or outreach from GameStop prior to receiving the proposal.” eBay said its board “will review this proposal with a focus on the value to be delivered to eBay shareholders, including the value of the GameStop stock consideration and the ability of GameStop to deliver a binding, actionable proposal.”

Morgan Stanley analysts issued a research note saying that eBay and GameStop have “fundamentally different” business models. “eBay is a 3P [third-party] eCommerce marketplace that doesn’t take inventory risk while GameStop is primarily an in-store wholesaler,” stated the research note, which was provided to Ars. “Given those dynamics, we struggle to outline meaningful potential cross-sell synergies as most of GameStop’s inventory is already available on eBay while the long-tail inventory base of eBay isn’t well suited for in-store retail.”

GameStop wants to slash eBay marketing budget

Morgan Stanley similarly doubted the potential cost savings. “On the expense side, we also think the potential opportunities would likely be minimal as physical and digital business require different cost bases, as do 3P marketplaces vs. 1P wholesalers. To add another challenge, GameStop has already undergone a series of large cost cuts,” the research note said.

Morgan Stanley analysts expressed skepticism about “how a deal would be financed given the material valuation gap.” If completed, they said it could end up as the largest leveraged buyout ever, “surpassing the recently announced $55 billion Electronic Arts transaction.”

GameStop said that eBay spent $2.4 billion on sales and marketing in fiscal 2025 but added only 1 million net active buyers, increasing the total from 134 million to 135 million. GameStop said it would cut $1.2 billion from eBay’s sales and marketing budget, arguing that the current spending “is not producing more users on a marketplace with near-universal brand recognition.”

GameStop proposed cutting another $300 million from eBay’s product development expenses and $500 million from general and administrative functions. The combined company will consolidate its finance, HR, real estate, legal, IT, and professional services after the merger to save money, GameStop said.

GameStop touted its own financial performance under Cohen, saying that it “moved from a $381 million net loss in fiscal 2021 to $418 million of net income in fiscal 2025.” eBay meanwhile said in its press release today that its “board and leadership team are executing a focused strategy to drive sustainable growth and long-term shareholder value.”

eBay last week reported Q1 2026 revenue of $3.1 billion, up 19 percent year over year. eBay’s GAAP net income was $512 million, up 2 percent.

GameStop, which is on a different fiscal schedule, reported net sales of $1.1 billion in Q4 2026. That was down from $1.28 billion in the prior year’s fourth quarter. GameStop’s Q4 net income also fell year over year, from $131.3 million to $127.9 million.

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Posted Tuesday 5 May 2026 at 7:13 am AEST (my time).

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At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda pledged to build a city of the future, a place where researchers, engineers, and scientists could live and work together. It was framed as the start of a transformation for the world’s largest car company, moving it toward becoming a fully fledged mobility company.

Six months ago, after Toyota spent an estimated $10 billion to build an urban paradise atop a disused factory, the first residents moved in. One-hundred handpicked “Weavers,” residents chosen to boost the tech cred of the sensor-laden mini-metropolis, began settling in.

Last week, I got a chance to check it out. Here’s what I learned while wandering the streets of Toyota’s vision of the future.

The future is safe

As part of its transformation into a true mobility company, Toyota is aiming to become the world’s safest carmaker. The company says it wants to create a “society with zero accidents”—a tall order given the sheer number of Toyotas currently on the road.

Woven City on a sunny day.

Credit: Toyota

“Statistically, the set of autonomous vehicles out there is nowhere close to the magnitude of vehicles that Toyota has in the world,” John Absmeier, Woven City’s CTO, told me. While companies like Waymo are fielding tens of thousands of vehicles, Toyota’s eventual autonomous fleet will need to operate at a much higher standard, he said.

To get there, Absmeier said Toyota’s cars will need far more awareness than onboard systems can provide, even with the most advanced lidar, radar, and imaging sensors on the planet. For instance, the only way to spot a kid darting out from behind a truck, he said, is with cameras on every street watching for hazards, paired with warning systems for oncoming traffic.

This is part of the age-old promise of vehicle-to-everything communications, and at Woven City, Toyota is trying to put that idea into practice.

The future is a privacy nightmare

But if the idea of ubiquitous cameras watching everyone gives you pause, you’re not alone—it certainly seemed startling to me. I counted eight separate cameras at a single intersection in Woven City, plus many more mounted on the ceilings of the buildings I toured. Even the small on-site coffee shop had half a dozen hanging overhead.

In the rain, Woven City felt even more like a ghost town.

Credit: Tim Stevens

There are plenty of cameras in urban areas around the world, but I haven’t seen anything approaching this level of density. All of them feed into what Toyota calls the Woven City AI Vision Engine, an agentic system designed to monitor, catalog, and report activity.

A demo video showed how these cameras can be used in retail environments to spot shoplifters. While I was told the system doesn’t use facial recognition, it can still track people based on their clothing, following them as they move from one camera to another.

Kota Oishi, general manager at Woven City, said that Toyota has surveyed people around the world, including Americans and Europeans, about their views on privacy and data. While people in Southeast Asia tended to be fairly relaxed about privacy, Japanese respondents were far more cautious, he said.

“Japanese people are more on the European side. They are very concerned about that data,” he said. “They need to be convinced that the data is protected, and they want to know specifically what the data will be used for.”

Protecting that data across so many systems under development at Woven City is a complex challenge. To try to manage it, Toyota created a system called “Data Fabric.” Saipang Chan, an engineer on the project, told me that users can opt into or out of individual services.

“We have our own consent management to ensure that all the data being shared or being collected,” he said. “We act under the consent of the data provider.”

Weavers use the Woven app to order services from the city.

Credit: Tim Stevens

Chan said that while user data can be exchanged among the various experiments within the Woven City’s walls, it’s not being sold. At least, not yet.

“We allow the Weavers to select what they want to share or not. So whether it’s nothing or whether it’s everything is up to the individual,” Absmeier told me. Oishi, the GM, said the vast majority of the Weavers have opted into the roughly 20 experiments currently underway. For example, 98 percent allow a robot with cameras to operate in their homes.

But these opt-in numbers come from a highly curated group of participants living in a controlled environment. The real world is a different place.

The future is one big creators’ hub

Daisuke Tanaka, a resident of Woven City, is something like an on-site digital matchmaker for Weavers. It’s not love they’re looking for, though; he connects creators and startups to spark collaborations every second Friday.

“Sometimes we’re talking about technologies and products, but sometimes they’re much more casual events,” he said. He cited a next-gen vending machine under development as an example of the sorts of new products coming from this collaboration. “They want to combine the photo-voltaics with the vending machine so it can run anywhere,” he said.

Expansive coworking spaces dot Woven City, designed to foster spontaneous brainstorming, with plenty of 3D printers scattered throughout for rapid prototyping. The stated goal is to spur creation, innovation, and successful startups.

Daisule Tanaka, a resident, shows off a package-delivery robot.

Tim Stevens

 

The Swake looks fun, but we weren’t allowed to ride it in the rain.

Tim Stevens

 

A maker space in Woven City’s Innovation Garage.

Toyota

 

Woven City residents act as alpha and beta testers for everything from an AI-powered karaoke machine that selects songs based on mood to a next-generation HVAC system designed to eliminate 95 percent of pollen in the home (roughly half of Japan’s population suffers from hay fever).

Residents also help test delivery robots and a device called the Swake, a three-wheeled scooter with a leaning backrest for cornering. I didn’t get to ride one, but with a top speed of 12 mph (20 km/h) and a range of 3.7 miles (6 km), the Swake could be a more stable and (and fun) alternative to the average Lime or Bird scooter.

The future is tiny

For something called a “city,” Toyota’s Woven City has a small footprint. Its largest structure is the former sheet-metal stamping facility at the factory that once anchored the site. Outside of that, only about 10 percent of Woven City’s eventual 175-acre (70.8-hectare) footprint is complete.

That’s roughly the size of three New York City blocks. You can walk from one end to the other in just a few minutes, which makes it a curious setting for a project meant to benchmark next-generation mobility.

The 20 prototype Swake machines also can’t leave the grounds, which limits the amount of real-world testing they’re getting.

The future must be financially sustainable

From an operational standpoint, Woven City is a business operating under Woven by Toyota, Inc. Its financials aren’t public (Toyota would not comment on total build costs or how much its residents pay to live there), but Absmeier said Woven City is expected to be profitable.

“Ultimately, we have to be a long-term sustainable business,” he said.

That’s why so much Toyota tech is being tested here, including efforts to refine systems like the AI Vision Engine before selling them to municipalities. Toyota has several closed test tracks around the world, but Woven City acts as a safe space to test a far broader suite of services and devices before they’re commercialized.

The future is full of robots that don’t do much yet

“Physical AI” was everywhere at Woven City: robots of all shapes and sizes that, for the most part, didn’t seem to do much.

There were robots for delivering packages to residents and others for carrying home groceries. A self-balancing, two-wheeled robot with one arm carried trays of food around apartments, and another had a single gripper designed to potentially help around the house someday. Most of them looked like design concepts without much practical use.

The Guide Mobi robot in front of a Toyota EV.

Credit: Tim Stevens

The Guide Mobi, however, was more compelling. Like a tugboat guiding cargo ships in and out of port, it’s used in Woven City to autonomously move cars from the parking garage to a pickup area for residents. But where a tugboat provides thrust to keep boats moving, the Guide Mobi uses sensors to prevent the cars from going the wrong way.

The cars in question are Toyota bZ4X EVs, which lack the necessary sensor array to handle the task on their own. The Guide Mobi, equipped with a lidar array, imaging sensors, and other systems, effectively takes control of a single car, which autonomously follows its digital “tug.” The car is delivered to the curb outside, where the Woven City resident can hop in and drive off.

Why rely on such a complicated solution when modern Teslas can perform similar tasks using only onboard sensors? Toyota says it’s prioritizing safety, and Tesla’s Summon feature has hardly delivered on that front.

The future has a smart grid

When residents want their car, Guide Mobi brings it to them.

 

The parking garage also works as a giant distributed energy store, taking advantage of the EVs bidirectional charging.

Toyota

 

Those bZ4X EVs don’t live in just any garage—they’re stored in a space Toyota calls a virtual power plant, or VPP. In addition to a roof full of solar cells to help charge the cars inside, the facility is chock-full of bidirectional chargers.

The cars inside can act as a collective battery pack, offsetting Woven City’s peak power demand by up to 10 percent. The plan is to offer the service to businesses with large EV fleets, reducing their overall power bills.

The catch is that those chargers have standard, human-operated plugs. Though the cars might be able to be delivered autonomously to drivers waiting outside, some poor soul still needs to unplug them before they’re sent out and plug them in when they return.

The future only works in the sun

It was miserable and rainy for much of the time I spent wandering Woven City, and the moisture was an unfortunate limiting factor for its operations.

While the Guide Mobi braved the rain for a test delivery, the Swake tricycles can’t run in such conditions. All the scooter-sharing stations were empty on that day, and many of the robots we’d been told to expect skittering around the streets had stayed home to keep their sensors dry.

The future is beautifully designed

There’s a bit of a prefab vibe to certain aspects of Woven City, particularly the brutalist residential buildings. It’s a space that’s stark, clean, and frequently beautiful.

Many of the shared spaces feature sweeping, flowing ridges of wood that run cleanly from outside to inside, creating a strong sense of visual continuity. The city’s pedestrian areas are lined with lush, attractive gardens that likely received a little extra attention before our visit.

Even the manhole covers, featuring a stylized Mt. Fuji, were cleverly designed. Woven City is certainly cold and corporate in places, but it also shows the level of polish that urban planning and design can reach when a single, well-funded corporate entity makes all the calls and foots the bill.

But where are all the people?

Tim Stevens

 

The manhole cover has Mt Fuji on it.

Tim Stevens

The future feels lonely

I spent most of my time in Woven City being shepherded from place to place by tour guides, but when I finally managed to escape and wander around on my own, it felt eerily empty.

It wasn’t quite Omega Man territory, but I didn’t see a single kid playing, dog out for a walk, or citizen running to one of the on-site convenience shops. The electric e-Palettes Toyota uses as buses were empty; they stopped at their stops, waited, and then left without picking up or dropping off anyone.

The curtains were drawn on all the apartments I could see, and there was no sign of laundry, bicycles, or other personal items on any apartment balcony.

I had to remind myself that this place is six months old, with only 100 Weavers so far—fewer residents than you’d find at your average Holiday Inn. It’s early days, and as the facility is built out and more folks move in, it will likely feel less sterile over time. But Toyota’s goal of building the world’s greatest creator hub will only start to take shape if outside companies find real ways to bootstrap their next products here.

The Inventor Garage at Woven City.

Toyota

 

Inside the Inventor Garage.

Toyota

 

Woven City is Toyota’s attempt to not only identify the next mobility zeitgeist but also to ensure it begins to take shape where the company can capitalize on it. It’s a big bet, but it’s backed by the world’s largest car company by volume and one of the few that has managed to consistently deliver products its customers want in a chaotic global market. As the broader Toyota Group turns 100 this year, it’s natural for it to focus on the next century.

It’s hoping Woven City will help define that future.

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Posted Tuesday 5 May 2026 at 7:12 am AEST (my time).

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. April’s list includes tracking Roman ship repairs, the discovery that mushrooms can detect human urine, crushing soda cans for science, and the physics of why dolphins can swim so fast.

Physics of why dolphins swim so fast

Dolphins are very good swimmers but the exact mechanisms by which they achieve their impressive speed and agility in water have remained murky. Japanese scientists from the University of Osaka ran multiple supercomputer simulations to learn more about how dolphins optimize their propulsion and found it has to do with the vortices, or eddies, produced by dolphin kicks, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Per the authors, when dolphins flap their tails up and down, the kicking motion pushes water backward and produces swirling currents of varying sizes.  The computer simulations enabled the team to break down those different sizes, revealing that the initial tail oscillations produce large vortex rings that generate thrust, and those larger ones then produce many more smaller vortices. However, the smaller ones don’t contribute to the forward motion.

In short, “Our results show that the hierarchy of vortices in turbulence is crucial for understanding dolphin swimming,” said co-author Susumu Goto. “The largest vortices are responsible for most of the propulsion, while the smaller ones are mainly byproducts of turbulent flow.” The team hopes to apply these insights into the mechanics of underwater propulsion to the design of faster and more efficient underwater robots.

DOI: Physics of Fluids, 2026. 10.1103/tnxb-ckr5  (About DOIs).

Tracking Roman shipwreck repairs

Credit: Adriboats © L. Damelet, CNRS/CCJ

Back in 2016, archaeologists discovered a shipwreck from the Roman Republic, the Ilovik–Paržine 1. The wreck has been the subject of much study of the actual ship, enabling scientists to determine it was constructed in what is now Brindisi on Italy’s south-eastern coast. Most recently, analysis of pollen trapped in the ship’s waterproofing layers have yielded insight into repairs made successively in other locations throughout the Adriatic Sea, according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Materials.

Per the authors, prior research had largely ignored studying non-wooden materials like seawater-resistant coatings, so they used mass spectrometry and similar methods to examine the molecular makeup of ten coating samples. The results showed that pine tree resin or tar (pitch) was the main component. But one sample was a combination of beeswax and tar, a mixture unique to Greek shipbuilders known as zopissa. The combination makes the coating easier to apply when heated and also makes the pitch adhesive more flexible.

Because pitch’s adhesive nature easily traps and preserve pollen, the researchers were also able to identify which plants had been present when the coating was applied, so they could in turn identify the regions where the pitch had been produced. They found pollen from a wide range of environments, such as forests of holly oak, pine, and matorral, all typical of the Mediterranean and Adriatic coastal regions. Other samples contained alder and ash, more common to rivers, as well as fir and beech more typical of the mountain regions of Istria and Dalmatia. This provides concrete proof of mid-voyage repairs to the ship.

DOI: Frontiers in Materials, 2026. 10.3389/fmats.2026.1758862  (About DOIs).

Crushing soda cans for science

Credit: Finn Box

Who doesn’t love to watch those YouTube videos of people using hydraulics to crush a variety of objects? That includes physicists at the University of Manchester, who were intrigued by the difference between crushing an empty soda can versus one that is full of liquid. An empty can collapsed immediately; a full can collapses gradually in a series of circular rings. The Manchester physicists wanted to know why a full can behaves this way. They investigated via a combination of mathematical modeling and laboratory crushing experiments, describing their findings in a paper published in the journal Communications Physics.

It turns out that how a full can buckles isn’t random and that the liquid inside actually alters how the can responds to force. The buckling may start in the middle, and minor variations in a given can’s shape and size might affect when the first ring emerges. But then, the authors say, the physics takes over in a highly predictable process. The rings arise because the metal softens as the can compresses, then stiffens, then compresses and stiffens again, repeating the pattern until the compression is complete—akin to something called homoclinic snaking.

This seems to be a fundamental property of liquid-filled cylinders, which are common in such industries as industrial storage transportation, construction, energy systems, and rocket parts. So this work could help engineers detect early signs of failure in such structures.

DOI: Communications Phhysics, 2026. 10.1038/s42005-026-02589-5  (About DOIs).

How Australia’s 12 Apostles formed

Credit: Mark Cuthell

Australia is home to many natural wonders and among the most striking is the “Twelve Apostles,” a clustering of limestone stacks off the shore of Campbell National Park in Victoria. But the same geological forces that formed the stacks may also be their undoing. In 2005, four of the stacks collapsed, followed by a fifth four years later, so only seven remain. Scientists are keen to learn more about their formation in order to reconstruct all the changes in climate, ocean conditions, and sea levels and thus better understand contemporary coastal erosion.  A team at the University of Melbourne described their latest findings in a paper published in Australian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The authors describe the Twelve Apostles formation as “an environmental time capsule,” since its limestone layers can yield information about variations in temperatures and sea level over millions of years, much like tree rings. Thanks to microscopic fossils, the Melbourne researchers found that the formation is younger than previously thought: 8.6 to 14 million years old, compared to the previous estimate of 7 to 14 million years.

That’s when tectonic plates first pushed them out of the sea, but the shaping of the pillars via coastal erosion only occurred over the last few thousand years. And that tectonic movement didn’t push them straight up, but tilted them just a few degrees. There are also small fault lines in the layers, evidence of past earthquakes. The next step is to take a closer look at the individual rock layers.

DOI: Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 2026. 10.1080/08120099.2026.2638817  (About DOIs).

“Gossipy” mushrooms can detect your urine

Credit: Yu Fukasawa et al., 2026

It’s well known that mushrooms have a vast, interconnected underground network by which they can communicate; it’s the main body of the mushroom, in fact, rather than what we see growing on the surface. But little is known about how, exactly, information spreads across these mycelial networks. Japanese researchers at Tohoku University found that electrical flow can either increase or decrease communication levels, depending on whether one applies water or urine, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The scientists attached electrodes to 37 locally grown mushrooms, specifically ectomycorrhizal fungi, which are sensitive to high concentrations of ammonia in the soil. Ammonia is a chemical byproduct of urine, so the team chose urine as a trigger for their experiments. They watered the mushrooms with either tap water or urine and measured the ‘shrooms’ electrical response.

The results: applying water around one mushroom increased electrical activity (and hence the flow of information), while applying water across a larger area reduced electrical activity. Applying urine to just one mushroom also reduced information flow. The spatial distance and how closely the mushrooms are genetically related also seem to be factors. More research is needed to understand why the mushrooms vary their responses, but the authors hypothesize that when water is broadly applied, there is no need to share information since the network already knows.

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2026. 10.1038/s41598-026-42673-y  (About DOIs).

Japanese poetry and  space weather

Credit: National Archives of Japan/Public domain

Achieving a deeper understanding space weather is vital to all manner of space-based science, such as extreme solar activity known as solar proton events (SPEs), which hurl high-energy particles toward the Earth traveling as much as 90 percent of light speed. Should an SPE coincide with a manned space mission—as a string of SPEs nearly did in 1972, just missing the Apollo 16 and 17 missions—it could expose astronauts to lethal radiation. Learning more about past SPEs is key but to date research has focused on rare, very powerful historical SPEs.

The standard method for identifying when an SPE occurred is measuring carbon-14, produced when high-energy photos penetrate the Earth’s magnetic field (usually near the poles) and collide with gases in the atmosphere. Those carbon-14 compounds then spread through the atmosphere around the globe and are eventually deposited into organic materials, like buried trees. But the method is time consuming and researchers would like to be able to identify the most likely places to focus their efforts. Japanese scientists have developed an interdisciplinary method for identifying less extreme SPEs, which are more frequent but harder to detect, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the Japan Academy Series B.

They turned to medieval historical sources for help, looking for any mention of phenomena that might be evidence for an SPE. The first clue came from a diary of an influential Japanese courtier and poet, Fujiwara no Teika, who described seeing “red lights in the northern sky over  Kyoto” in February 1204 CE—i.e., an aurora. So the team measured carbon-14 in asunaro wood in the region and discovered the telltale spikes of an SPE. An examination of tree rings confirmed that a red aurora had occurred in China between 1200 and 1201 CE. (SPEs don’t cause aurora but they are associated with the space weather conditions that do.) The authors also found that there were shorter fluctuations in the solar cycles at that time: seven- to eight-year cycles, vs. the eleven-year-cycles we see today.

DOI: Proceedings of the Japan Academy Series B, 2026. 10.2183/pjab.102.011  (About DOIs).

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Posted Sunday 3 May 2026 at 7:21 am AEST (my time).

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In a makeshift demonstration kitchen in Concord, California, cooking oil splatters in and around a frying pan, which catches fire on an unattended gas stove. Within moments, a smoke detector wails. But in this demonstration, something less common happens: An AI-driven sensor activates and wall emitters blast infrasound waves toward the source of the fire in an attempt to put it out.

The science of acoustic fire suppression, which has long been known and documented in scientific literature and the press, works by vibrating oxygen molecules away from a fuel source, depriving the fire of a critical component needed for combustion.

Indeed, after just a few seconds of infrasound, the tiny kitchen blaze goes out.

The demonstration I witnessed took place in the presence of numerous firefighters and officials from Contra Costa County Fire Protection District, the state’s premier wildland firefighting agency (CAL FIRE), and invited journalists.

“We were able to not just point-and-shoot like a fire extinguisher; we figured out how to run it through ducting and distribute it like a sprinkler system,” said Geoff Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Sonic Fire Tech, during the presentation.

The company’s goal is to replace sprinklers, which are effective at stopping fires but can also do significant water damage to a property. Sonic Fire Tech appears to be the first company trying to commercialize the science of acoustic fire suppression. Its executives have already been touring Southern California; Wednesday’s event was the first in the northern half of the state.

The company aims to make this infrasound technique mainstream in both commercial (for instance, a data center, where sprinklers would damage electronics) and in-home installations, given that sprinklers are already required in all new California homes built in 2011 and later.

Sonic Fire Tech also hopes to produce a backpack-based system that could be worn by wildland firefighters headed out into the field.

“We are making meaningful technological improvements on a monthly basis,” Stefan Pollack, a company spokesperson, emailed Ars after the event.

But two experts who spoke with Ars raised serious questions about the potential for this technology to supplant traditional sprinklers in a home. They are even more skeptical as to whether the technique can be effective in an uncontrolled wildfire situation, where flames can grow very quickly.

The infrasound system in action

Sprinkler replacement?

Sonic Fire Tech says that its system is as good as, if not better than, traditional sprinklers for many applications.

“Sonic Fire Tech is in fact intended to replace interior residential sprinklers,” Pollack told Ars. “The demo showed a critical benefit of SFT over water sprinklers in suppressing a kitchen fire, which represents about half of all residential fires. This is also applicable to commercial kitchen fires and other common grease and chemical fire applications.”

The company’s press releases tout infrasound’s advantages over sprinklers. “Traditional residential sprinklers activate several minutes only after heat rises to a threshold, can discharge large volumes of water that damage interiors and electronics, and require plumbing infrastructure that adds cost and complexity,” says one release. “Sonic Home Defense, by contrast, deploys in milliseconds and uses inaudible low-frequency infrasound waves to disrupt the chemistry of combustion before flames can spread, with no water, no chemicals, and no risk of flooding the interior of the home being protected.”

The goals sound great, but they do raise questions among outside observers.

“Sprinklers have a well-established role,” Nate Wittasek, a Los Angeles-based fire protection engineer, emailed Ars. “They apply water directly to the fuel, cool the space, slow or stop flashover, and give people time to get out while reducing risk to firefighters. Sound may knock down a small flame, but it does not cool hot surfaces or wet fuel. That raises real questions about re-ignition, smoldering fires, hidden fires, and fires that are partially blocked by contents.”

Water sprinklers have been around for a long time. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), a well-known industry nonprofit, was founded in the late 1800s to develop a uniform standard for sprinklers. The latest iteration of those guidelines, known as the “13D” standard, is well documented and widely adopted.

A recent press release from Sonic Fire Tech states that the company has “secured third-party validation of its system as a viable NFPA 13D-equivalent alternative to conventional residential sprinklers.”

The company told Ars that it has been evaluated by James Andy Lynch (who was present at the demonstration) and his team at Fire Solutions Group, a Pennsylvania-based consultancy, to establish Sonic Fire Tech’s bona fides.

Sonic Fire Tech declined to provide Ars with a full copy of Lynch’s report, citing “confidential and patent-pending information,” but it did send Ars the two-page executive summary.

This document states that “the Sonic Fire Tech system is capable of delivering extremely rapid fire detection, meaningful suppression or extinguishment, and consistent performance across a variety of installation configurations.”

But the summary lacks any kind of detailed explanation of which tests were run and under what conditions. It also concludes that “additional testing and optimization are recommended to further expand the range of validated applications,” adding that Sonic Fire Tech’s products have the “potential to complement or, in certain applications, serve as an alternative to traditional suppression systems.”

“Equivalency [to the 13D standard] can only be approved by the appropriate authority having jurisdiction and requires technical documentation be submitted demonstrating the equivalency,” Jonathan Hart, NFPA Technical Lead, Fire Protection Technical Resources, emailed Ars.

To date, Sonic Fire Tech has not publicly provided this information.

Wittasek said that if Sonic Fire Tech is going to claim that its product is as good as or better than the NFPA 13D standard, it should be able to provide a whole range of specifics, such as “who validated it, what test protocols were used, what fire scenarios were included, and how success was defined.”

“I would want to see full-scale testing that includes typical residential fires like furniture and mattress fires, cooking fires, electrical fires, and attic or exterior ember exposures,” he added. “It should also cover different conditions like open and closed doors, varying ceiling heights, crosswinds, obstructed fuel packages, and whether the fire comes back after the system shuts off.”

Similarly, Michael Gollner, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in fire dynamics, told Ars there’s simply not enough information yet to show that this technology works better than sprinklers.

He pointed to a 2018 academic paper, which found that “acoustics alone are insufficient to control flames beyond the incipient stage.”

By contrast, “Fire sprinklers are extensively tested and certified by standards developed by the fire safety community over many years,” he emailed Ars. “I think this product needs to demonstrate the same or better performance with the same reliability before it can be considered to replace any existing safety measure. While I am absolutely supportive of out-of-the-box thinking, lives are truly at stake, and new technologies must carefully demonstrate effectiveness and reliability before being entrusted by society.”

Dozer time

As for the Contra Costa County firefighters who hosted the demonstration, they are curious to see more. Deputy Fire Chief Tracie Dutter told Ars that the agency does not recommend specific products, but it does try to understand the uses that new technology can have.

“Sonic representatives indicated they are exploring opportunities to partner with fire departments to test this technology on a bulldozer,” Dutter said.

“The District would be open to testing this system on one of our dozers,” Dutter added, to “better understand its limitations and potential failure points.”

With new tech like this, firefighters also want to understand what “long-term maintenance requirements” it has, whether “routine testing or calibration is required to ensure reliability,” and “how system failures such as a malfunctioning detector or acoustic generator are identified and communicated to an owner.”

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Posted Sunday 3 May 2026 at 7:19 am AEST (my time).

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Scorpions are armed with dual front pincers (technically known as chelae or pedipalp appendages) and a venom-injecting telson, or stinger, on the posterior of their tail. These things look dangerous enough on their own, but a chemical examination showed they contain metals like zinc, manganese, and iron.

“That the metals are there has been known since the 1990s,” said Sam Campbell, a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia. “What we didn’t know was whether scorpions evolved to be like that or if it was accidental and they were just picking the metals up from the environment.”

To answer this question, Campbell and his colleagues examined how metals are distributed across the stingers and pincers of different scorpion species. Based on their data, detailed in a recent study published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, there was nothing accidental about it.

Mapping the weapons

Campbell’s team focused on 18 scorpion taxa selected from a large collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. To map the molecular structure of the scorpions’ weaponry, the researchers used high-resolution scanning electron microscopy coupled with micro-X-ray fluorescence imaging. These methods allowed them to build color-coded maps of all the stingers and pincers, with individual metals localized in extremely high detail. Based on these maps, the team could reconstruct metal enrichment patterns within the weapons.

In most of the studied specimens, zinc was highly concentrated at the extreme tip of the aculeus, the needle-like envenoming structure. “Zinc has all to do with hardness and ensuring that we retain the strength of the tip of the stinger,” Campbell explained. Just below this zinc-fortified tip, manganese often became the dominant metal in a distinct region lower in the aculeus.

The purpose of manganese in the region below the aculeus, the team speculates, is probably to improve the flexibility and absorption of vibrations. Having both metals arranged in this way turns the stinger into a biological spear capable of punching through tough hides or exoskeletons of prey. “It makes sense because a scorpion’s sting is quite aggressive and produces quite a lot of force, so the stinger has to take it without snapping,” Campbell said.

The team noticed a similarly clever metal arrangement in the pincers. Zinc and iron enrichment was present only in the granular rows of the chela, specifically in the jagged, tooth-like bumps called denticles on the movable outer segment. The layout resembled a samurai sword, where the hardest material is concentrated mainly along the cutting edge. “When these denticles, these teeth pop up, we see the enrichment and then, in the entire area around them, all the rest of the claw, there is no metal whatsoever,” Campbell said.

But when Campbell and his colleagues took a deeper dive into species-to-species variations in the scorpions’ weaponry design, they encountered yet another layer of complexity. “One of the things that made me want to do this investigation is that scorpions are all very different,” Campbell said. “They have different sizes and shapes of their pincers and their stingers, and there are significant differences in their behavior.”

The team wanted to learn whether these differences are reflected in scorpions’ patterns of metal enrichment in their weaponry. It turned out they are.

Metal allocation

Scorpion species use their pincers and stingers in different ways. Species in the Buthidae family use their stingers for hunting prey and usually have long and slender pincers with relatively weak crushing power. On the other hand, adults of the Pandinus imperator species, known as the Emperor Scorpion, use the stingers only for self-defense and rely on their robust, massive claws to subdue and crush insects, young mice, and small lizards they feed on.

Going into the study, the team hypothesized that pincers built for generating high crushing force would contain the highest levels of metal to provide maximum hardness, while enrichment in the weaker, slender pincers would be lower. While this held true for zinc, the correlation was the exact opposite for iron.

“The reason we suspect this is the case is that, rather than providing hardness to the claw, the iron enrichment has more to do with abrasion resistance,” Campbell said. When a scorpion with large beefy pincers hunts, it can usually just crush its victim outright. Scorpions with long, slender claws need to hold onto a wrestling, fighting prey for longer to give the venom from their stings time to start working. As for zinc, the enrichment in the chelae was greater in species with reduced crushing power, most likely to compensate for their morphological weakness.

Another finding of the study was the inverse correlation between zinc uptake in the stinger and the claws. If a scorpion species has highly zinc-enriched pincers, its stinger is relatively zinc-poor, and vice versa. “It’s not that they just choose to reinforce one weapon over the other,” Campbell said. “I think this is an evolutionary drive toward reinforcing the weapon that is used the most.”

Still, there are some weapon design problems that evolution failed to solve and questions we have not yet answered. “One of the really interesting things that you see in scorpions in the wild is that their stingers can actually snap,” Campbell said.

Design trade-offs

The point at which the stingers usually snap, the researchers say, is at the zone where zinc enrichment at the tip abruptly stops and transitions into manganese. “It’s quite an interesting weakness for them to have in that region, and I don’t have a real theory or answer to why it is so,” Campbell said.

One idea the team floats is that zinc and manganese are limited resources, so scorpions can only reinforce the most critical parts of the stingers instead of spreading the metals across their entire exoskeleton.

Going deeper into the reasons behind what appears to be a design flaw in an otherwise neatly built stinger is one thing Campbell wants to focus on in the future. But the team thinks there’s more to learn.

“We were using museum specimens, and we only picked one from each species,” Campbell said.

The downside of this approach is that the study did not capture variations in metal-enrichment patterns between different individuals of the same species. These variations, Campbell acknowledged, may be significant in scorpions, which in general have strong sexual dimorphism—females are typically much bigger than males.

Another angle the study did not cover is whether metal enrichment changes across the scorpions’ lives. Scorpions undergo several molts, shedding their exoskeletons to grow and transition into a new stage, or instar. “There was a study that showed in the first instar, when the scorpion is born, there is no metal enrichment,” Campbell said. “The metal starts to come to the stingers by the second instar.”

The challenge in answering questions like these, Campbell thinks, is that scorpions are notoriously difficult to study. They are nocturnal, they often live in deserts, and they burrow underground.

“We don’t 100 percent know what their behavior is,” Campbell said. “It would be good to make true correlations between what we observe in the wild, how they interact with their environment, and what we find in their exoskeletons in the lab. That would be a huge, huge study to try.”

The team’s study on metal enrichment in scorpions’ weapons is published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2025.0523

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Posted Saturday 2 May 2026 at 7:36 am AEST (my time).

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You almost certainly know them: Someone who had to retire from soccer because of a hip problem. A grandmother who can't lift her arm to comb her hair because of shoulder pain. A coworker who had a knee replacement. So often, the cause is osteoarthritis, a wear and tear of the joints that affects one in six people over the age of 30. Osteoarthritis has no cure, and the only remedies are the implantation of a prosthesis or some treatment for pain.

There is reason for optimism, however, because an agency in the US Department of Health and Human Services has allocated millions of dollars to various initiatives investigating a cure for this disease. That agency is the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), and the project that seeks to eradicate osteoarthritis is called NITRO, or Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis. The most advanced initiative in this area is being undertaken by a multidisciplinary team at the University of Colorado Boulder, which has received a $33.5 million grant from NITRO to develop an experimental therapy with the potential to reverse joint damage in a matter of weeks through a simple injection.

Osteoarthritis is characterized by the progressive wearing away of cartilage, the tissue that cushions the contact between bones. Over time, this deterioration causes not only pain and inflammation but also joint deformation and loss of mobility. It's the most common type of arthritis in the US and affects as many as 240 million people worldwide.

“At the moment, the options for many patients are either a massive, expensive surgery or nothing. There’s not a lot in between,” Evalina Burger, professor and chair of the Department of Orthopaedics at CU Anschutz, said via a statement. “That's why ARPA-H is so important.”

Against this backdrop, the Colorado team led by biomedical engineer Stephanie Bryant proposes a radically different approach: “Our goal is not just to treat pain and halt progression, but to end this disease.”

Joints That Can Heal Themselves

The breakthrough is based on harnessing the body's natural ability to regenerate itself. Instead of introducing artificial tissues or a prosthesis, the Colorado scientists have designed a system that “recruits” the body's own cells to repair the damage.

One of the strategies involves a single injection that releases an already approved drug in a controlled manner, thanks to a particle system that acts as a vehicle. This system allows small doses to be administered over months directly into the affected joint, stimulating the repair processes.

The second strategy is designed for more advanced cases. It involves a kit of biomaterials and proteins that can be applied through minimally invasive procedures. Once inside the body, this material solidifies and acts as a scaffold, attracting progenitor cells that fill and regenerate damaged areas of cartilage or bone.

Something very important that both approaches have in common is that they seek to transform the diseased joint into an environment conducive to natural regeneration.

Rapid and Positive Progress

In animal studies, the results have been encouraging. Treated joints returned to a healthy state within four to eight weeks. Moreover, in more severe injuries, the researchers observed complete regeneration of the damaged tissue.

“In two years, we were able to go from a moonshot idea to developing these therapies to demonstrating that they reverse osteoarthritis in animals,” said Bryant. Additional experiments with human cells obtained from patients undergoing joint replacement also showed clear regenerative effects, suggesting that the approach could be translatable to humans.

It is important to stress, however, that these results have not been validated in clinical trials. The researchers first intend to publish their findings in an academic journal later this year. They have also founded a startup, Renovare Therapeutics, to begin the commercialization process.

Back in the lab, the next step would be to expand animal studies and analyze key aspects such as toxicity and safety. If all goes according to plan, human clinical trials could begin in approximately 18 months.

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

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Posted Saturday 2 May 2026 at 7:36 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.39 of the Rocket Report! There’s a lot of news to share in the universe of powerful rockets this week, and we’re delighted to sum it up in this week’s edition. The biggest rocket of them all, Starship, had a relatively quiet week as SpaceX aims to launch the vehicle’s next test flight, perhaps sometime in May. The results of that flight and the outcome of Blue Origin’s first attempt to land on the Moon with its Blue Moon cargo lander in the coming months should tell us a lot about NASA’s actual chances of putting astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028.

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.

These 12 companies are developing SBIs. The US Space Force released a list on April 24 of a dozen companies working on Space-Based Interceptors for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome initiative, a multilayer defense system to shield US territory from drones and ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile attacks, Ars reports. The roster of Golden Dome Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) contractors, some of which were previously reported, includes Anduril Industries, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI USA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, Raytheon, Sci-Tec, SpaceX, True Anomaly, and Turion Space. The companies will contribute in different areas to develop and deliver SBI prototypes for testing. The agreements have a maximum combined value of $3.2 billion. Contracts for full-scale production will come later with a significantly higher price tag.

If they’re ever built… SBIs are widely seen as the most challenging and expensive element for Golden Dome, but they may not be the panacea administration officials argued for when President Donald Trump signed the executive order for Golden Dome in January 2025. Gen. Michael Guetlein, director of the Golden Dome program, suggested SBIs for boost-phase missile intercepts, which Trump’s executive order originally called for, may not be built. “We are so focused on affordability. If we cannot do it affordably, we will not go into production,” Guetlein said in a hearing before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee earlier this month. “We are looking at the threats from a multi-domain perspective to make sure I have redundant capabilities, and I don’t have single points of failure,” he added. “So, if boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it, because we have other options to get after it.”

Hello to Virgin Galactic’s new rocket plane. Virgin Galactic has completed structural assembly of the first Delta-class SpaceShip and moved the vehicle into an adjacent facility in Mesa, Arizona, to begin ground tests, bringing the company a step closer to resuming commercial suborbital flights later this year, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. That is the plan, at least. A photo released by Virgin Galactic shows there’s much work to do inside and outside the vehicle. The most recent schedule update from Virgin Galactic called for flight testing of the first Delta-class spaceship to begin in the third quarter, followed by commercial private astronaut flights to suborbital space by the end of the year.

The only game in town... Virgin Galactic hasn’t flown to space since June 2024, but the company finds itself leading the suborbital human spaceflight market after Blue Origin suspended flights of its New Shepard suborbital booster earlier this year. Virgin decided to move on to the Delta-class program after completing 12 flights to the edge of space—above 80 km or 50 miles, as defined by the US government—with the previous-generation VSS Unity rocket plane. The Delta-class ships are designed for a higher flight rate.

The Moon as a dartboard. Astronomers say the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that launched in early 2025 will strike the Moon later this summer, likely on the near side of the Moon, Ars reports. Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, has published a comprehensive report on the impact expected to occur at 2:44 am ET (06:44 UTC) on August 5. The Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage is 13.8 meters (45 feet) tall and has a 3.7-meter (12 feet) diameter. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, it will strike the lunar surface intact. Although the Moon will be visible to the eastern half of the US and Canada, and in much of South America, Gray said he believes the impact will probably be too faint to be seen by Earth-based telescopes.

This happens... Four years ago, Ars reported that astronomers believed another Falcon 9 upper stage would strike the Moon. However, subsequent analysis revealed that the object was, in fact, an upper stage from the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 mission. Gray said there is no doubt that this object is the Falcon 9 upper stage because it has been tracked since launch. There is no risk from its impact to anything on the Moon. It is a dead world, and there are no human-landed objects nearby.

Ukraine has a Russian spaceport in its sights. If you believe official Russian reports, the country’s northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months, Ars reports. The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX’s Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine’s military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow. Russian officials have not identified the source of the drones, but Russia’s defense ministry has ascribed other drone swarms in the Arkhangelsk region to Ukraine. Ukrainian drones have routinely struck deep into Russian territory, hitting Russian military bases, oil refineries, and the Russian capital.

Cloaked launch schedule… Since the reported drone incursions, the Russian government has put a tighter lid on information about its launches from Plesetsk. Authorities typically publish airspace warning notices called NOTAMs advising pilots to steer clear of a rocket’s flight path and downrange drop zones where spent booster rockets fall back to Earth. These NOTAMs usually cover a few minutes to a few hours for a primary launch date, and perhaps a backup date in the event of a delay. The notices accompanying the most recent launches from Plesetsk covered much longer time periods, with daily windows of up to 10 hours over up to 14 consecutive days. This makes it more difficult to pin down when a launch will occur ahead of time.

Russia debuts new rocket. Russia’s new Soyuz-5 rocket has taken to the skies at long last, Space.com reports. The Soyuz-5 lifted off for the first time ever on Thursday, rising off a pad at the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2 pm EDT (18:00 UTC). Things apparently went well on the flight, which was a brief suborbital shakeout cruise. “The first and second stages of Soyuz 5 performed as planned, and a mockup was launched onto the calculated suborbital trajectory, followed by a reentry into an area in the Pacific Ocean previously closed to shipping and aviation,” officials with Russia’s federal space agency, Roscosmos, said via the Telegram app on Thursday.

Resurrecting Zenit… Russia has been developing the Soyuz-5 rocket since 2017. It is a new vehicle, but it does not represent a major leap forward in technology, Ars reported last year. The Soyuz-5 is a replacement for the medium-class Zenit rocket, which had tanks manufactured in Ukraine coupled with Russian-made engines. The Zenit last flew in 2017. It was developed in the 1980s, before the Soviet Union’s breakup, and continued to fly for decades while Russia and Ukraine remained on good terms. That changed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The Soyuz-5 uses the same basic type of Russia-built RD-171 engine that flew on the Zenit rocket, but the tanks and structures are also built within Russia’s borders. Soyuz-5’s performance slots it in between Russia’s smaller legacy Soyuz-2 rocket and the heavy-lift Angara-A5. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

FAA tells launch companies it’s time to pay up. The Federal Aviation Administration is ready to begin collecting user fees for the first time for commercial launches and reentries, which could generate millions of dollars annually, Space News reports. The legal foundation for the user fees was signed into law last year by President Donald Trump as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which called for the FAA to phase in user fees over eight years, beginning in 2026. The money will go into a trust fund to help pay for the operating costs of the FAA’s commercial space office. The FAA will assess the user fee as the lesser of two amounts. For 2026, that fee is 25 cents per pound of payload, capped at $30,000 per launch or reentry. The FAA will retroactively charge launch and reentry operators for fees accrued since the beginning of this year.

SpaceX will pay most… The company most impacted by the user fees will be SpaceX, which owns and operates the vast majority of US launch and reentry vehicles. Based on the assessment of 25 cents per pound of payload, SpaceX initially would pay a fee of between $9,000 and $10,000 for each of its Falcon 9 launches carrying Starlink Internet satellites. The fee rate will increase over the next eight years, with the maximum fee reaching a cap of $200,000 in 2033. The funding will be used by the FAA to improve integration of launches and reentries into the national airspace system.

Atlas V launches again for Amazon. United Launch Alliance completed its second Atlas V rocket launch of the month Monday, marking the company’s fastest turnaround between two Atlas V missions from the same launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Spaceflight Now reports. It beats the previous record by nearly three days. Onboard the Atlas V rocket was a batch of 29 Amazon Leo satellites. This was ULA’s sixth flight delivering production versions of Amazon’s broadband Internet satellites to orbit and its seventh overall, including the two demo satellites launched on the Protoflight mission in October 2023.

The end is near… This was the 108th launch of an Atlas V to date. ULA is hitting a stride with the Atlas V rocket as the company’s new Vulcan launch vehicle remains grounded due to a booster anomaly on its most recent flight in February. But the Atlas V program is winding down, with hardware for just eight more Atlas Vs in ULA’s inventory, including two more for the Amazon Leo constellation. ULA is on contract to launch 38 Vulcan rockets to deploy satellites for the Amazon Leo network, but those missions are on hold pending the investigation into Vulcan’s solid rocket motor problem. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Ariane launches for Amazon, from the Amazon. Less than three days after the Atlas V launch from Florida, another cluster of 32 Amazon Leo satellites rode a European Ariane 6 rocket into orbit from the Guiana Space Center in South America, European Spaceflight reports. The rocket launched in its Ariane 64 configuration that features four solid-fuel boosters. The first of the 32 satellites was separated from the rocket’s upper stage just under an hour and a half after liftoff. All 32 satellites were deployed over 12 separation events lasting roughly 25 minutes in total.

Hitting a cadence… Arianespace has been contracted by Amazon to carry out 18 missions supporting the deployment of its satellite constellation, which is intended to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink global broadband network. Arianespace has indicated that it plans to launch up to eight Ariane 6 flights in 2026, a significant portion of which will be dedicated to working through its backlog for Amazon. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Lofty launch targets for New Glenn. Earlier this week, Blue Origin posted a job opportunity for a “senior manager” to oversee tank fabrication for “Quattro,” and the description contained some intriguing information, Ars reports. Quattro is the company’s nickname for a more powerful upper stage for the New Glenn rocket, which will feature four BE-3U engines instead of the two currently powering the booster. Blue Origin revealed plans for this more powerful variant of New Glenn, 9×4 (nine first stage engines, and four upper stage engines), last November. The 9×4 could debut as soon as next year, and the person Blue hires for upper stage tank fabrication will be charged with executing a “rate ramp” of 12 per year to 100 per year by 2029.

Miles to go… The upper stage is currently not reusable, so each new build will equate to one launch. Blue Origin has a long way to go before achieving 100 New Glenn flights, and doing it within three years sounds overly optimistic. The company has a lot on its plate with the development of a human-rated Moon lander for NASA, a standardized spacecraft bus and space tug called Blue Ring, and other lesser-known projects. The New Glenn rocket’s current upper stage, with two BE-3U engines, failed on the most recent launch earlier this month. But Blue Origin has talented engineers and deep pockets thanks to its owner Jeff Bezos, so it’s worth taking the goals seriously. Money solves many, if not all, ills.

Welcome back, Falcon Heavy. A triple-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the company’s most powerful operational rocket, blasted off from Florida on Wednesday, boosting a ViaSat Internet satellite into space, the company’s third in a globe-spanning fleet of high-speed broadband relay stations, CBS News reports. Along with putting the ViaSat-3 satellite into its planned preliminary orbit, the rocket’s two side boosters, heralded by competing sonic booms, executed on-target touchdowns on separate pads at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after boosting the vehicle out of the dense lower atmosphere. It was the 12th flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket since the booster’s maiden launch in 2018 and the first since October 2024 when SpaceX sent NASA’s Europa probe on the way to Jupiter.

A healthy backlog… Despite the long gap between flights, SpaceX has quite a few Falcon Heavy missions planned over the next few years. The next one is set to launch NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Florida in September. Another Falcon Heavy will launch a commercial lunar lander for Astrobotic, perhaps toward the end of this year. SpaceX has at least a dozen more Falcon Heavy flights on contract through the end of the decade. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Artemis III core stage arrives at KSC. The largest piece of hardware for NASA’s Artemis III mission arrived at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on Monday after a trip by barge from its factory in New Orleans, Florida Today reports. Ground teams at Kennedy offloaded the core stage—still lacking its engine section—from the barge on Tuesday and transferred it inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. There, technicians will install the core stage’s four RS-25 main engines and prepare the rocket for stacking.

Next year, maybe… NASA hopes to launch Artemis III next year on a mission to Earth orbit. The astronauts on Artemis III will perform rendezvous and docking tests in orbit between NASA’s Orion crew capsule and one or both human-rated lunar landers developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin. The agency’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, told lawmakers on Monday that SpaceX and Blue Origin say they could have their spacecraft ready for the Artemis III mission in Earth orbit in late 2027, somewhat later than NASA’s previous schedule of mid-2027. If Artemis III flies next year, NASA hopes to follow it with a human lunar landing attempt in 2028. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

May 1: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-38 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:35 UTC

May 3: Falcon 9 | CAS500-2 rideshare | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06:59 UTC

May 6: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-29 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:00 UTC

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Posted Saturday 2 May 2026 at 7:35 am AEST (my time).

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The genetic code is central to life. With minor variations, everything uses the same sets of three DNA bases to encode the same 20 amino acids. We have discovered no major exceptions to this, leading researchers to conclude that this code probably dated back to the last common ancestor of all life on Earth. But there has been a lot of informed speculation about how that genetic code initially evolved.

Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could get rid of one of the 20 currently in use. And, as a first attempt, they engineered a portion of the ribosome that worked without using an otherwise essential amino acid: isoleucine.

Changing the code

First off, why would you do this? Most work in the field has focused on altering the genetic code in ways that are useful, such as using more than 20 amino acids to enable interesting chemistry.

The reasoning here seems to be that, prior to the last common ancestor of life on Earth, organisms experimented with various genetic codes and probably used a mix of proteins and catalytic RNAs to run their metabolisms. While we’ve done a lot of studies of catalytic RNAs, we have far less of an idea of what sort of chemistry is possible with a reduced genetic code. And, the researchers suggest, AI-based tools have matured enough that redesigning proteins to use fewer amino acids is far more realistic than it was just a few years ago.

Isoleucine is one of three highly similar amino acids, along with leucine and valine. In the portion of the structure that’s distinct from other amino acids, all three have a branched structure that’s composed entirely of carbon and hydrogen. That makes them all hydrophobic, and they often are located in the interior of proteins, which keeps them away from the watery environment of the cell. So, purely by reasoning it out, one of those three would seem to be a good candidate to get rid of.

The researchers involved backed that reasoning up with evidence. They ran an analysis of the E. coli genome, checking which amino acids were substituted by other ones in related proteins from other species. Isoleucine was the amino acid that was most frequently swapped out for a different one. So, the researchers decided to start answering the question of whether we really need it at all.

Editing all 4,500 or so genes in E. coli would be a monumental task, and that many changes at once would almost certainly end up killing it, so the researchers started out with much smaller tests. To begin with, they took a set of 36 essential genes and replaced every isoleucine in them with valine, a similar amino acid, and then put the introduced gene back into the genome. For 22 of the genes, doing so killed the cells. But that does indicate that 17 of them got by ok without isoleucine, including one where it was swapped out in 45 different positions along the amino acid chain.

Notably, even in cases where cells tolerated the change, their growth often slowed compared to the unedited cells. That will become a recurring theme.

Redesigning the ribosome

To give their project a focus, the researchers decided to start engineering an isoleucine-free ribosome. The ribosome is a large complex of proteins and RNAs that translates messenger RNAs into proteins—you can think of it as a bit like one of the hardware components that’s needed to boot a living cell from a genome. Obviously, many of the proteins in the ribosome have critical enzymatic activities. But bringing that complex together requires that these proteins interact with each other and RNAs. So, the ribosome provides a very stringent test of whether engineering out an amino acid can be tolerated by cells.

As a preliminary test, the team did an isoleucine-to-valine swap for 50 different individual genes that contribute proteins to the ribosome. Eighteen of those worked with no obvious problems, another 19 grew more slowly, and the changes were lethal for the remaining 13 genes. The team then focused on the 32 genes with reduced fitness and adapted deep-learning protein-design software to suggest alternative sequences that did not include isoleucine.

Iterative testing using four different software packages produced alternative protein sequences for 25 of these 32 proteins that eliminated the fitness issues.

For the remaining five, they went back and forced changes at the isoleucine. They then let the software design changes in the amino acids that are physically close to it within the three-dimensional structure of the protein, the idea being that the change in amino acid may disrupt the protein’s structure in a way that other changes in nearby amino acids could compensate for. This led to successful redesigns for four of the five problem proteins.

While these are impressive achievements, testing them individually doesn’t really give the full picture of whether these redesigned proteins can put together a functionally equivalent ribosome. To do that, the researchers decided to remove isoleucine from all of the proteins in the small subunit of the ribosome. This is largely a matter of convenience. The genes for the 21 proteins in the small subunit are all clustered next to each other on a 10,000-base-long stretch of the genome, so the researchers could just replace them all at once.

Thinking small

Using the redesigned proteins from the earlier work, they started replacing ever-larger stretches of the genes along this 10,000-base stretch of DNA. Starting from one side, they replaced 10 genes without any trouble. By the time they got to replacing 17 of the 21, the cells were growing more slowly. Replacing 18 genes at once, however, killed the cells entirely.

So, they started working in from the other direction and found that the changes were tolerated until they hit the same gene identified as problematic when going from the other direction. That gene, called rplW, seems to be the critical holdup. Replacing 20 of the 21 genes and leaving rplW untouched led to cells that not only survived, but grew at about 70 percent the rate of an unmodified E. coli cell.

So, they took a careful look at the changes the software had suggested for rplW. It turns out that the software had compensated for the changes to isoleucines by deleting some small stretches of amino acids nearby. While that apparently worked to get a functional protein, it differed enough that it wouldn’t work in combination with all the other changes.

At this point, the team just brute-forced the issue. They had software packages suggest a number of alternative amino acids for each of the four isoleucine positions in rplW and tested every possible combination of them (16 designs in total). One of these designs was able to complete the isoleucine-free small subunit, with the resulting strain growing about 60 percent as fast as the unedited ones. The cells were grown 400 generations and typically picked up 20–30 mutations, but none of those restored an isoleucine to any of the ribosomal proteins.

Notably, if you just put this version of rplW back into the genome on its own, the cells die. It’s only tolerated in the context of all the other changes to the ribosome caused by the other redesigned proteins.

Some notes about the AI use

It’s not clear that any of this would have been possible without the heavy use of AI tools. All of the protein design tools were AI-based, and their outputs were checked using AlphaFold 2, the Nobel-winning AI protein structure software. And the authors of the paper highlight a number of cases where the AI software made suggestions that most biologists would have shied away from. These include replacing the structurally flexible, neutral isoleucine with either a charged amino acid or one that’s locked into a rigid structure.

That said, the results also show the limits of working with current AI models, largely because, unlike a human, they can’t really explain the process by which they’re making decisions. For example, some of the models made very different suggestions from each other, which the researchers say implies that they are exploring different regions of the space of possible sequences. But we don’t actually know whether that’s the case, or if each model had mathematical reasons for disliking the other’s suggestions.

That’s one of a number of cases in the paper where the researchers tried to reason backward about what the model was doing based on its output. In at least one case, the software redesigned the entire structural element (an alpha helix) the isoleucine it changed was located in, for reasons they don’t even hazard a guess.

It’s a good reminder that, at the moment, these software packages are tools: they let us do things that would otherwise not be possible, but they don’t actually help us understand all that much. We’re still left to reason through phenomena using the neural networks inside our skulls.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case; we could put more emphasis on exposing the inner workings of this software when developing it in order to get some insights into its decision-making process. But for now, I think the emphasis has been (quite reasonably) on getting something that works.

An amazing achievement, but is it useful?

Overall, this is astonishing work. These proteins have to interact with each other, interact with ribosomal RNAs, transfer RNAs, messenger RNAs, the growing proteins the ribosome makes—plus all the normal proteins over on the large subunit. Each of those has had billions of years to evolve the ability to work with each other. The fact that we could make such radical changes to the system over the course of a couple of years is just mind-blowing.

We still don’t know what’s slowing these cells down at the moment. It’s possible that the revised ribosome is less accurate, making more defective proteins by putting together amino acid chains with the more frequent errors. Or it could be slower catalytically, becoming a bottleneck for cell growth. That’s something we could definitely experiment with, and giving the strain time to evolve might bring its growth rate back up a bit.

Can we use it as a starting place to get to an isoleucine-free genome? I’d rate that as still in the “maybe” category. There are lots of other large protein complexes in the cell, and there may be some that the AI tools struggle with. We’ll see if these labs have time and funding to continue down this path. Still, I’m skeptical that it will tell us much about life before the universal common ancestor, given how much about the rest of the cell has changed in the meantime.

It may, however, prove effective in that regard, in that it could inspire other scientists to think about experiments that might give us a better picture of what cells with a limited genetic code might look like.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb5171  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 1 May 2026 at 7:26 am AEST (my time).

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The immune system operates at a scale scientists are only just beginning to be able to see. That new view could change how diseases like cancer are tackled.

Speaking at WIRED Health on April 16, Daniel Davis, an immunologist at Imperial College London, detailed how researchers are using advanced microscopes to uncover previously invisible dynamics in the human immune system, showing that there are multiple processes happening on a “nanoscale” that was previously out of reach.

That new view is already reshaping how immunity is understood. “We have discovered something that's known as the immunological synapse, which is that lots of different protein molecules are known to trigger the immune system,” Davis said.

Today’s microscopes reveal worlds that “we just had no idea that existed,” he explained. “There wasn't really a hypothesis that led us to that,” he said. “It was watching things happen under a microscope.”

At this scale, even the first moments of contact between cells look different. “When an immune cell sticks to another cell, it's got to decide if that other cell is healthy or diseased. Small, nanoscale protrusions come out from the immune cell to make that initial contact,” he said.

In collaboration with pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb, his lab is exploring how this level of detail can be used not just to observe immune responses, but influence them. After killing a diseased cell, for instance, an immune cell has to detach and move on to attack another, a process scientists have only recently been able to observe in detail.

Davis’s team is experimenting with reengineered antibodies—Y-shaped molecules that act as a bridge between immune cells and cancer cells—to strengthen the signals that activate those immune cells. By binding to the immune cell in this way and bringing key proteins closer together, these molecules can “send a really strong potent signal for the immune cell to switch on and kill the cancer.”

Conceptually, this suggests that arranging molecules on immune cells could make them more effective at killing target cells, potentially improving how the immune system attacks cancer or, in autoimmune disease, eliminates harmful cells. While the work is currently early stage, Davis says that “it might produce something in the end that could be tried in patients.”

There are many different kinds of molecules you could tweak the positioning of on the immune cell surface, he explains. “I don't have any real idea about which ones would be good to target or not target. At the moment, the strategies place lots of bets.”

“Lots of different small startup companies are trying lots of different versions of that type of therapy” as they try to find out what would enable that powerful response, he said.

Alongside these advances, Davis emphasized that immune health is inherently individual. Of all a human’s genes, the ones that vary most between people are—perhaps surprisingly—not those that determine appearance, but those linked to the immune system, he explained.

“There's a fundamental biological reason why humans are so diverse and that is because it's how our species has evolved to survive all different kinds of diseases,” he said.

That means people respond differently to the same infection. “I might think I haven't exercised enough, I haven't eaten the right stuff, I'm too stressed,” he said. In reality, “you might have inherited a particular set of immune system genes that make you better at fighting off that kind of illness.”

“There's no hierarchy in the system,” he added.

Right now, immune health practice is not at the point where it can tailor treatments to those differences. Davis added that though some companies are working toward personalized approaches, the ability to truly harness individual immune health remains a future goal.

In the meantime, Davis warned against blindly following simplistic health advice. “Any time you hear a sound bite” about improving immune health, he said, it is important to look more closely at the evidence behind it.

He pointed to the enduring belief that vitamin C can prevent or shorten colds, an idea popularized by chemist Linus Pauling, who won Nobel Prizes in 1954 and 1962. Despite the persistence of that advice, Davis said the effect is minimal: “[Pauling] cherry-picked the evidence.”

Similarly, there was Hans Selye, often described as the “father of stress research,” whose work showed that stress can produce physical effects in the body. While that insight remains important, Davis noted that eventually it was revealed that Selye had received funding from the tobacco industry, which sought to position smoking as a way to reduce stress.

The broader lesson, Davis said, is to be cautious of confident claims about immune health, regardless of their source.

“Please be wary of any one person's view, even if they've won two Nobel Prizes,” he said.

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Posted Friday 1 May 2026 at 7:25 am AEST (my time).

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Astronomers say the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that launched in early 2025 will strike the Moon later this summer, likely on the near side of the Moon.

Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, has published a comprehensive report on the impact expected to occur at 2:44 am ET (06:44 UTC) on August 5. The Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage is 13.8 meters (45 feet) tall and has a 3.7-meter (12 feet) diameter. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, it will strike the lunar surface intact.

Although the Moon will be visible to the eastern half of the US and Canada, and in much of South America, Gray said he believes the impact will probably be too faint to be seen by Earth-based telescopes.

Highly confident in its origin

Gray said he and other astronomers are highly confident that this object is the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that launched two lunar landers, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Hakuto-R, on January 15, 2025. After the launch, the two landers, a payload fairing, and the upper stage were all tracked following their separation. The two landers reached the Moon (only Blue Ghost successfully touched down), and the fairing reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

“The upper stage, 2025-010D, also kept orbiting the Earth, but was a bit higher and didn’t re-enter,” Gray wrote. “It’s had a few close passes by the Moon and Earth, but nothing that was close enough to look like a possible impact. The asteroid surveys observed it whenever it wasn’t too close to the Sun or Moon to see. As of 2026 February 26, we had accumulated 1053 observations of it.”

Gray estimates the object will be traveling at 2.43 km a second, or 5,400 mph, when it strikes the Moon in or near the Einstein Crater. This is about seven times the speed of sound. It will create a small crater, but otherwise should do no damage.

Not the first time this has happened

Four years ago, Ars reported that astronomers believed another Falcon 9 upper stage would strike the Moon. However, subsequent analysis revealed that the object was, in fact, an upper stage from the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 mission. Gray said there is no doubt that this object is the Falcon 9 upper stage because it has been tracked since launch.

There is no risk from its impact to anything on the Moon. It is a dead world, and there are no human-landed objects nearby.

However, both NASA and China are deep in the planning stages for establishing semi-permanent outposts near the South Pole of the Moon. As part of that, the cadence of launches on Falcon 9 and other rockets to the Moon is likely to increase by something like a factor of 10 due to the need to land rovers, supplies, habitats, communications equipment, and much more to support human activities.

There is a relatively easy fix for this: With some extra planning and sparing a little fuel, launch companies can put these stages into “disposal” orbits around the Sun and in a path that will avoid hitting Earth or the Moon in perpetuity. For the safety of future operations on the Moon, this probably should become standard operating procedure.

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Posted Thursday 30 April 2026 at 7:31 am AEST (my time).

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Antibiotic resistance is a fast-growing public health crisis, causing more than a million global deaths annually and contributing to nearly 5 million more. These infections are more difficult and more expensive to treat than typical infections and are responsible for longer hospital stays, driving up costs for hospitals and patients alike.

Treatment mostly comes down to guesswork on the part of physicians. Ara Darzi, a surgeon and director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, says AI-powered diagnostics offer a better way.

“We're standing, right now, in 2026, at the first genuine inflection point in this crisis,” Darzi said on April 16 at WIRED Health in London.

The overuse and misuse of antibiotics and a lack of new drug development have been fueling the rise of resistant microbes. When bacteria are exposed to levels of antibiotics that don't immediately kill them, they develop defense mechanisms to survive. Unnecessary prescriptions allow bacteria to develop immunity, rendering life-saving medications ineffective. It means a dwindling list of treatment options for patients with serious infections.

The problem is set to get worse. A 2024 report in The Lancet predicted that drug-resistant infections could cause 40 million deaths by 2050.

Traditional diagnostics to determine an antibiotic-resistant infection usually take two to three days, as they require culturing bacteria from a sample. But for some infections, such as sepsis, that is time patients don’t have. For every hour of delayed treatment, the risk of death increases by between 4 to 9 percent. While waiting for test results, doctors must use their best judgment in choosing which antibiotics to use.

AI-based diagnostics could help inform those decisions. “AI-powered diagnostics are achieving accuracy above 99 percent without additional laboratory infrastructure,” Darzi said.

These types of rapid diagnostics are especially needed in rural and remote areas of the world, he added. The World Health Organization estimates that antibiotic resistance is highest in southeast Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, where one in three reported infections were resistant in 2023. In Africa, one in five infections was resistant.

AI could also help discover new drugs for resistant infections and predict the spread of resistant bacteria. The UK’s National Health Service is working with Google DeepMind to develop an AI system to combat antibiotic resistance. In one demonstration, the system identified previously unknown mechanisms of resistance in just 48 hours, cracking a mystery that had taken researchers at Imperial College London a decade to understand.

Paired with an automated laboratory, Darzi said it’s now possible to run hundreds of parallel experiments around the clock. Deep learning models can now screen billions of molecular structures in days, while generative AI is being used to design compounds that do not exist in nature.

Yet major pharmaceutical companies have dropped antibiotic development because of a broken economic model. New antibiotics would need to be reserved to prevent resistance, but pharma companies profit based on high-volume sales. There’s little incentive for companies to stay in the game.

Darzi argued that new payment models are needed in order to encourage the development of new antibiotics. In 2024, the UK began a pilot program for a Netflix-style payment model in which the government pays a fixed annual subscription fee to a pharmaceutical company for access to new antibiotics, not for the volume prescribed. Sweden is also experimenting with a partially delinked model.

“The question that will determine the shape of medicine for the next 100 years is not whether we have the tools to respond. We have the tools,” he said. “The question is whether we have the character to take seriously what we are seeing.”

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Posted Thursday 30 April 2026 at 7:30 am AEST (my time).

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“This year’s Special Report highlights a critical moment to move beyond viewing brain health as an issue of older age and instead establish it as a lifelong priority and a shared responsibility across society,” authors said. “While individual behaviors matter, lasting progress depends on coordinated actions across workplaces, communities, health care systems and public health institutions to optimize the conditions that support cognitive function and well‑being.”

ias (ADRD) with regard to disease progression, types of dementias, risk factors as well as current treatments. It also discusses the prevalence of the disease, noting that 7.4 million older Americans now are living with Alzheimer’s disease. In total, the report estimates about 1 in 9 people (11%) age 65 and older have clinical Alzheimer’s dementia.

Health and long-term care costs for people living with dementia, meanwhile, are projected to reach $409 billion in 2026 and balloon to nearly $1 trillion in 2050, the report said. Of the $409 billion in estimated costs, Medicare and Medicaid are expected to cover $263 billion (64%) of these total healthcare and long-term care payments while out-of-pocket spending is expected to be $103 billion (25%) of total payments.

About half of all caregivers (48%) who provide help to older adults do so for someone with Alzheimer’s or another dementia, according to the report. Additionally, 83% of the hours of help provided to older adults with or without dementia in the United States come from family members, friends or other caregivers, who are often unpaid. The report estimates the value of the unpaid care provided by family caregivers at more than $5 billion in each of 28 states. 

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Not only does the way labor, as it is designed, contribute to symptoms of burnout, but it may be making people physically sick, and could potentially lead to death. According to a new International Labour Organization report, more than 840,000 people die each year from health conditions linked to major psychosocial risks at work. The report examined how job strain, effort-reward imbalance, job insecurity, long working hours, and workplace bullying contribute to cardiovascular disease and mental disorders. 

The report, titled “The psychosocial working environment: Global developments and pathways for action” estimates work-related psychosocial risk factors are associated with 840,088 deaths annually worldwide and nearly 45 million disability-adjusted life years, a measure of healthy years lost to illness, disability, or premature death. The ILO estimates the combined burden from cardiovascular disease and mental disorders associated with those workplace risks is equivalent to a loss of 1.37% of the global GDP each year.

The overwhelming share of the estimated death toll comes from cardiovascular disease, with the ILO attributing 783,694 deaths to cardiovascular conditions such as ischemic heart disease and stroke, compared with 56,394 deaths linked to mental disorders including depression. But mental disorders account for the larger share of healthy life years lost, reflecting the chronic and disabling nature of many mental health conditions.

The physiosocial effects of work, at a global scale

The findings are directly associating a number to common phrases we’ve heard through years of overworking: burnout, stress, disengagement, toxic culture, or low morale. 

The ILO defines the psychosocial working environment as the way jobs are designed, how work is organized and managed, and the broader policies and practices that govern daily working life. When those systems are poorly designed, hazards can emerge from excessive demands, low control, unclear roles, weak support, unstable work arrangements, harassment, discrimination, or a mismatch between effort and reward. 

Long hours remain one of the biggest and most measurable culprits, with the report saying 35% of workers globally work more than 48 hours a week—occupational-health research often defines long working hours as 55 hours or more a week. Previous estimates attributed roughly 745,000 deaths annually to long working hours, largely through ischemic heart disease and stroke.

Across the world, some countries fared worse than others. In 2019, 47% of workers in Asia and the Pacific worked more than 48 hours a week, compared with a global average of 35%. Long hours were more common in informal employment than formal employment, affecting 41% versus 28% of workers respectively. Wholesale and retail trade, transport and communications, and manufacturing were among the sectors with the highest reported burden of long hours.

Bullying and harassment are another major part of the workplace health picture. The ILO estimates 23% of workers globally have experienced at least one form of violence or harassment during their working life, with psychological violence the most commonly reported form at 18%. Physical violence was reported by 9% of workers and sexual violence or harassment by 6%, with women reporting higher exposure to sexual violence and harassment than men.

The ILO argues psychosocial risks should be managed through occupational safety and health systems, with policies that address the design and organization of work. It calls for better national data, clearer regulation, stronger enforcement and guidance, and workplace-level changes such as reviewing workloads, staffing, task allocation, supervision, working hours, and mechanisms for workers to raise concerns.

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The physics explaining how gases bubble through volcanoes or how water and oils flow through Earth’s crust can also help quantify the perfect percolation of hot water through ground coffee, researchers report in the April 1 Royal Society Open Science.

“I mostly work on volcanic eruptions,” says Fabian Wadsworth, an earth scientist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. He first became interested in the physics of making espresso as a pedagogical tool to teach students fundamental concepts of percolation. “Coffee felt like a natural way that students might get engaged with those problems,” he says.

Espresso begins with ground coffee beans, which get tamped — or compressed — into a receptacle to form a compact body called a puck. Hot, pressurized water then extracts flavors, bitterness and caffeine for your morning or afternoon needs.

To craft a quality espresso, you need two things, Wadsworth says. The first is to ensure the ground beans are even by removing clumps and tamping the puck uniformly, “so you don’t have one area of the puck where flow is happening more than another.” An even puck ensures the water diffuses throughout all the particles, capturing as much hidden flavor as possible.

The second factor, Wadsworth says, is “controlling the time it takes for the water to move through the coffee.” The more densely packed the puck, the longer water stays in contact with the particles. Too much contact will result in a bitter brew, while too little won’t extract enough flavor or caffeine.

In the equation, the researchers start with the premise that the grounds are evenly distributed and tamped with equal pressure across the puck. “Once you’ve achieved evenness, you can use our model to calculate the speed of the flow,” Wadsworth says. 

To verify the equation, Wadsworth and his colleagues scrutinized two coffee roasts — Tumba from Rwanda and Guayacán from Colombia — ground at 11 settings each, totaling 22 samples. With software that turns multiple X-ray cross sections into 3-D renderings, they charted how fluid moved through the samples.

The results suggest the espresso equation works just as clearly to describe percolation through grounds as other equations describe gas moving through magma or water through sandstone. The results help show how factors such as grain size can significantly impact taste through permeability. “If you were to double the grain size, you increase the permeability by a factor of four,” Wadsworth says. 

Harnessing insights from volcanology for coffee research is “genuinely exciting and shows how methods developed in one field can open new perspectives in another,” says coffee science expert Samo Smrke of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, who was not involved with the work.

The model will make the most sense to expert baristas with machines equipped to measure pressure and flow rates, Wadsworth says. “They might have a different language for talking about it, but I think they would be able to understand what we did and appreciate it.”

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European Great Tits and 36 other bird species on the continent are more afraid of women than they are of men, according to a recent study—and researchers have no idea why.

In the study, men could get about a meter closer to birds than women could before the animals flew away, according to the results. This pattern remained regardless of what the men and women were wearing, what their height was or how they tried to approach the creatures. That suggests birds may be able to suss out the sex of a human, though the researchers aren’t sure how.

“I fully believe our results, that urban birds react differently based on the sex of the person approaching them, but I can’t explain them right now,” said Daniel Blumstein, a co-author of the study and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement.

The researchers looked at birds living in urban centers in five European countries. They included birds that are known to flee as soon as a human approaches, such as magpies, and those that tend to flap off later, such as pigeons. The outsize fear response to women was consistent across the species.

In the paper, the team hypothesized that birds may be sensing chemical signals, such as pheromones, or using cues such as body shape to recognize a person’s sex. But more research is needed before they can come to any conclusions. Notably, previous findings in mammals also suggest these animals can tell men and women apart: for example, lab rats have been observed to feel greater stress when male researchers handle them than when female researchers do so.

“We have identified a phenomenon, but we really don’t know why. However, what our results do highlight is the birds’ sophisticated ability to evaluate their environment,” said study co-author Federico Morelli, an associate professor at the University of Turin, in the same statement.

“There are several possibilities for what cues birds are picking up on. It could be smells, it could be people’s [gait]. But how do we test this? Perhaps a study resembling Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks,” said Blumstein, referring to the famous British comedy show sketch.

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