Lennard Lee, a UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, calls himself just a “simple doctor,” but he’s anything but. During the pandemic, he led clinical efforts that showed it was still safe to give cancer patients chemotherapy, disproving fears that the coronavirus made this too risky, helping to maintain cancer treatment worldwide. He also delivered UK research that showed lateral flow testing was effective in identifying the most infectious Covid patients.

His most important project, however, is the one he’s currently leading as the national government advisor for mRNA cancer vaccines. This new type of vaccine, which is based on the same technology as the Covid vaccines first developed by BioNTech and Moderna, is seen by many as a potential breakthrough in the fight against cancer. Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health in London next week, Lee tells WIRED why he hopes these vaccines will prove to be the “silver lining of the pandemic.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: There are currently hundreds of mRNA cancer vaccine trials ongoing worldwide. How did the success of mRNA Covid vaccines kickstart this?

Lennard Lee: Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.

Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

In the UK, you set up the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad at the end of 2022 to fast-track cancer vaccine trials. Why set up such an ambitious project right after the Covid pandemic?

The pandemic was ending, the Omicron variant was much milder than previous variants, and everyone had had their vaccines. Research in the area of Covid vaccines was starting to close down, but companies like Moderna and BioNTech were trying to figure out what to do next, because there wasn’t going to be a need for a Covid vaccine market forever. So they started to pivot to cancer vaccines using mRNA technology, and they were looking for countries with proven capabilities for vaccine research and manufacture.

In the meantime, the UK was ready. We had fridges and we had world-class manufacturing and research facilities. During the pandemic, we had proven we could open and deliver clinical trials fast. Also, the UK had established a genomic global lead with Genomics England and the 100,000 Genome Project. All doctors and nurses in this country are trained in genomics. That was a big signpost for any pharmaceutical industry.

So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.

During the pandemic, the UK was opening clinical trials in a matter of a few weeks. But before it used to take years to complete a clinical trial. What changed?

It was really fascinating, because for many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.

Of course, opening a clinical trial during a pandemic is not necessarily the same as a clinical trial for cancer. But you had a breakthrough moment for the cancer vaccine project at an early stage.

There was a trial run by BioNTech, called BNT122, on people with high-risk bowel cancer, which was not recruiting very well across the world. So when we announced the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, the UK cancer community took that opportunity. We opened that trial at Birmingham University Hospital, which was the most surprising thing for me, because it is not a leading cancer vaccine studies center.

We needed to get 10,000 patients enrolled in the trial, and we got there within the course of three months. It was quite amazing. It just goes to show that because we’re a single health care system, we can do this much quicker than any other country.

The dominoes started falling very quickly on the back of that success: we opened a head and neck cancer trial in Liverpool, an esophageal and gastric cancer trial in Dundee, and a lung cancer trial in London. We started to create a community of people who were all pushing for launching cancer vaccine trials as quickly as possible.

Several mRNA-based cancer vaccines are in late-stage clinical trials internationally, and the UK is currently running 15 cancer-vaccine trials. When will we see the first approved mRNA cancer vaccine?

We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It’s now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That’s completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long.

What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there’s a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn’t. We’re hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive.

Hear Lennard Lee speak at WIRED Health on March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at health.wired.com.

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The Athena spacecraft was not exactly flying blind as it approached the lunar surface one week ago. The software on board did a credible job of recognizing nearby craters, even with elongated shadows over the terrain. However, the lander's altimeter had failed.

So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface.

An important detail, that. As a result, the privately built spacecraft struck the lunar surface on a plateau, toppled over, and began to skid across the surface. As it did so, the lander rotated at least once or twice before coming to a stop in a small, shadowed crater.

"The landing was kind of like sliding into second base," Steve Altemus, chief executive officer of Intuitive Machines, which built the lander, said in an interview Thursday.

Cold and lonely

It has been a busy and tiring week for the chief of a company that seeks to help lead the development of a lunar economy. Expectations were high for this, the company's second lunar landing attempt after its Odysseus vehicle became the first private spacecraft to ever make a soft landing on the Moon, last year, before toppling over.

In some ways, this mission was even more disappointing. Because Athena skidded across the lunar surface, it dredged up regolith. When it came to a stop, some of this material was blown up into the solar panels—already in a sub-optimal location on its side. The spacecraft's power reserves, therefore, were limited. Almost immediately, the team at Intuitive Machines knew their spacecraft was dying.

"We knew we had slid into a slightly shadowed crater, and the temperature was very cold," Altemus said. "The solar arrays had regolith on them, and they weren't charging, the ones pointing up, enough to give us sufficient power to power the heaters to keep it warm enough to survive."

It's cold and lonely on the Moon.

Credit: Intuitive Machines

The temperature in the crater where Athena ended up was approximately minus 280° Fahrenheit (minus 173° C). With the solar arrays generating only about 100 watts of power, there was not enough energy to both power the spacecraft's heaters as well as communicate back to Earth using Athena's high-gain antenna. So instead of limping along for 50 hours, mission operators decided to operate as robustly as they could for 13 hours, and get down as much data as they could.

During this time the lander was able to accomplish some of its objectives. By landing near the south pole, Athena returned valuable data and imagery to NASA about unexplored vistas. The lander extended NASA's drill (but did not operate it), private customers, including Nokia and Lonestar Data Holdings, were able to get some useful information from their payloads. But there were also some major disappointments. Lunar Outpost could not deploy its small rover, and an innovative hopper could not be fired up to roam across the Moon.

On balance, it was pretty disappointing, especially considering that Odysseus still did most of it science last year, even on its side.

You go back in, start training again

Yet what Altemus wants people to understand—which he acknowledges is somewhat difficult to explain—is that this mission was largely a success. What can he possibly mean by that?

Compared to the company's first spacecraft, Athena flew smoothly. During the company's first lunar flight in 2024, mission operators came into work each shift to put out the fire of the day. By contrast, Athena made it all the way to within miles above the Moon without significant problems. In doing so, the company validated the spacecraft's methane-based propulsion system, which allows for a "fast" transit to the Moon in less than a week. In addition, the company proved out its communications technology that will be used as part of a lunar data relay network that NASA has contracted with Intuitive Machines to develop. Moreover, Athena attempted to land within a few degrees of the south pole, a challenging location due to the solar angle and uneven terrain, and made it down without crashing.

Of course, the most important thing a lunar lander is supposed to do is land on the Moon, which Intuitive Machines did not do successfully. For the second mission in a row, the lander's altimeter failed. Although it was a different problem with the spacecraft's altimeter this time—it's still unclear why Athena's rangefinder failed, perhaps due to a thermal or vibration event—it is frustrating to fail for a similar reason. But all the pieces for success are there, and in the demanding environment of spaceflight, Intuitive Machines is close, Altemus said.

Landing is the most important step.

Credit: Intuitive Machines

In an effort to buck up the troops, Altemus has been communicating this message to employees over the last week.

"It's like losing a Final Four game or an NBA title," he said. "You lose it, and then what do you do? You don't give up. You go back in, you start training again, you start working out again, and that's what the team's doing."

He said the company is well-capitalized, and already under contract with NASA for two additional landing missions later this decade. It also has the lunar relay network contract valued up to $4.8 billion, and more. The financial runway to achieve Intuitive Machines' ambitions remains open.

"I would say it's more disappointing than really a material setback," Altemus said. "The world was watching, and we put our heart and soul into this company and this vehicle. And I look in the eyes of the team, and they had such ambitions for this mission, Athena and Gracie the hopper. I mean, it was a big leap. It might have been too big a leap on the second mission."

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Satellites come in all shapes and sizes, but there aren't any that look quite like SPHEREx, an infrared observatory NASA launched Tuesday night in search of answers to simmering questions about how the Universe, and ultimately life, came to be.

The mission launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 8:10 pm local time (11:10 pm EDT) Tuesday. Less than 45 minutes later, the Falcon 9's upper stage released SPHEREx into a polar orbit at an altitude of roughly 420 miles (675 kilometers). Ground controllers received the first signals from the spacecraft, confirming its health after reaching space.

As soon as next month, once engineers verify the observatory is ready, SPHEREx will begin a two-year science mission surveying the sky in 102 colors invisible to the human eye. The observatory's infrared detectors will collect data on the chemical composition of asteroids, hazy star-forming clouds, and faraway galaxies.

"SPHEREx is going to produce an enormous three-dimensional map of the entire night sky, and with this immense and novel dataset, we're going to address some of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics," said Phil Korngut, the mission's instrument scientist at Caltech.

"Using a technique called linear variable filter spectroscopy, we're going to produce 102 maps in 102 wavelengths every six months, and our baseline mission is to do this four times over the course of two years," Korngut said.

Boiling it down

The mission's full name, for which SPHEREx is the acronym, is a mouthful—it stands for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. The $488 million mission seeks answers to three basic questions: How did the Universe begin? How did galaxies begin? What are the conditions for life outside the Solar System?

While it's possible to sum up these objectives in an elevator pitch, the details touch on esoteric topics like cosmic inflation, quantum physics, and the flatness of spacetime. Philosophically, these questions are existential. SPHEREx will try to punch above its weight.

Built by BAE Systems, SPHEREx is about the size of a subcompact car, and it lacks the power and resolution of a flagship observatory like the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb's primary mirror spans more than 21 feet (6.5 meters) across, while SPHEREx's primary mirror has an effective diameter of just 7.9 inches (20 centimeters), comparable to a consumer-grade backyard telescope.

But NASA's newest space telescope has a few advantages. While Webb is designed to peer deep into small slivers of the sky, SPHEREx's wider field of view will observe the sky in all directions. Like its name might suggest, SPHEREx will capture a spherical view of the cosmos. Color filters overlay the instrument's detector array to separate light entering the telescope into its component wavelengths, a process known as spectroscopy. NASA says SPHEREx's unique design allows it to conduct infrared spectroscopy on hundreds of thousands of objects simultaneously, and more than 600 exposures per day.

"SPHEREx is a testament to doing big science with a small telescope," said Beth Fabinsky, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Because SPHEREx orbits hundreds of miles above the Earth, the telescope flies above the discernible atmosphere, which can absorb faint thermal energy coming from distant astronomical sources. Its detectors must be cold, below minus 360° Fahrenheit, or 55 Kelvin, or the telescope would be blinded by its own light. This is the reason the spacecraft has such an unusual look.

Many past infrared telescopes used cryogenic coolant to chill their detectors, but this is a finite resource that gradually boils off in space, limiting mission lifetimes. Webb uses a complicated tennis court-sized sunshield to block heat and light from the Sun from its infrared instruments. Engineers came up with a simpler solution for SPHEREx.

Three concentric photon shields extend from the top of the spacecraft to insulate the telescope's optics and detectors from light from the Sun and the Earth. This design requires no moving parts, boosting the mission's reliability and longevity. The photon shields look like an Elizabethan collar. Pet owners may know it as the "cone of shame" given to animals after surgeries.

For SPHEREx, this cone is an enabler, allowing astronomers to map hundreds of millions of galaxies to study inflation, a cosmological theory that suggests the Universe underwent a mind-boggling expansion just after the Big Bang nearly 13.8 billion years ago. Through the process of inflation, the Universe grew a "trillion-trillion-fold" in a fraction of a second, Korngut said.

The theory suggests inflation left behind the blueprint for the largest-scale structures of the Universe, called the cosmic web. Inflation "expanded tiny fluctuations, smaller than an atom, to enormous cosmological scales that we see today, traced out by galaxies and clusters of galaxies," said Jamie Bock, a cosmologist at Caltech who leads the SPHEREx science team.

"Even though inflation (theory) was invented in the 1980s, it's been tested over the intervening decades and has been consistent with the data," Bock said. "While we have this general picture, we still don't know what drove inflation, why it happened. So what SPHEREx will do is test certain models of inflation by tracing out the three dimensions, hundreds of millions of galaxies, over the entire sky. And those galaxies trace out the initial fluctuations set up by inflation."

SPHEREx's telescope will also collect the combined light emitted by all galaxies, all the way back to the cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies shined through the foggy aftermath of the Big Bang. Scientists believe star formation peaked in the Universe some 10 billion years ago, but their understanding of cosmic history is based on observations of a relatively small population of galaxies.

"SPHEREx, with its small telescope, is going to address this subject in a novel way," Bock said. "Instead of really counting, very deeply, individual galaxies, SPHEREx is going to look at the total glow produced by all galaxies. This cosmological glow captures all light emitted over cosmic history from galaxies, as well as anything else that emits light. So it's a very different way of looking at the Universe, and in particular, that first stage of star and galaxy formation must also be in this cosmic glow."

Bock and his science team will match the aggregate data from SPHEREx with what they know about the Universe's early galaxies from missions like Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope. "We can compare to counts that have been built up with large telescopes and see if we've missed any sources of light," Bock said.

Closer to home

In our own galaxy, SPHEREx will use its infrared sensitivity to investigate the origins and abundance of water and ice in molecular clouds, the precursors to alien solar systems where gas and dust collapse to form stars and planets.

"We think that most of the water and ice in the universe is in places like this," said Rachel Akeson, SPHEREx science data center lead at Caltech. "It's also likely that the water in Earth's oceans originated in the molecular cloud. So how will SPHEREx map the ice in our galaxy? While other space telescopes have found reservoirs of water in hundreds of locations, SPHEREx observations of our galaxy will give us more than 9 million targets, a much bigger sample than we have now."

As the telescope scans across these millions of targets, its detectors will measure of each point in the sky in 102 infrared wavelengths. With the help of spectroscopy, SPHEREx will measure how much water is bound up in these star-forming clouds.

"Knowing the water content around the galaxy is a clue to how many locations could potentially host life," Akeson said.

All-sky surveys like SPHEREx's often turn up surprises because they ingest immense amounts of data. They leave behind enduring legacies by building up catalogs of galaxies and stars. Astronomers use these archives to plan follow-up observations by more powerful telescopes like Webb and Hubble, or with future observatories employing technologies unavailable today.

As it pans across the sky observing distant galaxies, SPHEREx's telescope will also catch glimpses of targets within our own Solar System. These include planets and thousands of asteroids, comets, icy worlds beyond Pluto, and interstellar objects that occasionally transit through the Solar System. SPHEREx will measure water, iron, carbon dioxide, and multiple types of ices (water, methane, nitrogen, ammonia, and others) on the surface of these worlds closer to home.

Finding savings where possible

A second NASA mission hitched a ride to space with SPHEREx, deploying into a similar orbit a few minutes after the Falcon 9 released its primary payload.

This secondary mission, called PUNCH, consists of four suitcase-size satellites that will study the solar corona, or outer atmosphere, a volatile sheath of super-heated gas extending millions of miles from the Sun's surface. NASA expects PUNCH's $150 million mission will reveal information about how the corona generates the solar wind, charged particles that stream continuously from the Sun in all directions.

There are tangible reasons to study the solar wind. These particles travel through space at speeds close to 1 million mph, and upon reaching Earth, interact with our planet's magnetic field. Bursts of energy erupting from the Sun, like solar flares, can generate shocks in the solar wind current, leading to higher risks for geomagnetic storms. These have a range of effects on the Earth, ranging from colorful but benign auroras to disruptions to satellite operations and navigation and communications systems.

Other NASA spacecraft have zoomed in to observe second-by-second changes in the Sun's atmosphere, and a fleet of sentinels closer to Earth measure the solar wind after it has traveled through space for three days. PUNCH will combine the imaging capacities of four small satellites to create a single "virtual instrument" with a view broad enough to monitor the solar wind as it leaves the Sun and courses farther into the Solar System.

Hailing a ride to space is not as simple as opening up Uber on your phone, but sharing rides offers a more cost-effective way to launch small satellites like PUNCH. SpaceX regularly launches rideshare flights, called Transporter missions, on its Falcon 9 rocket, sometimes with more than 100 satellites on a single launch going to a standard orbit. Missions like SPHEREx and PUNCH aren't usually a good fit for SpaceX's Transporter missions because they have more stringent demands for cleanliness and must launch into bespoke orbits to achieve their science goals.

Matching SPHEREx and PUNCH to the same rocket required both missions to go to the same orbit and be ready for launch at the same time. That's a luxury not often available to NASA's mission planners, but where possible, the agency wants to take advantage of rideshare opportunities.

Launching the PUNCH mission on its own dedicated rocket would have likely cost at least $15 million. This is the approximate price of a mission on Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket, the cheapest US launcher with the muscle to lift the PUNCH satellites into orbit.

"This is a real change in how we do business," said Mark Clampin, the acting deputy administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, or SMD. "It's a new strategy that SMD is working where we can maximize the efficiency of launches by flying two payloads at once, so we maximize the science return."

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Drinking alcohol is bad in many ways; raising a glass can raise your risks of various health problems, such as accidental injuries, liver diseases, high blood pressure, and several types of cancers. But, it's not all bad—in fact, it's surprisingly good for your cholesterol levels, according to a study published today in JAMA Network Open.

Researchers at Harvard University led the study, and it included nearly 58,000 adults in Japan who were followed for up to a year using a database of medical records from routine checkups. Researchers found that when people switched from being nondrinkers to drinkers during the study, they saw a drop in their "bad" cholesterol—aka low-density lipoprotein cholesterol or LDL.  Meanwhile, their "good" cholesterol—aka high-density lipoprotein cholesterol or HDL—went up when they began imbibing. HDL levels went up so much, that it actually beat out improvements typically seen with medications, the researchers noted.

On the other hand, drinkers who stopped drinking during the study saw the opposite effect: Upon giving up booze, their bad cholesterol went up and their good cholesterol went down.

The cholesterol changes scaled with the changes in drinking. That is, for people who started drinking, the more they started drinking, the lower their LDL fell and higher their HDL rose. In the newly abstaining group, those who drank the most before quitting saw the biggest changes in their lipid levels.

Specifically, people who went from drinking zero drinks to 1.5 drinks per day or less saw their bad LDL cholesterol fall 0.85 mg/dL and their good HDL cholesterol go up 0.58 mg/dL compared to nondrinkers who never started drinking. For those that went from zero to 1.5 to three drinks per day, their bad LDL dropped 4.4 mg/dL and their good HDL rose 2.49 mg/dL. For people who started drinking three or more drinks per day, their LDL fell 7.44 mg/dL and HDL rose 6.12 mg/dL.

For people who quit after drinking 1.5 drinks per day or less, their LDL rose 1.10 mg/dL and their HDL fell by 1.25 mg/dL. Quitting after drinking 1.5 to three drinks per day, led to a rise in LDL of 3.71 mg/dL and a drop in HDL of 3.35. Giving up three or more drinks per day led to an LDL increase of 6.53 mg/dL and a drop in HDL of 5.65.

The good and the bad

For reference, the optimal LDL level for adults is less than 100 mg/dL, and optimal HDL is 60 mg/dL or higher. Higher LDL levels can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, peripheral artery disease, and other health problems, while higher HDL has a protective effect against cardiovascular disease. Though some of the changes reported in the study were small, the researchers note that they could be meaningful in some cases. For instance, an increase of 5 mg/dL in LDL is enough to raise the risk of a cardiovascular event by 2 percent to 3 percent.

The researchers ran three different models to adjust for a variety of factors, including basics like age, sex, body mass index, as well as medical conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, and lifestyle factors, such as exercise, dietary habits, and smoking. All the models showed the same associations. They also broke out the data by what kinds of alcohol people reported drinking—wine, beer, sake, other liquors and spirits. The results were the same across the categories.

The study isn't the first to find good news for drinkers' cholesterol levels, though it's one of the larger studies with longer follow-up time. And it's long been found that alcohol drinking seems to have some benefits for cardiovascular health. A recent review and meta-analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that moderate drinkers had lower relative risks of heart attacks and strokes. The analysis also found that drinkers had a lower risk of all-cause mortality (death by any cause). The study did, however, find increased risks of breast cancer. Another recent review found increased risk of colorectal, female breast, liver, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus cancers.

In all, the new cholesterol findings aren't an invitation for nondrinkers to start drinking or for heavy drinkers to keep hitting the bottle hard, the researchers caution. There are a lot of other risks to consider. For drinkers who aren't interested in quitting, the researchers recommend taking it easy. And those who do want to quit should keep a careful eye on their cholesterol levels.

In their words: "Public health recommendations should continue to emphasize moderation in alcohol consumption, but cholesterol levels should be carefully monitored after alcohol cessation to mitigate potential [cardiovascular disease] risks," the researchers conclude.

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Declining vaccination rates are fueling a growing measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico that has so far been linked to two deaths. In late February, an unvaccinated child in Texas with no underlying health conditions became the first mortality. Then, on March 6, health officials in New Mexico confirmed that a deceased adult resident, who was also unvaccinated, tested positive for measles after death.

Amid the outbreak, misinformation about measles is spreading on social media, with many conservative and anti-vaccine accounts downplaying the severity of the virus and promoting claims that the child in Texas died of other causes. On X, US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, suggested that “measles parties” can build up children’s immunity to the virus. Health officials have warned against measles parties, calling them “foolish.” In fact, measles can cause severe complications, including secondary infections, and can sometimes be deadly.

Most people alive today have never experienced measles, thanks to vaccines that were first rolled out in 1963. In the decade before the vaccine’s introduction, an estimated 3 to 4 million people a year were infected with measles in the United States. Of those, an estimated 48,000 people were hospitalized and 400 to 500 people died each year.

The current outbreak in Texas started in late January. State health officials have identified 223 measles cases as of March 11. Of those, 29 people have been hospitalized. The majority of cases are in Gaines County, where the kindergarten vaccination rate for measles is 82 percent, significantly lower than the 95 percent rate needed to protect a community from the disease. Across the border in neighboring Lea County, New Mexico, 33 people have been infected so far, with one person requiring hospitalization. The vast majority of cases in both states are in unvaccinated individuals. For comparison, 285 people in the US came down with measles in all of 2024, and 40 percent of those required hospitalization.

Measles is known for its characteristic rash that starts as flat, red spots and grows into larger blotches, but the measles virus can wreak havoc on the body in more serious ways. The disease is highly contagious and can be dangerous in babies, young children, and even adults. The measles virus spreads when an infected person coughs or sneezes, and it can linger for up to two hours in an airspace.

“No matter how healthy you are at baseline, it very efficiently enters the body through the upper airway,” says Glenn Fennelly, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and assistant vice president for global health at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso.

In the lungs, the virus enters a type of white blood cell called alveolar macrophages, which transport pathogens to the lymph nodes. Typically, the lymph nodes act as a drainage system, removing foreign substances. But when the measles virus gets shuttled to lymph tissue, the virus attacks and destroys an important part of the immune system called memory cells. These memory cells remember prior infections and help the body fight pathogens it’s encountered before. When memory cells get wiped out, it leaves an individual more susceptible to future infections.

The phenomenon is known as immune amnesia, and it can leave people vulnerable to other infections for several weeks to months. Research has shown that it can take two to three years after a measles infection for protective immunity to fully return.

“The measles virus is strongly immunosuppressive, meaning that it will interfere with the normal function of many white cells in the body that fight against other infections,” Fennelly says.

One of those infections is bacterial pneumonia, which causes inflammation and fluid buildup in the lungs. About one in five people who get sick with measles in the US is hospitalized, and one in 20 will develop pneumonia. In some cases, patients may need supplemental oxygen or intubation and ventilator support.

In a February 28 press briefing, Ron Cook, chief health officer at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, described the hospitalized patients as having severe symptoms, with many of them also experiencing dehydration and low oxygen levels due to inflammation in the lungs.

“Pneumonia is the most common cause of death for measles in young children,” says Edith Bracho-Sanchez, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Measles can cause serious complications in those without immunity, especially in children under 5.

Photograph: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

Measles can also cause a severe complication called encephalitis, or swelling of the brain, which can be fatal. Encephalitis can happen during an infection if the virus travels to the brain, or after an infection if the brain becomes inflamed because of an overactive immune response. About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis. The condition can cause convulsions and in rare cases, deafness or intellectual disability.

The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is the best way to protect against these complications. One dose of the vaccine is 93 percent effective against measles, and two doses is 97 percent effective. The first dose is recommended for children ages 12 to 15 months old, and the second dose is typically given between the ages of 4 and 6.

There are no antiviral treatments available for measles, and while vitamin A is often given to people with an infection, it does not prevent measles or kill the virus. “The infection itself can deplete levels of vitamin A in the body,” Bracho-Sanchez says. Both the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend two doses of vitamin A to children who are hospitalized with measles, since vitamin A deficiency can increase the risk of serious complications. However, large doses of vitamin A can be toxic.

Secretary of health and human services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suggested that treatment with cod liver oil, which contains vitamin A, is showing “very, very good results” in measles patients. But health experts caution that cod liver oil supplements can contain more vitamin A than the recommended daily amount and can also make children sick if they take too much.

Bracho-Sanchez says the best way to have adequate levels of vitamin A is to eat a diet rich in fruit and vegetables. Vaccination, she says, remains the best way to protect against measles.

Updated 3-11-2025 7:37 pm GMT: A misidentification of a quote from Glenn Fennelly was corrected.

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Scientists have long understood that microbes, zooplankton, and fish are vital sources of recycled nitrogen in coastal waters. But whales and other marine mammals like seals also help in this regard by releasing tons of nutrient-rich fecal matter into those waters. Now we can add whale urine to that list, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Lots of people think of plants as the lungs of the planet, taking in carbon dioxide, and expelling oxygen,” said co-author Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont. “For their part, animals play an important role in moving nutrients. Seabirds transport nitrogen and phosphorus from the ocean to the land in their poop, increasing the density of plants on islands. Animals form the circulatory system of the planet—and whales are the extreme example.”

Back in 2010, Roman co-authored a study in which they examined field measurements and population data to determine that whales and seals could be responsible for replenishing 2.3×104 metric tons of nitrogen per year in the Gulf of Maine alone. Specifically, they feed in deeper waters and then release "flocculent fecal plumes" (i.e., feces) at the surface, serving as a kind of "whale pump" that boosts plankton growth, among other tangible benefits.

For this latest study, Roman and his co-authors looked more closely at whale urine and the possible ecological benefits it provides, distributing key nutrients over thousands of miles during whale migrations. “These coastal areas often have clear waters, a sign of low nitrogen, and many have coral reef ecosystems,” said Roman. “The movement of nitrogen and other nutrients can be important to the growth of phytoplankton, or microscopic algae, and provide food for sharks and other fish and many invertebrates.”

A “great whale conveyor belt”

Migrating whales typically gorge in summers at higher latitudes to build up energy reserves to make the long migration to lower latitudes. It's still unclear exactly why the whales migrate, but it's likely that pregnant females in particular find it more beneficial to give birth and nurse their young in warm, shallow, sheltered areas—perhaps to protect their offspring from predators like killer whales. Warmer waters also keep the whale calves warm as they gradually develop their insulating layers of blubber. Some scientists think that whales might also migrate to molt their skin in those same warm, shallow waters.

Roman et al. examined publicly available spatial data for whale feeding and breeding grounds, augmented with sightings from airplane and ship surveys to fill in gaps in the data, then fed that data into their models for calculating nutrient transport. They focused on six species known to migrate seasonally over long distances from higher latitudes to lower latitudes: blue whales, fin whales, gray whales, humpback whales, and North Atlantic and southern right whales.

They found that whales can transport some 4,000 tons of nitrogen each year during their migrations, along with 45,000 tons of biomass—and those numbers could have been three times larger in earlier eras before industrial whaling depleted populations. “We call it the ‘great whale conveyor belt,'” Roman said. “It can also be thought of as a funnel, because whales feed over large areas, but they need to be in a relatively confined space to find a mate, breed, and give birth. At first, the calves don't have the energy to travel long distances like the moms can." The study did not include any effects from whales releasing feces or sloughing their skin, which would also contribute to the overall nutrient flux.

“Because of their size, whales are able to do things that no other animal does. They're living life on a different scale,” said co-author Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the nonprofit organization Climate Central. “Nutrients are coming in from outside—and not from a river, but by these migrating animals. It’s super-cool, and changes how we think about ecosystems in the ocean. We don't think of animals other than humans having an impact on a planetary scale, but the whales really do.” 

Nature Communications, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56123-2  (About DOIs).

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There’s an unbelievable amount of work going on right now to boost the performance of lithium-ion batteries. PhDs around the globe are, at this very moment, furrowing their respective brows, trying to eke out a few percentage points of extra energy density, shave a few minutes off of charging times, or add a few months to a given cell’s effective lifespan.

And then along comes a startup called Breathe Battery Technologies with an algorithm that promises to boost charging speeds by upward of 30 percent, all while preserving the lifespan of those cells. It’s part of a software package light enough to run on ancient embedded systems and small enough to be deployed via over-the-air updates. Best of all, it’s not theoretical: Volvo will feature this tech on the company’s upcoming ES90 sedan, and you can already find it on some smartphones.

Here’s how it works.

Breathe’s tech underpins Volvo’s upcoming ES90 sedan.

Before we delve into the details, let’s quickly run through exactly what’s happening inside a battery. The charge provided by a battery happens when ions flow from anode to cathode, then journey across the electrolyte while carrying electrons with them. When it’s time to recharge, the process is effectively reversed, shoving those ions back across the void as quickly as possible.

These processes generate heat, and while some heat is fine, too much can damage the battery. Overheat your cells? Best case, their lifespan is reduced. Worst case? Well, you’d better stand back.

Charging, and particularly fast charging, is a careful dance between wasting time by charging too slowly and damaging the battery by charging too quickly. In most EVs, that dance is choreographed by a lookup table.

Similar to the fuel injection tables of yore that dictate how much juice to squirt into the cylinder for each combustion cycle in an engine, battery tables say precisely how much current should be applied to a given cell at a given temperature and state of charge.

The problem is, those tables aren’t very good.

Breathe’s algorithm promises to boost charging speeds by upward of 30 percent.

To use these tables, you must know the battery’s temperature and state of charge. Find those figures, and the table tells you how much current can be applied to recharge the battery. It literally defines the charge curve for the cell. These tables are developed by the companies that make the cells (like Samsung SDI or LG Energy Solution) and the companies that put them in their cars.

The problem is that these lookup tables can be vague, lacking specific values for every temperature and state of charge. A lack of data fidelity makes for imprecise results. It’s like trying to draw a beautiful, flowing curve, but you can only use a few straight lines.

The tables are also inflexible, covering a narrow range of temperatures. “If you start with a table, you are fundamentally locked into the dimensions of that table. You are really bottlenecking yourself from the very get-go,” Ian Campbell, the CEO of Breathe, said.

Additionally, cars often waste a lot of energy to keep the batteries in a very narrow temperature range just to optimize the use of the lookup table. “You need to heat up or cool down the battery in order to prepare for this fast charging, and that also consumes a lot of energy,” Björn Fridholm, technical specialist in battery management at Volvo, added.

That takes us back to Breathe and its special sauce. You’re still working with the same basic factors: voltage, temperature, and current. Here, though, a software package (called Breathe Charge) determines the ideal charging rate with much more precision across a wider performance envelope than could be reasonably contained within a table.

“So you end up with this incredible level of fidelity and adaptivity across all timescales,” Campbell said.

To resurrect the metaphor from above, instead of jagged lines, you can now draw flowing charging curves that more closely match the ideal performance of the individual battery cells.

By mirroring that curve, cars equipped with Breathe’s tech will charge faster without putting any additional stress on the battery cells. And by providing a wider range of data, cars can charge more quickly even when outside their ideal thermal windows.

How much more quickly? Breathe and Volvo say this tech delivers a 30 percent reduction in charge time when going from 10 to 80 percent on a high-speed charger. But Breathe’s algorithm also delivers even bigger improvements when operating outside of ideal conditions. At zero degrees Celsius, that charge time improvement was 48 percent.

Cars equipped with Breathe tech will charge faster without putting more stress on the cells.

Image: Breathe

Why isn’t everyone doing this? It comes down to two constraints, the first being a deep enough understanding of the behavior of the individual cells. To gather that data, Breathe has a pair of labs in London where it stress tests sample cells from manufacturers.

Breathe determines a given cell chemistry’s strengths and weaknesses, breaking those chemical attributes into computer data, which drives the company’s digital physics model.

That then takes us to the second constraint: system overhead. While manufacturers and chipmakers love to talk about cars becoming supercomputers on wheels, the reality is that most of today’s cars still rely on embedded systems, dated chips with limited memory, and specs closer to yesterday’s graphing calculators than today’s GPU-laden rigs.

Efficiency is key. Breathe’s algorithm requires minimal processor cycles and fewer than 10 kilobytes of memory. The lightweight nature means that Breathe’s tech can be run on all sorts of limited hardware, even deployed via over-the-air updates — assuming those integrated systems are smart enough to be reflashed remotely.

Getting that efficiency means reliance on industry simulation and physics modeling tools, primarily MATLAB and Simulink. However, Campbell said that Breathe (which currently numbers about 75 employees) is working on future versions for the faster automotive processors to come.

Many of these future automotive processing chips also deliver some aspect of onboard AI, but it isn’t on the roadmap for Breathe. Campbell said he’s “bullish” on machine learning tech in this application but that it isn’t quite ready yet.

But the biggest constraint is the battery cells themselves. The amount of current they can receive is dictated by their construction and chemistry. Breathe Charge doesn’t violate the laws of physics; it simply ensures that the car is always feeding the right amount of current at the right time.

Breathe’s algorithm requires minimal processor cycles and fewer than 10 kilobytes of memory.

Image: Breathe

Volvo’s electric ES90, with Breathe Charge onboard, is slated to hit the market later this year. Fridholm confirmed the software could theoretically run on Volvo’s other EVs, including those already on the market, but he made it clear that we shouldn’t expect charge-boosting over-the-air updates hitting models like the EX30 anytime soon. “For now, we’re launching it on the ES90,” he said, and left it at that.

But Breathe won’t stop there. On its Careers page, the company currently has openings for sales-related positions in Detroit, Michigan — American auto manufacturers are clearly a target.

Breathe’s tech can also be found on the Oppo 8, where it’s optimized to extend battery health. Campbell said the company is also working to line up “a couple of cool customers” on the consumer devices front. In other words, hopefully we’ll be able to sample some fast-charging software in something a bit more affordable than a new Volvo soon.

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The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon's size, body shape and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark,  others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon's body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

Thanks to research published in 2023 on its fossilized teeth, we're now fairly confident that megalodon shared something else with these relatives: it wasn't entirely cold-blooded and kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean. Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, are endothermic: They have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings.

Of particular relevance to this latest paper is a 2022 study by Jack Cooper of Swansea University in the UK and his co-authors. In 2020, the team reconstructed a 2D model of the megalodon, basing the dimensions on similar existing shark species. The researchers followed up in 2022 with a reconstructed 3D model, extrapolating the dimensions from a megalodon specimen (a vertebral column) in Belgium. Cooper concluded that a megalodon would have been a stocky, powerful shark—measuring some 52 feet (16 meters) in length with a body mass of 67.86 tons—able to execute bursts of high speed to attack prey, much like the significantly smaller great white shark.

Not everyone agreed, however, Last year, a team of 26 shark experts led by Kesnshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University, further challenged the great white shark comparison, arguing that the super-sized creature's body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought. The team concluded that based on the spinal column, the combination of a great white build with the megalodon's much longer length would have simply proved too cumbersome.

A fresh approach

Now Shimada is back with a fresh analysis, employing a new method that he says provides independent lines of evidence for the megalodon's slender build. "Our new study does not use the modern great white shark as a model, but rather simply asks, 'How long were the head and tail based on the trunk [length] represented by the fossil vertebral column?' using the general body plan seen collectively in living and fossil sharks," Shimada told Ars.

Shimada and his co-authors measured the proportions of 145 modern and 20 extinct species of shark, particularly the head, trunk, and tail relative to total body length. Megalodon was represented by a Belgian vertebral specimen. The largest vertebra in that specimen measured 15.5 centimeters (6 inches) in diameter, although there are other megalodon vertebrae in Denmark, for example, with diameters as much as 23 centimeters (9 inches).

Based on their analysis, Shimada et al, concluded that, because the trunk section of the Belgian specimen measured 11 meters, the head and tail were probably about 1.8 meters (6 feet) and 3.6 meters (12 feet) long, respectively, with a total body length of 16.4 meters (54 feet) for this particularly specimen. That means the Danish megalodon specimens could have been as long as 24.3 meters (80 feet). As for body shape, taking the new length estimates into account, the lemon shark appears to be closest modern analogue. "However, the exact position and shape of practically all the fins remain uncertain," Shimada cautioned. "We are only talking about the main part of the body."

The team also found that a 24.3-meter-long megalodon would have weighed a good 94 tons with an estimated swimming speed of 2.1-3.5 KPM (1.3-2.2 MPH). They also studied growth patterns evident in the Belgian vertebrae, concluding that the megalodon would give live birth and that the  newborns would be between 3.6 to 3.9 meters (12-13 feet) long—i.e., roughly the size of a great white shark. The authors see this as a refutation of the hypothesis that megalodons relied on nursery areas to rear their young, since a baby megalodon would be quite capable of hunting and killing marine mammals based on size alone.

In addition, "We unexpectedly unlocked the mystery of why certain aquatic vertebrates can attain gigantic sizes while others cannot," Shimada said. "Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming."

That's in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. "It can be 'large' but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be 'gigantic' because of hydrodynamic constraints," said Shimada. "We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark."

Shimada emphasized that their interpretations remain tentative but they are based on hard data and make for useful reference points for future research.

An "exciting working hypothesis"

For his part, Cooper found a lot to like in Shimada et al.'s latest analysis. "I'd say everything presented here is interesting and presents an exciting working hypothesis but that these should also be taken with a grain of salt until they can either be empirically tested, or a complete skeleton of megalodon is found to confirm one way or the other," Cooper told Ars. "Generally, I appreciate the paper's approach to its body size calculation in that it uses a lot of different shark species and doesn't make any assumptions as to which species are the best analogues to megalodon."

Cooper acknowledged that it makes sense that a megalodon would be slightly slower than a great white given its sheer size, "though it does indicate we've got a shark capable of surprisingly fast speeds for its size," he said. As for Shimada's new growth model, he pronounced it "really solid" and concurred with the findings on birthing with one caveat. "I think the refutation of nursery sites is a bit of a leap, though I understand the temptation given the remarkably large size of the baby sharks," he said. "We have geological evidence of multiple nurseries—not just small teeth, but also geological evidence of the right environmental conditions."

He particularly liked Shinada et al.'s final paragraph. "[They] call out 'popular questions' along the lines of, 'Was megalodon stronger than Livyatan?'" said Cooper. "I agree with the authors that these sorts of questions—ones we all often get asked by 'fans' on social media—are really not productive, as these unscientific questions disregard the rather amazing biology we've learned about this iconic, real species that existed, and reduce it to what I can only describe as a video game character."

Regardless of how this friendly ongoing debate plays out, our collective fascination with megalodon is likely to persist. "It's the imagining of such a magnificently enormous shark swimming around our oceans munching on whales, and considering that geologically speaking this happened in the very recent past," said Cooper of the creature's appeal. "It really captures what evolution can achieve, and even the huge size of their teeth alone really put it into perspective."

DOI: Palaeontologia Electronica, 2025. 10.26879/1502  (About DOIs).

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Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that’s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing.

When they did, they observed that interjections—that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence—were ubiquitous in everyday speech. “One in every seven utterances are one of these things,” says Dingemanse, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. “You’re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.”

Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. “Think of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,” says Dingemanse. “If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.” An um or uh from the speaker, for example, signals that they’re about to pause, but aren’t finished speaking. A quick huh? or what? from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

That need seems to be universal: In a survey of 31 languages around the world, Dingemanse and his colleagues found that all of them used a short, neutral syllable similar to huh? as a repair signal, probably because it’s quick to produce. “In that moment of difficulty, you’re going to need the simplest possible question word, and that’s what huh? is,” says Dingemanse. “We think all societies will stumble on this, for the same reason.”

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call “continuers,” such as mm-hmm — signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. Once again, the form of the word is well suited to its function: Because mm-hmm is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

Sign languages often handle continuers differently, but then again, two people signing at the same time can be less disruptive than two people speaking, says Carl Börstell, a linguist at the University of Bergen in Norway. In Swedish Sign Language, for example, listeners often sign yes as a continuer for long stretches, but to keep this continuer unobtrusive, the sender tends to hold their hands lower than usual.

Different interjections can send slightly different signals. Consider, for example, one person describing to another how to build a piece of Ikea furniture, says Allison Nguyen, a psycholinguist at Illinois State University. In such a conversation, mm-hmm might indicate that the speaker should continue explaining the current step, while yeah or OK would imply that the listener is done with that step and it’s time to move on to the next.

Wow! There’s more

Continuers aren’t merely for politeness—they really matter to a conversation, says Dingemanse. In one classic experiment from more than two decades ago, 34 undergraduate students listened as another volunteer told them a story. Some of the listeners gave the usual “I’m listening” signals, while others—who had been instructed to count the number of words beginning with the letter t—were too distracted to do so. The lack of normal signals from the listeners led to stories that were less well crafted, the researchers found. “That shows that these little words are quite consequential,” says Dingemanse.

Nguyen agrees that such words are far from meaningless. “They really do a lot for mutual understanding and mutual conversation,” she says. She’s now working to see if emojis serve similar functions in text conversations.

The role of interjections goes even deeper than regulating the flow of conversation. Interjections also help in negotiating the ground rules of a conversation. Every time two people converse, they need to establish an understanding of where each is coming from: what each participant knows to begin with, what they think the other person knows and how much detail they want to hear. Much of this work—what linguists call “grounding”—is carried out by interjections.

“If I’m telling you a story and you say something like ‘Wow!’ I might find that encouraging and add more detail,” says Nguyen. “But if you do something like, ‘Uh-huh,’ I’m going to assume you aren’t interested in more detail.”

A key part of grounding is working out what each participant thinks about the other’s knowledge, says Martina Wiltschko, a theoretical linguist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain. Some languages, like Mandarin, explicitly differentiate between “I’m telling you something you didn’t know” and “I’m telling you something that I think you knew already.” In English, that task falls largely on interjections.

One of Wiltschko’s favorite examples is the Canadian eh?  “If I tell you you have a new dog, I’m usually not telling you stuff you don’t know, so it’s weird for me to tell you,” she says. But ‘You have a new dog, eh?’ eliminates the weirdness by flagging the statement as news to the speaker, not the listener.

Other interjections can indicate that the speaker knows they’re not giving the other participant what they sought. “If you ask me what’s the weather like in Barcelona, I can say ‘Well, I haven’t been outside yet,’” says Wiltschko. The well is an acknowledgement that she’s not quite answering the question.

Wiltschko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. “I haven’t found a language that doesn’t do these three general things: what I know, what I think you know and turn-taking,” she says. They are key to regulating conversations, she adds: “We are building common ground, and we are taking turns.”

Details like these aren’t just arcana for linguists to obsess over. Using interjections properly is a key part of sounding fluent in speaking a second language, notes Wiltschko, but language teachers often ignore them. “When it comes to language teaching, you get points deducted for using ums and uhs, because you’re ‘not fluent,’” she says. “But native speakers use them, because it helps! They should be taught.” Artificial intelligence, too, can struggle to use interjections well, she notes, making them the best way to distinguish between a computer and a real human.

And interjections also provide a window into interpersonal relationships. “These little markers say so much about what you think,” she says—and they’re harder to control than the actual content. Maybe couples therapists, for example, would find that interjections afford useful insights into how their clients regard one another and how they negotiate power in a conversation. The interjection oh often signals confrontation, she says, as in the difference between “Do you want to go out for dinner?” and “Oh, so now you want to go out for dinner?”

Indeed, these little words go right to the heart of language and what it is for. “Language exists because we need to interact with one another,” says Börstell. “For me, that’s the main reason for language being so successful.”

Dingemanse goes one step further. Interjections, he says, don’t just facilitate our conversations. In negotiating points of view and grounding, they’re also how language talks about talking.

“With huh?  you say not just ‘I didn’t understand,’” says Dingemanse. “It’s ‘I understand you’re trying to tell me something, but I didn’t get it.’” That reflexivity enables more sophisticated speech and thought. Indeed, he says, “I don’t think we would have complex language if it were not for these simple words.”

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Sunday, 9 March

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 03:09 – 03:40 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 carrying the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions. The SPHEREx satellite will snap images of the universe in infrared light. It will help astronomers understand more and allow for the study of light coming from more than 450 million galaxies. The PUNCH satellite will consist of four small satellites that will work together to study the sun’s corona. The satellites will also snap images of solar wind leaving the sun to help scientists learn more about space weather.

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 3B/E
• When: 17:20 UTC
• Where: Xichang Satellite Launch Center
• Why: The Long March 3B/E will be launched carrying an unknown payload into orbit.

Monday, 10 March

• Who: Rocket Lab
• What: Electron
• When: 00:00 UTC
• Where: Mahia, New Zealand
• Why: Rocket Lab will use an Electron rocket to launch the QPS-SAR 9 satellite for the Japanese company, iQPS. This synthetic aperture radar Earth observation satellite will be able to distinguish objects are small as 1 meter long, making it ideal from tracking vehicles.

Tuesday, 11 March

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 8
• When: 16:30 UTC
• Where: Hainan Commercial Launch Site
• Why: A Long March 8 will be used to launch 18 satellites for the Thousand Sails internet constellation, run by the Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology. These satellites are similar to SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites. In the end, there is expected to be 14,000 of these satellites in low Earth orbit.

Wednesday, 12 March

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 06:39 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 rocket to launch its Transporter-13 mission to a Sun-synchronous orbit. This is a rideshare mission which will see a number of satellites for various entities. There will be 27 satellites on this mission from 14 countries.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 23:48 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch the Crew-10 Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) carrying several astronauts. Aboard the craft will be NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. The crew will be the next ISS expedition crew.

Saturday, 15 March

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Angara 1.2
• When: 10:00 UTC
• Where: Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia
• Why: Roscosmos will launch an Angara 1.2 rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome carrying three military satellite into orbit. The satellites are designated Kosmos 2585-2587.

• Who: Firefly Aerospace
• What: Alpha
• When: 13:25 – 14:17 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: Firefly Aerospace will use an Alpha rocket to launch the LM 400 demonstrator for Lockheed Martin.

Starlink missions:

• What: Starlink Group 12-21
• When: 04:10 – 08:10 UTC, Sunday, 9 March

• What: Starlink Group 12-16
• When: 12:18 – 16:18 UTC, Tuesday, 11 March

• What: Starlink Group 12-25
• When: 20:27 – 00:27 UTC, Thursday – Friday, 13 – 14 March

Recap

• The first mission we got last week was from Russia. Roscosmos launched the Soyuz 2.1b rocket carrying a GLONASS-K2 navigation satellite. It was placed in a medium Earth orbit and will provide navigation services as part of the GLONASS constellation.
• Next up, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink Group 12-20 consisting of 21 Starlink satellites. Following the launch, the first stage of the rocket performed a landing. You can watch it on SpaceX’s website.
• On Thursday, Europe joined the launch party when Arianespace launched the Ariane 62 from French Guyana. It was carrying the third Composante Spatiale Optique (CSO 3) military reconnaissance satellite for CNES and DGA, the French defense procurement agency.

• The final mission came from SpaceX which launched the eighth Starship mission. While Mechazilla caught Super Heavy again, the top portion of Starship failed and broke up in the atmosphere. You can see the mission on the SpaceX website.

That’s all for this week, check in next time.

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A longstanding scientific belief about a link between cancer prevalence and animal body size has tested for the first time in our new study ranging across hundreds of animal species.

If larger animals have more cells, and cancer comes from cells going rogue, then the largest animals on Earth—like elephants and whales—should be riddled with tumours. Yet, for decades, there has been little evidence to support this idea.

Many species seem to defy this expectation entirely. For example, budgies are notorious among pet owners for being prone to renal cancer despite weighing only 35 g. Yet cancer only accounts for around 2 percent of mortality among roe deer (up to 35 kg).

Peto’s paradox is that bigger, longer-lived species should have higher cancer prevalence, yet they don’t seem to. Back in 1977, Professor Sir Richard Peto noted that, on a cell-by-cell basis, mice seem to have much higher susceptibility to cancer than humans. This has led to speculation that larger species must have evolved natural cancer defenses.

Several examples of these cancer defenses have since been identified. For example, Asian elephants, a species with notably low cancer prevalence, have over 20 copies of a tumour suppressor gene (TP53) compared to our own lone copy. However, scientists are yet to find broader evidence across a range of animal species.

Our new study challenges Peto’s paradox. We used a recently compiled dataset of cancer prevalence in over 260 species of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles from wildlife institutions. Then, using powerful modern statistical techniques, we compared cancer prevalence between the animals.

We found that larger species do, in fact, have more cancer compared to smaller ones. This holds across all four major vertebrate groups, meaning that the traditional interpretation of Peto’s paradox doesn’t hold up. But the story doesn’t end there.

At first look, our findings seemed to be at odds with another long-standing scientific idea. Cope’s rule is that evolution has repeatedly favored larger body sizes, because of advantages like improved predation and resilience. But why would natural selection drive species toward a trait that carries an inherent risk of cancer?

The answer lies in how quickly body size evolves. We found that birds and mammals that reached large sizes more rapidly have reduced cancer prevalence. For example, the common dolphin, Delphinus delphis evolved to reach its large body size—along with most other whales and dolphins (referred to as cetaceans) about three times faster than other mammals. However, cetaceans tend to have less cancer than expected.

Larger species face higher cancer risks but those that reached that size rapidly evolved mechanisms for mitigating it, such as lower mutation rates or enhanced DNA repair mechanisms. So rather than contradicting Cope’s rule, our findings refine it.

Larger bodies often evolve, but not as quickly in groups where the burden of cancer is higher. This means that the threat of cancer may have shaped the pace of evolution.

Humans evolved to our current body size relatively rapidly. Based on this, we would expect humans and bats to have similar cancer prevalence, because we evolved at a much, much faster rate. However, it is important to note that our results can’t explain the actual prevalence of cancer in humans. Nor is that an easy statistic to estimate.

Human cancer is a complicated story to unravel, with a plethora of types and many factors affecting its prevalence. For example, many humans not only have access to modern medicine but also varied lifestyles that affect cancer risk. For this reason, we did not include humans in our analysis.

Fighting cancer

Understanding how species naturally evolve cancer defences has important implications for human medicine. The naked mole rat, for example, is studied for its exceptionally low cancer prevalence in the hopes of uncovering new ways to prevent or treat cancer in humans. Only a few cancer cases have ever been observed in captive mole rats, so the exact mechanisms of their cancer resistance remain mostly a mystery.

At the same time, our findings raise new questions. Although birds and mammals that evolved quickly seem to have stronger anti-cancer mechanisms, amphibians and reptiles didn’t show the same pattern. Larger species had higher cancer prevalence regardless of how quickly they evolved. This could be due to differences in their regenerative abilities. Some amphibians, like salamanders, can regenerate entire limbs—a process that involves lots of cell division, which cancer could exploit.

Putting cancer into an evolutionary context allowed us to reveal that its prevalence does increase with body size. Studying this evolutionary arms race may unlock new insights into how nature fights cancer—and how we might do the same.

Joanna Baker, Postdoctoral Researcher in Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading and George Butler, Career Development Fellow in Cancer Evolution, UCL. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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By The Associated Press

Updated: March 07, 2025 at 6:18PM EST

Published: March 07, 2025 at 6:35AM EST

SANTA FE, N.M. — Forensic experts came to a heartrending conclusion Friday about the manner of death for actor Gene Hackman: he died of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease on an empty stomach a week after a rare, rodent-borne disease took the life of his wife at their home in Santa Fe.

The partially mummified remains of Hackman, 95, and Betsy Arakawa, 65, were discovered Feb. 26 when maintenance and security workers showed up at the home and alerted police.

Authorities unraveled the mysterious circumstances and revealed that Arakawa likely died Feb. 11 at home from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare but potentially fatal disease spread by infected rodent droppings.

Hackman, in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, apparently was unaware that his wife was dead.

“He was in a very poor state of health. He had significant heart disease, and I think ultimately that’s what resulted in his death,” chief medical investigator Dr. Heather Jarrell said. “It’s quite possible he was not aware she was deceased.”

Both deaths were ruled to be from natural causes.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Arakawa’s last known outing was a round of errands and shopping Feb. 11. She visited a pharmacy, pet store and grocery before returning to the couple’s gated neighborhood that evening.

Arakawa stopped answering emails that day. The couple’s cellphone communications have not yet been analyzed.

Hackman’s pacemaker last showed signs of activity a week later, indicating an abnormal heart rhythm Feb. 18, the day he likely died, Jarrell said.

Hackman was found in the home’s entryway, and Arakawa was found in a bathroom. Their bodies were decomposing with some mummification, a consequence of body type and climate in Santa Fe’s especially dry air at an elevation of nearly 7,200 feet (2,200 metres).

The revelations about the manner of the couple’s deaths jolted Santa Fe, the state capital city known as a refuge for celebrities, artists and authors.

“All of us that knew him should have been checking on him,” said Stuart Ashman, co-owner of Artes de Cuba gallery, who cherished his encounters with Hackman at a local Pilates exercise studio. “I had no idea. ... It’s just really sad. And that she died a week before him. My God.”

Experts believe Hackman was severely impaired due to Alzheimer’s disease and unable to deal with his wife’s death in the last week of his life — or seek help after she died.

“Their (the authorities’) explanation, I thought, was quite clear and plausible, said Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist in Virginia. ”I believe they really discovered what truly happened in this case.”

Most older Americans with Alzheimer’s diesease and related dementias live at home, and many receive care from family or friends.

Hantavirus typically is reported in spring and summer, often due to exposures that occur when people are near mouse droppings in homes, sheds or poorly ventilated areas. This is the first confirmed case of hantavirus in New Mexico this year.

While hantavirus is found throughout the world, most cases in the U.S. have been found in western states. The virus can cause a severe and sometimes deadly lung infection.

Jarrell said it was not known how quickly Arakawa died.

One of the couple’s three dogs, a kelpie mix named Zinna, also was found dead in a crate in a bathroom closet near Arakawa, while two other dogs survived.

Dogs do not get sick from hantavirus, said Erin Phipps, a veterinarian with the New Mexico Health Department. A necropsy will be done on the dog.

The sheriff considers this an open investigation until they receive results of the dog’s necropsy and finish checking into data from personal cellphones retrieved from the home.

Hackman, a Hollywood icon, won two Oscars during a storied career in films including “The French Connection,” “Hoosiers” and “Superman” from the 1960s until his retirement in the early 2000s.

Arakawa, born in Hawaii, studied as a concert pianist, attended the University of Southern California and met Hackman in the mid-1980s while working at a California gym.

Hackman dedicated much of his time in retirement to painting and writing novels far from Hollywood’s social circuit. He served for several years on the board of trustees at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, and he and

Arakawa were investors in local businesses.

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The US military's robotic mini-space shuttle dropped out of orbit and glided to a runway in California late Thursday, ending a 434-day mission that pioneered new ways of maneuvering in space.

The X-37B spaceplane touched down on Runway 12 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 11:22 pm local time Thursday (2:22 am EST Friday), capping its high-flying mission with an automated reentry and landing on the nearly three-mile-long runway at the West Coast's spaceport.

The Space Force did not publicize the spacecraft's return ahead of time, keeping with the Pentagon's policy of secrecy surrounding the X-37B program. This was the seventh flight of an X-37B spaceplane, or Orbital Test Vehicle, since its first foray into orbit in 2010.

Classified, but not invisible

The winged spaceship launched on December 28, 2023, into an elliptical, or oval-shaped orbit taking the X-37B thousands of miles from Earth. The Space Force did not disclose the exact parameters of the spaceplane's orbit, but a few months after the launch, amateur observers on the ground detected the X-37B in an orbit ranging between 201 and 24,133 miles in altitude (323 and 38,838 kilometers). The orbit was inclined about 59 degrees to the equator.

The first six X-37B missions launched on smaller rockets, limiting their range to low-Earth orbit. For the seventh mission, the Space Force selected SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, which had the extra oomph to boost the spaceplane to greater distances.

Since the first X-37B flight in 2010, defense officials across multiple administrations have hesitated to release details about the goals of each mission. In broad terms, military officials describe the X-37B as a platform for technology demonstration experiments. With rare exceptions, the Pentagon has declined to release the specifics of those experiments, other than highlighting the benefits of putting a payload into space and returning it to Earth intact, something the X-37B is uniquely able to do.

This policy largely remained in place for the seventh X-37B mission, although there were a few disclosures that shed new light on the spaceplane's capabilities.

In October, the Space Force announced the X-37B began a series of "aerobraking" maneuvers to dip its stubby wings into the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere at each perigee, or the lowest point of each of its orbits around the Earth. Over time, these encounters with the diffuse gases in the upper atmosphere gradually slowed the X-37B's velocity through aerodynamic drag, bringing its orbit closer to the planet.

Aerobraking is a fuel-efficient means of changing a spacecraft's orbit. NASA has used a similar approach to reposition satellites in orbit around Mars without expending too much fuel. This is the first time the Space Force has said it used aerobraking on one of its missions.

"Mission 7 broke new ground by showcasing the X-37B’s ability to flexibly accomplish its test and experimentation objectives across orbital regimes," said Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force's chief of space operations, in a statement. "The successful execution of the aerobraking maneuver underscores the US Space Force’s commitment to pushing the bounds of novel space operations in a safe and responsible manner."

The military has two reusable Boeing-built X-37Bs in its inventory. The vehicles measure about 29 feet (9 meters) long, roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA's space shuttle orbiters. The X-37B has a wingspan just shy of 15 feet (4.6 meters), and is not designed to carry people. In orbit, the spaceplane opens the doors to its cargo bay and extends a solar panel to produce electricity, allowing the X-37B to loiter in orbit for years.

The aerobraking maneuver also allowed ground controllers to dispose of the X-37B's service module, an add-on mounted to the rear of the spacecraft, without stranding it in a high orbit where it could pose a risk as space junk for decades or centuries.

On this mission, military officials said the X-37B tested "space domain awareness technology experiments" that aim to improve the Space Force's knowledge of the space environment. Defense officials consider the space domain—like land, sea, and air—a contested environment that could become a battlefield in future conflicts.

The Space Force hasn't announced plans for the next X-37B mission. Typically, the next X-37B flight has launched within a year of the prior mission's landing. So far, all of the X-37B flights have launched from Florida, with landings at Vandenberg and at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where Boeing and the Space Force refurbish the spaceplanes between missions.

The aerobraking maneuvers demonstrated by the X-37B could find applications on future operational military satellites, according to Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command.

"The X-37 is a test and experimentation platform, but that aerobraking maneuver allowed it to bridge multiple orbital regimes, and we think this is exactly the kind of maneuverability we'd like to see in future systems, which will unlock a whole new series of operational concepts," Whiting said in December at the Space Force Association's Spacepower Conference.

Space Command's "astrographic" area of responsibility (AOR) starts at the top of Earth's atmosphere and extends to the Moon and beyond.

"An irony of the space domain is that everything in our AOR is in motion, but rarely do we use maneuver as a way to gain positional advantage," Whiting said. "We believe at US Space Command it is vital, given the threats we now see in novel orbits that are hard for us to get to, as well as the fact that the Chinese have been testing on-orbit refueling capability, that we need some kind of sustained space maneuver."

Improvements in maneuverability would have benefits in surveilling an adversary's satellites, as well as in defensive and offensive combat operations in orbit.

The Space Force could attain the capability for sustained maneuvers—known in some quarters as dynamic space operations—in several ways. One is to utilize in-orbit refueling that allows satellites to "maneuver without regret," and another is to pursue more fuel-efficient means of changing orbits, such as aerobraking or solar-electric propulsion.

Then, Whiting said Space Command could transform how it operates by employing "maneuver warfare" as the Army, Navy and Air Force do. "We think we need to move toward a joint function of true maneuver advantage in space."

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Intuitive Machines announced on Friday morning that its Athena mission to the surface of the Moon, which landed on its side, has ended.

"With the direction of the Sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge," the company said in a statement. "The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission."

Athena, a commercially developed lander, touched down on the lunar surface on Thursday at 11:28 am local time in Houston (17:28 UTC). The probe landed within 250 meters of its targeted landing site in the Mons Mouton region of the Moon. This is the southernmost location that any probe has landed on the Moon, within a few degrees of the lunar south pole.

Déjà vu for IM-2

This marked the Houston-based company's second lunar mission. The first one, a little more than a year ago, suffered a problem with its laser rangefinders prior to landing. Although it touched down softly, this first lander reached the Moon going slightly faster than intended—and in a location with a steeper slope. It broke a landing leg and toppled over. However, even in this configuration, the Odysseus mission was able to generate power and complete a significant portion of its scientific objectives over the course of a week of activity on the Moon.

Intuitive Machines has not yet said precisely what happened in Athena's final moments before it reached the Moon on Thursday. However, in a news conference on Thursday afternoon, company officials confirmed that they had experienced another problem with the laser rangefinders. This caused the spacecraft to, again, not know precisely where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, or how high.

The Athena mission was funded in significant part by NASA. The space agency has begun to hire commercial companies like Intuitive Machines to deliver scientific experiments to the lunar surface as it gears up for a human exploration program near the South Pole of the Moon.

NASA expected Athena to have a reasonable chance of success. Although it landed on its side, Odysseus was generally counted as a win because it accomplished most of its tasks. Accordingly, NASA loaded a number of instruments onto the lander. Most notable among these was the PRIME-1 experiment, an ice drill to sample and analyze any ice that lies below the surface.

A dark day, but not the end

"After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted," the company's statement said. However, this likely means that the company was able to contact the instrument but not perform any meaningful scientific activities.

NASA has accepted that these commercial lunar missions are high-risk, high-reward. (Firefly's successful landing last weekend offers an example of high rewards). It is paying the companies, on average, $100 million or less per flight. This is a fraction of what NASA would pay through a traditional procurement program. The hope is that, after surviving initial failures, companies like Intuitive Machines will learn from their mistakes and open a low-cost, reliable pathway to the lunar surface.

Even so, this failure has to be painful for NASA and Intuitive Machines. The space agency lost out on some valuable science, and Intuitive Machines has taken a step backward with this mission rather than moving forward as it had hoped to do.

Fortunately, this is unlikely to be the end for the company. NASA has committed to a third and fourth mission on Intuitive Machines' lander, the next of which could come during the first quarter of 2026. NASA has also contracted with the company to build a small network of satellites around the Moon for communications and positioning services. So although the company's fortunes look dark today, they are not permanently shadowed like the craters on the Moon that NASA hopes to soon explore.

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Welcome to Edition 7.34 of the Rocket Report! What a day in space Thursday was. During the morning hours we saw the triumphant second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket, a pivotal moment for European sovereignty in space. Then Intuitive Machines had a partially successful landing on the Moon. And finally, on Thursday evening, SpaceX's Starship failed during its second consecutive test flight.

Firefly sets date for next Alpha launch. Having completed a static-fire test, Firefly Aerospace has set a target date of March 15 for the launch of its "Message in a Booster" mission. The Alpha rocket will launch Lockheed Martin’s LM 400 spacecraft from Vandenberg Space Force Base, with the 52-minute launch window opening at 6:25 am PT (14:25 UTC). Lockheed is self-funding the demonstration mission of its new satellite bus, the LM 400, which it says can serve civil, military, and commercial customers.

A slow build ... This is Alpha's second launch for Lockheed Martin, and the first of Firefly's multi-launch agreement with the company that includes up to 25 missions over the next five years. Alpha is capable of lifting 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit, and this will be the rocket's sixth launch since its debut in September 2021. The company has recorded one failure, two partial failures, and two successes during the time. It's been a slow ramp up for Alpha, with the rocket having launched just a single time in 2024, in July.

Isar Aerospace wins Asian launch contract. A Japanese microgravity services startup named ElevationSpace has become the first Asian customer for Germany’s Isar Aerospace, Space News reports. ElevationSpace said Monday it has booked a launch during the second half of 2026 with Isar Aerospace for AOBA, a 200-kilogram spacecraft designed to test a recoverable platform for space-based experiments and manufacturing. This is a hopeful sign that European startups will have commercial appeal beyond the continent.

Spectrum rocket nearing debut launch ... The Japanese firm cited Isar Aerospace’s direct injection capability into low Earth orbit and flexible launch scheduling as key factors in its decision to sign the contract. Isar Aerospace said last month that Spectrum, designed to deliver up to 1,000 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, has completed static-fire testing and is prepared for its first flight from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, pending final regulatory approval.

A small launch site in French Guiana. The French space agency, CNES, has opened a public consultation period for the new multi-user micro-launcher facility at the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana, European Spaceflight reports. Last month, the first of four public consultation sessions into the construction of the new Multi-Launcher Launch Complex at the Guiana Space Centre was held at Kourou Town Hall. In March 2021, CNES announced plans to transform the old Diamant launch site into a new multi-use facility for commercial micro-launcher providers, supporting rockets with payloads of up to 1,500 kilograms.

Lots of potential users ... The final mission launched from the Guiana Space Centre’s Diamant facility lifted off in 1976, after which it was abandoned and left to be reclaimed by the jungle. In 2019, the site was earmarked for revitalization to serve as a testing ground for the Callisto and Themis reusable rocket booster demonstrators. This testing was, however, always going to serve as a temporary justification for the launch facility’s rebirth. In July 2022, CNES pre-selected Avio, HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Latitude to use the facility. However, MaiaSpace has since allocated the Guiana Space Centre’s old Soyuz launch pad for its partially reusable Maia rocket.

Firefly nets Earth science launch contract. Amid its successful lunar landing, forthcoming Alpha launch, and a new launch contract, Firefly is having one heck of a week. NASA revealed this week that it has selected Firefly Aerospace to launch a trio of Earth science smallsats that will study the formation of storms, Space News reports. The agency said March 4 that it awarded a task order through its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Firefly to launch the three-satellite Investigation of Convective Updrafts mission.

Hello, Virginia ... NASA did not disclose the value of the task order, a practice it has followed on other VADR awards. The three satellites will launch on a Firefly Alpha rocket from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA did not disclose a launch date in its announcement, but Firefly, in its own statement, said the launch would take place as soon as 2026. Firefly said it will launch the mission from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, which has been used by Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket and will also be used by Alpha and the future MLV rocket.

Ariane 6 delivers for Europe when it is needed. Europe's Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight. "This is an absolute pleasure for me today to announce that Ariane 6 has successfully placed into orbit the CSO-3 satellite," said David Cavaillolès, who took over in January as CEO of Arianespace, the Ariane 6's commercial operator. "Today, here in Kourou, we can say that thanks to Ariane 6, Europe and France have their own autonomous access to space back, and this is great news."

Can no longer rely on US rockets ... This was the second flight of Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket, following a mostly successful debut launch last July. The first test flight of the unproven Ariane 6 carried a batch of small, relatively inexpensive satellites. An auxiliary propulsion unit (APU)—essentially a miniature second engine—on the upper stage shut down in the latter portion of the inaugural Ariane 6 flight, after the rocket reached orbit and released some of its payloads. Philippe Baptiste, France's minister for research and higher education, says Ariane 6 is "proof of our space sovereignty," as many European officials feel they can no longer rely on the United States.

US launch facilities are not prepared for a surge. Rocket firm executives warned this week that the nation’s primary launch facilities may soon be unable to handle the projected surge in rocket launches, potentially hampering America’s competitiveness in the rapidly expanding commercial space sector, Space News reports. "I don’t think that people realize how many rockets are going to be launching five or eight years from now," Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, said at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Conference in Aurora, Colorado.

Support needed for multiple daily launches ... Limp’s concerns were echoed by executives from SpaceX and United Launch Alliance during a panel discussion, where all three agreed that the industry must collectively prepare for a future where multiple daily launches become the norm. Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, highlighted that even at Cape Canaveral, the busiest US spaceport, current protocols don’t allow simultaneous launches by different providers.

Falcon 9 first stage fails to land safely. After what appeared to be a routine Starlink mission on Sunday, a Falcon 9 first stage landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly after the landing, however, a fire broke out in the aft end of the rocket. This damaged a landing leg and caused the rocket to topple over. Florida Today has video of the badly damaged rocket returning to Port Canaveral.

Space remains hard ... The Starlink satellites safely reached orbit, so this did not impact the primary mission. However, Falcon 9 landings have become so seemingly routine, such a failure now stands out. This booster was relatively new, having launched three Starlink missions, GOES-U, and Maxar 3. It was only the first-stage booster's fifth flight. To date, SpaceX has successfully flown a single booster 26 times.

India begins construction of a new launch site. The Indian space agency, ISRO, presently has two operational launch pads at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The space agency launches Indian and foreign satellites aboard rockets like PSLV and GSLV from here. As it seeks to expand its launch activities, ISRO officially began constructing a new launch site at Kulasekaranpattinam, in Tamil Nadu, this week, The National reports.

Avoiding the dogs ... The Kulasekaranpattinam launch site is strategically located near the equator. With open seas to the south of it, the site allows for direct southward launches over the Indian Ocean. This will minimize fuel consumption and maximize payload capacity for small satellite launch vehicles, particularly beneficial for cost-effective commercial satellite launches. The site also avoids the need for complex "dogleg" maneuvers around Sri Lanka.

SpaceX launches Starship on its eighth flight. SpaceX launched the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket on Thursday evening after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The test flight sought a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands.

Alas ... Unfortunately for SpaceX, the Starship upper stage failed again, in a similar location, with similar impacts. About a minute before reaching the cutoff of the vehicle's engines en route to space, the upper stage spun out of control and broke apart. "During Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost," SpaceX said in a statement about an hour later. "Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses." Ars will have full coverage of what is a serious setback for the company.

Amazon culture comes to Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos has moved to introduce a tough Amazon-like approach to his rocket maker Blue Origin, as the world’s third-richest person seeks to revive a company that has lagged behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the Financial Times reports. The space company’s founder and sole shareholder has pushed to shift its internal culture with management hires from Amazon, while implementing policies akin to the e-commerce giant, including longer working hours and more aggressive targets.

Work-life balance, what? ... Key to Bezos’s effort is chief executive Dave Limp. The former Amazon devices chief was appointed in late 2023 and has been followed in quick succession by several veterans from the $2.2 trillion tech giant, including supply chain chief Tim Collins, chief information officer Josh Koppelman, and chief financial officer Allen Parker. The changes in leadership have been accompanied by significant layoffs. In February, roughly 10 percent of Blue Origin’s more than 10,000-strong workforce was dismissed. Employees are now expected to work longer hours, and badge scanners have been introduced to track employee time similar to Amazon.

Space Force is to blame for Vulcan delays? The debut of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket was delayed more than four years, ultimately from 2019 to January 2024. The first flight went very well, but during the second certification mission in October 2024 there was an anomaly with one of the two solid rocket boosters powering the vehicle. Although the rocket reached its intended orbit, this issue necessitated an investigation. Vulcan has yet to fly again, and with the certification process still ongoing, it is now likely to launch no earlier than sometime this summer.

Spacecraft end up moving to the right ... No one is more interested in seeing Vulcan fly than the US Space Force, which has dozens of missions lined up for the rocket. These missions were supposed to be launched between 2022 and 2026. To make up for lost time, the Space Force now hopes to launch 11 national security missions this year (this almost certainly won't happen). In a curious comment to Space News, Bruno appeared to put some of the blame for delays on the Space Force, rather than Vulcan's tardiness: Bruno pointed out there is inherent unpredictability in national security launch schedules, noting that "about half of the spacecraft end up needing to move right, and they move right by a lot." It is a weird comment to make with a rocket that is years late.

Next three launches

March 9: Falcon 9 | SPHEREx & PUNCH | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 03:09 UTC

March 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-21 | Cape Canaveral, Fla. | 04:10 UTC

March 10: Electron | The Lightning God Reigns | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 00:oo UTC

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SpaceX's Starship launcher spun out of control minutes after liftoff Thursday, showering fiery debris over the Bahamas and dealing another setback to Elon Musk's rocket program after a failure under similar circumstances less than two months ago.

Starship and its Super Heavy booster, loaded with millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants, lumbered off their launch pad in Texas at 5:30 pm CST (6:30 pm EST; 23:30 UTC) to begin the eighth full-scale test flight of SpaceX's new-generation rocket. Thirty-three Raptor engines propelled the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket through a clear afternoon sky with more than twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket, the workhorse of the Apollo lunar program.

Repeating a feat SpaceX accomplished with Starship twice before, the rocket's Super Heavy booster separated from the Starship upper stage roughly two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, then guided itself back to the Texas coastline for a catch by mechanical arms on the launch pad's tower. SpaceX is now 3-for-3 with attempts to catch a Super Heavy booster back at the launch site, a sign that engineers are well on their way to mastering how to recover and reuse boosters in a similar way as they do with the smaller workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

But SpaceX is now 0-for-2 on test flights of the newest version of Starship, called Block 2 or Version 2. The first six Starship test flights used an initial version of the ship, but SpaceX is modernizing its fleet with Starship Block 2, which stands slightly taller than the first version in order to accommodate additional propellants. Starship Block 2 also debuts smaller forward flaps to give the hardware another layer of protection from the scorching heat of reentry. The other notable change with Block 2 is a redesigned fuel-line system to feed propellants to the ship's six Raptor engines.

Hardware rich

The good news is there are many more Starships under construction in South Texas, so SpaceX likely won't have to wait long to try again. The company started the year aiming for as many as 25 Starship test flights in 2025, but will end the first quarter of the year with just two.

"Today was a minor setback," wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, on X. "Progress is measured by time. The next ship will be ready in 4 to 6 weeks."

SpaceX has contracts with NASA worth approximately $4 billion to design and develop a human-rated Moon lander based on the Starship design. The Starship lander is a central piece of NASA's architecture for the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade. For Starship to fly to the Moon, SpaceX must refill it with super-cold propellants in low-Earth orbit, something no one has done at this scale before.

Musk sees Starship as the interplanetary backbone for transporting cargo and people to Mars, one of his most consistent long-term goals. This, too, requires orbital refueling. Musk recently suggested SpaceX could be ready to demonstrate ship-to-ship orbital refueling in 2026, a year later than the 2025 goal NASA officials discussed in December.

Starship will also launch SpaceX's next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. Before Thursday's launch, ground crews loaded four Starlink mock-ups inside Starship's payload bay to test the rocket's deployment mechanism. Officials were eager to assess the performance of Starship Block 2's heat shield before committing to an attempt to recover the ship intact (like SpaceX is already doing with the Super Heavy booster) on a future mission. But the premature ending of this test flight means those objectives must wait.

SpaceX oversees Starship using an iterative development cycle. Engineers come up with new designs, rapidly test them, and then incorporate lessons learned into the next rocket. It's not surprising to see a few rockets blow up using this spiral development cycle. But back-to-back failures, especially with so many similarities, may point to a more fundamental issue.

The flight plan going into Thursday's mission called for sending Starship on a journey halfway around the world from Texas, culminating in a controlled reentry over the Indian Ocean before splashing down northwest of Australia.

The test flight was supposed to be a do-over of the previous Starship flight on January 16, when the rocket's upper stage—itself known as Starship, or ship—succumbed to fires fueled by leaking propellants in its engine bay. Engineers determined the most likely cause of the propellant leak was a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship's climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle's natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected.

Engineers test-fired the Starship vehicle earlier this month for this week's test flight, validating changes to propellant temperatures, operating thrust, and the ship's fuel feed lines leading to its six Raptor engines.

But engineers missed something. On Thursday, the Raptor engines began shutting down on Starship about eight minutes into the flight, and the rocket started tumbling 90 miles (146 kilometers) over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX ground controllers lost all contact with the rocket about nine-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.

"Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines," SpaceX wrote on X. "This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship."

Just like in January, residents and tourists across the Florida peninsula, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands shared videos of fiery debris trails appearing in the twilight sky. Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint, just as they did in response to the January incident.

There were no immediate reports Thursday of any Starship wreckage falling over populated areas. In January, residents in the Turks and Caicos Islands recovered small debris fragments, including one piece that caused minor damage when it struck a car. The debris field from Thursday's failed flight appeared to fall west of the areas where debris fell after Starship Flight 7.

A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the regulatory agency will require SpaceX to perform an investigation into Thursday's Starship failure.

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If you took introductory physics, you learned about the “fundamental forces.” It goes something like this: All interactions are the result of one or more of five basic forces: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, gravity, electric, and magnetic. “Doing physics,” then, means identifying the forces in play.

There’s a problem, though, which might not have been mentioned: The forces you observe depend on your vantage point—your “frame of reference.” Look out the window. Trees, houses, lawns—they’re all stationary, right? But look at that same spot from space and it’s moving a thousand miles an hour. It looked still to you before because you were moving with it.

We have this same problem with electric and magnetic fields. Depending on your reference frame, what appears to be a magnetic force from one spot appears to be an electric force from another.

Is your brain melting yet? Just wait—it gets even weirder. To understand what’s going on here, let’s first look at electric and magnetic forces in isolation.

The Electric Force

See all that stuff around you? Everything. It's all made of just three things: protons, electrons, and neutrons. That's kind of wild when you think about it. Two of these fundamental particles have an electric charge: the negatively charged electron and the positive proton.

If an object has more electrons than protons, it will have a net negative charge. So, that sock in the dryer that clings to everything? It picked up extra electrons by rubbing against other clothes. If an object loses electrons it has a positive charge.

We can calculate the electrostatic force between two charged objects with Coulomb’s law. This says that the force between them depends on the product of their charges and how far apart they are. To illustrate, I built this high-tech contraption below, which has two little foam blocks hanging on strings. I gave them both a negative charge, which means they’ll repel each other. Check it out:

See? Because of the repulsion force, they aren’t hanging straight down. If they were oppositely charged, they would attract and stick together. That's the electric force.

The Magnetic Force

OK, so objects with charge experience an electric force. But if the charged objects are moving, they can also create and experience a magnetic force. One way to get moving charges is to run electric current through a wire. (This is literally a stream of electrons.) This will create a magnetic field, and other wires with electric current will experience a magnetic force.

Imagine you have two parallel wires carrying electric current in the same direction. Since wire 1 has moving charges, it creates a magnetic field. Wire 2 is in the presence of this magnetic field, so it experiences a force that pulls it toward wire 1. The reverse is also true, which means that wire 1 is attracted to wire 2. If one wire has a current in the opposite direction, the two wires repel.

We can be really glad about magnetic forces. This is what makes electric motors work, powering everything from electric cars to dishwashers to air conditioners. It's not just weird repelling wires.

But This Is Weird

To review: Charges experience an electric force, and moving charges experience a magnetic force. We can break this down by saying that electric charges create an electric field (E), and other charges in an electric field experience a force. At the same time, a moving charge makes a magnetic field (B), and other moving charges experience a force in that field.

So let’s say we have a moving charge (with a velocity v and charge q) in a region with both an electric and magnetic field. In that case, the total force on the charge can be calculated with the Lorentz force equation. It looks like this:

Let's see how this plays out in a couple of situations. First, suppose we have two electrons all by themselves. If these electrons begin at rest and you release them, there will be an electric force pushing them apart. If you could see electrons, here's what that might look like:

Now say we have another pair of electrons starting the same distance apart. However, these are moving with some velocity v to the right. The electric force also pushes them apart. But since they’re moving, they will produce an attractive magnetic force that partly offsets the electric force. As you can see, in the same amount of time they aren’t as far apart as the first pair. Check it out:

So far so good. Or IS IT? Let's say the initially stationary (purple) electrons repel and are 1 meter apart in 1 second. (I’m just making up nice round numbers.) For the moving (yellow) electrons, it takes a bit longer to get 1 meter apart—maybe 1.1 seconds. This is actually a problem.

Imagine you’re in a tiny car traveling beside these two moving electrons. From this reference frame, the two electrons are at rest. But since they’re at rest, there is no magnetic force, only an electric force pushing them apart. So if we record the time it takes to get to 1 meter, would it be 1 second (like the stationary electrons) or 1.1 seconds like the moving ones? See the problem?

The answer to this situation uses Einstein's theory of special relativity. The idea is that the velocity of an object depends on the motion of the observer—“it’s all relative.” If you measure the speed of a train from a moving car you get a different value than a pedestrian would see. Yeah, we get it. It’s fine. However, Einstein also said the time at which events occur and their duration is also relative.

That … doesn’t feel so fine. Let’s go back to the repelling electrons. It turns out that the stationary and moving observers agree that it takes 1 second for their charges to move apart by 1 meter. But from the stationary observer’s perspective, time would seem to slow down for the moving frame.

This is called time dilation. You don’t notice it in the world because the effect is super tiny for normal speeds, but as a moving frame gets closer to the speed of light you get more and more time dilation.

So time dilation reconciles the observations from the two reference frames. But the problem isn’t solved, because it means two observers are seeing two different fundamental forces. Looking at the yellow electrons above, the stationary observer sees a magnetic force in action, while the moving observer sees only an electric force.

Really, this was a big deal in physics. So how did they fix it? By saying that the electric and magnetic forces are essentially the same thing—called the “electromagnetic force.” We now consider this just one type of interaction between objects that have the property of electrical charge.

This is how science goes. You build a model and use it until it fails you. Then you change the model. The failure is actually when you learn. So it’s no longer the five fundamental forces—now we have the fundamental-er four!

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Inside a small control room, during the middle of the day on Thursday local time in Texas, about a dozen white-knuckled engineers at a space startup named Intuitive Machines started to get worried. Their spacecraft, a lander named Athena, was beginning its final descent down to the lunar surface.

A little more than a year had passed since the company's first attempt to land on the Moon with a similarly built vehicle, Odysseus. Due to problems with that spacecraft's laser rangefinder, it skidded into the Moon's surface and toppled over.

So engineers at Intuitive Machines had checked, and re-checked the laser-based altimeters on Athena. When the lander got down within about 30 km of the lunar surface, they tested the rangefinders again. Worryingly, there was some noise in the readings as the laser bounced off the Moon. However, the engineers had reason to believe that, maybe, the readings would improve as the spacecraft got nearer to the surface.

"Our hope was that the signal to noise would improve as we got closer to the Moon," said Tim Crain, chief technology officer for Intuitive Machines, speaking to reporters afterward.

It didn't. The noise remained. And so, to some extent, Athena went down to the Moon blind. The spacecraft's propulsion system, based on liquid oxygen and methane, and designed in-house, worked beautifully. But in the final moments, the spacecraft did not quite know where it was relative to the surface.

Probably lying on its side

Beyond that, Crain and the rest of the company, including its chief executive Steve Altemus, could not precisely say what happened. After Athena landed, the engineers in mission control could talk to the spacecraft, and they were able to generate some power from its solar arrays. But precisely where it was, or how it lay on the ground, they could not say a few hours later.

Based on a reading from an inertial measurement unit inside the vehicle, most likely Athena is lying on its side. This is the same fate Odysseus met last year, when it skidded into the Moon, broke a leg, and toppled over.

"I would like to get a picture," Altemus said. "I would like to get more data before we can determine the orientation."

NASA, and several other companies, had packed a lot of interesting payloads onto the lander. The mission was designed to last, nominally, for a couple of weeks while solar energy was available. However, due to its present orientation, Athena is not receiving full power. This will limit activities in the coming days.

It does seem that Athena landed relatively near its target, the Mons Mouton area of the Moon, further south than any lander has set down on the Moon. This flat-topped mountain, which towers above the surrounding area, is about 100 miles from the lunar south pole.

One key question is whether the spacecraft's primary mission, the PRIME-1 experiment with an ice drill to sample any ice that lies below the surface, will be able to function. NASA officials were non-committal during a news conference when asked Thursday if this drill could still be deployed.

Successes and challenges

The space agency's chief of science, Nicola Fox, sought to put a positive spin on the sideways landing of the Intuitive Machines spacecraft. She noted that there are, at present, two US spacecraft landed on the Moon and active. There is Athena, and the Firefly Aerospace-built Blue Ghost lander that touched down four days ago.

"This is a community," Fox said. "We all share in each other's successes. And we all empathize with each other's challenges."

NASA deserves credit for funding risky missions like that undertaken by Intuitive Machines and Firefly. Heretofore only government-led missions from the United States, Soviet Union, China, and India have successfully made a soft landing on the Moon. But it still must be difficult to accept that a second Intuitive Machines lander was felled by a problem with the same instrument, its altimeter.

Look, this stuff is really hard. And it's even more difficult for a publicly traded company like Intuitive Machines. The company's stock opened trading at $13.65 on Thursday, and closed at $11.26. In after hours trading, it sunk to about $8.

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Europe's Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight.

The 184-foot-tall (56-meter) rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 11:24 am EST (16:24 UTC). Twin solid-fueled boosters and a hydrogen-fueled core stage engine powered the Ariane 6 through thick clouds on an arcing trajectory north from the spaceport on South America's northeastern coast.

The rocket shed its strap-on boosters a little more than two minutes into the flight, then jettisoned its core stage nearly eight minutes after liftoff. The spent rocket parts fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The upper stage's Vinci engine ignited two times to reach a nearly circular polar orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above the Earth. A little more than an hour after launch, the Ariane 6 upper stage deployed CSO-3, a sharp-eyed French military spy satellite, to begin a mission providing optical surveillance imagery to French intelligence agencies and military forces.

"This is an absolute pleasure for me today to announce that Ariane 6 has successfully placed into orbit the CSO-3 satellite," said David Cavaillolès, who took over in January as CEO of Arianespace, the Ariane 6's commercial operator. "Today, here in Kourou, we can say that thanks to Ariane 6, Europe and France have their own autonomous access to space back, and this is great news."

This was the second flight of Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket, following a mostly successful debut launch last July. The first test flight of the unproven Ariane 6 carried a batch of small, relatively inexpensive satellites. An Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU)—essentially a miniature second engine—on the upper stage shut down in the latter portion of the inaugural Ariane 6 flight, after the rocket reached orbit and released some of its payloads. But the unit malfunctioned before a third burn of the upper stage's main engine, preventing the Ariane 6 from targeting a controlled reentry into the atmosphere.

The APU has several jobs on an Ariane 6 flight, including maintaining pressure inside the upper stage's cryogenic propellant tanks, settling propellants before each main engine firing, and making fine adjustments to the rocket's position in space. The APU appeared to work as designed Thursday, although this launch flew a less demanding profile than the test flight last year.

Is Ariane 6 the solution?

Ariane 6 has been exorbitantly costly and years late, but its first operational success comes at an opportune time for Europe.

Philippe Baptiste, France's minister for research and higher education, says Ariane 6 is "proof of our space sovereignty," as many European officials feel they can no longer rely on the United States. Baptiste, an engineer and former head of the French space agency, mentioned "sovereignty" so many times, turning his statement into a drinking game crossed my mind.

"The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences on our research partnerships, on our commercial partnerships," Baptiste said. "Should I mention the uncertainties weighing today on our cooperation with NASA and NOAA, when emblematic programs like the ISS (International Space Station) are being unilaterally questioned by Elon Musk?

"If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security, and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential part of this," he continued.

Baptiste's comments echo remarks from a range of European leaders in recent weeks.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address Wednesday night that the French were "legitimately worried" about European security after Trump reversed US policy on Ukraine. America's NATO allies are largely united in their desire to continue supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia's invasion, while the Trump administration seeks a ceasefire that would require significant Ukrainian concessions.

"I want to believe that the United States will stay by our side, but we have to be prepared for that not to be the case," Macron said. "The future of Europe does not have to be decided in Washington or Moscow."

Friedrich Merz, set to become Germany's next chancellor, said last month that Europe should strive to "achieve independence" from the United States. "It is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe."

Merz also suggested Germany, France, and the United Kingdom should explore cooperation on a European nuclear deterrent to replace that of the United States, which has committed to protecting European territory from Russian attack for more than 75 years. Macron said the French military, which runs the only nuclear forces in Europe fully independent of the United States, could be used to protect allies elsewhere on the continent.

Access to space is also a strategic imperative for Europe, and it hasn't come cheap. ESA paid more than $4 billion to develop the Ariane 6 rocket as a cheaper, more capable replacement for the Ariane 5, which retired in 2023. There are still pressing questions about Ariane 6's cost per launch and whether the rocket will ever be able to meet its price target and compete with SpaceX and other companies in the commercial market.

But European officials have freely admitted the commercial market is secondary on their list of Ariane 6 goals.

European satellite operators stopped launching their payloads on Russian rockets after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, with Elon Musk inserting himself into European politics, there's little appetite among European government officials to launch their satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 was the go-to choice for the European Space Agency, the European Union, and several national governments in Europe after they lost access to Russia's Soyuz rocket and when Europe's homemade Ariane 6 and Vega rockets faced lengthy delays. ESA launched a $1.5 billion space telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket in 2023, then returned to SpaceX to launch a climate research satellite and an asteroid explorer last year. The European Union paid SpaceX to launch four satellites for its flagship Galileo navigation network.

European space officials weren't thrilled to do this. ESA was somewhat more accepting of the situation, with the agency's director general recognizing Europe was suffering from an "acute launcher crisis" two years ago. On the other hand, the EU refused to even acknowledge SpaceX's role in delivering Galileo satellites to orbit in the text of a post-launch press release.

"For this sovereignty, we must yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX or another competitor that may seem trendier, more reliable, or cheaper," Baptiste said. "We did not yield for CSO-3, and we will not yield in the future. We cannot yield because doing so would mean closing the door to space for good, and there would be no turning back. This is why the first commercial launch of Ariane 6 is not just a technical and one-off success. It marks a new milestone, essential in the choice of European space independence and sovereignty."

Two flights into its career, Ariane 6 seems to offer a technical solution for Europe's needs. But at what cost? Arianespace hasn't publicly disclosed the cost for an Ariane 6 launch, although it's likely somewhere in the range of 80 million to 100 million euros, about 40 percent lower than the cost of an Ariane 5. This is about 50 percent more than SpaceX's list price for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch.

A new wave of European startups should soon begin launching small rockets to gain a foothold in the continent's launch industry. These include Isar Aerospace, which could launch its first Spectrum rocket in a matter of weeks. These companies have the potential to offer Europe an option for cheaper rides to space, but the startups won't have a rocket in the class of Ariane 6 until at least the 2030s.

Until then, at least, European governments will have to pay more to guarantee autonomous access to space.

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In an early clinical trial, an experimental norovirus vaccine given as a pill produced defensive responses exactly where it counts—in the saliva of older people most vulnerable to the explosive stomach bug.

The results, published this week in Science Translational Medicine, are another step in the long effort to thwart the gruesome germ, which finds a way to violently hollow out innards wherever people go—from restaurants to natural wonders and even the high seas. It's a robust, extremely infectious virus that spreads via the nauseating fecal-oral route. Infected people spew billions of virus particles in their vomit and diarrhea, and shedding can last weeks. The particles aren't easily killed by hand sanitizers and can linger on surfaces for up to two weeks. Exposure to as few as 10 virus particles can spark an infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, norovirus causes an average of between 19 and 21 million cases of acute gastroenteritis in the US every year, leading to 109,000 hospitalizations and 900 deaths. This racks up an economic burden estimated to be $2 billion to $10.6 billion.

Vaccine design

For most, the gut-busting bug is miserable but usually over in a few days. But older people—especially those with underlying medical conditions—are vulnerable to severe outcomes. About 90 percent of people who die from a norovirus infection are people age 65 or older who live in long-term care facilities.

For this reason, researchers have aimed to design a vaccine that's sure to be effective in older people, who typically have weaker immune responses just from the aging process. But, of course, this makes the already daunting task of developing a vaccine yet harder—and norovirus poses some specific challenges. For one, there aren't a lot of good laboratory models and animal systems to run norovirus experiments or test candidate drugs. For example, healthy mice infected with a mouse version of norovirus don't develop any symptoms (lucky critters). Then there's the fact that norovirus isn't one virus; it's many. There are 49 different genotypes of norovirus, which have been categorized into 10 "genogroups." It's unclear if protection against one genotype or genogroup will help protect against the others, and if so, by how much.

Currently, there are several norovirus vaccines in the works, at various stages with various designs. The one published this week is being developed by a San Francisco-based company called Vaxart and uses a proprietary oral delivery system. The pill includes a deactivated virus particle (an adenovirus), which can't replicate in people but can deliver the genetic blueprints of two molecules into cells lining our intestines. One of the genetic blueprints it delivers tells the intestinal cells how to manufacture a protein found on the outside of norovirus particles, called VP.1. Once manufactured in the intestines, VP.1 can train the immune system to identify invading norovirus particles and attack them. The other genetic code included in the vaccine is for what's called an "adjuvant," which is basically a booster molecule that helps rev up immune responses.

While several other vaccines in the works are delivered by injections, producing systemic responses, the idea of the pill is to build up immune responses to norovirus directly where it invades and attacks—the mucosal lining of the digestive tract, including the mouth and intestines. There is some preliminary data suggesting that having antibodies against norovirus in saliva correlates with protection from the virus.

Good news

Vaxart has previously published Phase I trial data showing that its pill is safe and well-tolerated in healthy adults ages 18 to 49. The study, published in 2018, also indicated that the pill generated "substantial" systemic and mucosal antibodies against norovirus.

For the new study, Vaxart did a repeat Phase I trial with 65 older people—ages 55 to 80, broken into groups of 55 to 65, and 66 to 80. The participants were randomly assigned to get either a placebo (22) or a low (16), medium (16), or high (11) dose of the vaccine VXA-G1.1-NN, which targets one genotype of norovirus. Again, the vaccine was safe and well-tolerated. There were no serious side effects. The most common side effects were headache and fatigue, which were reported at about the same rates among the placebo and vaccinated groups.

Further, detailed examination of the participants' immune responses showed not only systemic response, but responses in distant mucus membranes. In the blood, two types of antibodies (IgA and IgG) increased by several fold after vaccination compared with the placebo group. The group with the largest responses was the one that received the high dose.

A test that acts as a surrogate for neutralizing antibody responses to norovirus indicated that the antibodies spurred by the vaccine could block the virus. Additional tests found that cellular immune responses were also activated and that the systemic responses result in protection in places far from the intestines—namely the mouth and nose. Saliva tests and nasal swabs found significant jumps in secreted IgA against norovirus.

Immune responses were strongest in the first two months after vaccination and diminished over time, but some persisted for nearly seven months. When the scientists looked at differences between the two age groups (55–65 and 65–80), they didn't see significant differences, suggesting the vaccine was equally effective in the older group.

Overall, the scientists at Vaxart concluded that the vaccine "has the potential to inhibit infection, viral shedding, and transmission."

"Overall, VXA-G1.1-NN administration in older adults led to robust and durable immunogenicity detected both in circulation and multiple mucosal sites, an exciting outcome considering that diminished cellular and mucosal immunity are typical in older populations," they wrote.

Not so good news

The outlook isn't entirely rosy, though—there is some bad news. While immune responses rose in statistically significant measures during this small early-stage trial, it's unclear if that equates to real-life protection. And there's some good reason to be wary. In 2023, Vaxart released results of a challenge study, in which 141 brave souls (76 vaccinated and 65 given a placebo) were deliberately exposed to norovirus to see if the vaccine was protective. The results were weak: 53 placebo-group members (81.5 percent) became infected with norovirus, as determined by a PCR test looking for genetic evidence of the virus in their stool—and so did 76 vaccinated people (60 percent). That worked out to the vaccine offering only a 29 percent lower relative risk of getting infected. Looking at whether infected people developed symptoms of acute gastroenteritis, the vaccine had a protective efficacy of about 21 percent: 34 vaccinated people (48 percent) versus 37 placebo-group members (57 percent) developed symptoms.

While the study was a disappointment, Vaxart wasn't ready to give up, arguing that the challenge study used large-dose exposures that people wouldn't encounter in the real world.

"We use lots of copies of virus to ensure a high infection rate. In nature, 10 to 15 copies of virus is generally enough to give certain susceptible individuals disease," James Cummings, chief medical officer at Vaxart, said in an investor call reported by Fierce Biotech at the time. "Field efficacy generally goes up, because the amount of inoculum that is causing disease that will be seen in the field is far lower than what is seen in the challenge study. My projection is that we would see an improvement in the decrease of [acute gastroenteritis] with our vaccine."

Even a slight boost in efficacy could make the vaccine seem worthwhile. A 2012 modeling study suggested that even a vaccine with 50 percent efficacy could avert up to 2.2 million cases and save up to $2 billion over four years.

For now, we'll have to wait to see what future trial data shows. And Vaxart's vaccine isn't the only one in the pipeline, nor is it the furthest along. Moderna has a norovirus vaccine in a Phase 3 trial, which is a larger study that will look at efficacy. But, while the trial is just beginning, Moderna noted in a financial update in February that the trial has been put on hold by the Food and Drug Administration due to a possible neurological side effect in one participant.

"The trial is currently on FDA clinical hold following a single adverse event report of a case of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which is currently under investigation," Moderna reported. "The Company does not expect an impact on the study's efficacy readout timeline as enrollment in the Northern Hemisphere has already been completed. The timing of the Phase 3 readout will be dependent on case accruals."

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Cow D lived on a dairy farm in New Zealand. The animal looked like the typical black-and-white cow farmers raise for milk, except for one thing: Researchers had outfitted Cow D with an artificial fistula—a hole offering them a way to reach the microbes inhabiting the animal’s bathtub-size stomach. But it’s what happened next that offers a porthole into the global debate over the use of genetic data.

In the spring of 2009, Samantha Noel, then a doctoral researcher at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, reached into Cow D’s rumen and plucked out a strain of Lachnospiraceae bacterium, later dubbed ND2006. Another team of geneticists sequenced the microbe’s complete set of genes, or genome, and uploaded the information, which was then shared with GenBank, a public database run by the US National Institutes of Health. If genes are the book of life, then this process was like adding a digital copy to an online library. In policy circles, these lines of code go by another name: digital sequence information, or DSI.

Eventually, a section of the sequence found inside Cow D caught the attention of scientists on the other side of the world. The sequence contained a promising new genetic tool for modifying DNA, a CRISPR. Editas Medicine, a Massachusetts-based company focused on commercializing gene-editing technology for medical applications, used these data to build its platform and now holds the license on a portfolio of patents—all without ever interacting with the cow or its microbes directly. The company subsequently developed an experimental therapy, which involved injecting a modified CRISPR-associated molecule into patients’ eyeballs to treat a common form of inherited blindness. Editas billed the breakthrough as the first such treatment “administered to people anywhere in the world.” The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, contain little mention of any sequence data and even less about its origins.

These origins also aren’t mentioned in conjunction with other products, including a commercially synthesized enzyme identified as Lb ND2006, 5 milligrams of which sells for $8,695. When Undark first contacted Noel, now an associate professor in the Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark, she wrote back to say she had no idea: “No one has ever contacted me about CRISPR before.🙂”

CRISPR provides one example of how biotechnology comes about through efforts to understand biodiversity. The research also illustrates how computation has become fundamental to biology: Algorithms and search tools allow scientists to comb through digital databases, and that data is what powers artificial intelligence programs, like AlphaFold2, the Nobel-prize winning model that predicts protein structures. “It’s being used everywhere,” said Margo Bagley, a former chemical engineer who is now an Asa Griggs Candler professor of law at Emory University School of Law. “People just go to the databases.”

But these data still come from organisms, and these organisms come from somewhere. Add politics and policies to the equation, and questions around the use of DSI become a volatile mix. The question is not: Who owns life? The Biodiversity Convention, a UN treaty, resolved that, landing on the agreement that countries own genetic resources that are found within their borders. Rather, the question over DSI concerns the fine line between use and misuse: How should humanity share the world’s genetic data, keeping resources accessible while also ensuring a fair share from any profit? Some refer to the search for new and useful products in nature as bioprospecting. Others see a more parasitic framework and contend that profiting off biodiversity without paying back royalties is a form of theft, like stealing precious resources without paying the locals a dime. There’s even a pejorative term for it: biopiracy.

Regardless of these varying perspectives, one thing is clear: The existing legal framework was not designed for the digital age. And although international negotiators wrangled over DSI for many years, they reached a consensus that left its use in a gray zone. “When you have a lack of legal certainty, then folks tend to try to avoid it,” Bagley said. “That's not necessarily good for society as a whole because there's still so much biodiversity that has not been analyzed that could hold the key to cures for diseases, et cetera. So we want to find a way to justly and fairly have access to that in a way that has low transaction costs—a way that everyone benefits from.”

And so, despite the routine use of DSI, the parties involved in the international negotiations have yet to figure out a fair and equitable exchange. Technical details aside, another factor complicates everything: Underlying the contemporary debate is the contested history of colonial powers extracting materials, often in an exploitative manner. Where some see an altruistic search for scientific knowledge, others see a pattern of unbridled greed.

Early antibiotics

In 1948, the Rev. William W. Conley set off on a mission in Indonesia, collecting specimens for the US drug company Eli Lilly and Co. Conley and his colleagues eventually mailed back a vial of soil, which contained the bacteria used to develop the antibiotic vancomycin. According to one account, the company donated $1,000 to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. (The drug generates just under $400 million annually.)

Similarly, erythromycin, an antibiotic commonly smeared into the eyes of newborns in the US, comes with a contested backstory: The Philippines maintains that the drug came from samples collected in the country under false premises. Over the last century, other alleged examples of commercialization without consent emerged, too. W.R. Grace, a US chemical company, tried to patent biopesticides from neem trees traditionally used in India and Nepal; a dietary product sold by the British company Phytopharm and the multinational firm Unilever came from the hoodia plant, which had a history of use among the tribesmen of the Kalahari; captopril, a drug marketed by E.R Squibb & Sons (now known as Bristol Myers Squibb), came from the venom of a Brazilian viper.

Until 1992, bioprospecting went largely unregulated. That year, the Biodiversity Convention convened in Rio de Janeiro, laying the groundwork for what’s become known as the Nagoya Protocol for “access and benefit-sharing.” The protocol covers all plant, microbial, and animal material (excluding genetic material from humans). It’s roughly analogous to a mining permit: Researchers obtain permission from the providers and agree to share the profit should they extract something of value. Notably, the US is the only United Nations member state not to have ratified the agreement.

In 2002, as discussions for the protocol were still underway, negotiators created a set of non-binding benefit-sharing guidelines and tried to assist countries in setting up agreements. “Nobody implemented them,” said Bart Van Vooren, a Brussels attorney who specializes in life sciences. “Then there was a push to negotiate the Nagoya Protocol,” he added. Negotiators rarely said so bluntly, in his view, but the onerous agreements undermined the entire premise of benefit sharing. “Because the compliance cost is so high, very few get permits,” he said. “It’s very hard.”

More recently, advances in gene sequencing created a digital loophole. Instead of sending an emissary to scoop up soil in another country, researchers could just trawl through genetic information freely posted online, find what they wanted, and synthesize the genetic material in the lab—without needing a passport or a permit. Some believed that DSI fell under the Nagoya Protocol and that the definition of “genetic resources” included physical samples and digital representations. Others felt digital copies were intangible and therefore excluded. When negotiations resumed in 2016, discussions got off to a rocky start. One group of researchers wrote a letter claiming that if DSI were put into existing protocols, it would hamstring scientists. According to sources who attended the meetings, both sides would trade barbed insults; one representative reportedly compared the illicit sharing of genetic information to child sexual abuse images.

In mid-2024, as the talks inched closer to an agreement, negotiators met in Montréal. At the meeting, according to Michael Halewood at CGIAR, a global partnership researching food security, “everybody involved in this process got educated and got a better understanding of what DSI is and how it’s used.” With a clearer definition in place, negotiators floated the idea of a mandatory fund: Countries would make companies using DSI pay up. But the proposal did not go over well with everyone. After the meeting, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations issued a statement saying its members had “serious concerns” about the lack of clarity, which, the association said, “would be detrimental to innovation.”

Then, in October of 2024, at a summit in Calí, Colombia, delegates agreed to establish a voluntary fund. Businesses that profit from biodiversity, such as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, the agreement said, should contribute 1 percent of their profits (or 0.1 percent of their revenue) to the newly established Calí fund, which could raise an estimated $1 billion annually for conservation. Public institutions are exempt and contribute as-yet-undefined non-monetary benefits should they develop products using DSI.

Where some saw an imperfect compromise, other attendees apparently left the talks in disgust. In published reports, for instance, Sajeewa Chamikara, an environmental activist in Sri Lanka, referred to the agreement as “digital colonialism” and “legalized robbery.”

Biopiracy?

Are these concerns about DSI mostly hypothetical? Some say yes; others say no. Textbook cases of physical biopiracy exist, but a clear case of digital biopiracy is harder to come by. As Halewood put it, “It’s not like you can just go and say, ‘Oh, I found this golden gene sequence from the single genome that was put up online and become a biopirate,” Halewood said. “It’s never that simple.”

Even the case of Cow D in New Zealand is not clear cut, and that was exactly the point. Experts that spoke to Undark had a range of perspectives, but many agreed it underscored the complexity and the importance of getting any such policy right.

To some observers, CRISPR seemed like a perfect example, since these tools allow researchers to tinker with genetic sequences found all over the world. But the development of new CRISPR tools usually involves the comparison of many sequences and gene-cutting enzymes and synthetic modifications to the sequence. The resulting patents came about from many sources. Rather than stealing from one country’s well, the process drew from a collective pool.

In 2024, the DSI Scientific Network, an informal group of scientists that formed to advise the CBD negotiations, wrote a case study on another example: the first vaccines against COVID-19. These shots came about because of the digital availability of copies of SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses that cause respiratory illnesses. Within days of researchers publishing the sequence data online, scientists from the pharmaceutical company Moderna made synthetic copies in the lab. The company eventually patented their resulting vaccines, although the patents drew from many sources, involving 176 genetic strains from a large range of countries. As the case study points out, “No single sequence was vital to its work.” As such, the authors suggest the use of DSI is a non-issue and further underscored the idea that use involved far more steps and material than a single copy of sequence. The study concludes there would be no obligations associated with the use of any one sequence from any one country—and likely negligible benefits.

For her part, Bagley has argued that the use of digital sequence as a workaround is not hypothetical. After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, Regeneron, a New York pharmaceutical company, developed a vaccine; researchers used a strain that had originally been isolated from a surviving patient in Guinea, the West African country, and was provided by the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine. The institute would have required a licensing agreement for the use of a physical copy of the Ebola virus but had uploaded its sequence to a public database—essentially with no strings attached. Regeneron had no legal obligations to pay back the patient or the country of origin. (Moreover, Guinea had no relevant national laws of its own.) The company made hundreds of millions of dollars; Guinea got nothing.

But the Ebola and COVID-19 examples involve pathogens, which some consider exempt from Nagoya, and such viruses fall under a separate regulatory regime. Similarly, the use of any one sequence can be complicated by multiple agreements made under the auspices of the UN, such as the High Seas Treaty, which pertains to biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, or the so-called Plant Treaty, which outlines the use of seeds from food crops. Legal observers describe these as lasagna layers of legislation, which pose problems for compliance. “It's not that companies don't want to pay,” Van Vooren, the Brussels attorney, said. “But if you have a pathogen regime, you have a multilateral DSI regime, if you have a national Nagoya Protocol regime, if you have a high seas regime, if you have a plant treaty regime, you've just made a total mess because its one product can trigger five of them.”

Other fine-grained questions about the implementation of the new Calí fund remain. In an email, Amber Hartman Scholz, a microbiologist and head of the science policy department at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ and a volunteer member of the DSI Scientific Network, listed several: “When will the first payments start? Who will take leadership? Governance and/or monitoring of the mechanism is mostly undecided. What counts as a non-monetary benefit? And how will we keep track of these?”

The consensus-building resulted in a resolution, but the agreement lacked clarity in the one respect that mattered most: Creating legal certainty about the use of DSI.

Meanwhile, in Iceland...

A Basecamp Research team member in Iceland. In 2019, Oliver Vince and his team collected samples

on the ice, sequencing the DNA of previously undescribed microorganisms on portable devices.

The trip laid the groundwork for Vince to co-found Basecamp.

Credit: Basecamp Research

There may be another way. In 2019, Oliver Vince, a biomedical engineer in the UK, went to Iceland. His team pulled gear to a base camp at the northern edge of Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest ice cap mass. The researchers collected samples and sequenced the DNA of previously undescribed microorganisms on portable devices, off the grid.

The trip laid the groundwork for Basecamp Research, which Vince co-founded in London and which has raised more than $85 million to date. The company aims to build the world’s largest genetic database. After all, if their researchers could collect data from a remote camp on ice to later upload to a vast database, then people could do the same from anywhere. Users can send genetic sequences to Basecamp, which uses AI models to crunch large sets of biological data; companies and other non-commercial users can leverage this data to design drugs, therapies, and more. If the companies make money, the country of origin of the original sequences receives royalties.

According to Vince, the approach solves the practical and pragmatic issues around DSI by offering legal certainty. The other approach of using public databases, he said, mirrors the murkiness around the access to human cell lines. “So in human genetics originally, it was a Wild West, right?” he said. “There were these big open public databases and everyone was just sort of, freely pulled from it, particularly commercial users. Then, obviously, loads of rules came in and now it's absolutely impossible to share data without permission, without consent, without paying back, with all those sorts of protocols around it, which makes sense.” The DSI agreement in Calí, he said, showed the same was becoming true with biodiversity data.

He also saw a lack of incentive for people to participate by uploading data—and more data was a requirement for the whole system to work well. “What you find when you actually go out there and you talk to people all over the world is there are people who are both interested and capable of learning these techniques,” he said, “who want to study the biodiversity, who are motivated to do so, but for whom there isn't a purpose to do it. There isn’t someone willing to support that.”

To that end, Basecamp Research has partners in 25 countries, including nonprofits and academic centers like the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. In exchange for sending data, the providers got data that could, among other potential applications, be used for biodiversity monitoring. Nobody objected to paying back, he said, now that there was a tight agreement in terms of traceability and legal clarity.

Among the company’s headline partnerships is the David Liu lab. Liu, director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, co-founded Editas Medicine. The basis for one of Editas’ products, according to the published scientific literature, had first been identified in a public database, including the microbe found inside Cow D. (Liu did not respond to a request for comment.)

The path to Editas’ discovery from Cow D wasn't just a simple, single step. Rather, it involved many incremental achievements, underscoring the difficulty of assigning value to a snippet of a genetic sequence, an organism, or a single researcher’s hand plunged into a steaming hot rumen. Moreover, as one DSI Scientific Network volunteer member, Andrew Hufton, described it, patents cover the use of DSI for a specific application. Unlike the physical world, where mining exhausts the resource, data mining in computational biology does not prevent someone else from coming along and using those same genetic sequences. When it came to the use of the CRISPR found in Cow D’s microbes, Hufton said, Editas’ patents did not prevent someone else from finding commercial applications in the same or very similar genetic sequences, which almost certainly exist elsewhere. “When you patent scissors,” he added, “you aren’t stopping everyone else from using sharp edges.”

Seen this way, the cow-to-CRISPR pipeline appeared to be a perfect example of DSI. While Western scientists saw the collaborative use of data as a largely unremarkable altruistic search for scientific knowledge, others saw the potential for exploitation.

The need for reparations, paying back for the wrongdoing of the past, had been made explicit during the recent international negotiations. The agreements made under the Biodiversity Convention aimed for true collaboration and attempted to build toward a common goal: The common good. But, so far, in Halewood’s view, the implementation missed the mark. “It just hasn't been allowed to work,” he said. “So we keep repackaging it, we keep running at it. Again, DSI created a wonderful opportunity to create something broad and flat that cut across the sectoral divides.”

The latest round of negotiations seemed poised to simplify DSI. “And yet we seem to have maybe not quite got over the line again,” Halewood added. “Maybe companies will come forward and make payments, but we'll know in a couple of years.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Seaweed forests have become a much-plumbed well for anyone seeking solutions to some of the world's biggest environmental problems. Companies with a climate-conscious bent are using seaweed instead of petroleum-derived materials to make products like sustainable shopping bags and furniture. Growing more seaweed forests has been hailed as a way to sequester carbon, while harvested seaweed is being put into livestock feed in an effort to cure methane-laden cow burps.

Now, a company called Marine Biologics wants to catch a ride on the seaweed wave by whipping these oceanic greens into a fermented slurry. The startup’s goal is to eventually collect millions of pounds of seaweed, liquefy and preserve it, then analyze that congealed goo and separate it into its base components. From there, the minerals, proteins, or carbohydrates can be broken down, extracted, and used for a host of consumer applications.

The first place that goo will be going is into your food, as emulsifiers used in many types of food production. Then, maybe other products like cosmetics and anything made with plastic. First, the company just wants to collect all that sweet, sweet seaweed data.

Marine Biologics CEO Patrick Griffin comes from a past life in finance and cryptocurrency—he was the first employee at the blockchain company Ripple. But his time working directly in the crypto world came to an abrupt end after a horrific surfing accident.

Walloped by a wave in the ocean, Griffin’s surfboard hit him in the face while he floated in the water and punctured his left eyeball, which then had to be removed. It was a traumatic experience that he says left him with a very different perspective on life and sense of priorities. “I really embarked on a journey in thinking about, OK, what's the next chapter going to be?” Griffin says.

Ultimately, the experience prompted him to leave behind blockchain and crypto, industries which also happen to be very climate unfriendly and have massive carbon footprints. He left Ripple and started his own company with an aquatic moniker.

“It's a little bit of a cliché,” he admits. “You make your bones in crypto and then you launch a climate technology company.”

Ironically, the accident got him excited about the ocean again. He saw a gap in the climate resiliency market in the form of fundamental building materials. Even if all the world’s other ongoing climate resiliency efforts worked—vehicle electrification, renewable energy investments—products are still often built on a foundation of plastics or other oil-based materials.

“The chemicals and materials that we use today are all by and large built on petroleum,” Griffin says. “It is the last piece of the puzzle that you're really going to have to chip away at to make a big impact.”

Marine Biologics vice president of research and development Fraser Pick holds a sample of the company’s SuperCrude.

Courtesy of Marine Biologics

 

Seaweed at the beginning of the Marine Biologics process.

Courtesy of Marine Biologics

 

He figured seaweed—or macroalgae, as any one of the thousands of species of multicellular ocean plants are classified—could be a way to do that. Compared to terrestrial vegetation, seaweed grows fast (sometimes too fast) and has rich but widely variable chemical composites. To be able to rely on a consistent source of the different chemical components that can be found in seaweed, you would first need to have a way to collect data about the plants themselves.

“If people better understood the chemicals of seaweed, maybe we could better understand the markets that could handle them,” says the company’s chief science officer, Spencer Serin. “And that's going to rely on standardized testing strategies for seaweed that need to be very open and transparent and done at a high level.”

Step one, which the company is still working on, is collecting the data and figuring out how seaweed can be broken down into its composite parts and reused in other applications. Griffin says the company has a team of chemical scientists who drive all around Canada and Alaska in a truck with a 2,000-liter fermentation tank in the back. They collect seaweed from various locations and cart back samples to test and analyze the results.

“It’s a little bit like Waterworld meets Twister,” Griffin says.

They bring the seaweed to a processing facility and liquefy batches of the plant, then put them through a light fermenting process that lets the slurries keep for a year or more. Griffin describes the concoction as a very fine goo or a sludge.

“Our science guys like to call it SaaS—sludge-as-a-service,” Griffin says.

I ask chief science officer Serin about this phrase and he balks. “He called it that?” Serin says with a grimace. “I did not, that is definitely Patrick’s, he came up with that!”

The actual parlance the company officially uses to refer to its product is cribbed from the oil and gas industry. Once processed, Marine Biologics refers to its liquified blends as SuperCrudes. Each SuperCrude refers to the seaweed extracted from a specific area and will include data about the mineral and protein compounds found in the blend. (The company doesn’t collect just one type of seaweed, but rather defines its SuperCrudes based on where the plants are collected.) After analyzing the yield, the company benchmarks the crudes much in the same way that oil refineries refer to different grades of petroleum depending on where they are pulled out of the ground.

The final mixtures aren’t anything like oil, but the nomenclature the company uses is very deliberate. It wants to harness the language of fossil-fuel-derived products as its own to lend legitimacy to the way it classifies the purity of its seaweed smoothies.

Eventually, Marine Biologics wants to provide a license to give customers access to the information about what minerals, proteins, or carbs are in each SuperCrude and let them mix and match the varieties as needed to create the proper blend for whatever product or foodstuff they're trying to make.

“That's our core product,” Griffin says. “It's a license to make raw materials for your downstream product.” (Griffin says “downstream” a lot; it’s sort of hard to avoid the water puns in this business.)

While the company is still in the data processing stage, it wants to eventually be able to move “metric tons” of its seaweed SuperCrude. Processing all that sludge will take a whole lot of macroalgae. “We’re talking millions of pounds of seaweed,” Griffin says.

Still, it isn’t exactly clear how effective all that seaweed juice will be for its climate aspirations. While lots of sustainability minded companies are eager to use seaweed, there isn't a gigantic market for using it as a raw material in the way the world uses petroleum. Marine Biologics is hoping its efforts to standardize seaweed crude could make the case for it to be used more broadly. But it’s not there yet.

Sally Aaron, Marine Biologics’ chief commerce officer, says her interest in working to find a way to tackle the plastic pollution problem came after a boating trip in which she and her husband took two years to sail from the San Francisco Bay down the Pacific coast to Panama. Along the way, she kept seeing the signs of humanity’s impact on the planet way out in the ocean.

“Even 80 miles offshore, you would see plastic in the water,” Aaron says.

The company works with seaweed farmers in Alaska and British Columbia and hopes to expand to farmers across the world in order to collect different types of seaweed. Though Aaron does acknowledge that “the vast amount of seaweed in the world is wild harvest.”

She says the company has a vision for its seaweed crudes to be used in a variety of applications, like emulsifiers in cosmetics, biomaterials, paints, or really anything where you need to combine two opposite materials. Right now, the seaweed SuperCrudes have just been used in foodstuffs.

“It’s kind of a natural fit,” Aaron says. “Seaweed is something that's been eaten for thousands of years, so it's a good place for us to start.”

At a Future Food Tech event in San Francisco this month, Marine Biologics plans to have samples of food that SuperCrude was used to create. On the plate will be a ranch dressing handmade by the company’s VP of product using emulsifiers from the company’s seaweed stock. How will that ranch taste? Well, guess you’ll just have to wait and sea.

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Chatbots are now a routine part of everyday life, even if artificial intelligence researchers are not always sure how the programs will behave.

A new study shows that the large language models (LLMs) deliberately change their behavior when being probed—responding to questions designed to gauge personality traits with answers meant to appear as likeable or socially desirable as possible.

Johannes Eichstaedt, an assistant professor at Stanford University who led the work, says his group became interested in probing AI models using techniques borrowed from psychology after learning that LLMs can often become morose and mean after prolonged conversation. “We realized we need some mechanism to measure the ‘parameter headspace’ of these models,” he says.

Eichstaedt and his collaborators then asked questions to measure five personality traits that are commonly used in psychology—openness to experience or imagination, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—to several widely used LLMs including GPT-4, Claude 3, and Llama 3. The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science in December.

The researchers found that the models modulated their answers when told they were taking a personality test—and sometimes when they were not explicitly told—offering responses that indicate more extroversion and agreeableness and less neuroticism.

The behavior mirrors how some human subjects will change their answers to make themselves seem more likeable, but the effect was more extreme with the AI models. “What was surprising is how well they exhibit that bias,” says Aadesh Salecha, a staff data scientist at Stanford. “If you look at how much they jump, they go from like 50 percent to like 95 percent extroversion.”

Other research has shown that LLMs can often be sycophantic, following a user’s lead wherever it goes as a result of the fine-tuning that is meant to make them more coherent, less offensive, and better at holding a conversation. This can lead models to agree with unpleasant statements or even encourage harmful behaviors. The fact that models seemingly know when they are being tested and modify their behavior also has implications for AI safety, because it adds to evidence that AI can be duplicitous.

Rosa Arriaga, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of technology who is studying ways of using LLMs to mimic human behavior, says the fact that models adopt a similar strategy to humans given personality tests shows how useful they can be as mirrors of behavior. But, she adds, “It's important that the public knows that LLMs aren't perfect and in fact are known to hallucinate or distort the truth.”

Eichstaedt says the work also raises questions about how LLMs are being deployed and how they might influence and manipulate users. “Until just a millisecond ago, in evolutionary history, the only thing that talked to you was a human,” he says.

Eichstaedt adds that it may be necessary to explore different ways of building models that could mitigate these effects. “We're falling into the same trap that we did with social media,” he says. “Deploying these things in the world without really attending from a psychological or social lens.”

Should AI try to ingratiate itself with the people it interacts with? Are you worried about AI becoming a bit too charming and persuasive?

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The Apollo 17 mission landed on the Moon on December 11, in 1972. From that point on, literally for decades, NASA and the United States did not go back to the surface of our nearest planetary body.

It was not until February 22, 2024, that another American-built spacecraft made a soft landing on the Moon. This was the Nova-C Odysseus lander built by Intuitive Machines. It landed, toppled over, but still completed most of its scientific experiments.

This first successful landing on the Moon by the first privately built spacecraft ended a 51-year gap, or 18,700 days. It was a long freaking time.

Then, it happened again. Last weekend another privately built vehicle, Firefly's Blue Ghost, landed on the Moon. Blue Ghost stuck its landing, remaining upright. That was two landings in slightly more than a year. And now, it could happen again on Thursday afternoon. Intuitive Machines is back with its second Nova-C lander, Athena. If it is successful, that would be three US landers in 377 days.

So what’s going on?

Interest in the Moon has steadily been growing over the last 15 or 20 years, especially with the potential for water (in the form of ice) to exist in permanently shadowed craters at the poles. In 2018, because of this, as well as a burgeoning commercial space industry, NASA created the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Essentially, it hired private companies to deliver science payloads to the surface of the Moon. The space agency paid less for these missions, typically about $100 million, in return for accepting a greater chance of failure.

Although the program has not been without some hiccups—there have been delays, dropouts, and mission failures—the seeds of a program planted seven years ago are now starting to bear some fruit. NASA now has two companies in which it has some confidence to land on the Moon: Intuitive Machines and Firefly; and two more efforts, by Astrobotic Technology and Draper Laboratory (in collaboration with ispace) that may eventually become successful. Essentially, then, NASA is laying down the paving stones of a highway to the Moon.

Because the space agency now has some expectation that Intuitive Machines will be fully successful with its second landing attempt, it has put some valuable experiments on board. Principal among them is the PRIME-1 experiment, which has an ice drill to sample any ice that lies below the surface. Drill, baby, drill.

The Athena lander also is carrying a NASA-funded "hopper" that will fire small hydrazine rockets to bounce around the Moon and explore lunar craters near the South Pole. It might even fly into a lava tube. If this happens it will be insanely cool.

Because this is a commercial program, NASA has encouraged the delivery companies to find additional, private payloads. Athena has some nifty ones, including a small rover from Lunar Outpost, a data center from Lonestar Data Holdings, and a 4G cellular network from Nokia. So there's a lot riding on Athena's success.

So will it be a success?

"Of course, everybody's wondering, are we gonna land upright?" Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines' chief technology officer, told Ars. "So, I can tell you our laser test plan is much more comprehensive than those last time."

During the first landing about a year ago, Odysseus' laser-based system for measuring altitude failed during the descent. Because Odysseus did not have access to altitude data, the spacecraft touched down faster, and on a 12-degree slope, which exceeded the 10-degree limit. As a result, the lander skidded across the surface, and one of its six legs broke, causing it to fall over.

Crain said about 10 major changes were made to the spacecraft and its software for the second mission. On top of that, about 30 smaller things, such as more efficient file management, were updated on the new vehicle.

In theory, everything should work this time. Intuitive Machines has the benefit of all of its learnings from the last time, and nearly everything worked right during this first attempt. But the acid test comes on Thursday.

The company and NASA will provide live coverage of the attempt beginning at 11:30 am ET (16:30 UTC) on NASA+, with landing set for just about one hour later. The Moon may be a harsh mistress, but hopefully not too harsh.

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Since the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft launched in late February as a rideshare spacecraft along with a Falcon 9 launch, NASA has been providing a series of increasingly worrisome updates about the health of the small orbiter. Trailblazer appears to be spinning and out of contact with engineers back on Earth.

In an update published on Tuesday evening, the space agency acknowledged that a mission operations team at the California Institute of Technology is continuing its efforts to reestablish contact with the 200-kg spacecraft intended to orbit the Moon.

"Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state," the space agency said. "They will continue to monitor for signals should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication."

Will not reach science orbit

As a result of these challenges, Lunar Trailblazer has not been able to complete a series of small thruster firings over the last week that would put it on course to enter its planned orbit around the Moon, a polar orbit 100 km above the surface. Upon reaching the Moon about six months from now, the intent of Trailblazer was to study the form, amount, and location of lunar ice in permanently shadowed craters.

If communication can be reestablished, the space agency said, it is still possible that Trailblazer could be put into some kind of orbit around the Moon and complete some of its objectives. However, the outlook appears to be fairly grim.

The declining fortunes of the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft raise additional questions about a NASA program to develop these kinds of low-cost missions. Known as the Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (or SIMPLEx in the tortured acronyms that NASA uses for some of its programs), the program was created to fund lower-cost planetary exploration missions. So far, it has yet to record any successes.

A series of failures

Amid the rising cost of its Discovery and New Frontiers-class missions, NASA sought to open a new category of missions that would trade lower cost for higher risk. Unfortunately, the record to date is poor:

• Q-PACE: A CubeSat mission to study protoplanetary disks launched in 2021 on Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne, but contact was never established with the spacecraft.
• LunaH-Map: A CubeSat mission to study lunar ice was part of NASA's Artemis I mission in 2022, but likely due to extended launch delays, the spacecraft's propulsion system failed.
• Janus: A dual-spacecraft mission intended to fly with the Psyche spacecraft in 2022, but due to delays with Psyche altered its trajectory, and the Janus mission's asteroid targets were lost. The two spacecraft are in long-term storage.
• Lunar Trailblazer: The largest and most ambitious SIMPLEx mission to date, Trailblazer launched on February 28. It is currently in limbo.
• EscaPADE: A pair of 90-kg spacecraft, these two Mars orbiters were ready to fly on the debut of the New Glenn rocket last fall. After that launch vehicle's delays, they are awaiting a new launch date.

Trailblazer was somewhat of an outlier among the other missions in this class. It was significantly larger than most of the other SIMPLEx spacecraft, and its cost exceeded the $55 million cap for such missions. Its cost as of late 2022 was $72 million. Due to this higher value, NASA allocated additional resources to ensure its success. Trailblazer's primary contractor was also swapped from Ball Aerospace to Lockheed Martin.

A decadal survey of planetary science priorities that was published in April 2022 found that NASA should increase the cost cap of these missions to $80 million to give them a greater chance of success.

Source

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