On a warm summer morning at Princeton University, aerospace engineer Aimy Wissa was at the university helipad, preparing to fly a remote-controlled plane. But this wasn’t just any model aircraft. Across the top of its wings, Wissa and her team had carefully attached three rows of thin, flexible plastic flaps, hinged with tape.

Guided by a mini flight computer once up in the air, the 1.5-meter-wide aircraft repeatedly performed a test maneuver—gradually pitching its nose up until it lost lift and became unstable, a condition known as stalling. As data streamed in from the plane’s onboard sensors, Wissa observed that with the help of these flaps, the stall occurred more gradually and only when the plane’s nose was at a higher angle. The flaps were preventing sudden drops in lift and improving overall stability.

The inspiration for this experiment had come from the original masters of the air: birds. Years before, in a graduate class at Princeton, Wissa had stumbled upon a video of a gannet flying through gusty wind. She noticed small feathers underneath the bird’s wings popping out in unusual ways. Unlike the larger contour and flight feathers that streamline a bird’s body, these covert feathers are smaller, softer, and arranged in layers, like overlapping shingles on a roof. They tend to stay flat during normal flight, but when a bird performs quick turns or landings, these covert feathers lift slightly, helping the bird control turbulence.

“We started thinking if we can use the same elements that make bird flight so agile and maneuverable to improve our engineering systems,” says Girguis Sedky, one of Wissa’s former students, who now works as an aerospace engineer at Exponent, an engineering consulting firm in California.

While air crashes caused by stalling or loss of control are relatively rare, particularly in commercial aviation, they can be catastrophic. Pilot error, mechanical issues, and turbulence can all cause an aircraft to stall or lose control and plunge from the sky.

By investigating how multiple rows of covert feathers function, and then replicating their effect using small, flexible plastic flaps, Wissa and her team have demonstrated that their bioinspired design could improve aircraft stability, laying the groundwork for possibly scaling up such designs for full-scale aircraft in the future. Unlike traditional flaperons on airplane wings, which are mechanically controlled, the team’s flaps run along the top of the length of the wingspan and move freely in response to airflow without sensors or actuators, much like covert feathers on a bird’s wing. In Wissa’s model aircraft, when it encountered turbulence or high angles of attack, the flaps lifted automatically, subtly adjusting airflow to enhance stability and lift.

The team’s work builds on a rich but dormant tradition of taking aviation inspiration from birds. In the late 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci began sketching flying machines inspired by birds’ wing movements. The late 19th century saw scientists like Otto Lilienthal build gliders based on bird wing shapes. Lilienthal also wrote detailed case studies on how bird flight could be translated to the aviation industry, greatly influencing later engineers, including the Wright brothers. It was obvious why these early pioneers were so fascinated by birds. “As a human, how do you think that you can fly if you don’t even see anything that flies,” says David Lentink, an experimental biologist at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, who was not involved in the study.

Over time, however, aerospace engineers started thinking that they had surpassed the need to look at nature at all. There are millions of flying insects, over 1,400 species of bats, and more than 10,000 species of birds, yet most flying species have never been studied. “We may know their names, the eggs they lay, or their habitats, but we don’t know how they fly,” Lentink says. This is a huge missed opportunity, he believes, because studying animal flights enables researchers to think outside the box. It can bring new perspectives on how animals encounter and adapt to new physical conditions during flight.

Wissa noticed that previous studies had looked into covert-feather-inspired single flaps and how these contributed to air flow—but birds don’t just have one covert feather, they have multiple rows that interact with each other. There was very little research seeking to understand those interactions, the underlying physics behind their impact on airflow, and how the flaps could be integrated into a prototype aircraft.

Wissa’s team began by placing a single hinged flap at different positions along a wing’s upper surface. Using a wind tunnel, they then measured aerodynamic forces and airflow speeds around the wing. “When we placed the flap in different spots, it shifted the airflow distinctly, offering some lift benefits,” Sedky explains. They realized they could amplify these effects by simply adding more flaps.

A wing fitted with flaps in air tunnel testing.

Photograph: Princeton University/Lori M. Nichols

 

Photograph: Princeton University/Lori M. Nichols

The team then started looking into multiple rows of flaps to see if the aerodynamic benefits could be amplified, and realized that adding more ended up enhancing certain airflow mechanisms. To test the effects of this on an actual prototype aircraft, they brainstormed over materials suitable for mounting. They settled on using lightweight, flexible plastic film to replicate covert feathers’ natural stiffness and mass. “The idea was to really simplify the transfer [of the idea] from biology to engineering,” Wissa says. The flaps were carefully mounted on the model aircraft with tape, ensuring the materials and their placement were just right—too much stiffness or weight would prevent the flaps from opening.

Wissa and her colleagues then tested the flaps in specific scenarios, such as when an airplane needed to immediately land on a short runway or if it encountered sudden gusts of wind. Maintaining control when an airplane’s wing is at a high angle to the incoming air is critical—not only for stability, but also to prevent the aircraft from stalling. When Wissa and her team tested the flaps in a wind tunnel and on the prototype airplane, they found that the added flaps enhanced lift by up to 45 percent, reduced drag by nearly 31 percent, and helped prevent the sudden loss of lift that causes stalling, compared to when the aircraft was without the flaps.

These findings could be hugely important for the future of the aviation industry. Climate change is making weather conditions more unpredictable and severe. Over the past four decades, the frequency of extreme turbulence events has increased by 55 percent. To ensure passenger safety, aircraft must become more resilient and capable of performing agile maneuvers in challenging conditions without compromising aircraft stability and passenger safety.

At the same time, air traffic volume is continuing to increase, making it crucial to explore innovations that enhance aircraft efficiency and can help decarbonize flying without having to rely solely on innovations in fuel. Passive advancements could not only help with this, but would do so without depending on complex electronic systems.

Yet the path to getting such technology adopted commercially is challenging—and this has been the case for a lot of other animal-inspired technologies. For instance, in the 1980s, scientists discovered that sharks have small protrusions, called riblets, covering their bodies, which reduce drag as they glide through water. They wondered if applying a similar design to aircraft could significantly cut fuel consumption. In 1997, researchers quantified that the shark-skin-style riblets can reduce drag on airplanes by nearly 10 percent. However, commercial testing on real aircraft didn’t begin until 2016.

Lufthansa Technik, a German aerospace company, eventually developed AeroSHARK, an aircraft surface technology inspired by shark skin. “Today, 25 aircraft across seven airlines have been modified with our sharkskin technology, and the number is steadily growing,” says Lea Klinge, spokesperson at Lufthansa Technik. She adds that such innovations require decades of research, and that integrating new solutions into existing fleets without disrupting operations remains a major challenge.

When considering how to scale these feather-inspired flaps, “there are some logistical challenges in terms of what kind of materials we can make those flaps out of or how we can properly attach them to the wings,” Wissa says. And rolling out such an innovation would not be as simple as adding the plastic film to the small prototype aircraft in the team’s experiment. “Oftentimes, integrating innovative solutions at a commercial level can quickly become complex and multidisciplinary,” says Ruxandra Botez, an aerospace engineer at the university ETS Montreal. An aircraft has to go through a variety of safety tests and certifications, which can easily take several years. Botez also notes that most modern aircraft are built with incremental improvements on previous models, with manufacturers reluctant to stray far from existing designs.

Lentink, however, argues that focusing solely on commercial scalability is the wrong approach. He adds that if innovations with clear scalability are the only ones to be tested, researchers won’t think outside the box. “If you truly want to innovate in aerospace, then you do have to come up with these completely wild ideas,” he says. Staying too close to the final application limits engineers’ ability to create new things. He believes that the covert-feather-inspired flaps, in their current guise, probably aren’t close to immediate application. “But I don’t see it as criticism,” he says. “I see it as researchers developing critical ideas that can now be developed further in this technological pipeline towards an application.”

The scientists WIRED spoke to stress that the future of aircraft design must continue drawing inspiration from nature. Birds are more agile, capable, and maneuverable than anything humans have built. “If we want to create aircraft that can fly as efficiently and adaptably in unpredictable conditions, we’ll inevitably need to incorporate aspects of bird flight into next-generation designs,” says Sedky.

Even if they don’t make it onto large commercial planes, Wissa says these feather-inspired innovations could be game-changing for small aircraft, which are expected to play a major role in the future of aviation, such as in package delivery or urban air mobility—there are multiple startups trying to develop flying taxi services, for example. Such aircraft will likely need to take off and land in tight spaces. These innovations could boost lift and control during such high-angle maneuvers.

“As aircraft get smaller, they also become more susceptible to environmental factors like gusts, high winds, and turbulent airflows,” Wissa explains. Equipped with these flaps, small flying vehicles of the future might be able to handle “gusts that would have thrown an aircraft out of the sky.”

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Courtesy of Colossal Biosciences

De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences has gene-edited mice to have mammoth-like features, creating what the company calls the Colossal Woolly Mouse. The lab mice, which have been modified to have shaggy fur and golden coats, are a demonstration of the kind of gene edits that the company hopes to perform on a much larger scale, modifying Asian elephants to more closely resemble their woolly mammoth ancestors.

The genomes of the Colossal mice were edited at multiple points to change their fur so it was longer, frizzier, and more golden than that of normal lab mice. Some of the mice also had edits to a gene involved in the metabolism of fatty acids, which should change how the animals store fat—another key difference between mammoths and Asian elephants. Out of multiple cohorts of gene-edited mice, one set had edits in seven different genes, most of which were involved in hair type and one of which controlled fat metabolism.

Scientists already have a good understanding of how changes in mouse genetics influence their fur, so most of the edits selected by the Colossal scientists recreated these changes rather than using mammoth DNA as the model. “We did not just shove mammoth genes into a mouse. There’s 200 million years of evolutionary divergence between them, and that wouldn’t make any sense,” from either a scientific or ethical perspective, says Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal.

As well as the genes already well understood from mouse research, the Colossal scientists also mined ancient mammoth genomes to identify three genes that seemed to be important to mammoths’ adaptation to the cold. Two of these genes influenced hair type, while a third affected fat metabolism. The researchers then tried different combinations of edits in various groups of mice, producing some mice with frizzy fur, some with curly whiskers, and some with fluffy golden coats. The experiments are described in a pre-print paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.

“These mice are massively adorable,” says Colossal cofounder and CEO Ben Lamm. “They are significantly cuter than we anticipated, which probably means that our first-generation mammoths will also be equally as cute.” Lamm shared a photo of the woolly mice in their habitat at the Colossal offices, accompanied by a woolly mammoth toy and living against a snowy background. The company has no intentions to breed or sell the woolly mice, the CEO added.

The Colossal experiment raises questions about which gene edits qualify to make a mouse—or an Asian elephant—truly mammoth-like, says Vincent Lynch, a developmental biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York who wasn’t involved in the Colossal study. The Colossal mice are fluffier and frizzier than most lab mice, that’s for sure, but those traits still appear in other mice naturally. Or, to put it another way, is a Chow Chow more mammoth-like than a Chihuahua, or is it simply a much fluffier dog?

Where you land on that spectrum is partly a question of semantics, and partly one of genetics. Colossal refers to its would-be de-extinct mammoths as “cold-resistant elephants,” with the core biological traits of a mammoth, but genetically almost identical to an Asian elephant. Lamm says the company is targeting about 85 genes to create the cold-resistant elephants and has already experimented with editing 25 of those genes. The gene-edited mice, he says, will be useful for testing less visible traits like fat metabolism.

Experimenting in mice will also help the Colossal team figure out how to increase the survival rate of their gene-edited animals. The scientists mostly edited fertilized mouse eggs in order to make their woolly mice, but not every fertilized egg develops successfully into a gene-edited mouse. Sometimes the edits accidentally mess up some other part of the mouse genome, or sometimes the edited blastocysts fail to take when they’re implanted into a surrogate mouse mother. In one experiment, only 11 percent of the implanted blastocytes resulted in successful births.

Shapiro points out that the overall success rate of their experiment was high compared with similar work, and that all of the mice born were perfectly healthy. “We expected this because we picked edits that were compatible with healthy mice anyway,” she says.

The challenges of turning gene-edited eggs into live animals will be more pronounced when it comes to elephants, however. Lynch points out that lots of the standard scientific processes for gene editing and implanting cells have been developed on mouse models and may be more difficult in other species. There is also the added difficulty of elephants’ 22-month pregnancies, which means that any work that results in live elephants will take much, much longer than work with mice.

None of these challenges facing Colossal is insurmountable, Lynch says. The bigger question—for him at least—is whether it is worthwhile trying to recreate the woolly mammoth at all. One of Colossal’s main arguments for de-extinction is that by reintroducing creatures that mimic extinct animals they can help restore ecosystems to the way they were before those animals went extinct. Lynch says there is no guarantee that things would work out that way in reality. “You don’t know that is true,” he says.

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The idea of flying satellites in "very" low-Earth orbit is not new. Dating back to the dawn of the space age in the late 1950s, the first US spy satellites, as part of the Corona program, orbited the planet as low as 120 to 160 km (75 to 100 miles) above the Earth.

This low vantage point allowed the Kodak cameras on board the Corona satellites to capture the highest-resolution images of Earth during the height of the Cold War. However, flying so close to the planet brought a number of challenges, most notably that of atmospheric drag.

For much of the space age, therefore, satellites have flown much higher orbits. Most satellites today fly at an altitude of between 400 and 800 km (250 and 500 miles), which is high enough to avoid the vast majority of atmospheric drag while still being close enough to offer good communications and a clear view of the planet.

In recent years, a handful of new space companies have announced plans to develop small- and medium-size satellites designed to survive in very low-Earth orbit (VLEO) and capable of taking advantage of the closer-in vantage point. The first of these companies to actually reach the launch pad is a Denver-based startup named Albedo.

Hello, startup

Albedo was founded about four years ago by two engineers from Lockheed Martin, Topher Haddad and Ayjay Lasater, and a software engineer from Facebook, Winston Tri. Since 2021, the trio has raised more than $100 million to develop satellites capable of delivering visual images with a resolution of 10 cm.

"The vision was to commercialize VLEO as a means to capture imagery at a resolution that today you can only get from planes or drones or commercially, or from billion dollar national systems on the national security side," Haddad said in an interview.

This resolution is significantly higher than any currently available commercial satellite imagery and rivals the resolution of some of the best spy satellites currently operated by the US and other large space powers.

For high-resolution imagery today, Haddad said, sometimes the only real solution is helicopters or drones. But there are many locations on the planet that restrict fly overs, and the cost for regular over-flights by aircraft adds up quickly.

Clarity-1 at the pad

Albedo's first big test may come within the next week and the launch of the "Transporter-13" mission on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The company's first satellite, Clarity-1, is 530 kg (1170 pounds) and riding atop the stack of ridesharing spacecraft. The mission could launch as soon as this coming weekend from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The Clarity-1 satellite will be dropped off between 500 and 600 km orbit and then attempt to lower itself to an operational orbit 274 km (170 miles) above the planet.

This is a full-up version of Albedo's satellite design. The spacecraft is larger than a full-size refrigerator, similar to a phone booth, and is intended to operate for a lifetime of about five years, depending on the solar cycle. Clarity-1 is launching near the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, so this could reduce its active lifetime.

Albedo recently won a contract from the US Air Force Research Laboratory that is worth up to $12 million to share VLEO-specific, on-orbit data and provide analysis to support the development of new missions and payloads beyond its own optical sensors.

Serving many different customers

The advantages of such a platform include superior image quality, less congested orbits, and natural debris removal as inoperable satellites are pulled down into Earth's atmosphere and burnt up.

But what about the drawbacks? In orbits closer to Earth the primary issue is atomic oxygen, which is highly reactive and energetic. There are also plasma eddies and other phenomena that interfere with the operation of satellites and degrade their materials. This makes VLEO far more hazardous than higher altitudes. It's also more difficult to capture precise imagery.

"The hardest part is pointing and attitude control," Haddad said, "because that's already hard in LEO, when you have a big telescope and you're trying to get a high resolution. Then you put it in VLEO, where the Earth's rotation beneath is moving faster, and it just exacerbates the problem."

In the next several years, Albedo is likely to reach a constellation sized at about 24 satellites, but that number will depend on customer demand, Haddad said. Albedo has previously announced about half a dozen of its commercial customers who will task Clarity-1 for various purposes, such as power and pipeline monitoring or solar farm maintenance.

But first, it has to demonstrate its technology.

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Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to make a picture-perfect landing on the Moon early Sunday, touching down on an ancient basaltic plain, named Mare Crisium, to fulfill a $101 million contract with NASA.

The lunar lander, called Blue Ghost, settled onto the Moon's surface at 2:34 am CST (3:34 am EST; 08:34 UTC). A few dozen engineers in Firefly's mission control room monitored real-time data streaming down from a quarter-million miles away.

"Y’all stuck the landing, we’re on the Moon!" announced Will Coogan, the lander's chief engineer, to the Firefly team gathered in Leander, Texas, a suburb north of Austin. Down the street, at a middle-of-the-night event for Firefly employees, their families, and VIPs, the crowd erupted in applause and toasted champagne.

"They’re just fired up right now in the mission control room," said Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO. "They were all just pent up, holding it all in because they were calm, collected, and cool the whole time. Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed. After we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up."

Firefly's Blue Ghost, named for a species of firefly, became the second commercial company to put a spacecraft on the Moon, and the first to make a trouble-free landing. Intuitive Machines—also working under contract to NASA—landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the Moon in February 2024, but the lander snapped one of its legs and tipped over. Odysseus returned images and some scientific data from the lunar surface for a week, but the off-kilter landing cut short the mission.

Intuitive Machines, like Firefly, is headquartered in Texas. So America's first two commercial Moon landers come from the Lone Star State.

"We got some Moon dust on our boots," Kim told a crowd of supporters at the company's watch party.

It's been a long, strange trip for Firefly, founded in 2014 by a former SpaceX engineer named Tom Markusic. The company survived a bankruptcy and emerged with a new name and new ownership by a Ukrainian entrepreneur named Max Polyakov. The US government controversially forced a sale to US investors in 2022, citing national security concerns. Last year, the government backtracked, and released Polyakov and his companies from all restrictions imposed upon them.

Now owned by AE Industrial Partners, a private equity firm, Firefly has successfully flown its own small satellite launcher and is developing a medium-lift rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman. With Blue Ghost, Firefly has shot for the Moon, a business area the company's founders didn't imagine a decade ago.

An important moment

Sunday's landing shows NASA is starting to get its money's worth with an initiative set up seven years ago to establish a line of robotic precursor missions for the agency's Artemis lunar program. The CLPS, or Commercial Lunar Payload Services, program is designed to provide a cost-efficient way to deliver science and technology payloads to the Moon, while incubating the nascent industry of lunar transportation to support the needs of NASA and potential commercial customers.

NASA has a roster of 13 companies eligible to compete for CLPS missions, including long-established industry players like SpaceX and Lockheed Martin. But newcomers have won nearly all the CLPS contracts to date. NASA has assigned four CLPS landings to Intuitive Machines, three to Firefly, two to Astrobotic, and one to Draper Laboratory.

Before last year, more than five decades had passed since the last time an American spacecraft made a controlled landing on the Moon. China has landed four robotic missions on the Moon since 2013, including two landings on the Moon's far side and two sample return missions. India became the fourth country to land on the Moon in 2023, then Japan became the fifth in January 2024.

Government-owned space agencies developed all those missions, just as NASA managed the Apollo program to put US astronauts on the Moon from 1969 through 1972. By 2018, a decade had passed since NASA started teaming with commercial partners to deliver cargo, and eventually crew, to the International Space Station.

CLPS built on NASA's experience in commercial cargo and commercial crew, using fixed-price service contracts to procure lunar landing missions. However, there is a key difference. The agency didn't fund development costs for any of the CLPS participants. The private sector paid for all the work to design and build the CLPS landers, while NASA is only buying transportation services and committing to become a core customer. The idea was to help lunar transportation providers attract private investment with the prospect of lucrative NASA contracts, without burdening the contractors with onerous government requirements.

From the government's perspective, CLPS was "a lighter touch even than commercial cargo or commercial crew," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the former head of NASA's science division, in a 2023 interview with Ars.

NASA is using a similar development model from commercial crew to co-invest with SpaceX and Blue Origin in development of much larger human-rated lunar landers for the Artemis program.

The jury is still out on whether the CLPS initiative will create a commercial market, beyond the government, for lunar missions. NASA's commitment to commercial crew has led to several all-private human spaceflight missions to low-Earth orbit, most recently Polaris Dawn, during which private astronaut Jared Isaacman became the first person to perform a commercial spacewalk.

But Firefly's success Sunday, following on the heels of the Intuitive Machines landing last year, shows fixed-price contracting works for Moon missions. At a minimum, this will give NASA a lower-cost means of accessing the lunar surface. The Blue Ghost mission cost the space agency about $145 million—$101 million for Firefly's contract plus $44 million for the lander's government-provided science payloads.

There are no modern-era NASA lunar missions to allow an apples-to-apples cost comparison, but Zurbuchen estimated a traditional NASA development would cost more than $500 million.

Future CLPS missions will attempt to surmount new challenges, such as landing on the far side of the Moon. Firefly's first Blue Ghost lander targeted a relatively flat patch of the lunar surface, a 340-mile-wide (550-kilometer) impact basin formed when an asteroid struck the Moon nearly 4 billion years ago. This location, known as Mare Crisium or the Sea of Crises, can be found on the northeastern portion of the near side of the full Moon.

Shots on goal

NASA officials in 2018 acknowledged the strategy underpinning CLPS was risky. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine compared the strategy to taking "shots on goal," a sports analogy where not every shot is expected to land in the net. Astrobotic launched the first CLPS mission, but it succumbed to a propellant leak and never reached the Moon. That was followed by IM-1, the first Intuitive Machines mission, which achieved a partial success a year ago.

Firefly's Blue Ghost launched January 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket alongside another privately developed lunar lander from the Japanese company ispace. The two landers are taking separate paths to the Moon, with Firefly due to land first, followed by ispace's Resilience lander at a separate location in the next few months.

In the meantime, Intuitive Machines launched its second lander–Athena–last week ahead of its lunar-landing attempt Thursday near the Moon's south pole.

Firefly touched down inside its 100-meter (330-foot) target zone in Mare Crisium near a volcanic dome named Mons Latreille, which has sat dormant for billions of years after volcanic activity ceased on the Moon.

"We’re landing at a place that is of great scientific interest, but it was also a very achievable place to land," said Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science mission directorate.

There are 10 NASA-sponsored payloads aboard Firefly's first Blue Ghost lander, which stands about 2 meters (6.6 feet) tall. Its four landing legs span about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) wide. The solar-powered vehicle will remain stationary on the lunar surface and operate for about 14 days until the Sun sets on Mare Crisium, plunging temperatures to levels too low for the lander to survive.

The instruments include an electrodynamic dust shield, developed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to demonstrate technology using electric fields to remove lunar dust particles and prevent accumulation on sensitive components of the spacecraft.

Another payload, called PlanetVac, will extend from the bottom of the lander to contact the lunar surface, where it will fire a cartridge of high-pressure gas to force soil and dust into a collection chamber for inspection. PlanetVac was developed by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin, and NASA funded the cost of its ride to the Moon.

"There’s no digging, no mechanical arm to wear out requiring servicing or replacement—it functions like a vacuum cleaner," said Dennis Harris, who manages the PlanetVac payload for NASA, in a statement. "The technology on this CLPS payload could benefit the search for water, helium, and other resources and provide a clearer picture of in situ materials available to NASA and its partners for fabricating lunar habitats and launch pads, expanding scientific knowledge and the practical exploration of the solar system every step of the way."

"There are studies that range from studies of the Sun that we’ll conduct from the surface of the Moon, studies of the abrasive dust, the regolith," Kearns said. "We’re going to drill into the surface, we’re going to pick up regolith. It's going to answer so many questions over this one lunar day-long mission. It’s going to really be one for the history books."

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As the spring planting season arrives in College Station, Texas, certified master gardener Mark Smith is thrilled that peace is in the air. This time last year, a loud buzzing noise began disrupting Smith’s morning routine of checking on the peppers, tomatoes, herbs, and shrubs growing in his backyard. Several times an hour, an Amazon Prime Air delivery drone would noisily emerge about 800 feet away, just past a line of trees behind Smith’s home. His neighbors began calling the fleet flying chainsaws. Smith, a retired civil engineer, preferred a different comparison: “It was like your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long,” he says. “It was just incessant.”

Amid technical and regulatory challenges, Amazon’s decade-plus quest to fly small items such as toothpaste and batteries to people’s yards in under an hour has yielded just thousands of deliveries. The experience in College Station has highlighted another challenge: NIMBYs—or people who push for developments to be “not in my backyard”—potentially curtailing where Amazon operates.

Over the past few years, drone delivery companies have started operating in several towns and cities across the US without much fuss. The Federal Aviation Administration conducted environmental reviews of 21 planned drone rollouts over the past four years, none of which received more than three critical public comments or any organized opposition—except for one location.

In College Station, a university town of about 125,000 people, hundreds of ordinary residents along with the mayor and other officials banded together last year to oppose Amazon’s proposal to more than double the number of daily local drone flights. The FAA received about 150 comments opposing the plans, including from homeowners’ associations and other groups.

A parent said their teenage daughter feared using the swimming pool because of the drone’s camera. (Amazon says it faces forward, not down). A 92-year-old worried about doves that were no longer visible from a kitchen window. Many claimed their homes were losing value. One resident said their peace and quiet was being “invaded by some billionaire's insatiable desire to make even more money.”

In early July last year, councilmember Bob Yancy emailed the mayor and two city officials, explaining that complaints would intensify if Amazon didn’t move the drones. “Amazon’s MO thus far is to conduct aggressive PR efforts writ large while ignoring the immediately affected neighborhood,” Yancy wrote, according to public records obtained by WIRED. “Without causing a public stink around their project, for their sake and ours, I think we need to quietly secure some assurances that they will act immediately to directly address neighborhood concerns.”

The FAA ultimately determined that some of the public concerns were meritless or outside its purview and that Amazon’s proposed expansion wouldn’t cause significant environmental impacts. But the local pushback still got through to the tech giant. Company representatives sought city officials’ help in getting contact information for homeowners’ associations near the drone depot, according to the email records. Meetings ensued between Amazon and homeowners, and by the end of July, Amazon communicated its intent to relocate within the city. (Yancy tells WIRED that Prime Air is a valued member of the community and, as long as it is mindful of the noise, he hopes it stays.)

Over the summer, Amazon reduced the number of drone flights. In November, it fully adopted newer, quieter drones in College Station that deliver within a range of about 7.5 miles. Inside his house, with the double-paned windows shut and TV on, Smith could no longer hear the drones. More recently, wet winter weather has further restricted the frequency of flights. (Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson says the drones can withstand only light rain and limited temperatures.)

But things finally went back to fully normal for Smith and other residents of the woodsy communities near Amazon’s drone base in January, when the company temporarily grounded its drones nationwide for a software update process that is ongoing. Amazon plans to end its College Station lease on September 30, potentially giving the frustrated communities permanent quiet.

If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day. Now, he hasn’t seen one in weeks.

Residents say they have noticed wildlife return to the area. Paul Greer, who lives near the drone depot, says he heard an owl for the first time in months. Deer also are more abundant with the drones gone, he says. Even Greer’s dog, George, is at peace. Seeing and hearing the drones during walks agitated his 50-pound bull terrier. “I don’t think anybody expected the noise to be as invasive as it has been,” Greer says.

Amazon’s Stephenson reiterates that the FAA review determined that the operations would not have a significant impact on wildlife and says that College Station officials conducted a test that found the drones operated below the city’s noise limits. “We work hard to listen to the community and to mitigate any potential impact from our operations,” Stephenson says. Since the company launched its new MK30 drone, he says, it hasn’t “received any community complaints, and the feedback from local officials has been positive.”

Some of the College Station residents who have complained about the noise say they still largely support the testing of drones. But many believe Amazon miscalculated by locating its depot close to so many residences. The company’s first depot—now shut down—was located near businesses and vineyards in rural California. Its third and newest location is at one of its warehouses in a quiet Arizona town. A planned site in the UK is also based at a fulfillment center and largely bounded by fields and industrial parks. “I don’t think we should ban this,” Smith says of drone delivery. “If there’s a place for it, and the market needs it, then fine, but it shouldn’t mess up the peace in the neighborhood.”

Amazon’s drone sector rivals, such as DroneUp and Alphabet’s Wing, have made many more deliveries, mostly by operating out of commercial areas and forming partnerships with physical retailers. That’s not so easy for Amazon, the nation’s dominant online shopping platform. It has plenty of logistics warehouses, but they’re not necessarily located close enough to customers for delivery drones to reach them.

Location, Location, Location

Amazon has said little about how it chose the location of its College Station drone hub, which it began leasing in 2022. Residents such as Smith believe privacy may have played a role. The building Amazon leased is tucked away behind trees, limiting what might be visible to prying eyes. Stephenson, the Amazon spokesperson, says its choice of location involved “thorough analysis of the area” and “close collaboration with local leaders.”

Smith says that during a series of community events Amazon hosted in 2022, some College Station residents were miffed by how the company highlighted cookies rather than urgent necessities as items Prime Air could deliver. He and others also asked to see the drones in action to gauge how loud they might be, but the company refused. “We ended up getting it without actually hearing it,” he says. Amazon’s Stephenson says that the demonstrations weren’t possible, because the FAA didn’t approve the drones to take flight until the end of the year when commercial operations began.

As flights began picking up early last year, the people who live closest to the drone depot started fuming over the noise. Residents appealed to the city to do something, but Texas lawmakers have essentially banned cities from regulating drones, leaving local officials powerless.

Smith, who previously worked as a city public works director in charge of big projects, says the only developments that he had seen attract this amount of opposition were landfills. The drone pushback also attracted international media attention, sparking concerns at city hall.

Public records show city officials have suggested numerous options for Amazon’s potential relocation, including a mall about 4 miles up the highway from the current building. As of December, though, College Station mayor John Nichols wrote in one email, Amazon had not shared any recent updates about the status of its search. Nichols tells WIRED that as of last week, he still hadn't heard anything.

Lessons Learned

Some College Station residents who live near Amazon’s drone depot site say the noise and property value concerns raised by their neighbors are overblown. “What were people like when lawnmowers first came out?” says Kim Miller, who could hear the drones above her front yard and once received a dog toy by air as a gift from someone. “Progress has some drawbacks,” she says.

Raylene Lewis, a real estate agent at NextHome Realty Solutions, which has listings near the drone base, says home buyers don’t seem to mind the prospect of drones overhead. In fact, more people are curious about whether a prospective home is within Prime Air’s delivery range, she says. Lewis’ own house happens to be just outside the perimeter, but she says she would love to use the service “whether I want cookies or my medicine or pen and paper for a kid’s project.”

Lewis believes Amazon should have been more forthright about its operations and should have offered a local customer service center for people with questions and concerns. With updates still difficult to come by, some residents remain frustrated. Several of them learned about Amazon’s fleet grounding only after inquiries from WIRED.

The grounding followed two crashes—one related to rainy weather and the other operator miscommunications—of the roughly 80-pound drones, according to Bloomberg. Amazon’s Stephenson disputes the cause of the pause, saying it was initiated to “safely and properly conduct a software update” and that services will resume following FAA approval.

The accidents have introduced a new worry in College Station. “These events really bring out that Amazon is using my neighborhood as a test zone,” says Monica Williams, a teenager who opposed the company’s expansion plan.

For now, more drones are poised to hit the skies. In Dallas-Fort Worth, Amazon rival Wing is awaiting FAA review to triple its maximum deliveries per day to 30,000. In Florida, the company is seeking review to provide up to 60,000 deliveries each day, starting from Walmart supercenters in the Orlando and Tampa metro areas.

Smith and others in College Station expect that as long as drones aren’t constantly buzzing near homes—and new versions get increasingly quieter—complaints will be minimal. He believes Amazon learned a valuable lesson in his city, and he’s glad the company is adjusting its course. His garden is certainly happy to have him back.

Additional reporting by Aarian Marshall.

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There's no question that AI systems have accomplished some impressive feats, mastering games, writing text, and generating convincing images and video. That's gotten some people talking about the possibility that we're on the cusp of AGI, or artificial general intelligence. While some of this is marketing fanfare, enough people in the field are taking the idea seriously that it warrants a closer look.

Many arguments come down to the question of how AGI is defined, which people in the field can't seem to agree upon. This contributes to estimates of its advent that range from "it's practically here" to "we'll never achieve it." Given that range, it's impossible to provide any sort of informed perspective on how close we are.

But we do have an existing example of AGI without the "A"—the intelligence provided by the animal brain, particularly the human one. And one thing is clear: The systems being touted as evidence that AGI is just around the corner do not work at all like the brain does. That may not be a fatal flaw, or even a flaw at all. It's entirely possible that there's more than one way to reach intelligence, depending on how it's defined. But at least some of the differences are likely to be functionally significant, and the fact that AI is taking a very different route from the one working example we have is likely to be meaningful.

Defining AGI might help

Artificial general intelligence hasn't really been defined. Those who argue that it's imminent are either vague about what they expect the first AGI systems to be capable of or simply define it as the ability to dramatically exceed human performance at a limited number of tasks. Predictions of AGI's arrival in the intermediate term tend to focus on AI systems demonstrating specific behaviors that seem human-like. The further one goes out on the timeline, the greater the emphasis on the "G" of AGI and its implication of systems that are far less specialized.

But most of these predictions are coming from people working in companies with a commercial interest in AI. It was notable that none of the researchers we talked to for this article were willing to offer a definition of AGI. They were, however, willing to point out how current systems fall short.

"I think that AGI would be something that is going to be more robust, more stable—not necessarily smarter in general but more coherent in its abilities," said Ariel Goldstein, a researcher at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "You'd expect a system that can do X and Y to also be able to do Z and T. Somehow, these systems seem to be more fragmented in a way. To be surprisingly good at one thing and then surprisingly bad at another thing that seems related."

"I think that's a big distinction, this idea of generalizability," echoed neuroscientist Christa Baker of NC State University. "You can learn how to analyze logic in one sphere, but if you come to a new circumstance, it's not like now you're an idiot."

Mariano Schain, a Google engineer who has collaborated with Goldstein, focused on the abilities that underlie this generalizability. He mentioned both long-term and task-specific memory and the ability to deploy skills developed in one task in different contexts. These are limited-to-nonexistent in existing AI systems.

Beyond those specific limits, Baker noted that "there's long been this very human-centric idea of intelligence that only humans are intelligent." That's fallen away within the scientific community as we've studied more about animal behavior. But there's still a bias to privilege human-like behaviors, such as the human-sounding responses generated by large language models

The fruit flies that Baker studies can integrate multiple types of sensory information, control four pairs of limbs, navigate complex environments, satisfy their own energy needs, produce new generations of brains, and more. And they do that all with brains that contain under 150,000 neurons, far fewer than current large language models.

These capabilities are complicated enough that it's not entirely clear how the brain enables them. (If we knew how, it might be possible to engineer artificial systems with similar capacities.) But we do know a fair bit about how brains operate, and there are some very obvious ways that they differ from the artificial systems we've created so far.

Neurons vs. artificial neurons

Most current AI systems, including all large language models, are based on what are called neural networks. These were intentionally designed to mimic how some areas of the brain operate, with large numbers of artificial neurons taking an input, modifying it, and then passing the modified information on to another layer of artificial neurons. Each of these artificial neurons can pass the information on to multiple instances in the next layer, with different weights applied to each connection. In turn, each of the artificial neurons in the next layer can receive input from multiple sources in the previous one.

After passing through enough layers, the final layer is read and transformed into an output, such as the identity of the pixels in an image that correspond to a cat.

While that system is modeled on the behavior of some structures within the brain, it's a very limited approximation. For one, all artificial neurons are functionally equivalent—there's no specialization. In contrast, real neurons are highly specialized; they use a variety of neurotransmitters and take input from a range of extra-neural factors like hormones. Some specialize in sending inhibitory signals while others activate the neurons they interact with. Different physical structures allow them to make different numbers of connections.

In addition, rather than simply forwarding a single value to the next layer, real neurons communicate through an analog series of activity spikes, sending trains of pulses that vary in timing and intensity. This allows for a degree of non-deterministic noise in communications.

Finally, while organized layers are a feature of a few structures in brains, they're far from the rule. "What we found is it's—at least in the fly—much more interconnected," Baker told Ars. "You can't really identify this strictly hierarchical network."

With near-complete connection maps of the fly brain becoming available, she told Ars that researchers are "finding lateral connections or feedback projections, or what we call recurrent loops, where we've got neurons that are making little circle-like connectivity patterns. I think those things are probably going to be a lot more widespread than we currently appreciate."

While we're only beginning to understand the functional consequences of all this complexity, it's safe to say that it allows networks composed of actual neurons far more flexibility in how they process information—a flexibility that may underly how these neurons get re-deployed in a way that these researchers identified as crucial for some form of generalized intelligence.

But the differences between neural networks and the real-world brains they were modeled on go well beyond the functional differences we've talked about so far. They extend to significant differences in how these functional units are organized.

The brain isn’t monolithic

The neural networks we've generated so far are largely specialized systems meant to handle a single task. Even the most complicated tasks, like the prediction of protein structures, have typically relied on the interaction of only two or three specialized systems. In contrast, the typical brain has a lot of functional units. Some of these operate by sequentially processing a single set of inputs in something resembling a pipeline. But many others can operate in parallel, in some cases without any controlling activity going on elsewhere in the brain.

To give a sense of what this looks like, let's think about what's going on as you read this article. Doing so requires systems that handle motor control, which keep your head and eyes focused on the screen. Part of this system operates via feedback from the neurons that are processing the read material, causing small eye movements that help your eyes move across individual sentences and between lines.

Separately, there's part of your brain devoted to telling the visual system what not to pay attention to, like the icon showing an ever-growing number of unread emails. Those of us who can read a webpage without even noticing the ads on it presumably have a very well-developed system in place for ignoring things. Reading this article may also mean you're engaging the systems that handle other senses, getting you to ignore things like the noise of your heating system coming on while remaining alert for things that might signify threats, like an unexplained sound in the next room.

The input generated by the visual system then needs to be processed, from individual character recognition up to the identification of words and sentences, processes that involve systems in areas of the brain involved in both visual processing and language. Again, this is an iterative process, where building meaning from a sentence may require many eye movements to scan back and forth across a sentence, improving reading comprehension—and requiring many of these systems to communicate among themselves.

As meaning gets extracted from a sentence, other parts of the brain integrate it with information obtained in earlier sentences, which tends to engage yet another area of the brain, one that handles a short-term memory system called working memory. Meanwhile, other systems will be searching long-term memory, finding related material that can help the brain place the new information within the context of what it already knows. Still other specialized brain areas are checking for things like whether there's any emotional content to the material you're reading.

All of these different areas are engaged without you being consciously aware of the need for them.

In contrast, something like ChatGPT, despite having a lot of artificial neurons, is monolithic: No specialized structures are allocated before training starts. That's in sharp contrast to a brain. "The brain does not start out as a bag of neurons and then as a baby it needs to make sense of the world and then determine what connections to make," Baker noted. "There already a lot of constraints and specifics that are already set up."

Even in cases where it's not possible to see any physical distinction between cells specialized for different functions, Baker noted that we can often find differences in what genes are active.

In contrast, pre-planned modularity is relatively new to the AI world. In software development, "This concept of modularity is well established, so we have the whole methodology around it, how to manage it," Schain said, "it's really an aspect that is important for maybe achieving AI systems that can then operate similarly to the human brain." There are a few cases where developers have enforced modularity on systems, but Goldstein said these systems need to be trained with all the modules in place to see any gain in performance.

None of this is saying that a modular system can't arise within a neural network as a result of its training. But so far, we have very limited evidence that they do. And since we mostly deploy each system for a very limited number of tasks, there's no reason to think modularity will be valuable.

There is some reason to believe that this modularity is key to the brain's incredible flexibility. The region that recognizes emotion-evoking content in written text can also recognize it in music and images, for example. But the evidence here is mixed. There are some clear instances where a single brain region handles related tasks, but that's not consistently the case; Baker noted that, "When you're talking humans, there are parts of the brain that are dedicated to understanding speech, and there are different areas that are involved in producing speech."

This sort of re-use would also provide an advantage in terms of learning since behaviors developed in one context could potentially be deployed in others. But as we'll see, the differences between brains and AI when it comes to learning are far more comprehensive than that.

The brain is constantly training

Current AIs generally have two states: training and deployment. Training is where the AI learns its behavior; deployment is where that behavior is put to use. This isn't absolute, as the behavior can be tweaked in response to things learned during deployment, like finding out it recommends eating a rock daily. But for the most part, once the weights among the connections of a neural network are determined through training, they're retained.

That may be starting to change a bit, Schain said. "There is now maybe a shift in similarity where AI systems are using more and more what they call the test time compute, where at inference time you do much more than before, kind of a parallel to how the human brain operates," he told Ars. But it's still the case that neural networks are essentially useless without an extended training period.

In contrast, a brain doesn't have distinct learning and active states; it's constantly in both modes. In many cases, the brain learns while doing. Baker described that in terms of learning to take jumpshots: "Once you have made your movement, the ball has left your hand, it's going to land somewhere. So that visual signal—that comparison of where it landed versus where you wanted it to go—is what we call an error signal. That's detected by the cerebellum, and its goal is to minimize that error signal. So the next time you do it, the brain is trying to compensate for what you did last time."

It makes for very different learning curves. An AI is typically not very useful until it has had a substantial amount of training. In contrast, a human can often pick up basic competence in a very short amount of time (and without massive energy use). "Even if you're put into a situation where you've never been before, you can still figure it out," Baker said. "If you see a new object, you don't have to be trained on that a thousand times to know how to use it. A lot of the time, [if] you see it one time, you can make predictions."

As a result, while an AI system with sufficient training may ultimately outperform the human, the human will typically reach a high level of performance faster. And unlike an AI, a human's performance doesn't remain static. Incremental improvements and innovative approaches are both still possible. This also allows humans to adjust to changed circumstances more readily. An AI trained on the body of written material up until 2020 might struggle to comprehend teen-speak in 2030; humans could at least potentially adjust to the shifts in language. (Though maybe an AI trained to respond to confusing phrasing with "get off my lawn" would be indistinguishable.)

Finally, since the brain is a flexible learning device, the lessons learned from one skill can be applied to related skills. So the ability to recognize tones and read sheet music can help with the mastery of multiple musical instruments. Chemistry and cooking share overlapping skillsets. And when it comes to schooling, learning how to learn can be used to master a wide range of topics.

In contrast, it's essentially impossible to use an AI model trained on one topic for much else. The biggest exceptions are large language models, which seem to be able to solve problems on a wide variety of topics if they're presented as text. But here, there's still a dependence on sufficient examples of similar problems appearing in the body of text the system was trained on. To give an example, something like ChatGPT can seem to be able to solve math problems, but it's best at solving things that were discussed in its training materials; giving it something new will generally cause it to stumble.

Déjà vu

For Schain, however, the biggest difference between AI and biology is in terms of memory. For many AIs, "memory" is indistinguishable from the computational resources that allow it to perform a task and the connections formed during training. For the large language models, it includes both the weights of connections learned then and a narrow "context window" that encompasses any recent exchanges with a single user. In contrast, biological systems have a lifetime of memories to rely on.

"For AI, it's very basic: It's like the memory is in the weights [of connections] or in the context. But with a human brain, it's a much more sophisticated mechanism, still to be uncovered. It's more distributed. There is the short term and long term, and it has to do a lot with different timescales. Memory for the last second, a minute, and a day or a year and years, and they all may be relevant."

This lifetime of memories can be key to making intelligence general. It helps us recognize the possibilities and limits of drawing analogies between different circumstances or applying things learned in one context versus another. It provides us with insights that let us solve problems that we've never confronted before. And, of course, it also ensures that the horrible bit of pop music you were exposed to in your teens remains an earworm well into your 80s.

The differences between how brains and AIs handle memory, however, are very hard to describe. AIs don't really have distinct memory, while the use of memory as the brain handles a task more sophisticated than navigating a maze is generally so poorly understood that it's difficult to discuss at all. All we can really say is that there are clear differences there.

Facing limits

It's difficult to think about AI without recognizing the enormous energy and computational resources involved in training one. And in this case, it's potentially relevant. Brains have evolved under enormous energy constraints and continue to operate using well under the energy that a daily diet can provide. That has forced biology to figure out ways to optimize its resources and get the most out of the ones it does commit to a task.

In contrast, the story of recent developments in AI is largely one of throwing more resources at them. And plans for the future seem to (so far at least) involve more of this, including larger training data sets and ever more artificial neurons and connections among them. All of this comes at a time when the best current AIs are already using three orders of magnitude more neurons than we'd find in a fly's brain and have nowhere near the fly's general capabilities.

It remains possible that there is more than one route to those general capabilities and that some offshoot of today's AI systems will eventually find a different route. But if it turns out that we have to bring our computerized systems closer to biology to get there, we'll run into a serious roadblock: We don't fully understand the biology yet.

"I guess I am not optimistic that any kind of artificial neural network will ever be able to achieve the same plasticity, the same generalizability, the same flexibility that a human brain has," Baker said. "That's just because we don't even know how it gets it; we don't know how that arises. So how do you build that into a system?"

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Most of life’s engines run on sunlight. Photons filter down through the atmosphere and are eagerly absorbed by light-powered organisms such as plants and algae. Through photosynthesis, the particles of light power a cellular reaction that manufactures chemical energy (in the form of sugars), which is then passed around the food web in a complex dance of herbivores, predators, scavengers, decomposers, and more.

On a bright, sunny day, there’s a wealth of photons to go around. But what happens at low light? Biologists have long been curious about just how little light photosynthesis can run on—or how many photons need to arrive, and how quickly, for a cell’s photosynthetic machinery to process carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy. Calculations have suggested a theoretical minimum of around 0.01 micromoles of photons per square meter per second, or less than one-hundred-thousandth of the light of a sunny day.

For decades, this calculation was theoretical, given the difficulties of studying photosynthesis under low light. No one could confirm it in the field, though there are plenty of places on Earth that light barely reaches. Every winter in the high Arctic, for example, the sun, hidden by the tilt of the Earth, vanishes for months. Meters of snow blanket the sea ice and block incoming light, leaving the frigid ocean below as dark as the inside of a tomb. There, biologists assumed, photosynthesizing microalgae that live in the water and ice power down for the season and wait for warmth and light to return.

“People thought of the polar night as these desert conditions where there’s very little life, and things are all sleeping and hibernating and waiting for the next spring to come,” said Clara Hoppe, a biogeochemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “But really, people had never really looked at it.”

In winter 2020, Hoppe spent months living on a ship wedged into an ice floe, through the polar night, to study the limits of photosynthesis in the dark. Her team’s recent study in Nature Communications reported microalgae growing and reproducing at light levels at or close to the theoretical minimum—far lower than had previously been observed in nature.

The study shows that in some of the coldest, darkest places on Earth, life blooms with the barest quantum of light. “At least some phytoplankton, under some conditions, may be able to do some very useful things at very low light,” said Douglas Campbell, a specialist in aquatic photosynthesis at Mount Allison University in Canada, who was not involved in the study. “It’s important work.”

The Power of the Dark Side

Scientists have traditionally understood the Arctic to be a place of stasis for much of the year. In winter, organisms that can flee the frigid waters do so; those that stay live off stored reserves or sink into a silent sleep. Then, when the sun returns, the place comes back to life. During spring bloom, an upsurge in photosynthesizing algae and other microbes kick-starts the Arctic ecosystem, fueling a yearly revel, with tiny crustaceans, fish, seals, birds, polar bears, whales, and more.

It seemed to Hoppe that any phytoplankton able to get an earlier start than the competition could have a more successful summer. This led her to wonder when, precisely, the organisms could respond to the light coming back.

Her interest received a jolt in 2015 when she tagged along on a research project led by researchers at the University of Tromsø in Norway. The multidisciplinary team found an unexpectedly thriving ecosystem in the winter waters off the Svalbard archipelago; some organisms, particularly clams, were actually more active than they were in summer. To everyone’s surprise, the phytoplankton were not asleep either: Hoppe measured higher levels of the pigment chlorophyll—a useful proxy for active photosynthesis—in the seawater than anyone expected. Rather than sinking into surface sediments and overwintering in a dormant “sleep mode,” many cells Hoppe found were having an active winter, with their cellular operations fully up and running.

“If these things are active,” Hoppe said, “the question obviously becomes: When do they start to function again for the ecosystem?” She began to wonder about the vast, cold blackness of the polar ocean.

In early 2020, Hoppe found herself testing the limits of photosynthesis directly, camped aboard an icebreaker ship that had been deliberately rammed into an ice floe and allowed to drift with its engines off through the polar night. A rotating crew of scientists with the expedition Mosaic (Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate) occupied RV Polarstern on its journey to gather as much data about the Arctic winter as possible.

Hoppe and her colleagues worked in the darkness of 24-hour night, amid expanses of glittering ice and wind chills down to minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit. Cracks and ridges in the ice constantly shifted the route to a permanent hole in the ice, named Ocean City, from which Hoppe and her team gathered hundreds of liters of seawater samples and hauled them back to the ship for analysis.

The team carried out two parallel sets of measurements. First, they took samples of microalgae from seawater and sea ice into the shipboard lab. There, they incubated the cells and offered them carbon (traceable by isotope, or the number of neutrons in the atomic nuclei) and minute amounts of light (though significantly more than what was available under the ice). By measuring the cells’ carbon-uptake rates, they were able to estimate the limits of the organisms’ capacity for photosynthesis.

The researchers also took regular seawater samples in which to track the amounts of phytoplankton and chlorophyll present over time. Throughout February, both sets of numbers remained static, Hoppe said. By the end of March, however, the microalgae’s carbon uptake had jumped, along with the number of cells and the concentration of chlorophyll—proxies for growth and photosynthesis. Hoppe and her team tested and ruled out many possible explanations, and recognized that the uptick in photosynthesis coincided with the return of the first springtime sunlight.

Yet a key piece of evidence only emerged three years after the expedition, Hoppe said, and from researchers in another department: the physicists measuring light beneath the sea ice. This has historically been tricky: “You can’t really measure light under the ice without disturbing the environment you’re trying to measure,” Hoppe said. “Because you drill a hole, you walk around—even footsteps on the snow and ice are going to change the light field.”

To get around the problem, the sea ice physicist Niels Fuchs and his team aboard RV Polarstern had placed extremely precise light sensors around the ice floe early in the season and allowed them to freeze to the underside of the ice for the winter. Like trail cameras placed in the backwoods by a wildlife biologist, the light sensors recorded data on under-ice light for months, undisturbed.

In February, the darkness of the polar night was nearly absolute, and not even photons from a bright moon or fleeting twilight could reach the dark waters below. Then, in late March, the sun briefly surfaced over the horizon. Beneath that ice, the light sensors recorded an astronomically small number of photons: an upper range of 0.04 micromoles per square meter per second, a number very close to the theoretical minimum amount of light that photosynthesis can run on. The actual amount of light was probably lower.

“The light we observed, compared to a normal sunny day, is like one droplet of water compared to 3 liters,” said Fuchs, an ice specialist at the University of Hamburg and coauthor on the study.

Their estimate is a conservative one, he added, and it’s possible even fewer photons got through. “The ice cover is quite heterogeneous,” he explained. Because some parts of the sheet might allow more light through than others, the research team selected the upper thresholds of their light measurements. “In the end there’s some variety, and we really want to be on the safe side—to not stake on the lower limit where we’re not 100 percent certain that this is really the amount of light.”

Pairing Fuchs’ light data with Hoppe’s microalgae observations clinched it: At the end of March, right when the barest amount of sunlight returned, the microalgae not only had their photosynthetic machinery up and running but were also growing and building biomass. Her team concluded that they’d made the first-ever field observation of photosynthesis at just around the theoretical minimum—where the amount of light was an order of magnitude lower than what had been observed in nature before.

Sleep No More

Hoppe was excited to observe photosynthesis at or near the minimum amount of light that could power life. But the finding raised a question: How could dormant cells be ready to turn their machinery on at the very moment that spring’s first light trickled through the ice?

Her team found that during the darkest periods of polar night, the microalgae didn’t show a measurable uptick in carbon uptake—they were neither growing nor photosynthesizing. Yet they weren’t totally dormant either. The cells kept running on low power. Then, as soon as the light levels rose enough to support active carbon fixation in late March, the algae were ready to explode into action.

“It’s sort of like a seedbed or an inoculation issue,” Campbell said. “That ability to productively exploit really low light improves your ability to survive and then be ready to go fast when the light goes back.”

The researchers aren’t entirely sure how the microalgae managed to stay alive and out of dormancy through the darkest times. Some, such as diatoms, can consume dissolved organic nutrients directly from the water. Perhaps they could eke out a living from stray photons that passed through cracks in the ice or were emitted by some bioluminescent creature. Or perhaps polar algae have evolved unique mechanisms that can keep their metabolism running on low at frigid temperatures so that they’re ready to activate at first light.

Such adaptations might be important to the ecology of the region, said Kevin Flynn, a plankton specialist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory who was not involved in the study. “The organisms may be getting ready earlier than we think,” he said. The finding is “important work that’s a reality check about what nature really does.”

However, he isn’t entirely convinced that the cells’ late-March growth occurred through photosynthesis. “The appearance of chlorophyll does not mean that they are photosynthesizing to obtain that growth,” he said. “They may simply be making more chlorophyll from organics and in preparation for photosynthesizing. Because as the season goes, there will be light. And the organism which is ready for it quicker than the others is going to go the quickest.”

On the other hand, Campbell thinks it’s possible that the algae might be photosynthesizing even earlier than Hoppe’s team suggested. Their estimates of light levels were conservative, he said, and photosynthesis may have been occurring well in advance of the kind of biomass accumulation that’s easy to measure. It is feasible to him, then, that “these things are right at or touching below that biochemical thermodynamic limit,” he said.

The findings paint a new picture of life in the Arctic’s polar night and possibly beyond. Life may not be packed entirely into a few short months of summer; rather, the waters may be productive—or, at the very least, still living—throughout the year. This, Hoppe said, could rewrite our understanding of Arctic organisms’ life cycles, interactions, and energy reserves.

She wonders, too, whether Arctic phytoplankton’s ability to ride out near-absolute darkness might be shared by some algae in the colder, darker waters of the deep sea. If she’s right, the zone of productive ocean may be deeper than anyone thought. “If polar phytoplankton were able to evolve these mechanisms,” Hoppe suggested, “I’m sure phytoplankton in other areas of the ocean can do the same.”

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

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Due to the way WB manufactured their DVDs, virtually all discs pressed between 2006-8 are unplayable now.

The T-1000 in Terminator 2 could change shape at will, morph its hands into blades or turn parts of its body into a fluid to move through metal bars. “I saw this movie when I was a child—it was like, 'Wow, can you imagine,' I thought, 'being able to do this?'” says Otger Campàs, a professor at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. “Now I work on embryos. And what we saw in The Terminator actually happens in an embryo. This kind of shape shifting is what an embryo does.”

Campàs and his team drew inspiration from processes called fluidization and convergent extension—mechanisms that cells in embryos use to coordinate their behavior when forming tissues and organs in a developing organism. The team built a robotic collective where each robotic unit behaved like an embryonic cell. As a collective, the robots behaved like a material that could change shape and switch between solid and liquid states, just like the T-1000.

Real-world and sci-fi alloys

The T-1000 was a marvel to behold, but the movie gave no clues as to how it worked. This is why Campàs and his colleagues looked for clues elsewhere. Similar shape-shifting properties have been observed in embryos when you watch their development sped up using time-lapse imaging. “Tissues in embryos can switch between solid and fluid states to shape the organs. We were thinking how we could engineer robots that would do the same,” Campàs says.

The team focused on three abilities that enable cells in embryonic tissues to work their magic. The first is that they can move relative to each other even when they are tightly packed and connected. The second is signaling: releasing molecules that neighboring cells recognize and respond to, potentially by orienting their movement in a specific direction. The third is the ability of cells to adhere to one another, forming a strong and cohesive whole.

Campàs and his colleagues decided to design cell-like robots that could do all those things.

T-1000 building blocks

Each robot had motorized gears around its perimeter that could interlock with gears on other robots. The gears allowed the robots to move within the collective without breaking their bonds with each other, just like cells do in a living organism.

Linking the robots was a job of magnets that could rotate to maintain adhesion regardless of their orientation. Each robot also had a photodetector that could sense the polarity of light, allowing basic commands to be sent using a simple flashlight with a polarization filter. “The switch between solid and liquid states was driven by fluctuations of the force the motors applied, and we encoded the intensity of those fluctuations in the intensity of light,” says Matthew Devlin, a researcher at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author of the study.

In response to light signals, two robotic collectives, 20 robots total, could elongate toward each other, touch in the middle, and form a bridge that could hold a load of just under 5 kilograms. After forming a cube, they could support an adult human weighing around 70 kilograms. They could also flow around an object, assume a complementary shape, and stiffen up to act as a wrench. “This was the Terminator idea of shapeshifting. This was exactly what we had in mind,” Campàs claims.

The only problem was, the robots were a bit above 5 centimeters in diameter. To get robotic collectives closer to Terminator’s mimetic polyalloy, the team wants to make the robots smaller. Much smaller.

Terminator nanobots?

“The good news is, you don’t have to go down with scale to what you see in living systems,” Campàs says. “Cells are roughly 10 microns. But anything around 100 microns—even up to 1 millimeter—robots would already be really impressive.” Unfortunately, we are rather far from making machines that small.

According to the team, robots working like ones they used in the study could be scaled down to 1 or 2 centimeters in diameter. “At this moment, it is impossible to make something the size of like a grain of rice with all the features we have, but it could well become possible within the next decade,” Campàs claims. But even if we do figure out the miniaturization part, there are other issues to solve, like powering all those robots up.

The robots used in the study were powered by lithium-ion batteries that could keep them operating continuously for about half an hour. But the power consumption was only significant during transitions from one shape to another. Once the collective was locked in a shape, they only needed tiny amounts of power. The big problem is that each robot has to be charged manually. This worked for a collective of 20 robots but would become a real issue if the number of robots went up to hundreds or thousands. One possible solution researchers see is wireless charging, provided we could make it work over longer distances. For now, though, the shape-shifting robotic collective was meant primarily as a proof-of-concept.

“We’re far from the Terminator thing, let me be clear about that. It’s not that we’re doing it tomorrow. If you talk to people doing micro mechanical devices, you’ll know it’s not easy,” Campàs says. But he said the research community now has an example of how something like the T-1000 material could work, and miniaturizing robots is all that’s left to do. “Our goal was to get people excited to actually go and do it,” Campàs adds.

Science, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/science.ads7942

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The north pole of Mars is slowly sinking under the weight of an ice cap that only formed within the past few million years. And, in the process, it's telling us something about what the planet's interior must be like, thanks in no small part to data obtained by hardware we landed in Mars' equatorial regions.

That's the conclusion of a new modeling study that produces results that are broadly consistent with earlier work, although quite a bit more detailed. In the process, the work shows how it's possible to take data from radically different data sources and pull them together into a coherent picture.

Weighted down

While the crust of a planet is relatively solid, it bends and breaks in various ways under the strain of plate tectonics. It also flexes in response to ice. The long glacial period that preceded our current interglacial saw sheets of ice that pressed the crust down into the mantle under their difficult-to-conceive weight. With the ice gone, the crust is slowly rising again, in a process called glacial isostatic rebound.

Given that Mars is significantly colder and further from the Sun, it's easy to imagine that its polar ice caps have been there for ages, and the planet is frozen and static. But that isn't likely to be the case. Working backward using orbital mechanics, it appears that the poles got more sunlight in the past; plugging that information into Martian climate models suggests the polar ice caps are probably less than 10 million years old.

So, the polar ice caps may be new enough that the crust at the poles is still sinking. And, if that's the case, it can tell us something about the crust and the mantle underneath it.

But it's not sinking fast enough for us to detect it from orbit. So, instead, researchers built a set of models of the evolution of Mars. These used different assumptions about the properties of Mars' interior, including the amount of heat in the crust, its thickness, etc. Given that there was a range of reasonable values for each of these properties, this resulted in 84 different models. So, the team had to figure out which of those 84 were likely to represent realistic conditions.

To figure out which models might be valid, the researchers looked for constraints from other data that could rule some of these models out.

Process of elimination

One of the big constraints comes from NASA's InSight lander, which brought the first seismograph to Mars. If a marsquake that was higher than a 3.8 magnitude were to take place at the north pole, InSight should have picked it up at its equatorial location. Given that it hadn't seen any marsquakes of this sort, then that set a limit on how quickly the crust there is deforming.

In addition, radar imaging from in orbit has created images of Mars' polar ice caps that extend down to the crust itself. This can provide information on how badly the shape of the area differs from what you might expect from a spherical surface.

The orbiters that carried the radar hardware, along with one or two others, have been orbiting long enough that any major changes in Mars' gravity caused by ice accumulation or crustal displacement would have shown up in their orbital behavior. The orbital changes they do see, "indicates that the increase in the gravitational potential associated with long-term ice accumulation is higher than the decrease in gravitational potential from downward deflection." They calculate that the deformation has to be less than 0.13 millimeters per year to be consistent with the gravitational signal.

Finally, the model had to have realistic conditions at the polar ice cap, with a density consistent with a mixture of ice and dust.

Out of those 84 models, only three were consistent with all of these constraints. All three had a very viscous Martian interior, consistent with a relatively cold interior. That's not a surprise, given what we've already inferred about Mars' history. But it also suggests that most of the radioactive elements that provide heat to the red planet are in the crust, rather than deeper in the interior. That's something we might have been able to check, had InSight's temperature measurement experiment deployed correctly. But as it is, we'll have to wait until some unidentified future mission to get a picture of Mars' heat dynamics.

In any case, the models also suggest that Mars' polar ice cap is less than 10 million years old, consistent with the orbitally driven climate models.

In a lot of ways, the new information is an update of earlier attempts to model the Martian interior, given a few more years of orbital data and the information gained from the InSight lander, which also determined the thickness of Mars' crust and size of its core. But it's also a good way of understanding how scientists can take bits and pieces of information from seemingly unrelated sources and build them into a coherent picture.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08565-9  (About DOIs).

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. February's list includes dancing sea turtles, the secret to a perfectly boiled egg, the latest breakthrough in deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, the discovery of an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb, and more.

Dancing sea turtles

There is growing evidence that certain migratory animal species (turtles, birds, some species of fish) are able to exploit the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, using it both as a compass to determine direction and as a kind of "map" to track their geographical position while migrating. A paper published in the journal Nature offers evidence of a possible mechanism for this unusual ability, at least in loggerhead sea turtles, who perform an energetic "dance" when they follow magnetic fields to a tasty snack.

Sea turtles make impressive 8,000-mile migrations across oceans and tend to return to the same feeding and nesting sites. The authors believe they achieve this through their ability to remember the magnetic signature of those areas and store them in a mental map. To test that hypothesis, the scientists placed juvenile sea turtles into two large tanks of water outfitted with large coils to create magnetic signatures at specific locations within the tanks. One tank features such a location that had food; the other had a similar location without food.

They found that the sea turtles in the first tank performed distinctive "dancing" moves when they arrived at the area associated with food: tilting their bodies, dog-paddling, spinning in place, or raising their head near or above the surface of the water. When they ran a second experiment using different radio frequencies, they found that the change interfered with the turtles' internal compass, and they could not orient themselves while swimming. The authors concluded that this is compelling evidence that the sea turtles can distinguish between magnetic fields, possibly relying on complex chemical reactions, i.e., "magnetoreception." The map sense, however, likely relies on a different mechanism.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08554-y  (About DOIs).

Long-lost tomb of Thutmose II

Thutmose II was the fourth pharaoh of the Tutankhamun (18th) dynasty. He reigned only about 13 years and married his half-sister Hatshepsut (who went on to become the sixth pharaoh in the dynasty). Archaeologists have now confirmed that a tomb built underneath a waterfall in the mountains in Luxor and discovered in 2022 is the final resting place of Thutmose II. It's the last of the 18th dynasty royal tombs to be found, more than a century after Tutankhamun's tomb was found in 1922.

When it was first found, archaeologists thought the tomb might be that of a king's wife, given its close proximity to Hatshepsut's tomb and those of the wives of Thutmose III. But they found fragments of alabaster vases inscribed with Thutmose II's name, along with scraps of religious burial texts and plaster fragments on the partially intact ceiling with traces of blue paint and yellow stars—typically only found in kings' tombs. Something crucial was missing, however: the actual mummy and grave goods of Thutmose II.

It's long been assumed that the king's mummy was discovered in the 19th century at another site called Deir el-Bahari. But archaeologist Piers Litherland, who headed the British team that discovered the tomb, thinks that identification was in error. An inscription stated that Hatshepsut had the tomb's contents relocated due to flooding. Litherland believes the pharaoh's actual mummy is buried in a second tomb. Confirmation (or not) of his hypothesis won't come until after archaeologists finish excavating what he thinks is the site of that second tomb, which is currently buried under multiple layers of rock and plaster.

Hidden images in Pollock paintings

Physicists have long been fascinated by the drip paintings of "splatter master" Jackson Pollock, pondering the presence of fractal patterns (or lack thereof), as well as the presence of curls and coils in his work and whether the artist deliberately exploited a well-known fluid dynamics effect to achieve them—or deliberately avoided them. Now psychiatrists are getting into the game, arguing in a paper published in CNS Spectrums that Pollock—known to incorporate images into his early pre-drip paintings—also used many of the same images repeatedly in his later abstract drip paintings.

People have long claimed to see images in those drip paintings, but the phenomenon is usually dismissed by art critics as a trick of human perception, much like the fractal edges of Rorschach ink blots can fool the eye and mind. The authors of this latest paper analyzed Pollock's early painting "Troubled Queen" and found multiple images incorporated into the painting, which they believe establishes a basis for their argument that Pollock also incorporated such images into his later drip painting, albeit possibly subconsciously.

"Seeing an image once in a drip painting could be random," said co-author Stephen M. Stahl of the University of California, San Diego. "Seeing the same image twice in different paintings could be a coincidence. Seeing it three or more times—as is the case for booze bottles, monkeys and gorillas, elephants, and many other subjects and objects in Pollock's paintings—makes those images very unlikely to be randomly provoked perceptions without any basis in reality."

CNS Spectrums, 2025. DOI: 10.1017/S1092852924001470

Solving a fluid dynamics mystery

Soap opera in the maze: Geometry matters in Marangoni flows.

Every fall, the American Physical Society exhibits a Gallery of Fluid Motion, which recognizes the innate artistry of images and videos derived from fluid dynamics research. Several years ago, physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) submitted an entry featuring a pool of red dye, propelled by a few drops of soap acting as a surfactant, that seemed to "know" how to solve a maze whose corridors were filled with milk. This is unusual since one would expect the dye to diffuse more uniformly. The team has now solved that puzzle, according to a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

The key factor is surface tension, specifically a phenomenon known as the Marangoni effect, which also drives the "coffee ring effect" and the "tears of wine" phenomenon. If you spread a thin film of water on your kitchen counter and place a single drop of alcohol in the center, you'll see the water flow outward, away from the alcohol. The difference in their alcohol concentrations creates a surface tension gradient, driving the flow.

In the case of the UCSB experiment, the soap reduces local surface tension around the red dye to set the dye in motion. There are also already surfactants in the milk that work in combination with the soapy surfactant to "solve" the maze. The milk surfactants create varying points of resistance as the dye makes its way through the maze. A dead end or a small space will have more resistance, redirecting the dye toward routes with less resistance—and ultimately to the maze's exit. "That means the added surfactant instantly knows the layout of the maze," said co-author Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz.

Physical Review Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1802831115

How to cook a perfectly boiled egg

There's more than one way to boil an egg, whether one likes it hard-boiled, soft-boiled, or somewhere in between. The challenge is that eggs have what physicists call a "two-phase" structure: The yolk cooks at 65° Celsius, while the white (albumen) cooks at 85° Celsius. This often results in overcooked yolks or undercooked whites when conventional methods are used. Physicists at the Italian National Research Council think they've cracked the case: The perfectly cooked egg is best achieved via a painstaking process called "periodic cooking," according to a paper in the journal Communications Engineering.

They started with a few fluid dynamics simulations to develop a method and then tested that method in the laboratory. The process involves transferring a cooking egg every two minutes—for 32 minutes—between a pot of boiling water (100° Celsius) and a bowl of cold water (30° Celsius). They compared their periodically cooked eggs with traditionally prepared hard-boiled and soft-boiled eggs, as well as eggs prepared using sous vide. The periodically cooked eggs ended up with soft yolks (typical of sous vide eggs) and a solidified egg white with a consistency between sous vide and soft-boiled eggs. Chemical analysis showed the periodically cooked eggs also contained more healthy polyphenols. "Periodic cooking clearly stood out as the most advantageous cooking method in terms of egg nutritional content," the authors concluded.

Communications Engineering, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s44172-024-00334-w

More progress on deciphering Herculaneum scrolls

The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that employs "digital unwrapping" and crowd-sourced machine learning to decipher the first letters from previously unreadable ancient scrolls found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum. The 660-plus scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. The badly singed, rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, as even touching them could cause them to crumble.

In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge made its first award for deciphering the first letters, and last year, the project awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text. The latest breakthrough is the successful generation of the first X-ray image of the inside of a scroll (PHerc. 172) housed in Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries—a collaboration with the Vesuvius Challenge. The scroll's ink has a unique chemical composition, possibly containing lead, which means it shows up more clearly in X-ray scans than other Herculaneum scrolls that have been scanned.

The machine learning aspect of this latest breakthrough focused primarily on detecting the presence of ink, not deciphering the characters or text. Oxford scholars are currently working to interpret the text. The first word to be translated was the Greek word for "disgust," which appears twice in nearby columns of text. Meanwhile, the Vesuvius Challenge collaborators continue to work to further refine the image to make the characters even more legible and hope to digitally "unroll" the scroll all the way to the end, where the text likely indicates the title of the work.

What ancient Egyptian mummies smell like

Much of what we know about ancient Egyptian embalming methods for mummification comes from ancient texts, but there are very few details about the specific spices, oils, resins, and other ingredients used. Science can help tease out the secret ingredients. For instance, a 2018 study analyzed organic residues from a mummy’s wrappings with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and found that the wrappings were saturated with a mixture of plant oil, an aromatic plant extract, a gum or sugar, and heated conifer resin. Researchers at University College London have now identified the distinctive smells associated with Egyptian mummies—predominantly"woody," "spicy," and "sweet," according to a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The team coupled gas chromatography with mass spectrometry to measure chemical molecules emitted by nine mummified bodies on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and then asked a panel of trained human "sniffers" to describe the samples smells, rating them by quality, intensity, and pleasantness. This enabled them to identify whether a given odor molecule came from the mummy itself, conservation products, pesticides, or the body's natural deterioration. The work offers additional clues into the materials used in mummification, as well as making it possible for the museum to create interactive "smellscapes" in future displays so visitors can experience the scents as well as the sights of ancient Egyptian mummies.

Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.4c15769

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Sunday, 2 March

• Who: Galactic Energy
• What: Ceres 1
• When: 07:59 UTC
• Where: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China
• Why: Expected to launch some satellites, but it's not clear which.

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1b
• When: 22:22 UTC
• Where: Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia
• Why: Roscosmos will launch a Soyuz 2.1b rocket carrying the GLONASS-K2 satellite. This navigation satellite will be placed into a medium Earth orbit.

Monday, 3 March

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 03:09 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: Arianespace
• What: Ariane 6
• When: 16:24 UTC
• Where: French Guyana
• Why: An Ariane 6 rocket will be launched carrying the Composante Spatiale Optique (CSO 3) military reconnaissance satellite for the French military. It will replace the Helios 2 spy satellites.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Starship
• When: 23:30 - 01:09 UTC
• Where: Texas, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch Starship on its 8th mission (IFT-8). The objectives will be catching the Super Heavy booster with Mechazilla and deploying four Starlink simulators. We could also see Starship performing a landing.

Thursday, 6 March

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 06:39 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: In this mission, Transporter-13, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying several satellites to a Sun-synchronous orbit. There will be 27 satellites on this mission from 14 countries.

Starlink missions

• What: Starlink Group 12-20
• When: 02:24 UTC, Monday, 3 March

• ---

  What: Starlink Group 12-21

   

• When: 06:00 UTC, Wednesday, 5 March

• ---

  What: Starlink Group 12-16

   

• When: 14:09 UTC, Friday, 7 March

• ---

  What: Starlink Group 11-7

   

• When: 02:00 UTC, Saturday, 8 March

Recap

• The first mission last week was from SpaceX which launched a Falcon 9. It was carrying a batch of Starlink satellites dubbed Starlink Group 15-1. You can see the launch on X.
• Next, Blue Origin launched New Shepard 30 carrying Lane Bess, Jesús Calleja, Tushar Shah, Richard Scott, Elaine Chia Hyde and Russell Ty Wilson up to the edge of space.

• The third mission was notable as SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander, named Athena, on the IM-2 mission to the Moon. NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, Epic Aerospace's orbital tug Chimera-GEO, and AstroForge’s Odin mission were secondary payloads.

• Finally, we got the launch of Starlink Group 12-13 on a Falcon 9 from SpaceX. You can watch that on X too.

That’s it for this week, check in next time!

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At a time when many analysts are declaring memecoins dead, the most popular memecoin of all time, Dogecoin, not only perseveres but appears likely to become more mainstream than ever in 2025.

Most memecoins—cryptocurrencies inspired by Internet memes—remain controversial. Their prices can suddenly skyrocket before abruptly crashing, causing extreme gains and losses at a moment's notice, often triggered by a celebrity mention that tenuously amplifies short-term interest.

Donald Trump's memecoin is a recent example. Within two days of its launch, it peaked at above $70 before falling to $17 shortly after, Reuters reported. Seeing that politically backed token take off apparently inspired Argentine President Javier Milei to endorse another memecoin called Libra, which seemed to set off a brief price surge before a devastating crash that caused most traders to endure losses. Only about 34 investors in total reportedly profited $124.6 million from Milei's endorsement, which a federal judge is now investigating as an alleged "rug pull" scheme, Reuters reported.

Overall, memecoins are viewed as highly volatile cryptocurrency assets vulnerable to fraud, insider trading, pump-and-dump schemes, and other market manipulation. And Dogecoin, like all memecoins, has also experienced wild swings in its value, which seems especially volatile before and after Elon Musk promotes the token on his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter).

Although Dogecoin started out as a joke cryptocurrency, investors started taking it more seriously after its value jumped by 36,000 percent after Musk tweets promised to send it "to the moon" in 2021, sociologist Dominik Zelinsky wrote in a 2024 article exploring Musk's influence on the Dogecoin market. And more recently, Dogecoin's price spiked after Donald Trump formally announced the creation of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, a reference to the token).

Musk's X posts about Dogecoin are viewed as so dependable to move the market that hundreds have used a bot to instantly buy and sell the token on Binance based on what they say, Tradoge creator Guillaume Schurck told Ars (while also noting that he never offers any financial advice).

In the past, Musk has said that "the most entertaining outcome"—and "the most ironic outcome"—of his efforts to popularize Dogecoin "would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth of the future." His seeming influence on Dogecoin's price has prompted at least one attempted class-action lawsuit raised by angry Dogecoin investors who accused Musk of running a "crypto pyramid scheme" that collectively caused $258 billion in losses by seemingly pumping up Dogecoin's price at his whim, Zelinsky noted.

Musk successfully defeated those claims, partly by insisting that his forward-looking statements about Dogecoin were purely "aspirational." But while the judge in that case said Musk's Dogecoin praise was obviously "puffery" that "no reasonable investor could rely upon," Zelinsky analyzed two years of Musk's social media posts trying to understand "why did people follow Musk" and spend "their money on an object that was never intended to be a sound investment?"

He found that years of Musk tweets branding Dogecoin as "the people's crypto" and envisioning the token as someday becoming "the standard for the global financial system" actually created a segment of true believers among his followers who, to this day, fully expect Musk to be a cryptocurrency kingmaker who will crown Dogecoin as the default "currency of Earth."  (It possibly helps that Musk has repeatedly referred to his supporters as the "people of Earth.")

Those true believers recently got a big boost of confidence that "someday" may be coming soon. Last week, Dogecoin Foundation Director Timothy Stebbing announced on X that deals have been struck with big brands to "rapidly" accelerate Dogecoin's adoption and utility.

"We believe 2025 will see the largest growth in utility and adoption to date," Stebbing predicted in a 2024 Dogecoin ecosystem report.

But Dogecoin's plan hinges on stabilizing the memecoin's value, which is what Zelinsky found the segment of Musk believers also want. And that has seemingly introduced some tension in their belief system, should Musk's ongoing endorsements maintain the memecoin's price volatility and potentially obstruct Dogecoin's steady growth.

In his report, Stebbing wrote that Dogecoin could see between 200–300 percent growth in value over the next three years by partnering on "projects that see Dogecoin used as a means of payment for goods and services."

"The true value of Dogecoin will settle as we move from speculative asset to utility-based means of exchange," Stebbing forecasted, suggesting that by steering the token away from pump-and-dump cycles, "the future looks bright."

For Musk fans who expect him to make or break the memecoin, it may be hard to swallow that the best thing for Dogecoin could be for Musk to stop talking about it.

Stebbing told Ars that Musk "definitely got Dogecoin noticed," but "long before any celebrity endorsements, Dogecoin had a very active community" who used the coin to complete small transactions between individuals. It was initially useful for tipping or paying artists and musicians, he said. And if Musk stepped back from his 2019 fan-appointed role as Dogecoin's fake CEO, that might end up being the move that allows the memecoin to shine.

"As far as celebrity endorsements having an effect on the price, I know a lot of us would rather it stay a bit more stable, but since Dogecoin isn't supposed to be speculative, a celebrity 'pump' isn't that vital," Stebbing told Ars. "Acceptance and adoption, however, is."

Dogecoin deals may rapidly mainstream the memecoin

Apparently, the ball got rolling on a series of deals after a mysterious "close friend of Dogecoin" introduced the foundation to "a group of people with decades of experience at the very top of the American private investment and enterprise world," Stebbing said on X. (As you might expect, some commenters made jokes implying Musk may be the "close friend.")

Unlike prior investors who only saw Dogecoin as a flashy brand with social media traction to cash in on, Stebbing claimed that this investor group—members of which will be made public by mid-March—simply "wanted to be involved in helping Dogecoin achieve [its] goals of becoming a real daily-use currency, through adoption for payments across the United States."

Springing from that partnership is a new commercial entity called the House of Doge (HOD), Stebbing confirmed. Over the next five years, the HOD will be "tasked with bringing Dogecoin adoption to the world stage," putting Dogecoin in the pockets of "large corporations, globally recognized brands, and millions of new individuals not yet familiar with Dogecoin and our mission," Stebbing wrote.

In his post, Stebbing paints a future in which Dogecoin is widely accepted at major sporting events—possibly catching on with millions of baseball, football, hockey, and sports-car racing fans who may never have traded in cryptocurrency before. The token will also be an acceptable form of payment at restaurant chains, Stebbing teased, and even potentially soon in kids' school cafeteria lines. And perhaps representing the strongest endorsement of Dogecoin's legitimacy as a currency, Stebbing said US government officials are also "excited" about adopting Dogecoin to pay for "everything from city parking" to utilities.

Previously, the Dogecoin Foundation operated on donations fueling a small development team, limiting the currency's growth, as Stebbing claimed the foundation turned away millions in potential investments deemed unserious about Dogecoin's mission. But now, with money soon coming from the HOD, the foundation is already moving to double its development team. That will allow the foundation to focus on building new technologies, making it even easier to adopt the memecoin in even more settings, Stebbing said.

The HOD will also "create a large Dogecoin Reserve & Treasury which will be utilized to provide liquidity to the various organizations and integrations across the US, to help onboard a whole new wave of users to Dogecoin," Stebbing wrote on X.

Dogecoin vs. stablecoins

Not everyone believes Dogecoin is about to take over the world.

At the time of this writing, the token is worth approximately 20 cents after about a week of incremental price drops that—according to live reporting on blockchain transactions by "Whale_Alert" on X—are seemingly spooking some traders.

That's not true of certain Dogecoin believers who endure slump after slump, firmly believing in the token's long-term vision and not seeking short-term gains or simply committing to the bit. And at the start of 2025, there was some evidence that their belief was well-founded. In December, Galaxy Research, which focuses on forecasting cryptocurrency trends, predicted that Dogecoin could hit the $1 mark in 2025. Back in 2021 when Musk was helping pump up Dogecoin's price to its furthest extreme, Mark Cuban predicted that when the memecoin reached a $1 valuation, Dogecoin would likely stay above that price and function like a stablecoin.

Unlike memecoins, stablecoins' values are pegged to various currencies. In the US, for example, Trump has abandoned the idea of developing a central bank digital currency in favor of legislation promoting the mass adoption of US dollar-backed stablecoins. According to Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith—whose group is currently advising Congress on stablecoin legislation while forming small working groups to build industry consensus on policy shifts—the "whole point" of Trump pushing stablecoins is to strengthen the US dollar by speeding up and increasing access to it worldwide.

Smith told Ars that Trump's crypto czar, David Sacks (a longtime Musk ally), appears motivated to advance stablecoin legislation "as soon as possible this year."

Currently, there are two bills—the "STABLE" Act in the House and the "GENIUS" Act in the Senate (which, yes, if combined, could be billed as the "STABLE GENIUS" Act, Smith joked)—that provide both bank and non-bank paths to issue dollar-backed stablecoins.

The Blockchain Association advocated for non-bank paths for years, making it clear to lawmakers that demand is there.

"Globally, there's actually a huge demand for US dollar-denominated stablecoins because many countries are looking for a safe place to store their money, and they want to get access to US dollars, and they can't get it through their banks," Smith said. "And so they're getting it through stablecoins."

In the future, Smith wants to see state and federal pathways developed, as well as a market regulator appointed to officially classify tokens.

If done "correctly," clearer regulatory guidelines would encourage a wide range of companies to issue tokens from the US, Smith said, while potentially paving the way for the entire industry of blockchain technologies to thrive domestically. Mass adoption of stablecoins could also, she suggested, normalize and spur the adoption of other cryptocurrencies as average US citizens suddenly become used to having crypto wallets.

"I think stablecoins have the potential to be the gateway to the crypto world for a lot of Americans," Smith told Ars.

Marquette University finance expert David Krause told Ars that he agrees with Smith that "wider stablecoin adoption could pave the way for broader cryptocurrency acceptance, potentially including Dogecoin."

"Almost all memecoins are nothing more than a joke or a scam," Krause said. "However, Dogecoin's low fees and fast transaction times actually make it somewhat attractive for payments, like tipping or donating to charities. As Dogecoin's ecosystem expands with real-world applications (small retailer integration is possible), it could move beyond its meme status and become a more practical tool."

But Krause does not see a future in which Dogecoin could become a common medium of exchange.

"I certainly don't imagine using Dogecoin at the grocery store checkout," Krause told Ars.

This month, Krause published an article suggesting that it was unlikely that the Securities and Exchange Commission would approve Dogecoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—a verdict expected this October that could also help mainstream the memecoin or move it closer to the $1 mark.

Krause told Ars he believes that even with the Trump administration's rushed attempts to quickly relax crypto regulations, ETF approval would probably be a "long shot" because "Dogecoin's volatility and speculative nature present major hurdles" without "substantial safeguards and structural changes."

"Celebrity endorsements and social media hype might give Dogecoin a short-term boost, but this could actually harm its long-term viability," Krause told Ars. "Dogecoin's price volatility, driven by social media trends rather than underlying value, makes it susceptible to market manipulation and raises regulatory concerns. To thrive long-term, Dogecoin needs to shift its focus from hype to fundamental development, real-world applications, and regulatory compliance."

For his part, Stebbing told Ars that he doesn't see ETFs playing a long-term role in the Dogecoin landscape, and he isn't fixated on Dogecoin reaching $1. In fact, he's eager to move past the milestone, whether Dogecoin sticks at that vaunted price point or not.

"Price stability is more important than price when it comes to using Dogecoin for everyday retail purchases," Stebbing told Ars. "If I had to guess, there are a lot of people who will sell their Dogecoin the moment we hit $1, [and] I look forward to getting that over with so we can find the true, stable value of the currency."

“Time will tell” if X enables Dogecoin payments

Smith pointed out that stablecoin legislation could motivate companies to become stablecoin issuers, and it seems likely that Musk would entertain such an idea on X, where his attempts to launch X Money have stalled so far.

After claiming that X users could manage their entire financial life on the platform by the end of 2024, Musk's platform kicked off 2025 heavily promoting X Money's delayed launch this year. Those announcements came despite the fact that X withdrew a key money transmitter license application in New York that analysts suggested risked delaying its launch indefinitely.

It seems possible that stablecoins could provide X with another path to issue dollar-backed currency without needing money transmitter licenses in every state. Musk may have given up on fighting for the licenses, instead teaming up with Trump to potentially eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which monitors the traditional sort of money transmitter activities that currently seem just out of Musk's reach. (Trump killing off the CFPB is viewed as a conflict of interest for Musk, whose DOGE department is overseeing cuts, CBS News reported.)

There has long been speculation that X Money will enable cryptocurrency payments, including Dogecoin. After Musk took over Twitter, he briefly changed the logo to a shiba inu, the symbol of Dogecoin. And while X has never officially confirmed the rumors, it's not a stretch to think that Musk may be interested in promoting Dogecoin through X, perhaps even striving to make it easier to convert Dogecoin into stablecoins on the same platform where Musk's posts, many followers believe, move markets.

If X embraces Dogecoin, it could make bots like Tradoge less attractive. Schurck told Ars that changes Musk made removing free access to X's API had already briefly disrupted the bot, but he "managed to find a workaround."

Stebbing told Ars that he has no "special insight" into Musk's plans for X Money, but he thinks "it would be unusual, considering their predilections as an organization that once had the Dogecoin mascot as their logo for a week, not to adopt the currency."

"Time will tell," Stebbing said.

X did not respond to Ars' request to comment.

Loyal Musk fans have faith in Dogecoin’s future

Schurck told Ars he's not really involved in trading any cryptocurrencies other than Dogecoin, confirming that, like many others Zelinsky tracked online, he primarily became attracted to the memecoin because of Musk's endorsements.

"Musk's X posting is the main reason I buy and sell Doge," Schurck said.

Of course, Schurck isn’t alone in only trading Dogecoin due to Musk's influence.

Zelinsky started studying Musk's seeming power over Dogecoin markets while filling a gap in research exploring economic impacts of charismatic leaders like Musk and Trump, whose authority is "made, maintained, and unmade through symbolically charged acts of social exchange." He's currently writing a book focused on expanding research into how charismatic leaders in the tech world and other areas are changing over time and considers Musk "a pretty good example" of a charismatic leader whose political influence is currently peaking.

"It's hard to go higher than being this kind of a second-in-charge or second-in-popularity to Trump," Zelinsky said.

On Reddit and X, Zelinsky analyzed messages from Musk followers who truly believed that Dogecoin price hikes are Musk's "gift" propelling Dogecoin to become not just the "currency of Earth" but the currency of Mars. That's the real fantasy that makes Musk such a charismatic figure, Zelinsky suggested.

"If we keep believing in the coin and everything we should make it stand for, we will be chilling on Mars," one Musk follower said.

"Forget about the effing moon, Elon Musk is taking Doge to Mars!!!" another posted.

Others, whom Zelinsky satirically refers to as pirates, are more pragmatic. In a "non-devotional way," Zelinsky told Ars, they trust that Musk "could create a momentous demand that would drive the price of Dogecoin upward and let them profit from credulous investors who are late to the party."

"I used Doge the right way," one Musk follower said. "I’m not gonna hold that shit," it "has no utility. Just have notifications turned on for [Elon's] twits and [make] some easy money."

Zelinsky told Ars that historically, followers of charismatic leaders generally hold onto their beliefs until the charisma wanes and figures become viewed as mundane. Since Musk's political influence is arguably greater than ever, it's likely that his followers have only strengthened their belief in his power to fulfill his promises to popularize Dogecoin and take them to Mars.

But charismatic authority is "a very volatile kind of phenomenon," Zelinsky said, forecasting that even Musk "cannot stay charismatic forever." He pointed to a field of study into technofeudalism, which theorizes that tech leaders in particular are becoming more traditional and less disruptive over time.

One could argue that Dogecoin, too, has charismatic authority over traders, many of whom love that Doge is disruptive and buy Doge just for a laugh. But if Dogecoin becomes more stable, as Stebbing wants, Dogecoin risks becoming "less interesting as an object of belief," Zelinsky suggested.

And although there are plenty of believers in Dogecoin today, there also persists a stubborn segment of Dogecoin fans who don't want the joke to end or see the memecoin become as normal as a crumpled-up dollar. Dogecoin could risk losing this joker segment if it becomes too stable and serious.

Schurck told Ars that while he could easily see more people using Dogecoin if companies started adopting it as a payment method, for him, "Dogecoin remains a joke first. A funny, expensive joke and a cool meme, sure! But still a joke."

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Around 700 million years ago, Earth was a frozen, white sphere, its rocky surface buried kilometers under ice. Despite the barren landscape, the evolution of complex life in the oceans was about to pick up steam. New research published this week in Geology suggests that the two realms were more connected than previously thought.

As massive glaciers scratched and scarred Earth’s rocky surface, they freed less-common minerals, which were later flushed into the seas as the ice melted into giant glacial rivers. These minerals in turn may have spurred nutrient cycling in the oceans, boosting the metabolism of microbial life.

“In retrospect, I’m surprised it took [researchers] so long to go and do a study like this,” says Galen Halverson, a stratigrapher at McGill University who was not involved in the work. “It fits with what we understand” about the glaciated Earth.

Reading the rocks

Earth didn’t just go through one deep freeze; it experienced two, separated by about 15 million years of thawing in the Neoproterozoic. Chris Kirkland, a geochronologist at Curtin University in Australia, and his collaborators wanted to study the rock record from this freeze-thaw period, called the Cryogenic, to better understand the widespread environmental changes that occurred over this time.

The researchers turned to a vast swath of rock called the Dalradian Supergroup located in present-day Scotland and Ireland. Formed about 800 million years ago on the eastern shore of a past continent called Laurentia, its rocks would have been covered in ice during the so-called “snowball Earths.”

The team collected samples of sandstones, which are rocks composed of many different individual grains that provide a “fingerprint of where that rock has come from,” says Kirkland. Many of those grains contain zircon, a mineral resistant to erosion, making it stable through time. Zircons also incorporate tiny amounts of the element uranium into their crystal structure, which decays into lead at a known rate and can therefore be used to precisely date the age of the minerals. While zircons from this time period have not yet been studied, Halverson notes that previous studies of snowball Earth have tracked the presence of iron, neodymium, and osmium in the geologic record.

After bringing tens of kilograms of sandstones back to the lab, the team crushed them to separate out hundreds of individual grains. Then, they used tweezers to image grains in an electron microscope. Finally, they fired lasers into the crystal structures of the grains to release their constituent elements, which were then sent into a mass spectrometer to determine the ratio of uranium to lead. Using this ratio to calculate the ages of crystals within different layers of ancient rock, the researchers determined how the rock grew or eroded over time.

During the years of the snowball Earths, the researchers found signs that older uranium-containing rocks were being broken down. They hypothesized that, as giant glaciers inched across Earth, they etched deep into the ground like a bulldozer, grinding down into deeper rocks and minerals that were not as prevalent on the surface. Then, when temperatures rose, the glaciers melted into powerful streams that dissolved some of the material in the loose rocks and minerals and flushed it into the ocean, causing a spike in oceanic nutrients.

While scientists had already known that the Neoproterozoic ocean became enriched in minerals, the prevailing hypothesis was that this was the product of an oxygenating planet. As early cyanobacteria produced increasingly massive amounts of oxygen, the make-up of the atmosphere changed, along with the gases present in the ocean. After reacting with this oxygen, some dissolved elements precipitated out of the seawater, becoming available for life.

Now, says Kirkland, the research shows that “you’re changing atmospheric conditions and oxidation states, but you’re also delivering more material to the oceans.” In other words, both the air and land were changing the ocean.

Life is complex

But when new minerals made their way to the water, what did they actually do? Cycle throughout the bottom of the ocean, delivering new elements to previously barren locations and providing energy for microbial life. At the end of the Cryogenic, these early lifeforms appear to have gotten gradually more complex, paving the way for the first known multicellular life in the ensuing Ediacaran.

“Any time there’s a really radical environmental shift, we know that’s an interesting time for evolution,” says Chris Kempes, a theoretical biophysicist at the Sante Fe Institute who was not involved in the research. For example, when temperatures drop or less sunlight is available, organisms’ speed and metabolic rates generally slow down, creating new pressures on life, Kempes’ research has found. Halverson thinks the extreme habitats that life had to endure during the snowballs played more of a role in shaping evolution than the nutrient flushes from glaciers.

Even so, studies like Kirkland’s that try to understand how nutrients and energy availability changed throughout history are “the key to understanding when and why there are major evolutionary transitions,” Kempes says.

To determine what other minerals may have been key players in the ancient oceans, Kirkland hopes to look at rocks called apatites, which contain oxygen and other elements like strontium and phosphorus. However, these break down much easier than zircon-rich rocks, meaning they are less stable through long stretches of time.

Though the global changes of the Cryogenic happened eons ago, Kirkland sees parallels with the wide-scale climate changes of today. “The atmosphere, the land, and the oceans are all interconnected,” he says. “Understanding these [ancient] cycles gives us information about how more modern cycles on the planet may work.”

Geology, 2025.  DOI:  10.1130/G52887.1

Hannah Richter is a freelance science journalist and graduate of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing. She primarily covers environmental science and astronomy. 

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There's a saying about putting lipstick on a pig, but what if it's not lipstick? That's the question the universe set out to answer when it aligned in such a way that famed (or perhaps infamous) car customizer Mansory got itself a Tesla Cybertruck. The Mansory Elongation—a name that must have taken ages to think of—offers exterior, interior, and wheel and tire upgrades for the straight-edged stainless steel-wrapped pickup.

Among those who mod cars, there are the tuners, who focus on adding power and (one hopes) performance, and then there are the customizers, who concentrate more on aesthetics. Once upon a time, the entire luxury car industry worked like that—a client would buy a rolling chassis from Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, or Talbot and then have bodywork added by coachbuilders like Gurney Nutting, Touring, or Figoni et Falaschi.

Modern homologation requirements have mostly put an end to that level of coachbuilding, but for the ultra-wealthy prepared to spend telephone numbers on cars, brands like Rolls-Royce will still occasionally oblige. More common now are those aftermarket shops that spiff up already luxurious cars, changing normal doors for gullwing versions, adding flaring fenders and bulging wheel arches, and plastering the interior in any hue of leather one might imagine.

Mansory has been on the scene since the end of the 1980s and has made a name for itself festooning Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and even Bugattis with extra bits that their original designers surely did not want added. Now it's the Tesla Cybertruck's turn.

One almost feels sorry for the original. Almost—the Cybertruck somehow manages to look worse in real life than in pictures; the confluence of angles where its various steel body panels fit together somehow serves to prove the exception to the rule that is the golden ratio. I'd never call it elegant, but if it ever had any elegance, Mansory made sure that's all gone with the Elongation.

Mansory's press release says that the front and rear bumpers and "extravagant" fender flares bear the classic signature of its designers. The additions are whatever the opposite of subtle is; the front lip extension reminds me of the track-focused Porsche 911 GT3 I drove last month, and I'm staring at the three triangular protuberances on the wheel arch extension and wondering if they really could be there to control vortices or just look nice.

Functional aero or nah?

Mansory

 

This interior reminds me fondly of a pair of sneakers I like.

Mansory

 

The forged carbon fiber does look nice, though.

Mansory

 

At 26 inches, the new wheels probably don't help range that much, although the carbon fiber add-ons all over the body surely do worse in that regard. Mansory's specs list energy consumption at 2.4 miles/kWh (26.1 kWh/100 km). The interior is up to the customer—you get to decide what gets paint, what gets carbon fiber, and what gets leather (and in which eye-searing shades).

You'd have to contact Mansory to find out how much all of this would cost, should you have a Cybertruck you think needs taking down a peg or two.

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Welcome to Edition 7.33 of the Rocket Report! Phew, what a week for Rocket Lab! The company released a bevy of announcements in conjunction with its quarterly earnings report Thursday. Rocket Lab is spending a lot of money to develop the medium-lift Neutron rocket, and as we'll discuss below, a rocket landing platform and a new satellite design. For now, the company is sticking by its public statements that the Neutron rocket will launch this year—the official line is it will debut in the second half of 2025—but this schedule assumes near-perfect execution on the program. "We’ve always been clear that we run aggressive schedules," said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO. The official schedule doesn't quite allow me to invoke a strict interpretation of Berger's Law, which states that if a rocket's debut is predicted to happen in the fourth quarter of a year, and that quarter is six or more months away, the launch will be delayed. However, the spirit of the law seems valid here. This time last year, Rocket Lab targeted a first launch by the end of 2024, an aggressive target that has come and gone.

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

Australian startup sets a launch date. The first attempt to send an Australian-made rocket into orbit is set to take place no sooner than March 15, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. Gilmour Space Technologies' launch window announcement marks a major development for the company, which has been working toward a test launch for a decade. Gilmour previously hoped to launch its test rocket, Eris, in May 2024, but had to wait for the Australian government to issue a launch license and airspace approvals for the flight to go forward. Those are now in hand, clearing the last regulatory hurdle before liftoff.

Setting expectations ... Gilmour's Eris rocket is made of three stages powered by hybrid engines consuming a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. Eris is designed to haul payloads of up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit, and will launch from Bowen Orbital Spaceport in Queensland on Australia's northeastern coast. Gilmour said it would be "very lucky" if the rocket reached orbit on the first attempt. "Success means different things for different people, but ignition and liftoff will be huge," said James Gilmour, the company's co-founder. (submitted by ZygP)

Blue Origin is keeping a secret. Blue Origin conducted the 10th crewed flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle Tuesday, carrying six people, one of whom remained at least semi-anonymous, Space News reports. The five passengers Blue Origin identified come from business and entertainment backgrounds, but in a break from past missions, the company did not disclose the identity of the sixth person, with hosts of the company webcast saying that individual “requested we not share his name today.” Photos released by the company before the launch, and footage from the webcast, showed that person to be a man wearing a flight suit with an “R. Wilson” nametag, and the NS-30 mission patch also included “Wilson” with the names of the other members of the crew. Not disclosing the name of someone who has been to space has little precedent.

Big names on NS-31 ... Some of the passengers Blue Origin will fly on the next New Shepard crew mission lack the anonymity of R. Wilson. The next flight, designated NS-31, will carry an all-female crew, including music star Katy Perry, CBS host Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez, a former journalist who is engaged to Blue Origin's founder, Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin identified the other three passengers as Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Virgin Galactic is still blowing through cash. Virgin Galactic reported a net loss of $347 million in 2024, compared to a $502 million net loss in 2023, with the improvement primarily driven by lower operating expenses, the company said this week in a quarterly earnings release. These lower operating expenses are tied to Virgin Galactic's decision to suspend operations of its VSS Unity suborbital rocket plane last year to focus investment into a new series of suborbital spacecraft known as Delta-class ships. Virgin Galactic said cash and cash equivalents fell 18 percent from the same period a year ago to $178.6 million. Investors have been eager for details on when it would resume—and then ramp up—flights to increase sales and cash-in on a backlog of around 700 ticket holders, Bloomberg reports.

March toward manufacturing ... Virgin Galactic said it plans to start assembling its first Delta-class ship in March, with a first flight targeted for the summer of 2026, two years after it stopped flying VSS Unity. The Delta ships will be easier to recycle between flights and will carry six paying passengers, rather than the four VSS Unity carried on each flight. Company officials believe a higher flight rate with more passengers will bring in significantly more revenue, which was reported at just $430,000 in the fourth quarter of 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Japanese customers seem to love Rocket Lab. While Rocket Lab is developing the larger Neutron rocket, the company's operational Electron launch vehicle continues to dominate the market for dedicated launches of small satellites. Rocket Lab announced Thursday it signed a new multi-launch deal with iQPS, a Japan-based Earth-imaging company. The new deal follows an earlier multi-launch contract signed with iQPS in 2024 and brings the total number of booked dedicated Electron launches for iQPS to eight.

Radar is all the rage ... These eight Electron launches in 2025 and 2026 will help iQPS build out its planned constellation of 36 radar remote sensing satellites capable of imaging the Earth day and night, and through any weather. The new deal is one of the largest Electron launch agreements to date, second only to Rocket Lab’s 10-launch deal with another Japanese radar constellation operator, Synspective, signed last year. (submitted by zapman987)

Falcon 9 launch targets Moon and asteroid. With two commercial Moon landers already on their way, Houston-based Intuitive Machines launched its second robotic lander atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, CBS News reports. Given the on-time launch and assuming no major problems, the Athena lander is expected to descend to touchdown on a flat mesa-like structure known as Mons Mouton on March 6, setting down just 100 miles from the Moon's south pole—closer than any other spacecraft has attempted. Intuitive Machines became the first company to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon last year, but the Athena lander will pursue more complex goals. It will test a NASA-provided drill designed to search for subsurface ice, deploy a small "micro-rover," and dispatch a rocket-powered drone to explore a permanently shadowed crater.

Hitching a ride ... The Athena lander didn't take up all the capacity of the Falcon 9 rocket. Three other spacecraft also rocketed into space Wednesday night. These rideshare payloads were AstroForge's commercially developed Odin asteroid prospector to search for potentially valuable mineral deposits, NASA's Lunar Trailblazer satellite to characterize lunar ice from a perch in lunar orbit, and a compact space tug from Epic Aerospace. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

This rocket got a visitor for the first time since 2009. Astroscale's ADRAS-J mission became the first spacecraft (at least in the unclassified world) to approach a piece of space junk in low-Earth orbit, Ars reports. This particular object, a derelict upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket, has been in orbit since 2009. It's one of about 2,000 spent rocket bodies circling the Earth and one of more than 45,000 objects in orbit tracked by US Space Command. Astroscale, based in Tokyo, built and launched the ADRAS-J mission in partnership with the Japanese space agency as a demonstration to show how a commercial satellite could rendezvous with an object in orbit that was never designed to receive visitors.

Next steps ... ADRAS-J worked like a champ, closing in to a distance of less than 50 feet (15 meters) from the H-IIA rocket as it orbited several hundred miles above the Earth. The rocket is a "non-cooperative" object representative of other large pieces of space junk, which Astroscale wants to remove from orbit with a series of trash-collecting satellites like ADRAS-J. But this demo only validated part of the technology required for space debris removal. Japan's space agency and Astroscale are partnering on another mission, ADRAS-J2, for launch in 2027 to go up and latch onto the same H-IIA rocket and steer it out of orbit toward a controlled reentry over the ocean.

An update on Falcon 9's upper stage. SpaceX said that a Falcon 9 upper stage that reentered over Europe earlier this month suffered a propellant leak that prevented it from doing a controlled reentry, Space News reports. The upper stage was placed in orbit on a February 1 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. After deploying its payload of 22 Starlink satellites, the upper stage was expected to perform a burn to enable a controlled reentry over the ocean, a standard procedure on most Falcon 9 launches to low-Earth orbit. The stage, though, did not appear to perform the burn and remained in orbit. Its orbit decayed from atmospheric drag, and the stage reentered over Europe on February 19. Debris from the Falcon 9 second stage, including composite overwrapped pressure vessels, fell in Poland, landing near the city of Poznań.

Higher than expected body rates ... In an update posted to its website this week, SpaceX blamed the upper stage anomaly on a liquid oxygen leak. "During the coast phase of this Starlink mission, a small liquid oxygen leak developed, which ultimately drove higher than expected vehicle body rates," SpaceX said. SpaceX aborted the deorbit burn and instead passivated the upper stage, a process where the rocket discharges energy from its batteries and vents leftover propellant from its tanks to minimize the risk of a break-up in orbit. This was the third incident involving a Falcon 9 upper stage in a little more than six months. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Rocket Lab reveals "Return On Investment." Rocket Lab's Neutron rocket is designed for partial reusability, and the company unveiled Thursday an important piece of infrastructure to make this a reality. Neutron's first-stage booster will land on a modified barge named Return On Investment, measuring around 400 feet (122 meters) wide, somewhat bigger than SpaceX's drone ships used for Falcon 9 landings at sea. In order to prep the barge for rocket duty, the company is adding autonomous ground support equipment to capture and secure the landed Neutron, blast shielding to protect equipment during Neutron landings, and station-keeping thrusters for precise positioning. It should be ready to enter service in 2026. Rocket Lab also has the option to return the Neutron first stage back to the launch site when mission parameters allow the rocket to reserve enough propellant to make the return journey.

More news from Rocket Lab ... Continuing the firehose of news from Rocket Lab this week, the company announced a new satellite design called "Flatellite" that looks remarkably similar to SpaceX's Starlink satellites. The satellite is flat in shape, hence its name, and stackable to fit as many spacecraft as possible into the envelope of a rocket's payload fairing. Rocket Lab said the new satellite "can be produced in high volumes and (is) tailored for large constellations, targeting high value applications and national security missions." (submitted by zapman987)

The writing is on the wall for SLS. The lights may be starting to go out for NASA's Space Launch System program. On Wednesday, one of the Republican space policy leaders most consistently opposed to commercial heavy lift rockets over the last decade—as an alternative to NASA's large SLS rocket—has changed his mind, Ars reports. "We need an off-ramp for reliance on the SLS," said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, in written testimony before a congressional hearing about US space policy.

Not keeping Pace ... A physicist and influential policy expert, Pace has decades of experience researching and writing space policy. He has served in multiple Republican administrations, most recently as executive secretary of the National Space Council from 2017 to 2020. He strongly advocated for the SLS rocket after Congress directed NASA to develop it in 2011. As part of his policy recommendations, Pace said NASA should seek to use commercial providers of heavy lift launch so that NASA can send "multiple" crew and cargo missions to the Moon each year. He notes that the SLS rocket is not reusable and is incapable of a high flight rate. Commercial options from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance are now available, Pace wrote.

The verdict is in for Starship Flight 7. SpaceX believes the spectacular break-up of Starship's upper stage during its most recent test flight was caused by a harmonic response that stressed onboard hardware, leading to a fire and loss of the vehicle, Aviation Week reports. Higher-than-expected vibrations stressed hardware in the ship's propulsion system, triggering propellant leaks and sustained fires until the test flight ended prematurely. The rocket broke apart and deposited debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean and forced dozens of commercial and private aircraft to delay their flights or steer into safer airspace.

Whole lotta shaking … SpaceX's description of the problem as a harmonic response suggests vibrations during Starship's climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle's natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing. SpaceX completed an extended-duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship's Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight, which could launch from South Texas as soon as Monday.

Next three launches

March 1: Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 10:00 UTC

March 2: Ceres 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 08:10 UTC

March 2: Soyuz-2.1b | Glonass-K2 No. 14L | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia | 22:22 UTC

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There's a scene in the film Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey's character flies his spaceplane up to meet a mothership spinning out of control. The protagonist rises to the challenge with a polished piece of piloting and successfully links up with his objective.

Real life, of course, isn't quite this dramatic. Slow down that spin to a tranquil tumble, and replace McConaughey's hand on the joystick with the autonomous wits of a computer, and you'll arrive at an approximation of what a Japanese company Astroscale has accomplished within the last year.

Still, it's an impressive feat of engineering and orbital dynamics. Astroscale's ADRAS-J mission became the first spacecraft (at least in the unclassified world) to approach a piece of space junk in low-Earth orbit. This particular object, a derelict upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket, has been in orbit since 2009. It's one of about 2,000 spent rocket bodies circling the Earth and one of more than 45,000 objects in orbit tracked by US Space Command.

"This is the world's first technology that allows any object orbiting the Earth at high speeds to be safely approached from the ground," said Nobu Okada, founder and CEO of Tokyo-based Astroscale. "It has great potential."

Mission success

Like most other space debris, the H-IIA rocket approached by Astroscale is uncontrolled, and lacks navigation aids or inter-satellite communication links that could help another satellite safely move in for a close look. This presents a more significant technical challenge than rendezvousing with a "cooperative" object like the International Space Station.

Ars reported on the progress of Astroscale's ADRAS-J mission last August, soon after the spacecraft flew as close as 50 meters (164 feet) from the H-IIA rocket. ADRAS-J is the centerpiece of a public-private partnership between Astroscale and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which participated with a $13 million contract to co-fund the mission.

ADRAS-J, short for Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan, launched in February 2024 to begin its pursuit of the H-IIA rocket in a polar orbit more than 350 miles (560 kilometers) above the planet. On November 30, ADRAS-J completed its final close approach to the H-IIA upper stage to reach a position just 15 meters (49 feet) from the rocket, using cameras and laser ranging sensors for autopilot navigation before backing away.

With this achievement, Astroscale unlocked its final milestone payment from the Japanese space agency, officials announced Wednesday. Part of Astroscale's demonstration involved completing a 360-degree flyaround of the H-IIA rocket.

"This was acrobatic and super difficult technology," Okada said last month in a briefing on Astroscale's business outlook. "Please remember the debris is not sitting still. It is traveling around the Earth at seven to eight kilometers per second, which is (nearly) 100 times faster than a bullet train."

Imagery captured by Astroscale showed the H-IIA upper stage to be in good condition, looking much like it did before it launched 16 years ago on a mission to deploy a Japanese climate research satellite. The remnant rocket is about the size of a city bus, while ADRAS-J is a little larger than a kitchen oven.

Is this really for space junk?

It will be up to a future Astroscale mission, named ADRAS-J2, to transit the last 15 meters to the H-IIA rocket. ADRAS-J was a pathfinder, and didn't have the equipment to actually latch on to another object in orbit. Last year, Japan's space agency awarded Astroscale a contract worth $88 million (13.2 billion yen) to build and launch ADRAS-J2 to rendezvous and use a robotic arm to attach itself to the same H-IIA rocket, then steer the discarded upper stage back into the atmosphere for a destructive reentry.

ADRAS-J2 is scheduled to launch in 2027, according to Astroscale.

Astroscale's showcase in orbital ballet positions the company as a contender in the commercial satellite servicing industry, where business opportunities may eclipse the market for space debris removal, which Okada founded Astroscale to pursue in 2013. The company has subsidiaries in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel to tailor offerings to customers in different parts of the world.

The US and European governments are now customers for Astroscale. The UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency partnered to award Astroscale approximately $35 million in government support for a demonstration mission named ELSA-M, slated to launch in late 2025 or early 2026 for an attempt to capture and de-orbit a defunct satellite in OneWeb's broadband megaconstellation using a magnetic docking plate. This will differ from Astroscale's work in Japan because the OneWeb satellite will be prepared to receive a visitor, unlike the H-IIA rocket.

Removing space junk from orbit sounds like a wonderful idea. It could reduce the chance of collisions generating more pieces of space debris. Spent rocket stages left in orbit are among the most concerning objects for space debris hawks because they might retain propellants or stored battery energy with explosive potential.

But the big question is who pays for such an undertaking? Removing just the 2,000 rocket bodies from orbit could probably cost tens of billions of dollars. Perhaps it's worth launching a handful of cleanup missions to remove the most hazardous objects in orbit, such as large spacecraft or debris flying too high for atmospheric drag to force reentry for centuries or longer.

Therefore, it's not surprising Astroscale has pivoted to other applications. The rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) technology proven with ADRAS-J enables several other types of missions, such as satellite servicing and inspection.

Astroscale's US subsidiary won a $25.5 million contract from the US Space Force in 2023 to build a satellite refueler that can hop around geostationary orbit. Like the ADRAS-J mission, this project is a public-private partnership, with Astroscale committing $12 million of its own money. In January, the Japanese government selected Astroscale for a contract worth up to $80 million to demonstrate chemical refueling in low-Earth orbit.

The latest win for Astroscale came Thursday, when the Japanese Ministry of Defense awarded the company a contract to develop a prototype satellite that could fly in geostationary orbit and collect information on other objects in the domain for Japan's military and intelligence agencies.

"We are very bullish on the prospects for defense-related business," said Nobu Matsuyama, Astroscale's chief financial officer.

Astroscale's other projects include a life extension mission for an unidentified customer in geostationary orbit, providing a similar service as Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV).

So, can Astroscale really do all of this? In an era of a militarized final frontier, it's easy to see the usefulness of sidling up next to a "non-cooperative" satellite—whether it's to refuel it, repair it, de-orbit it, inspect it, or (gasp!) disable it. Astroscale's demonstration with ADRAS-J showed it can safely operate near another object in space without navigation aids, which is foundational to any of these applications.

So far, governments are driving demand for this kind of work.

Astroscale raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding before going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last June. After quickly spiking to nearly $1 billion, the company's market valuation has dropped to about $540 million as of Thursday. Astroscale has around 590 full-time employees across all its operating locations.

Matsuyama said Astroscale's total backlog is valued at about 38.9 billion yen, or $260 million. The company is still in a ramp-up phase, reporting operating losses on its balance sheet and steep research and development spending that Matsuyama said should max out this year.

"We are the only company that has proved RPO technology for non-cooperative objects, like debris, in space," Okada said last month.

"In simple terms, this means approach and capture of objects," Okada continued. "This capability did not exist before us, but one's mastering of this technology enables you to provide not only debris removal service, but also orbit correction, refueling, inspection, observation, and eventually repair and reuse services."

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Doctors around the US have anecdotally reported an uptick of children critically ill with the flu developing severe, life-threatening neurological complications, which can be marked by seizures, delirium, hallucinations, decreased consciousness, lethargy, personality changes, and abnormalities in brain imaging.

It's long been known that the seasonal flu can cause such devastating complications in some children, many with no underlying medical conditions. But doctors have begun to suspect that this year's flu season—the most severe in over 15 years—has taken a yet darker turn for children. On February 14, for instance, health officials in Massachusetts released an advisory for clinicians to be on alert for neurological complications in pediatric flu patients after detecting a "possible increase."

With the anecdata coming in, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed all the data it has on neurological complications from flu this year and seasons dating back to 2010. Unfortunately, existing surveillance systems for flu do not capture neurological complications in pediatric cases overall—but they do capture such detailed clinical data when a child dies of flu.

An analysis of that data, published today in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, can't definitively say that this year is out of the norm. For one thing, the flu season is not yet over. But the data so far does suggest it may be one of the more severe seasons in the last 15 years.

Specifically, the CDC received reports of a severe neurological complication called influenza-associated acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE). ANE is a severe form of the more general category of influenza-associated encephalopathy or encephalitis (IAE), meaning brain dysfunction or inflammation from the flu.

When a child dies of the flu, clinicians are required to fill out a standardized case report form from the CDC, which collects a large variety of data, including complications. Encephalopathy or encephalitis are included as a checkbox on the form.

Between 2010 and February 8, 2025, 1,840 children died of the flu. Of those, 166 had IAE checked off as a complication. IAE was most prevalent in children aged 2 to 4 but affected children in all age groups under 18. More than half of the cases (54 percent) had no underlying medical conditions, and most (80 percent) were unvaccinated against the flu.

Uncertain trends

Most of the cases (72 percent) were from an influenza type A strain rather than the generally less common type B. Among 73 cases with influenza A subtyping data, H1N1 was the most common virus strain (56 percent), with the remainder being H3N2. So far this flu season, H1N1 and H3N2 are circulating at about equal proportions.

CDC scientists then broke out the data by year, finding a range of 0 percent of deaths with IAE (in the 2020–2021 flu season) to 14 percent of deaths with IAE (2011–2012). So far in this flu season, there have been 68 pediatric deaths, nine of which (13 percent) were with IAE. That puts this flu season as the second worst for IAE-caused pediatric flu deaths. But again, the data is preliminary as the flu season is still ongoing, and there can be lags in reporting.

Whether ANE is occurring more frequently than in previous years is yet more uncertain, given that it's not a complication systematically reported on the standardized case reports for flu deaths. ANE is a severe type of IAE that is diagnosed based on a specific pattern of brain lesions seen on computed tomography (CT scans) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs).

The CDC called the health departments of the states where the nine fatal cases with IAE had been reported to ask if the children had ANE specifically. Of the nine IAE fatalities, four had the more severe ANE. All four of the deaths were in children younger than age 5. Only one child had underlying health conditions. Two had been vaccinated against the flu. All of the children were infected with H1N1.

Given the data limitations, "it is currently not known whether these reported cases vary from expected numbers," the CDC researchers conclude. The CDC noted that Japan does systematically collect data on encephalitis and encephalopathy generally, as well as IAE specifically. Between 2010 and 2015, 74 percent of all IAE cases were in people under the age of 18. Of those IAE cases in children and teens, 8 percent were fatal.

While this year's flu season is still going, the CDC researchers called for enhanced surveillance to try to capture data on IAE in non-fatal cases. The researchers also emphasized the importance of vaccination, which is known to reduce the risk of the flu and its complications.

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CEDAR PARK, Texas—Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.

These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.

Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities—spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocket—to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.

From a business perspective, Firefly's foray into lunar transportation has been worth the effort. NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has awarded the company three contracts to deliver experiments to the Moon's surface. Under the first deal, NASA is paying Firefly about $101 million to transport 10 payloads to the Moon on the company's first Blue Ghost lander.

Now, Firefly is about to find out if its lunar program is a technical success. Landing on the Moon is risky. In the last decade, the success rate for lunar landing attempts is a little above 50 percent—6-for-11—and two of the successful landers either tipped over or landed upside-down.

Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO, is confident that Blue Ghost will work. In an interview with Ars, Kim cited the lander's development team, design, and "robust" testing on the ground before Blue Ghost went to the launch pad as reasons for his optimism.

"At the end of the day, it's those three things," Kim said. "It's the people. Are you trained up? Are they committed? Are they responsible and own it? Two, it's the design with margin, really good designs with margin, then taking into account all the lessons learned (from other lunar missions).

"And then, three, the qualification program, testing it and testing it and testing it," Kim said. "That's what gives everyone confidence that we're going to stick this landing."

Moon in 4K

Assembled in Cedar Park, a suburb north of Austin, Texas, the Blue Ghost spacecraft is about the size of an SUV. Blue Ghost launched January 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket alongside another privately developed lunar lander from the Japanese company ispace. The two landers are taking separate paths to the Moon, with Firefly due to land first, followed by ispace's Resilience lander at a separate location in the next few months.

You can find Blue Ghost's landing site on the upper right part of the full Moon in a dark region the size of Missouri known as Mare Crisium. This 340-mile-wide (550-kilometer) impact basin was formed when an asteroid struck the Moon nearly 4 billion years ago. Firefly will target landing near an ancient volcanic dome named Mons Latreille, which has sat dormant for billions of years after volcanic activity ceased on the Moon.

It will take 46 days for Blue Ghost to transit from the launch pad in Florida to Mare Crisium. The spacecraft spent nearly a month circling the Earth, gradually boosting its orbit higher until it reached the vicinity of the Moon on February 13, when it fired its engines to slip into lunar orbit. Since then, Blue Ghost has adjusted its trajectory several times before reaching a near-circular orbit about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the Moon on Monday.

Firefly released a time-lapse video Monday from one of Blue Ghost's 12 cameras showing the spacecraft's top deck, with the Moon's cratered terrain unrolling beneath it. In the distance, a crescent Earth disappears behind the Moon's curved horizon, then reemerges in an Earthrise reminiscent of iconic imagery captured by astronauts during the Apollo program.

This week, Firefly is preparing for a final series of maneuvers this weekend to prepare for landing early Sunday. First, Blue Ghost will fire its engines for 19 seconds to drop its orbit closer to the Moon. About 11 minutes prior to touchdown, the spacecraft will ignite its engines again to decelerate from about 3,800 mph of lateral velocity to less than 100 mph (1.7 km/second to 40 m/second).

Blue Ghost will then pitch over to point its thrusters down toward the lunar surface and pulse a set of eight smaller reaction control system thrusters to slow its vertical descent. This phase of the landing sequence will begin with the spacecraft about 1,600 feet (500 meters) above the surface.

"Our RCS thrusters will continue to pulse as needed to control that descent to make sure that we are landing in a good orientation," said Farah Zuberi, Firefly's director of spacecraft mission management. "That reduces our descent rate to about 1 meter per second, and then our vision navigation system further tracks crater slopes (and) rocks to automatically select a hazard-free site within the landing zone that was identified by NASA.

"Then we will touch down onto the lunar surface," Zuberi said. "We’ll use our shock absorbing legs to stabilize the lander as it touches down, and then there are contact sensors on the footpads to signal engine shutdown, and that’s when we will know that we have nominally landed."

The lander's four shock-absorbing legs have some give, sort of like the crush zone of a car, according to Will Coogan, Firefly's chief engineer for the Blue Ghost lander. The legs have an aluminum honeycomb material inside, and they connect to bowl-shaped footpads with a ball-socket joint to give the spacecraft some flexibility in case it comes down on a slope or a rock. Ideally, the lander's navigation instruments will guide Blue Ghost to a flat landing site without any major obstacles.

"These footpads do bend," Coogan told Ars during a visit to see the Blue Ghost lander in its Texas factory. "They will bend a little bit around a rock, but they’ll also rotate to find the most stable position."

Early results from Blue Ghost

After landing, Firefly's ground controllers hope to switch from a low-bandwidth communications link to a higher data rate X-band system. If all goes according to plan, Blue Ghost could be streaming live video from the surface of the Moon back to Earth in as little as 30 minutes after touchdown.

Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 days (one entire lunar day) after landing. The instruments aboard Firefly's lander include a subsurface drill, an X-ray imager, and an experimental electrodynamic dust shield to test methods of repelling troublesome lunar dust from accumulating on sensitive spacecraft components. The spacecraft will drain its batteries after the Sun sets at Mare Crisium for the two-week-long lunar night.

A few of the NASA-funded experiments on Blue Ghost have already produced preliminary results. For example, an experimental receiver aboard the Blue Ghost lander acquired and tracked navigation signals from GPS satellites for the first time in lunar orbit, where these signals are 361 times weaker than on Earth. This is twice the distance of the previous record for the farthest GPS signal acquisition.

Future Moon missions, including human expeditions, will require precise positioning data to help spacecraft and astronauts navigate to pinpoint landings and rove across the lunar surface. NASA's network of ground stations can provide navigation services for Moon missions, but their capacity is limited and oversubscribed by other spacecraft in deep space. Relying on existing satellite navigation signals would offload some of the demand for these ground stations and perhaps reduce the need for a dedicated fleet of navigation satellites in lunar orbit.

So far, the navigation experiment on Firefly's Blue Ghost shows this might be possible. In a few days, the receiver will try again to acquire GPS and Galileo navigation signals from the lunar surface, another first.

Engineers also gathered data on the performance of a radiation-tolerant flight computer as the spacecraft transited through the Van Allen radiation belts in the weeks following launch.

Firefly’s place in CLPS

There's a reason Moon landings aren't easy. Landers like Firefly's Blue Ghost operate autonomously, ingesting cues from lasers or cameras to guide themselves toward a smooth landing. The Moon lacks an atmosphere to help spacecraft slow down during descent. More than 50 years elapsed between the last US landing on the Moon and the Intuitive Machines mission a year ago. One could argue lunar landing expertise atrophied in the United States.

Countless design decisions go into developing and building a spacecraft. Early on, Firefly's engineers had to determine what materials, engines, and electronics to use on Blue Ghost.

Most fundamentally, engineers needed to decide on the lander's shape. This matters. Firefly officials say their lander's design makes it less vulnerable to tipping over after a wonky landing. The Odysseus lander built by Intuitive Machines snapped one of its legs and fell over on its side after arriving on the Moon last year. The altimeter on Odysseus failed, causing it to come down with too much horizontal velocity.

The spacecraft continued operating and returned some scientific data from the Moon, so it qualified as at least a partial success. But the tumble prevented the spacecraft from recharging its batteries, and the Odysseus shut down a few days after landing. A second lander from Intuitive Machines, named Athena, launched to the Moon Wednesday and should reach the surface on March 6, just four days after Firefly gets there.

The landers designed by Intuitive Machines are tall and skinny. Firefly's Blue Ghost is "short and squatty" in shape, which should make it harder to tip over, said Kim, who took over as Firefly's chief executive last year.

Coogan said Blue Ghost's designers intentionally chose a shape for the spacecraft that puts the center of mass as low to the ground as possible. Intuitive Machines stacked their two fuel and oxidizer tanks on top of each other, resulting in a taller vehicle. The four propellant tanks on Blue Ghost are arranged in a diagonal configuration, with two containing hydrazine fuel and two holding an oxidizer called nitrogen tetroxide.

This trade-off means Firefly's lander is heavier, with four tanks instead of two. By going with a stockier lander design, Firefly needed to install four tanks because the spacecraft's fuel and oxidizer have different densities. If Firefly went with just two tanks side-by-side, the spacecraft's center of mass would change continually as it burns propellant during the final descent to the Moon, creating an unnecessary problem for the lander's guidance, navigation, and control system to overcome.

"You want to avoid that," Coogan said. "What you can do is you can either get four tanks and have fuel and oxidizer at diagonal angles, and then you're always centered, or you can stay with two tanks, and you can stack them."

Firefly's approach requires fewer landing legs than Intuitive Machines—four instead of six. And engineers designed Blue Ghost's landing legs to be more forgiving in uneven terrain or during an off-balance landing. "The lower your center of mass, is really the best," Coogan said. "There are only so many outcomes of this engineering trade."

NASA set up the CLPS program in 2018 to provide an avenue for companies to bid on opportunities to transport payloads to the Moon. While there are tangible scientific and engineering payoffs from the experiments aboard the CLPS landers, the initial salvo of commercial lunar missions has more sweeping goals. In this phase of the CLPS program, NASA wants contractors to show that they can reliably land on the Moon to foster a commercial lunar economy, facilitating a range of business pursuits to go along with the government's Artemis lunar program.

NASA has made 13 industrial teams eligible to compete for CLPS missions. The space agency has placed firm orders with five of these providers—Astrobotic, Blue Origin, Draper Laboratory, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines—for 11 lunar missions. Intuitive Machines and Firefly have won the most CLPS task orders, with four and three missions, respectively.

Kim said he has talked with the other CLPS companies since becoming Firefly's CEO. They each are pursuing different technical solutions, but they face the same daunting challenges in getting to the Moon. While they compete for NASA's money, the CLPS competitors—or what Kim calls "competimates"—have a mutual interest in seeing one another succeed. A series of failures might cause NASA to restructure or cancel the CLPS program and wouldn't do anything to cultivate the lucrative business environment sought by all the CLPS companies.

"I've spoken to NASA Headquarters, and they give the same advice: 'Hey, go talk to the different CEOs of those different companies and learn from them and share with them as well,'" Kim said. "I've spoken to each of the CEOs. I've also done my own homework and research."

Thomas Zurbuchen, the former head of NASA's science mission directorate, was instrumental in getting the CLPS program up and running. Early in the program, Zurbuchen guessed the first group of CLPS lander missions might have a 50–50 chance of success. Borrowing from a sports metaphor, NASA officials likened CLPS to taking "shots on goal" with a regular cadence of missions, allowing contractors to try new ways of doing business, overcome potential failures, and try again in an iterative development cycle.

With the small sample size of two missions in the books, the CLPS program is batting .500, just as Zurbuchen predicted. The outcome of this weekend's landing attempt will determine whether CLPS moves ahead or behind the Zurbuchen curve.

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Gene Hackman and his wife found dead at their home

Gene Hackman: A look back on his career

Gene Hackman reflects on career and acting

 

 

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Gene Hackman with wife Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist, at the 2003 Golden Globes

Hackman's career spanned four decades and a variety of acclaimed roles. Here he starred alongside Warren Beatty in 1967's Bonnie and Clyde as the older Clyde brother - a role for which he received a Best Supporting Actor nod

A mysterious disease with Ebola-like symptoms has emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to the World Health Organization, the disease was first detected on January 21, and over the past five weeks hundreds have been infected and more than 50 people have died in the northwest of the country. Health officials are yet to determine the cause of the disease.

Initial investigations suggest the outbreak began in the village of Boloko, where three children died within days of eating the carcass of a bat. The symptoms of the infected include fever, headache, diarrhea, nosebleeds, vomiting blood, and general bleeding—which match the symptoms caused by viruses such as Ebola and Marburg. However, experts have ruled out these pathogens after testing more than a dozen samples from suspected cases.

In early February, health authorities recorded a second cluster of cases and deaths in the village of Bomate, several hundred kilometers away, though there is currently no known link between the clusters. As of February 15, when the WHO last reported on the outbreak, a total of 431 suspected infections had been reported, including 53 deaths. In most cases, the interval between the onset of symptoms and death was only 48 hours.

Samples from 18 cases have been sent to the National Institute for Biomedical Research in the DRC's capital, Kinshasa, testing negative for the most common pathogens linked to hemorrhagic fever symptoms, although some tested positive for malaria. “The exact cause remains unknown, with Ebola and Marburg already ruled out, raising concerns about a severe infectious or toxic agent,” the WHO wrote in its most recent bulletin on the outbreak, stressing the urgent need to accelerate laboratory investigations, improve the management and isolation of those infected, and increase surveillance and risk communication. “The remote location and weak health care infrastructure increase the risk of further spread, requiring immediate high-level intervention to contain the outbreak.”

Disease outbreaks caused by pathogens in animals transferring to humans—a process known as zoonotic spillover—are becoming more common in Africa. Changing land use and climate change are two major drivers, as they can both increase contact between humans and pathogen-harboring wildlife. According to estimates from the WHO, outbreaks of diseases transmitted from animals to people increased by 63 percent in Africa between 2012 and 2022. The continent has seen multiple outbreaks of mpox in recent years, as well as clusters of Ebola and Marburg cases.

Late last year, another mysterious illness killed more than 70 people in the southwest of the DRC, many of them children. Symptoms in that outbreak were flu-like, and most patient samples tested came back positive for malaria. The outbreak was later attributed to respiratory infections aggravated by malaria.

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

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That comforting hot cup of tea—or refreshing glass of iced tea on a hot summer day—could help reduce the amount of toxic metals in drinking water, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Food & Science Technology.

“We’re not suggesting that everyone starts using tea leaves as a water filter,” said co-author Vinayak Dravid, who studies sorbent materials at Northwestern University. “Our goal was to measure tea’s ability to adsorb heavy metals. By quantifying this effect, our work highlights the unrecognized potential for tea consumption to passively contribute to reduced heavy metal exposure in populations worldwide.”

Some 2 billion people drink tea on a daily basis worldwide, and numerous studies have suggested various health benefits from regular tea consumption. Most nutrition studies focus on things like polyphenols, caffeine, or other chemicals released during brewing, but such research overlooks a unique aspect of tea: unlike most food and drink, tea leaves are not directly consumed, and the brewing process allows tea leaves to adsorb chemicals as well as release them—most notably heavy metal toxins like lead, arsenic, or cadmium. (Adsorption is when a substance adheres to the surface of something; absorption is when a material takes in a substance.)

A 2020 study suggested that tea leaves serve as a carrier of toxic metals from contaminated soil. Dravid et al. think this hypothesis is "misguided," suggesting instead that it's the high surface area of tea leaves and the fact that tea is prepared with boiling water—which is what releases flavor chemicals from the leaves into the water—that is responsible. The heavy metals in water partition onto the leaves while the tea steeps, resulting in lower heavy metal consumption by tea drinkers. This proposed mechanism might help explain why so many studies find health benefits to drinking tea.

Testing the teas

To test their hypothesis, the authors purchased Lipton and Infusions commercial tea bags, as well as a variety of loose-leaf teas and herbal alternatives: black tea, green tea, white peony tea, oolong tea, rooibos tea, and chamomile tea. The tea bags were of different types (cotton, cellulose, and nylon). They brewed the tea the same way daily tea drinkers do, steeping the tea for various time intervals (mere seconds to 24 hours) in water spiked with elevated known levels of lead, chromium, copper zinc, and cadmium. Tea leaves were removed after steeping by pouring the tea through a cellulose filter into a separate tube. The team then measured how much of the toxic metals remained in the water and how much the leaves had adsorbed.

It turns out that the type of tea bag matters. The team found that cellulose tea bags work the best at adsorbing toxic metals from the water while cotton and nylon tea bags barely adsorbed any contaminants at all—and nylon bags also release contaminating microplastics to boot. Tea type and the grind level also played a part in adsorbing toxic metals, with finely ground black tea leaves performing the best on that score. This is because when those leaves are processed, they get wrinkled, which opens the pores, thereby adding more surface area. Grinding the tea further increases that surface area, with even more capacity for binding toxic metals.

But the most significant factor was steeping time: the longer the steeping time, the more toxic metals were adsorbed. Based on their experiments, the authors estimate that brewing tea—using a tea bag that steeps for three to five minutes in a mug—can remove about 15 percent of lead from drinking water, even water with concentrations as high as 10 parts per million.

“Any tea that steeps for longer or has higher surface area will effectively remediate more heavy metals,” said co-author Benjamin Shindel, a former graduate student of Dravid who now works at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. “Some people brew their tea for a matter of seconds, and they are not going to get a lot of remediation. But brewing tea for longer periods or even overnight—like iced tea—will recover most of the metal or maybe even close to all of the metal in the water.”

“I’m not sure that there’s anything uniquely remarkable about tea leaves as a material,” said Shindel. “They have a high active surface area, which is a useful property for an adsorbent material and what makes tea leaves good at releasing flavor chemicals rapidly into your water. But what is special is that tea happens to be the most consumed beverage in the world. You could crush up all kinds of materials to get a similar metal-remediating effect, but that wouldn’t necessarily be practical. With tea, people don’t need to do anything extra. Just put the leaves in your water and steep them, and they naturally remove metals.”

It probably won't solve a major global water crisis, but it just might improve your health when it comes to illnesses correlated with heavy metal exposure, like heart disease and stroke.

ACS Food and Science Technology, 2025. DOI: 10.1021/acsfoodscitech.4c01030  (About DOIs).

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One of the big advantages of electric vehicles is their greater freedom when it comes to packaging. Batteries go where it makes the most sense in terms of stability and safety. Electric motors are compact and don't need much cooling compared to a combustion engine, and there's no exhaust to worry about.

Putting the motors close to the wheels makes sense—in the wheel itself if possible—and it seems that a startup called Donut Labs may have solved some of the problems hub-mounted motors have faced in the past.

You can see where the name came from—the motors look like metal donuts. That originally had me thinking they used axial flux technology, as some hybrid supercars do, but I was mistaken. These are radial flux motors, just ones that make a lot of torque considering their size and mass.

Hub motors do a lot to simplify an EV powertrain, as there's no need for any driveshaft or gearing. But they've also added unsprung weight in prior implementations, and exposing the motors to the harsh environment experienced by the wheels did little for reliability.

That won't be a problem with these motors. "We call it the infinite motor because it will outlast the life of the vehicle when done right," said Marko Lehtimäki, Donut Labs' CEO.

"It's really about a manufacturing process more than anything," said Donut Labs Chief Product Officer Ville Piippo, "to get the process in a repeatable way, like a bulletproof way, so that no magnets or coils or anything are flying in the wrong places.

"It's very, very difficult to destroy in any other way but crashing in a very traumatic way... because it is really just the one moving part of the bearing," Piippo told me.

At CES, Donut Labs unveiled a family of five motors; the smallest one is suitable for large drones or uncrewed eVTOL vehicles, and the larger versions are for semi-trucks and passenger cars.

"The set of benefits is different to each application or each size," Piippo said. "In small things, you're very price conscious, and you need to kind of optimize for the cost. And then the bigger you go, the more performance you can get or the more performance increase compared to the conventional setup you can get."

"But then there's also the kind of unlocked new industries where nobody has been that capable making a heavy lift... drone—like lifting shipping containers or something like this—until now. Because we have a very compact shape and very lightweight design, we can do quite a bit of performance in everything that flies because we can play with the cooling in a smart way with this design," Piippo said.

For a compact EV crossover, Donut Labs thinks its tech could reduce the number of components in a powertrain by three-quarters, saving weight and assembly time—and therefore money. For a semi-truck, the savings could be an order of magnitude higher, according to the company's case study.

In fact, the first use has been for motorcycles. The Verge TS Pro electric motorcycle we tested last summer was created to show off the motor technology.

The reaction at CES was positive—"we had maybe 10 to 20 times more business than we anticipated, and we were aiming quite high," Lehtimäki said.

"Major OEMs have understood for decades that in-wheel motors would be the golden solution if they could get the weight down," he said. "But I feel that there's been some education going on in the last few years because it felt to us that everybody we spoke to, you just show the graph of torque and power per kilogram, and they're like, 'OK, when can we have it?'"

Plenty can happen between an OEM testing parts for proving and a product appearing in the showroom that uses that technology. But if all goes well, we might see vehicles with Donut Labs' motors in a couple of years. They may show up elsewhere, too. Lehtimäki told me that interest has come in from outside the automotive and mobility sectors, including applications like wind turbines and washing machines.

That last one has some charming history to it—when inventors were tinkering with electric cars in the 1970s, they often turned to washing machines for a source of torquey electric motors.

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New research from a team at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring the Milky Way, hosts a gravitational structure hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole.

The most widely accepted theory of galactic evolution holds that supermassive black holes are found only in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. Until now, there was no reason to imagine that a small cluster like the Large Magellanic Cloud could host one. When x-ray telescopes or observatories have been trained on smaller clusters like the Large Magellanic Cloud, they have found no signatures associated with black hole activity.

But then came the hypervelocity stars. For nearly 20 years, astronomers have spotted fast-traveling stars with enough acceleration to be ejected from their own galaxies. While a traditional star moves at about 100 kilometers per second, a hypervelocity star travels up to 10 times faster. Experts think such stars appear by being “catapulted outward” by a supermassive gravitational structure under the Hills mechanism—which is where a binary star system interacts with a black hole, with one star captured by the black hole and the other flung away from it.

Within the Milky Way itself there are hypervelocity stars that probably originated here. Studies suggest they were accelerated by Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. But at least 21 hypervelocity stars detected are consistent with being ejected by a supermassive black hole but cannot be linked to the intrinsic activity of the Milky Way. In the team’s simulations, it’s plausible that these stars are instead originating from the Large Magellanic Cloud.

For the team, led by Jiwon Jesse Han, this is one of the first major pieces of evidence for the presence of a supermassive black hole in our neighboring dwarf galaxy. According to the team’s initial calculations, this black hole structure could be between 251,000 and 1 million solar masses. Its average mass would be 600,000 times the size of the sun.

The study—which is currently in preprint but is to be published in The Astrophysical Journal—used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, whose purpose is to map millions of stars to calculate their motion.

There could, of course, be other explanations for the phenomenon. Stars escaping from their galaxies could also originate from a supernova or any other energetic mechanism powerful enough to eject them. The paper’s authors explain, however, that this does not appear to be the case with the hypervelocity stars that seem to come from the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is an irregularly shaped galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, along with other dwarf star clusters, such as Sagittarius, Carina, or Draco. It is 163,000 light-years from Earth and has a diameter of approximately 14,000 light-years. Astronomers believe that in the distant future—in about 2.4 billion years—the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way will merge into a single larger cluster, along with other larger structures, such as the Andromeda galaxy. Experts believe that the merger process will be slow and, on a planetary scale, will not pose any problems.

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

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This was just months after the Cupertino-giant had changed its name from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. and was busy celebrating the iPhone's debut. Apple saw rave reviews of its newest product, big profits, and people lining up outside its stores to get their hands on the iPhone. However, Jobs had to publicly apologize at the time after the company's actions upset early buyers.

A minute-long video clip recalls Jobs's answer when an employee asked how Apple will keep its culture and brand as it grows. Here's what Jobs said at the time:

There's lots of ways to be...as a person. And some people are...some people express their deep appreciation for their species in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out.

 

And you never, you never meet the people, you never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours, but somehow in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love some things transmitted there.

Jobs was associated with many popular companies and products in his lifetime, from Apple to Pixar and Macintosh to iPhone. He was born on February 24, 1955, and passed away at the age of 56 on October 5, 2011.

The late co-founder started Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976 and left the company due to internal conflicts in 1985 to start NeXt Inc. in the same year. He purchased The Graphics Group from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division a year later and renamed it Pixar.

Jobs returned to Apple when it acquired NeXT Inc. and remained the CEO until months before his death. He authorized Walter Isaacson to write his official biography, which was released in October 2011.

Jobs was also known for a popular deal with Microsoft that saved Apple from the verge of bankruptcy. Old checks he signed appeared at auctions and sold for tens of thousands of dollars. An old job application filled out by Jobs in 1973 was auctioned off for $174,757.

The Steve Jobs Archive was launched by his friends and family in 2022 to showcase a private historical collection. Since then, it hosted a couple of digital exhibits and launched an ebook in 2023, offering a curated collection of Steve's speeches, interviews, and correspondence.

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