It was only a few days ago that a certain fear-mongering website named, ahem, Ars Technica published an article about the prospect of a killer asteroid striking the planet Earth in the year 2032.

At the time, the odds of a small asteroid first discovered late last year—and designated 2024 YR4—hitting us were non-negligible. There was an estimated 3.2 percent chance that the large rock would impact the planet eight years from now.

In the days since then, the odds have fallen dramatically. Based on the latest estimate from NASA, there is now just a 0.0039 percent chance. Put another way, the odds of impact are 1 in 26,000.

Now, you might be inclined to call the author of that news article a planetary hero, as the odds of an impact have dropped precipitously since the publication of this dire warning. The correlation is clear and convincing. We're more modest than that here at Ars, although we wouldn't turn away some new subscribers.

In reality, even as the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 was moving away, ground-based telescopes were able to gather enough observations to get a better handle on its orbit. So we can safely take a deep breath and return to the more pressing existential problems posed by threats on this planet rather than off-world.

However, there is something that we should all take away from this experience.

Astronomers will find a lot more of these

City-killer asteroids the size of 2024 YR4 are fairly common in the inner Solar System. This asteroid was likely somewhere between 40 and 100 meters across, which is large enough to cause regional destruction on the planet, but small enough to be difficult to find with most telescopes. However, we should expect to find more of them in the coming years.

"An object the size of YR4 passes harmlessly through the Earth-Moon neighborhood as frequently as a few times per year," Richard Binzel, one of the world's leading asteroid experts and a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Ars. "The YR4 episode is just the beginning for astronomers gaining the capability to see these objects before they come calling through our neck of the woods."

These new capabilities include powerful telescopes, some of which are expressly designed to find near-Earth hazards.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, is nearing completion in Chile. Among its primary scientific objectives is finding small asteroids near Earth, and it is likely to find many. A little more than two years from now, the NEO Surveyor is scheduled to launch to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point. This NASA-backed instrument will survey the Solar System for threats to Earth. Finally, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope due to launch in 2027 will not look directly for asteroids, but also is likely to find threats to Earth.

With all of these tools coming online, astronomers believe we are likely to find 10 or even 100 times more objects like 2024 YR4.

"For perhaps many of these new discoveries, we will have initial uncertainties about their miss-distance from Earth," Binzel said. "But just like YR4, with a little time and patient tracking, we will be able to rule out entirely any hazard."

Finding more asteroids is a good thing

Binzel invented what is known as the "Torino Scale" about three decades ago to characterize the threat to humanity from asteroids and comets that are potentially on a collision course with Earth. The scale factors in both the probability of impact of an object as well as the kinetic energy that it could deliver to the planet.

This scale ranks objects from 0, meaning no impact, to 10, which is (ok, this is a slight exaggeration) nearly as bad as the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars.

The highest ranking of an asteroid was 99942 Apophis, which briefly reached level 4 on the scale for a few days after its discovery in 2004. (Further analysis revealed that its orbit in 2036 will bring the asteroid near Earth, but not strike the planet.) As for 2024 YR4, it is notable because it reached a level 3 last week, when its odds of striking the planet were highest. But fear not; it's now a level 0.

In fact, the message people should take from this whole experience is that the Solar System is full of small rocks whizzing all around. And when it comes to asteroids and comets, knowledge is power.

"Rather than making anyone anxious, by finding these objects that are already out there and pinning down their orbits, we are becoming more secure in our knowledge that any sizable asteroid is not likely to take us by surprise as an unwelcome guest landing on us," Binzel said.

And if there are legitimate threats, the more time we have to prepare a deflection mission to intercept the asteroid, the better.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one other glimpse” of the plane in space was while it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s upper stage” during its December 2023 launch.

The Space Force says it snapped the photo during experimental “first-of-kind” aerobraking maneuvers “to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel.” The Air Force said in October this would involve “a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere,” and that once complete, it would resume its other experiments before de-orbiting.

This is the X-37B’s seventh mission; its sixth, which concluded in November 2022, lasted about two-and-a-half years (or 908 days) and was its longest mission to date. Prior to its launch, the Space Force described mission goals that included “operating in new orbital regimes” and testing ”future space domain awareness technologies.“ It also mentioned an onboard NASA experiment involving plant seeds’ radiation exposure during long spaceflight missions.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Found in the forests of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Eastern Australia, birds of paradise are famous for flashy feathers and unusually shaped ornaments, which set the standard for haute couture among birds. Many use these feathers for flamboyant mating displays in which they shape-shift into otherworldly forms.

As if this didn’t attract enough attention, we’ve now learned that they also glow in the dark.

Biofluorescent organisms are everywhere, from mushrooms to fish to reptiles and amphibians, but few birds have been identified as having glowing feathers. This is why biologist Rene Martin of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to investigate. She and her team studied a treasure trove of specimens at the American Museum of Natural History, which have been collected since the 1800s, and found that 37 of the 45 known species of birds of paradise have feathers that fluoresce.

The glow factor of birds of paradise is apparently important for mating displays. Despite biofluorescence being especially prominent in males, attracting a mate might not be all it is useful for, as these birds might also use it to signal to each other in other ways and sometimes even for camouflage among the light and shadows.

“The current very limited number of studies reporting fluorescence in birds suggests this phenomenon has not been thoroughly investigated,” the researchers said in a study that was recently published in Royal Society Open Science.

Glow-up

How do they get that glow? Biofluorescence is a phenomenon that happens when shorter, high-energy wavelengths of light, meaning UV, violet, and blue, are absorbed by an organism. The energy then gets re-emitted at longer, lower-energy wavelengths—greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. The feathers of birds of paradise contain fluorophores, molecules that undergo biofluorescence. Specialized filters in the light-sensitive cells of their eyes make their visual system more sensitive to biofluorescence.

To find out just how many species of these birds fluoresce, Martin screened specimens of adult males and females in a dark room by shining blue and ultraviolet light on them. Most species ended up glowing green or yellow-green. Males had the most biofluorescent plumage, which was observed on the head, neck, chest, and abdomen. Even the skin on their feet and the insides of their mouths would fluoresce in blue and UV light.

Females had fewer biofluorescent feathers, usually on the chest and abdomen.  Birds of paradise are highly sexually dimorphic, meaning males and females look very distinct, so this isn’t a surprise. This made sense to Martin because it is thought that biofluorecence in these birds evolved largely through sexual selection, with the males that can show off more fluorescent feathers being more likely to land a mate.

Biofluorescence also depends on habitat. Most birds of paradise live high in the forest canopy, while some dwell closer to the ground. The amount of high-energy radiation that filters in through the foliage can vary greatly between habitats, some of which are heavily shaded by leafy canopies, while others are more open and allow more sunlight in.

Showoff

How the birds move can also affect the way their fluorescence shows up. Direct light from larger gaps in the canopy makes it more obvious, while incident light that does not hit the feathers directly has a more subtle effect. Sometimes the bird can change its degree of fluorescence just by moving into areas with more or less light. Females tend to use this for camouflage, while males use it to show off.

Take the mating display of the Western parotia (Parotia sefilata). The male will clear an area on the forest floor, which the researchers think may be a way to reduce visual background noise so his plumage stands out even more. He can even change his eye color from blue to a striking yellow by contracting his bicolored irises. He dances and flashes his fluorescent patches until the female decides whether he has enticed her.

Something that is immediately noticeable about the Western parotia and many other birds of paradise is that most of their feathers are a shade of black so dark and impenetrable that Martin and her team call it “super black”. It is thought to be the ultimate contrast to their brighter colors generated by bioluminescence. Species without these “super black” feathers were found to be lacking in biofluorescence.

While it may be hard not to notice the bizarre beauty of birds of paradise, the researchers wonder whether biofluorescence may be a more widespread phenomenon among birds. There are a handful of parrot, owl, nightjar, penguin, and puffin species that are known to have biofuorescent feathers or patches of skin.

But not all biofluorescence necessarily comes associated with ultra-dark feathers. "The presence of white or light-colored feathers (i.e., that may contain fluorophores that result in fluorescence) in the majority of avian lineages indicates that fluorescence may be far more widespread in birds than what has been reported in the literature to date,” the researchers said in the same study.

It is possible. The Moluccan cockatoo, which is mostly white except for the coral feathers in its crest, is endemic to the Moluccas, islands off the east coast of Indonesia that are also home to some species of birds of paradise. Whether this parrot species is biofluorescent is unknown for now, but it might be a good species to test the researchers’ hypothesis.

Royal Society Open Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.241905

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Just four West African countries are the foundation of an industry worth more than $100 billion. In the tropical nations of Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria, rows of cacao trees sprout pods bearing dozens of seeds. Once harvested, these humble beans are dried, roasted, and processed into something beloved worldwide.

Chocolate has been coveted for millennia and, particularly on Valentine’s Day, is an unmistakable token of love. But as increasingly erratic weather continues driving up the costs of confectionery, the sweet treat has become a symbol of something much less romantic: climate change.

Two reports published last week found that warming is pushing temperatures beyond the optimal range for cacao growth in the countries at the heart of the world’s supply, particularly during primary harvest seasons. The research reveals how burning oil, coal, and methane is roasting the planet’s cocoa belt and skyrocketing chocolate prices.

“One of the foods that the world most loves is at risk because of climate change,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at the nonprofit Climate Central, which wrote one of the two reports. “I would hope that by hearing that human activity is making it harder to grow cocoa, it might cause people to stop and think about our priorities as a species, and whether we can and should be prioritizing actions to limit future climate change and future harms to this food that we love so much.”

About 70 percent of the world’s cacao is grown in West Africa, with Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria the biggest producers. The bulk of the rest is grown in places with similar climates not far from the equator, such as Indonesia and Ecuador. The trees grow best in rainforest conditions with high humidity, abundant rain, nitrogen-rich soil, and natural wind buffers. Exposure to temperatures higher than 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit prompts water stress, hinders plant growth, and erodes the quality and quantity of seeds the trees yield.

Last year, warming added at least six weeks’ worth of days above that threshold in nearly two-thirds of cacao-producing areas across Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria, likely contributing to a disastrous harvest, according to the Climate Central report.

The researchers examined temperature data for the region and estimates of what might have been experienced over the past decade in a world without human-induced warming. They found that between 2015 and 2024, climate change increased the number of days each country experiences temperature ranges above the ideal for cacao growth by an average of two to four weeks annually. Most of those hotter days came during the main crop cycle, when the plants bloom and produce beans. Warming is also altering rain patterns, accelerating droughts, facilitating the spread of devastating diseases like pod rot, and contributing to soil degradation. Another new study found low rates of pollination and higher-than-average temperatures in Ghana have combined to limit yields.

But teasing out just how much of an impact climate change has had on production and consumer prices remains largely unchartered by scientists and economists. Dahl also said it’s unknown which weather phenomenon is behind the largest impact on production, nor is it clear what influence El Niño had on last year’s harvests.

Emmanuel Essah-Mensah, a cocoa grower in Ghana, described climate change as one of the most serious problems affecting production throughout West Africa. “The drought means we are losing 60 percent of our cocoa plants. I have seen a drastic decline in income, as have all the farmers in my farming cooperative,” Essah-Mensah told Grist.

Droughts, floods, and plant diseases thrashing the region last year contributed to record cocoa prices, which in turn caused the cost of chocolate to jump, according to a report by the nonprofit Christian Aid, which works toward sustainable development and economic justice. Global cocoa production fell by about 14 percent in the 2023-24 season, and ahead of Valentine’s Day last year, the soaring price of cocoa on the futures market shattered a 47-year record.

Kat Kramer, coauthor of the report and a climate policy consultant for the nonprofit, said the findings, and those of Climate Central, expose the industry’s vulnerability to climate change. “Chocolate lovers need to push companies and their governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kramer, “otherwise chocolate supplies will tragically be at increasing climate risk.”

The implications of this go beyond what it means for this delectable delicacy. Cocoa also is used in other goods like cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, which account for a significant piece of the global market. Yet chocolate remains king, with the US importing around $2.8 billion worth of it every year—over 10 percent of the world’s supply.

Federal Reserve data suggests that global cocoa prices rose 144 percent in December, more than doubling from the year before, said Alla Semenova, an economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. This is known as the producer price, or what global chocolate manufacturers pay those who process the raw beans. Still, that cost is often absorbed by confectionary customers. “When producer prices rise, when the costs of production rise, consumer prices rise,” said Semenova.

Yet even as prices go up, the farmers raising cacao don’t always see any of that profit. Josephine George Francis, who produces the crop alongside coffee on her farm in Liberia, said farmers throughout West Africa actually lose money due to the rising cost of growing crops in a warming world. “We need a different approach that puts sustainability and farmers at its heart,” said George Francis. “We do not benefit from increased prices on world markets.”

Of course, cocoa isn’t the only ingredient in confectioneries threatened by warming. Early last year, sugar, another essential ingredient, sold at some of the highest prices in over a decade after extreme weather constrained global sugarcane production.

“It is not just the quantity of cocoa production that is affected by the acceleration of climate change,” said Semenova. “The type and the quality of the ingredients that go into the production of chocolate will change.”

All of this has led many chocolatiers to adapt. Some, like Mars and Hershey, have been quietly reducing the amount of cocoa or even introducing new treats that eliminate it entirely. As prices continue to rise, analysts expect to see demand wane, a trend even Valentine’s Day can’t stop.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

The mantis shrimp comes equipped with its own weapons. It has claws that look like permanently clenched fists that are known as dactyl clubs. But when it smashes the shells of its prey, these fists come out of it undamaged.

When throwing punches, mantis shrimp can strike at the speed of a .22 caliber bullet (about 1,316 kmph or 818 mph)—one of the fastest movements in the animal kingdom. That generates a force over a thousand times their body weight. However, unleashing that much energy can backfire because the shockwaves it produces could seriously damage an animal’s soft tissue. None of that seems to affect the mantis shrimp. Now we finally know why.

When a team of researchers from Northwestern University studied the dactyl clubs of one mantis shrimp species, they found that they have layered structures that selectively block sound waves, acting as protective gear against vibrations that could otherwise harm the shrimp. These types of structures, known as phononic mechanisms, filter out sound waves that could otherwise cause nerve and soft tissue trauma.

“Together, these region-specific mechanisms form a synergistic protection system that withstands repeated high-intensity impacts without substantial damage,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science.

Beyond body armor

Mantis shrimp are neither mantids nor shrimp. They are actually stomatopods, predatory marine crustaceans that first emerged 400 million years ago and feed on mollusks, fish, cnidarians and other crustaceans. The peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) is one of the most formidable predators of the tropical shallows it hunts in.

The Northwestern research team closely studied the dactyl clubs of one peacock mantis shrimp specimen and discovered three layers of phononic defenses. Phonons are units of vibrational energy that arise from atoms moving back and forth in a solid material. Phononic materials, like the shrimp’s defense mechanisms, are structured to manipulate sound waves that pass through them.

When dissecting the clubs, the researchers found that they are covered in hydroxyapatite, a coating that also gives tooth enamel and bone their toughness. Beneath that coating is what they call the impact region, which consists of a chitin layer in a herringbone pattern (chitin is the hard, sugar-based material that makes up the animal’s shell). This particular structural form of chitin is thought to dissipate sound waves that could possibly cause cracking.

Under the herringbone layer is what the researchers called the periodic region, made from layers of coiled chitin springs. The shrimp will draw back its dactyl clubs and then punch forward, releasing energy from the loaded springs to crack the shells of prey. These springs are made of chitin nanofibers layered in a twisted arrangement, which makes each structure appear much like an actual spring. These also manipulate the propagation of sound waves to both prevent breakage and protect nerves and soft tissues.

Protecting yourself from … yourself

Mantis shrimp have to put up with incredibly intense blows, even though they are the ones who deal them. Their dactyl clubs swish through the water so fast that they create a temporary low-pressure area and form air bubbles in a process called cavitation. When those bubbles implode, they release light and heat energy so extreme that, for a fraction of a second, the water immediately surrounding the punch zone becomes as hot as the Sun. There may even be momentary flashes of light.

To find out how much force a mantis shrimp’s dactyl clubs can possibly withstand, the researchers tested live shrimp by having them strike a piezoelectric sensor like they would smash a shell. They also fired ultrasonic and hypersonic lasers at pieces of dactyl clubs from their specimens so they could see how the clubs defended against sound waves.

By tracking how sound waves propagated on the surface of the dactyl club, the researchers could determine which regions of the club diffused the most waves. It was the second layer, the impact surface, that handled the highest levels of stress. The periodic surface was almost as effective. Together, they made the dactyl clubs nearly immune to the stresses they generate.

There are few other examples that the protective structures of the mantis shrimp can be compared to. On the prey side, evidence has been found that the scales on some moths’ wings absorb sound waves from predatory bats to keep them from echolocation to find them.

Understanding how mantis shrimp defend themselves from extreme force could inspire new technology. The structures in their dactyl clubs could influence the designs of military and athletic protective gear in the future.

“Shrimp impacts contain frequencies in the ultrasonic range, which has led to shrimp-inspired solutions that point to ultrasonic filtering as a key [protective] mechanism,” the team said in the same study.

Maybe someday, a new bike helmet model might have been inspired by a creature that is no more than seven inches long but literally doesn’t crack under pressure.

Science, 2025.  DOI:  10.1126/science.adq7100

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Monday, 24 February

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 04:42 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 21 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. Among this batch will be 13 direct-to-cell satellites that can communicate directly with supported devices. This batch of satellites has the designation Starlink Group 12-13.

Tuesday, 25 February

• Who: Blue Origin
• What: New Shepard
• When: 15:30 UTC
• Where: Texas, US
• Why: Blue Origin will launch New Shepard, which will carry a crew of six to the edge of space. The crew includes Lane Bess, Jesús Calleja, Elaine Chia Hyde, Dr. Richard Scott, Tushar Shah, and an undisclosed sixth crew member. The crew will experience several minutes of near weightlessness.

Wednesday, 26 February

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Starship
• When: 23:30 UTC
• Where: Texas, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch Starship on Integrated Flight Test 8 (IFT-8) on Wednesday. The Super Heavy booster will try to land at the launch tower, and Starship will attempt to deploy 10 Starlink simulator payloads in orbit.

Thursday, 27 February

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 00:02 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, called Athena, to the Moon, where it will land on the Shackleton Connecting Ridge near the lunar south pole. NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, Epic Aerospace's orbital tug CHIMERA-GEO and AstroForge’s Odin mission will fly as secondary payloads. The Odin mission will head to asteroid 2022 OB5, a small near-Earth asteroid that could be metallic.

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1a
• When: 21:24 UTC
• Where: Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
• Why: The Soyuz rocket will launch the 91st Progress cargo delivery ship to the International Space Station (ISS) so that astronauts have everything they need to continue operating in space.

Friday, 28 February

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 02:52 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch 21 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. This mission also includes 13 direct-to-cell satellites, and the batch as a whole is Starlink Group 12-20. After the launch, the Falcon 9 will attempt a landing for reuse.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 03:09 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch 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.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a Rocket Lab Electron rocket carrying the first BlackSky Gen 3 satellite. The mission introduced BlackSky’s newest 35cm high-resolution Gen-3 satellites to orbit, allowing them to greatly enhance and optimize their geospatial intelligence capabilities.

• Next up, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink Group 10-12, which included 23 Starlink satellites. The first stage of the rocket performed a landing so that it could be reused.

Watch on X

• The final mission we got, at the time of writing, was another Starlink mission from SpaceX. This time, it was Starlink Group 12-14. The first stage of this rocket also performed a landing.

Watch on X

That’s all for this week; check in next time!

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

As the owner of a 3-year-old laptop, I feel the finite lifespan of lithium batteries acutely. It's still a great machine, but the cost of a battery replacement would take me a significant way down the path of upgrading to a newer, even greater machine. If only there were some way to just plug it in overnight and come back to a rejuvenated battery.

While that sounds like science fiction, a team of Chinese researchers has identified a chemical that can deliver fresh lithium to well-used batteries, extending their life. Unfortunately, getting it to work requires that the battery has been constructed with this refresh in mind. Plus it hasn't been tested with the sort of lithium chemistry that is commonly used in consumer electronics.

Finding the right chemistry

The degradation of battery performance is largely a matter of its key components gradually dropping out of use within the battery. Through repeated cyclings, bits of electrodes fragment and lose contact with the conductors that collect current, while lithium can end up in electrically isolated complexes. There's no obvious way to re-mobilize these lost materials, so the battery's capacity drops. Eventually, the only way to get more capacity is to recycle the internals into a completely new battery.

There's potentially another option: inject some new material into the battery itself. While there are physical limits to how much you can cram into the physical space inside the battery, this does have the potential to extend its useful life and get more out of the cost and energy required for manufacturing.

By all appearances, however, that isn't what the team behind the recent research was trying to do. Instead, most of the new paper describing the researchers' work is focused on a related problem: getting lithium into a battery during the manufacturing process. It just happens to be the case that the approach they are developing will work for both manufacturing and rejuvenation.

In current manufacturing processes, the lithium is typically included in one of the electrodes, leaving the battery ready for use. There are, however, a number of electrode materials that can potentially store a lot of lithium but aren't easy to load up with it ahead of manufacturing. So, the researchers were interested in manufacturing the battery, then finding a way to get the lithium in afterward.

So, they started searching for a lithium compound that fit a very long list of fairly specific properties. One is that it had to undergo reactions that liberated the lithium within the voltage range typically used by the mature batteries so that all of it would eventually react. The reaction also had to be irreversible to prevent ongoing cycles of reactions between the lithium and the remains of the chemical that brought it there. Those chemical remains had to be easy to get back out of the battery, as well. Finally, the chemical had to be soluble in battery electrolytes and stable when exposed to air and moderate heat so it could be used in existing manufacturing.

Lithium delivery

The chemical they came up with is LiSO₂CF₃. Under voltage, the chemical will lose both the lithium and an electron, leaving behind an unstable chemical that breaks down into SO₂ and a mixture of HCF₃ and C₂F₆. All of those products are gases at room temperature and will simply bubble out of the electrolyte if there's any space for them to do so.

To test it, the researchers essentially built a lithium-free lithium battery. Then, using an electrolyte with dissolved LiSO₂CF₃, they filled an electrode with lithium ions by applying a voltage, drawing off the gases that formed in the process. Once fully loaded, they could seal the battery off, expecting it to cycle the lithium as normal.

In their testing, they use a couple of unusual electrode materials, such as a chromium oxide (Cr₈O₂₁) and an organic polymer (a sulfurized polyacrylonitrile). Both of these have significant weight advantages over the typical materials used in today's batteries, although the resulting batteries typically lasted less than 500 cycles before dropping to 80 percent of their original capacity.

But the striking experiment came when they used LiSO₂CF₃ to rejuvenate a battery that had been manufactured as normal but had lost capacity due to heavy use. Treating a lithium-iron phosphate battery that had lost 15 percent of its original capacity restored almost all of what was lost, allowing it to hold over 99 percent of its original charge. They also ran a battery for repeated cycles with rejuvenation every few thousand cycles. At just short of 12,000 cycles, it still could be restored to 96 percent of its original capacity.

Before you get too excited, there are a couple of things worth noting about lithium-iron phosphate cells. The first is that, relative to their charge capacity, they're a bit heavy, so they tend to be used in large, stationary batteries like the ones in grid-scale storage. They're also long-lived on their own; with careful management, they can take over 8,000 cycles before they drop to 80 percent of their initial capacity. It's not clear whether similar rejuvenation is possible in the battery chemistries typically used for the sorts of devices that most of us own.

The final caution is that the battery needs to be modified so that fresh electrolytes can be pumped in and the gases released by the breakdown of the LiSO₂CF₃ removed. It's safest if this sort of access is built into the battery from the start, rather than provided by modifying it much later, as was done here. And the piping needed would put a small dent in the battery's capacity per volume if so.

All that said, the treatment demonstrated here would replenish even a well-managed battery closer to its original capacity. And it would largely restore the capacity of something that hadn't been carefully managed. And that would allow us to get far more out of the initial expense of battery manufacturing. Meaning it might make sense for batteries destined for a large storage facility, where lots of them could potentially be treated at the same time.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08465-y  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

I’m on an overnight flight from New York to Frankfurt, Germany, and the accoutrements given to me in business class have a sustainable sheen. Both the polyester blanket and polyester flight kit proudly claim they are made of fabric spun from recycled plastic bottles.

But doesn’t United Airlines know that recycled bottles are so yesterday’s green material? No, the new hot and hyped technology is recycling polyester into polyester. And I’m on my way to observe the most well-capitalized innovation in this burgeoning field, a chemical recycling process by a new startup, Reju.

Only a half hour outside downtown Frankfurt at a drab industrial park are Reju’s temporary office and three half-constructed buildings that will serve as its industrial operations. In the middle will be R&D and education, to the right is the depolymerization plant, and to the left will be the repolymerization plant.

Plastics, including polyester, are formed by taking individual chemicals called monomers and forming them into chains to create polymers. Essentially, Reju’s process breaks the polyester down into its constituent chemicals (depolymerization) then puts it back together in a chain again (repolymerization).

I suit up in a hard hat, vest, safety glasses, and sneakers, along with a half dozen other journalists and influencers to see inside the depolymerization plant, where the magic happens. (Reju hosted me on this trip and covered my travel costs.) Silver pipes snake everywhere into small silos, and from our vantage point on the ground floor, we can look up through the metal grates and through the guts of panels and ducts to the top of the four-story building. Men in jeans and high-visibility vests wander the plant, casually tinkering with the settings on various pieces of machinery, calling in German to each other.

As I’ve reported before, the fashion industry is dissatisfied with the current polyester recycling paradigm. Just 0.3 percent of materials used in fashion are from recycled sources, and of that, it's pretty much all water bottles.

You see, polyester is the exact same as PET plastic used in water bottles, just in a different shape (threads instead of a bottle). Mechanically recycling PET—melting it down and re-extruding it—isn’t ideal, because the process degrades the quality of the plastic, making it less pliable and high-performance. It also requires pure, undyed PET, with the clear plastic bottle being the paragon. And polyester textiles are never pure polyester.

The most common mix of materials you’ll find in old clothing is 70 percent polyester, 30 percent cotton. “But when you go into the details, it’s actually 60 percent PET, 5 percent dyes, 2 percent elastane, maybe contains a little bit of nylon. Who knows?“ says Antoni Mairata, the chief technology officer at Reju, as he prepares us to walk through the factory.

My previous reporting has shown that polyester can also contain plasticizers like BPA, metals such as antimony, toxic PFAS, and more undesirable contaminants it picked up as it moved across the world through factories, warehouses, and container ships. This is why we feed millions of clear, food-grade water bottles into recycling plants, while dumping old polyester clothing into landfills.

So the hunt is on for a technology that can recycle dirty polyester fabric into clean polyester fabric. And that’s where chemical recycling comes in. “This is a chemical plant,” says Mairata. “It has nothing to do with any mechanical recycling plant that you might have seen.” Reju’s chemical recycling process strips out contaminants and yields a pure monomer. “What you get out is better than what you had before. That's what is meant by ‘upcycling,’” Mairata says.

The old polyester comes to Reju as multicolored shredded fiber. It’s purified through a crystallization process, which takes out the cotton and other contaminants. After the purification step, Reju’s polyester is in small, white, popcorn-like nuggets. Those are emptied at the top of the building into an extruder, which melts it all down. That honey-like liquid is poured into a reactor designed by Reju. In a series of metal boxes, it meets ethylene glycol to break the chemical bonds, with the help of a catalyst.

What comes out is the monomer PHET in the form of white powder. That is then sent over to the other building to be repolymerized, and voilà: You have pure recycled PET pellets, which can be shipped to a mill to be melted and extruded into polyester threads.

The catalyst is the secret sauce. Most chemical recycling requires super high temperatures and a lot of energy, which can cancel out the environmental benefits of recycling the polyester. But this catalyst has a boiling point at least 50 degrees Celsius lower than ethylene glycol's boiling point. Lower temperatures translate to lower energy requirements. The ethylene glycol is consumed, while the catalyst can be recycled back through the reactor again and again, for a closed-loop process. Reju's recycling system isn't zero-waste—it uses some energy and resources—but the company claims its recycled polyester production process emits half the greenhouse gases of virgin polyester production.

It also doesn’t create a waste byproduct, save for the dyes and finishes that came with the used polyester. (Reju is hoping to find a company that can take those waste products and make something valuable out of them, or else it will be stuck dealing with all that hazardous contaminant waste itself, including any PFAS or plasticizers. Bummer.)

“The fact that it's the fastest, it uses the least amount of energy, and has the highest yield, are the things that actually makes it possible to industrialize this,” Reju CEO Patrik Frisk says.

Reju says the catalyst is proprietary, but the patent by IBM, which discovered the process and has licensed it to Reju, indicates that it’s triethylamine, a flammable chemical commonly used as a catalyst in manufacturing resins. While it needs to be handled carefully in the factory, it degrades quickly and therefore doesn’t pose a risk of long term contamination or damage to humans or the environment.

Another benefit over mechanical recycling, which relies on plastic bottles and degrades the PET each go-round, is that this process can be repeated indefinitely without degrading the quality of the resulting polyester. Sounds pretty perfect. So what’s the catch?

A PET Project

The four-story building we’re touring is just a demo plant, a proof that the technology works and a place to refine it before scaling it up. The eventual industrial plant, which Reju aims to build by 2027, will be 50 times the size of this building.

That sounds impressive when compared to the typical sustainable material startup. But it’s just one project in a portfolio of “sustainable chemistry” projects by its mother company, Technip Energies, a 16,000-person French company that was spun off from a more traditional French engineering and construction firm, TechnipFMG, in 2021.

Technip Energies focuses on what it calls “energy transition” projects, like with Lanzatech on the Gulf Coast to decarbonize ethylene production, which got $200 million in funding from the US Department of Energy in 2024. There’s a UK carbon capture project with Shell, and an offshore wind joint venture with SBM Offshore. But most of Technip Energy’s revenue comes from liquified natural gas (LNG), ethylene, and hydrogen. It provides the engineering and technology expertise to build out petrochemical infrastructure such as offshore LNG storage and cracking plants, which turn fossil fuels into the ingredients for plastic.

T.EN Zimmer, a Frankfurt-based company founded in 1956 that Technip bought in 2015, is in the similar business of constructing polyester and nylon factories, and its technology is in over 1,000 polymer plants around the world, making up about 30 percent of the market, according to Frisk.

That accounts for Reju’s swagger, walking into the nascent polyester recycling industry like a kid walking into the schoolyard with his big brother right behind him, and a very imposing father taking up the rear. Polyester chemical recycling startups like Circ and Carbios have had to scrape together funding to take a promising technology from the lab to pilot plants and then demo plants, and that journey can take 10 years or more, if it happens at all.

Carbios announced in December it was pausing construction of its demo plant. Renewcell, a promising cotton recycling technology backed by the clothing brand H&M, declared bankruptcy only one year after it opened its commercial plant in Sweden. Fashion brands weren’t interested in buying its pricier product, even with its sustainability bonafides. Earlier this month, Unifi announced it was closing the American factory where its recycled-bottle polyester product Repreve is made (though it will continue to manufactured Repreve abroad).

Meanwhile, Reju, which has the polyester engineering prowess of T.EN Zimmer and the $4.7 billion market cap of Technip Energies behind it, “built a 1,000-ton demo plant in less than a year,” Frisk says. “That's unheard of.”

Reju is attempting to market its purified polyester to brands, who will then direct their favored polyester mills to purchase the recycled PET pellets. Reju wouldn’t say exactly how much more expensive its product is than virgin polyester, or even mechanically recycled polyester from bottles. But it definitely is. Its value proposition is that, with access to a stable of about 100 top-tier polymer engineers, it will produce the highest-quality and highest-performance polyester on the market, which also happens to be recycled.

“We actually have an opportunity for the brands to make a better product, which I believe is something that's important,” Frisk says. “Because we all know that the consumer is not really willing to pay for green … but they're willing to pay for a better product.”

Well, kind of. Some polyester, like the kind Nike and Patagonia source, has all the gee-whiz branding and is priced accordingly. But the fashion industry is notoriously price sensitive, and a lot of polyester, like the kind you’ll find in Shein crop tops, is the cheapest fabric available. Reju’s sustainable, high-tech product isn’t going to appeal to the “Let’s find the cheapest option on Amazon” crowd. And ostensibly, that is where our overproduction crisis really lies.

A Flood of Polyester

There’s one huge piece of the puzzle that is currently outside Reju’s control: finding affordable feedstock.

You would think that would be easy. According to a 2024 study, 28 percent of post-consumer garments in the US were primarily polyester. And currently, those used polyester garments are not exactly a hot commodity. They’re either landfilled, burned, downcycled into things like moving blankets and car insulation, or shipped abroad to developing countries for pennies per pound. There, some are sold, but more are landfilled, burned, and tossed into waterways or into the desert.

Sounds like free feedstock, right? Wrong. Currently, used clothing is hand-sorted by humans, a laborious and expensive process that pushes the cost of used clothing, even if it’s donated, over the cost of brand-new ultra-fast fashion. That has led to a slow-moving crisis in the secondhand apparel industry. In October, Soex Group, the largest global collector of used clothing and textiles, began insolvency proceedings.

So before Reju can ink deals with brands, it needs to know that the infrastructure is in place to cheaply and efficiently aggregate, sort, and prepare waste polyester for its recycling process. “With only this technology alone, you're not going anywhere,” Mairata says. “There's no company that can actually handle this complexity.” (He means the logistics of sourcing used polyester clothing while also recycling it.) “So you should partner up.”

Europe is somewhat ahead in this regard. By this year, European Union member states are required to establish publicly funded, separate collection sites for textiles so they don’t end up in household waste. The worry of many is that all those collected textiles will either be sent to incinerators or dumped on—er, shipped abroad to—developing countries, who are already up to their necks in old clothing waste. Reju is positioning itself as a better solution, and it has partnered with Nouvelles Fibres Textiles, a French company that deploys new technologies to automatically sort clothing by type and color, and remove hard points like zippers and buttons.

Reju also recently signed a deal with Cibutex, a Dutch consortium of five companies that provide linen and laundry services to health care and hospitality companies. That way it will have access to large amounts of fairly homogenous, used polyester textiles.

In the US, Reju announced a partnership with Goodwill and Waste Management in October, to figure out the basics of building a reliable supply chain. How will the old clothing be collected? Will it be separated from donations or collected curbside with other recyclables? Maybe both? How can the polyester be separated quickly and automatically, then stripped of buttons, zippers, and other doodads so it can be chopped up and prepared for chemical recycling? That all remains to be worked out.

Follow the Money

Reju is a departure for both T.EN Zimmer and Technip. Normally, Technip would just license the technology from IBM and T.EN Zimmer would offer it to its customers as one in a menu of options. Instead, Technip decided to start a new company that would produce the recycled PET itself.

The question that comes to mind is, why? Why would a fossil-fuel-dependent engineering company decide to get into the chemical recycling business?

Reju’s CEO, Patrik Frisk, who before this was CEO at Under Armour and Aldo, will tell you that it’s about addressing a polyester crisis. Global polyester production rose from 63 million metric tons in 2022 to 71 million in 2023, and none of that is getting recycled. “It's terrifying, but we've also got to realize that we created it, right? So we should be able to fix it somehow, or at least find a way to make sure that there is an alternative.”

Whether you believe that depends on how cynical you’re feeling. (These days? Very.) It could be that this technology can find success and start to make up for the fossil-fuel sins of Technip’s past. Or, like the pledges that were taken up and then quietly dropped by fashion brands and consumer product brands, it could be a pretty little distraction from the oncoming tidal wave of plastic everything.

After all, rising plastic demand, including for polyester, has fueled a boom in cracking plant construction—yes, the exact kind that Technip helps build.

At the time of my trip in November, the international plastic treaty negotiations were still a few weeks away from stalling out. The so-called “high-ambition” countries such as the UK, Canada, and many African, European, Latin American, and Pacific countries want to tackle plastics at their source, by reducing overall plastic production. The oil-producing countries want to categorize this proliferation of plastic as a waste management problem and let the growth of PET and other plastics continue unfettered—as long as there’s an interest in collecting and recycling them. (Whether that actually happens, well, that’s another story.)

If I had to take a guess, I would say this polyester recycling technology falls under the “waste management” rubric. Let the PET plastic factories, TE.N Zimmer’s clients included, do their thing. We’ll see if we can clean some of that mess up later.

As a sustainability journalist, I live a pretty spare lifestyle. I don’t feel great about jetting off to Mexico on a whim like many of my friends, nor could I afford it. I spend probably too much money on natural-fiber clothing. I thought long and hard about whether to fly to Germany for two days to see the plastics recycling plant. My nerdy curiosity won out.

But the week I visited Reju’s chemical recycling plant, I got a small taste of a different world. As I was ferried from the airport to the high-end hotel and back again in a BMW sedan, and settled into my capacious business class seat, I was acutely aware that all this abundance flows from fossil fuels. There’s the jet fuel and gasoline powering my comfortable rides, which are in turn funded by an energy conglomerate eager to show me its sustainable project.

Complicity in climate change, I mused, comes in many shades, but it is usually easy and comfortable. As easy and comfortable as one-click-buying a cheap and fluffy polyester blanket–even if you know it will eventually end up in the garbage.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Microsoft is arguably the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of over $3 trillion. Its products and services have been broadly adopted worldwide and are essential to the success of most organizations.

Last year's CrowdStrike global IT outage caused by a faulty kernel driver crippled operations across a wide range of business after leaving approximately 8.5 million Windows devices with dreadful a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) error.

While competition has stiffened over the years, prompting the Redmond giant to trade places with NVIDIA and Apple for the top spot due to their heavy investment in the AI bubble, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently shared the early key ingredients contributing to the tech giant's success.

As highlighted in the co-founder's new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, the philanthropic billionaire revealed that he began sneaking out at the wee hours of the night at the tender age of 13 to code because his house didn't have a computer.

He'd take a 20-minute ride downtown to access a computer, where he'd often practice and perfect his coding skills, only to return home at 2 a.m. Gates indicated that he greatly benefited from "laissez-faire treatment," as passers-by were seemingly unphased by his presence in town in the dead of night.

Bill Gates attributed his early interactions with a computer to a local company in Seattle called Computer Center. He had unlimited computer access, where he'd spend hours perfecting his coding skills. However, he was required to help the company with bugs and malware issues.

Bill Gates had to leave Harvard for Microsoft

Some Tesla owners have yet another thing to worry about. As sales crash in Europe and protests gather outside Tesla showrooms in the US as a result of the CEO's political engagement, it now emerges that more than 376,000 Model Y crossovers and Model 3 sedans are at risk for power steering failure. So far, it has resulted in more than 3,000 warranty claims and caused 570 crashes, according to Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Federal investigators have known about the problem for some time—in 2023 NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary inquiry after 12 reports of steering failures, including three Model 3s and nine Model Ys.

By February 2024, NHTSA had received 124 complaints about steering failure in 2023 Teslas and found another 2,264 reports of steering problems. Color me wrong, though—at the time, I wrote that "a software patch is unlikely to help," except a software patch is indeed the remedy here.

The problem is caused by excess voltage reaching the printed circuit board that controls the electronic power steering. That can overstress the components, which causes the power steering to fail next time the car slows to a complete stop. Unlike a recent steering recall affecting Mazda's CX-90 SUV, in this particular case the failure is unlikely to rob a driver of power steering while moving. The system is designed such that if the overvoltage occurs while the car is in motion, the power steering remains active until the car next stops.

A lack of power-assisted steering isn't the worst thing in the world—many readers will be old enough to remember when the feature was far from ubiquitous and parallel parking meant a bicep workout. But it's also not supposed to happen on such a safety-critical system.

According to the NHTSA Part 573 Safety Recall Report, NHTSA and Tesla discussed the problem for several months, with NHTSA's main concern that the failure (at a stop) could happen "at an unsafe location" and that the increased steering effort could surprise the driver and therefore a formal recall ought to be performed. Tesla agreed with that in mid-January.

This is now Tesla's second recall of 2025. At the beginning of the year, it issued a recall for more than 283,000 Models 3, Y, S, and X, which were built with potentially faulty backup camera systems. Since a backup camera system is a legal requirement under the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, such failures are taken seriously—in October 2024, a different issue saw the recall of more than 27,000 Cybertrucks to fix their cameras.

The first step in Tesla's remedy for this latest camera problem is another software update—the problematic builds could, in cold weather, short out some power components in the camera system. Tesla said it was also working to identify which cars had not been fixed in time—these will require the physical replacement of the car computer with a new unit.

Software recalls are only getting more common

As Ars noted last year, the nature of automotive safety recalls is changing. As ever more subsystems on modern cars are computer-controlled, automakers are using those computers to solve hardware problems, although not always in a manner that the owners entirely appreciate. The advent of software-defined vehicles will only accelerate this trend. In part, that's because they're designed to be easily updated over the air, but it's also because the automotive industry has fallen into the same "minimal viable product" trap as the tech sector, with cars being pushed out the door before everything is fully baked. As trends go, we don't like it.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

According to recent observations, the European Space Agency now says the probability of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting our planet has dropped to just 0.16 percent. That follows an announcement yesterday from NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory saying there was a 0.28 percent chance the asteroid would impact Earth.

Earlier this week, the odds of the asteroid impacting Earth on December 22nd, 2032, were closer to 3.1 percent, which was “the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger,” according to the agency.

The latest trajectory estimates come from new observations made after a week of limited visibility caused by a full moon. Ground-based telescopes will continue to track 2024 YR4 until April when its distant orbit will make observations from Earth impossible until it approaches again in 2028. The James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared capabilities will be used in March and May to observe the asteroid’s movements. Data gathered by the space telescope will help scientists more accurately calculate 2024 YR4’s size, what it’s made of, and the threat it poses.

First identified on December 27th, 2024 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) located in Chile, trajectory calculations showed 2024 YR4 was on a potential collision course with Earth after a few weeks of observation.

The asteroid is estimated to be between 130 and 300 feet in size and would impact the Earth with about 7.7 megatons of energy, according to Astronomy.com. That’s not powerful enough to wipe out humanity the same way an asteroid hit is believed to have done in the dinosaurs, but it’s more than enough energy to devastate a city with a direct hit.

Although the odds of the asteroid hitting the Earth have been dramatically reduced, NASA also says the new data has increased the chances of 2024 YR4 impacting the moon to one percent.

CNEOS’ Sentry page will be continuously updated with details on 2024 YR4’s latest impact probability.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Welcome to Edition 7.32 of the Rocket Report! It's true that the US space program has always been political. Domestic and global politics have driven nearly all of the US government's decisions on major space issues, most notably President John F. Kennedy's challenge to land astronauts on the Moon amid intense Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The Nixon administration's decision to end the Apollo program and focus on building a reusable Space Shuttle was a political move. More than 30 years later, the Clinton administration ordered a reevaluation NASA's plans for a massive space station in low-Earth orbit. In the post-Cold War zeitgeist of the 1990s, this resulted in Russia's inclusion on the International Space Station program. Flawed or not, these decisions were backstopped with some level of reasoning, debate, and national consensus-building. Today, the politics of space seem personal, small, and mean-spirited. Thankfully, there's a lot of launch action next week that might thrust us out of the abyss, even just for a moment.

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.

Rocket Lab launches for the 60th time. It's safe to say Rocket Lab is an established player in the launch business. The company launched its 60th Electron rocket Tuesday from New Zealand, Space News reports. It was the second Electron launch of the year, coming just 10 days after Rocket Lab's previous mission. The payload was a new-generation small electro-optical reconnaissance satellite for BlackSky. Rocket Lab has not disclosed a projected number of Electron launches for the year beyond estimating it will be more than the 16 Electron missions in 2024. The company said on its launch webcast that the next Electron launch was planned from New Zealand in "a few short weeks."

What's coming this year? ... Rocket Lab might have more to say in its quarterly earnings report next week about its plans for 2025, but here's what we know. Rocket Lab has a long backlog of missions with its light-lift Electron rocket, deploying small fleets of commercial Earth-imaging and data relay satellites for companies like BlackSky and Kinéis. A few government missions are among Rocket Lab's more interesting launches this year, including a US military mission to demonstrate how the Space Force might respond to a threat to one of its satellites. Officially, Rocket Lab aims to debut its larger Neutron rocket this year, but I wouldn't bet on it. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Firefly nabs another win. Continuing the theme of rapid response in space, the Space Force has awarded Firefly Aerospace a nearly $22 million contract to launch a separate mission pursuing objectives similar to the one booked to fly with Rocket Lab. The mission, dubbed Victus Sol, will be the fifth Tactically Responsive Space mission for the service, Defense News reports. In a prior responsive space mission, Firefly demonstrated in 2023 it could integrate a military satellite with its Alpha rocket and launch it within 27 hours, condensing what used to be weeks of work into a little more than a day. Clearly, this is a niche Firefly seems positioned to thrive in. Military officials view these kinds of capabilities as important for the Space Force's ability to react to real-time threats, defend against attacks, and reconstitute space-based assets disabled by an enemy in conflict.

A safari in orbit ... The Space Force's responsive space missions are managed by a military unit called Space Safari. A spokesperson for this organization told Defense News that the latest mission, Victus Sol, is "moving beyond demonstrations" and will support Space Force operations. What this means isn't clear because the spokesperson would not confirm any details about the mission, including its payload, objective, or launch date. However, fiscal 2025 budget documents say the mission could launch in late 2025 or 2026, and the service has indicated that 2026 is its target for flying operational Tactically Responsive Space missions. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Orbex is counting on ESA support. UK-based rocket builder Orbex has revealed that it is counting on a positive outcome from its European Launch Challenge bid to fund the development of its medium-lift rocket, Proxima, citing a "challenging investment climate," European Spaceflight reports. The European Space Agency initiated the European Launcher Challenge in November 2023 to support the development of sovereign launch capabilities and, ultimately, a successor to the Ariane 6. While the exact format of the challenge has not yet been confirmed, initial reports have indicated that it will include multiple awards of 150 million euros ($157 million) each.

Cart before the horse ... Orbex once appeared to be one of the most promising companies in a crop of European launch startups, but the gem has lost its luster. None of these startups have made an orbital launch attempt, but several of them, like Germany's Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg, have shown tangible progress. Orbex, meanwhile, has revealed little about the development of its first rocket, called Prime. Last year, Orbex announced a new, larger rocket named Proxima. This is not an unusual move. Many companies initially established with a focus on the small launch industry have transitioned to developing larger launch vehicles because that's where the money is. But Orbex hasn't launched anything. Orbex's announcement in December that it was abandoning construction of its owns spaceport in favor of another launch site in Scotland also raised questions about the company's outlook.

So long, ABL. Hello, Long Wall? Former small satellite launch company ABL Space Systems has capped a transformation to focus on missile defense by changing its name, Aviation Week reports. "As our mission sharpens to focus on missile defense, we reflected on what it means for our identity," wrote Dan Piemont, CEO of the newly renamed company. "I'm proud to share that our company is now Long Wall, inspired by the Long Walls of Athens." ABL announced its pivot from satellite launch services to missile defense in November, four months after the company's second RS1 rocket was destroyed on the launch pad during ground testing. The setback followed a failed inaugural test flight in 2023.

Oversupply ... There's no question that demand is growing for missile defense and hypersonic missile technology, the two new focus areas for Long Wall. Last month, President Donald Trump announced his intention to develop a comprehensive missile defense shield for the United States. The military has been interested in hypersonic technology for decades, but the interest has transitioned in recent years from an experimental nature to an operational basis, with mixed success. Hypersonic missiles are difficult to defend against because they fly lower and are more maneuverable than ballistic missiles, so it's natural for the Pentagon to pursue defensive and offensive solutions in this area. But there are many companies retooling for the hypersonics rush. Similarly, there were numerous small launch startups in the 2010s, including ABL. It begs the question: Has ABL pivoted from one oversupplied market to another?

SpaceX's Falcon lands near the Bahamas. SpaceX notched another spaceflight record as it completed the first rocket flight that featured a liftoff in one country and a landing in another, Spaceflight Now reports. A little more than eight minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday evening, the Falcon 9 rocket booster landed on the drone ship positioned off the coast of the Exuma Islands in the Bahamas. The landing platform was located 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) from the nearest point of land, within Bahamian territorial waters. SpaceX's previous rocket landings at sea have occurred in international waters.

This new ocean ... The government of the Bahamas hailed the occasion as an opportunity for the island nation to attract visitors and investment. "With today’s historic Falcon 9 booster landing in our waters, the Bahamas has become the first international destination in the world to host a SpaceX rocket landing," said Philip Davis, prime minister of the Bahamas. "This is not a one-time event—this is the beginning of a new chapter. Over the coming months, the Bahamas will host at least 20 scheduled rocket landings." Because the landing occurred in its territorial waters, the Bahamas had to approve SpaceX's plan to recover rockets there. In exchange for the government's approval, SpaceX will support the creation of a space exhibit in the Bahamas showcasing hardware and a SpaceX spacesuit, invest $1 million in the University of the Bahamas, and provide Starlink Internet connectivity to remote parts of the nation. The new booster landing zone in the Bahamas will allow SpaceX to launch into more types of orbits from Cape Canaveral. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

This SpaceX landing wasn't planned. Before dawn Wednesday, the sky across northern Europe was illuminated by an object zooming through the air in flames. The pyrotechnics were in fact caused by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket reentering the Earth's atmosphere, BBC reports. After sightings over England, Denmark, and Sweden, debris from the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket crashed into Poland. One Polish resident found what appeared to be a 1.5×1-meter pressure vessel from the upper stage behind his warehouse. No injuries were reported. Polsa, the Polish space agency, posted on X that the debris came from a Falcon 9, and independent orbital tracking data matched the rocket's location with the sightings over Europe.

Not supposed to happen ... The rocket stage that fell over Poland Wednesday launched a batch of Starlink Internet satellites from California earlier this month. Normally, SpaceX reignites the upper stage's engine for a deorbit burn after releasing the Starlink satellites, allowing the rocket to steer itself back into the atmosphere for a destructive reentry over the ocean. But something went wrong, and the burn failed to put the rocket on a trajectory toward reentry. Instead, it lingered in orbit for nearly three weeks before atmospheric drag naturally tugged it back toward Earth in an uncontrolled manner. This is the third time since last July that the Falcon 9's upper stage has encountered a problem in flight. (submitted by Dizdizzie)

India will take a measured approach toward the Moon. India will not build a large rocket for its planned crewed mission to the Moon but instead rely on multiple launches and satellite docking technology, the Times of India reports. "One option is to build a huge rocket and take a single module, but what will you do with that rocket thereafter?" said V. Narayanan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. "Economically, we have to understand and really look at all aspects. So, we are not going to build a huge rocket. We are going to have multiple modules. Maybe right now, our thinking is two modules. You take them separately and dock."

Buoyed by success ... Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has charged the Indian space agency to fly an astronaut to the Moon by 2040. Engineers are only now outlining the architecture for how India might achieve this goal. On January 16, India achieved its first successful docking between two satellites in orbit. This made India the fourth nation, after the United States, Russia, and China, to demonstrate an independent docking capability in orbit.

A new vehicle joins China's rocket fleet. China conducted the first launch of the Long March 8A rocket on February 11, carrying a second batch of satellites into orbit for the national Guowang project, Space News reports. The launcher took off from the Wenchang launch base in southern China and deployed at least eight satellites for the Guowang broadband megaconstellation, China's answer to Starlink. China has published scant information about the design, size, or capabilities of the Guowang satellites, raising questions about the nature of the satellites and concerns about transparency.

Only kinda new ... The Long March 8A is an upgraded variant of the standard Long March 8, which debuted in December 2020. It features the same first stage and side boosters as the original but includes a newly designed 3.35-meter-diameter (11-foot) hydrogen-oxygen second stage, allowing a wider, 5.2-meter-diameter (17-foot) payload fairing. The rocket can carry about 7,000 kilograms (15,400 pounds) into Sun-synchronous orbit. China plans to use the expendable Long March 8 and 8A rockets for numerous launches. They will likely become workhorses for deploying China's Guowang and Thousand Sails megaconstellations. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Here's the latest on Starship Flight 8. A little over a month after SpaceX's large Starship launch ended in an explosion over several Caribbean islands, the company is preparing its next rocket for a test flight, Ars reports. According to a notice posted by the Federal Aviation Administration, the eighth test flight of the Starship vehicle could take place as early as February 26 from the Starbase launch site in South Texas. Company sources confirmed that this launch date is plausible, but it's also possible that the launch could slip a day or two to Thursday or Friday of next week.

Flight 7, Take 2 … This is an important flight for SpaceX to get the Starship program back on track. On the previous Starship test flight last month, the rocket's upper stage failed about eight minutes after launch, raining debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean. The FAA is overseeing a SpaceX-led investigation into the accident, and while the inquiry is not yet complete, the posting indicating a launch date next week suggests government officials believe the investigation is nearing its end. Flight 8 will likely attempt the same goals as Flight 7 would have achieved, such as testing Starship's payload deployment mechanism and gathering data on novel heat shield materials.

Full stack for SLS SRBs. Engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida completed stacking the Space Launch System's twin Solid Rocket Boosters inside the Vehicle Assembly Building for the agency's Artemis II crewed test flight around the Moon, NASA reported this week. The boosters, each standing 177 feet (54 meters) tall, will provide the majority of the 8.8 million pounds of thrust to propel four astronauts inside the Orion spacecraft on their journey. The next step will be the placement of the SLS core stage in between the boosters in the coming weeks.

For what? … The long-term (and perhaps short-term) future of NASA's Space Launch System rocket is dubious. For now, NASA continues to make preparations for launching the Artemis II mission next year using the SLS rocket. But there's a push from Trump administration officials and advisers to cancel the rocket, which has cost somewhere around $29 billion since the program was announced in 2011. Each SLS rocket is fully expendable, and the rocket alone will cost up to $2.5 billion per flight, according to a 2023 audit by NASA's inspector general. This is, quite simply, unsustainable. There are alternatives. However, if the White House wants to put Americans around the Moon within the next few years—approximately the same time horizon as Trump's presidential term—keeping the Space Launch System around for a limited time might be the only way to do it.

Vulcan booster test-fired in Utah. Northrop Grumman test-fired a solid rocket booster for United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket last Thursday, February 13, in remote northern Utah, NASASpaceflight reports. Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, posted a photo of himself posing with the booster alongside Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of the Space Force's Space Systems Command. This was an important milestone in the investigation into why the nozzle from one of the strap-on boosters on ULA's second Vulcan rocket broke free shortly after liftoff in October. The rocket continued climbing into space, and the flight reached a successful conclusion, but the anomaly put the brakes on the Space Force's certification of Vulcan for national security missions.

Modified motor … A ULA spokesperson told NSF that investigators are reviewing data from the "static hot fire of a modified GEM 63XL booster in Utah on Feb. 13. This test was part of the process for understanding the root cause of the observation on a Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) during the Vulcan Cert-2 mission and we will provide additional details as we have them." Officials haven't disclosed the root cause of the booster anomaly in October, or what fixes are required on boosters already built and in ULA's inventory. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Updated at 10:15 am EST to clarify the nature of the booster anomaly on the second Vulcan rocket.

Next three launches

Feb. 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-14 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 15:19 UTC

Feb. 22: Long March 3B/E | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center | 12:10 UTC

Feb. 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-1 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 22:24 UTC

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Crafty cuttlefish employ several different camouflaging displays while hunting their prey, according to a new paper published in the journal Ecology, including mimicking benign ocean objects like a leaf or coral, or flashing dark stripes down their bodies. And individual cuttlefish seem to choose different preferred hunting displays for different environments.

It's well-known that cuttlefish and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin's unique structure. As previously reported, squid skin is translucent and features an outer layer of pigment cells called chromatophores that control light absorption. Each chromatophore is attached to muscle fibers that line the skin's surface, and those fibers, in turn, are connected to a nerve fiber. It's a simple matter to stimulate those nerves with electrical pulses, causing the muscles to contract. And because the muscles are pulling in different directions, the cell expands, along with the pigmented areas, changing the color. When the cell shrinks, so do the pigmented areas.

Underneath the chromatophores, there is a separate layer of iridophores. Unlike the chromatophores, the iridophores aren't pigment-based but are an example of structural color, similar to the crystals in the wings of a butterfly, except a squid's iridophores are dynamic rather than static. They can be tuned to reflect different wavelengths of light. A 2012 paper suggested that this dynamically tunable structural color of the iridophores is linked to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. The two layers work together to generate the unique optical properties of squid skin.

And then there are leucophores, which are similar to the iridophores, except they scatter the full spectrum of light, so they appear white. They contain reflectin proteins that typically clump together into nanoparticles so that light scatters instead of being absorbed or directly transmitted. Leucophores are mostly found in cuttlefish and octopuses, but there are some female squid of the genus Sepioteuthis that have leucophores that they can "tune" to only scatter certain wavelengths of light. If the cells allow light through with little scattering, they’ll seem more transparent, while the cells become opaque and more apparent by scattering a lot more light.

Scientists learned in 2023 that the process by which cuttlefish generate their camouflage patterns is significantly more complex than scientists previously thought. Specifically, cuttlefish readily adapted their skin patterns to match different backgrounds, whether natural or artificial. And the creatures didn't follow the same transitional pathway every time, often pausing in between. That means that contrary to prior assumptions, feedback seems to be critical to the process, and the cuttlefish were correcting their patterns to match the backgrounds better.

Four distinctive displays

Wild broadclub cuttlefish hunting with four different displays: (a) leaf, (b) passing-stripe, (c) branching coral, and (d) pulse display.

Matteo Santon/University of Bristol

 

Representative examples of the four main hunting displays viewed from prey perspective.

Matteo SantonUniversity of Bristol

 

All those elements combine to make cuttlefish the master “hypnotists of the underwater world,” co-author Matteo Santon of the University of Bristol in England told New Scientist. He and his colleagues spent several months filming 98 cuttlefish hunting prey in Indonesia. Santon was particularly interested in studying the cuttlefish's ability to adopt moving stripe patterns (the topic of a forthcoming paper) and soon realized that his subjects exhibited a range of four distinct hunting displays when approaching their prey, each with a different coloration, texture, and body posture.

In the "Leaf" display, for instance, the cuttlefish stretches its lateral arms horizontally, tucking its other arms into a cone while turning its body olive-green, and approaching the prey very slowly—as if it were a floating mangrove leaf being carried along by the current. In the "Branching Coral" display, the cuttlefish raises its two central arms and splays its remaining arms in front of the body while turning yellow and orange. This might serve to help the cuttlefish hide among staghorn corals to conceal its approach to prey.

For the "Passing Stripe" display, the cuttlefish took on a dark gray hue and flashed a downward-moving black stripe along its body. This serves as a form of motion camouflage, as the downward motion of the stripe counters the more threatening expanding motion as the cuttlefish approaches its prey. In the "Pulse" display, the two lateral arm pairs point forward in a tight zone, while the central arms extend upward and out wide, as pulses of dark color play out on the overall gray coloration of the body. The advantages gained by this are less clear, per the authors, but it might serve to minimize the cuttlefish profile from the perspective of its prey (e.g., crabs).

The most commonly used patterns were the branching coral, passing stripe, and leaf displays, with pulse displays only accounting for about 11 percent of those observed. Sixty-two of the cuttlefish were filmed more than once and used two or more different hunting displays. "This suggests that this variability is unlikely explained by individual cuttlefish personality," the authors wrote. In fact, it demonstrates that "cuttlefish, in different environmental contexts in the wild, show a much broader behavioral repertoire than when housed in the laboratory."

Ecology, 2025. DOI: 10.1002/ecy.70021  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

With the rapid emergence of generative AI, the world is rapidly evolving as more people and organizations hop onto the bandwagon. A recent study published by Microsoft researchers suggested that an overreliance and dependence on AI-powered tools like Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT might make you dumb.

The researchers attributed their findings to the tools' negative implications on a person's critical thinking, leading to the deterioration of cognitive faculties. However, more trouble seemingly looms on the horizon with AI's rapid advancement and broad adoption across the world.

In a recent interview with Patrick Collison, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates detailed four "scary things" the next generation should be worried about.

According to the philanthropic billionaire:

"There's, you know, about four or five things that are very scary, and the only one that I really understood and worried about a lot when I was young was nuclear war. Today I think we'd add climate change, bioterrorism/pandemic, and keeping control of AI in some form. So, you know, now we have four footnotes."

Bill Gates has openly discussed the highlighted areas of concern in the past, particularly nuclear war during his youthful days.

While there have been multiple reports indicating there's a 99.999999% probability AI could lead to existential doom, Gates believes the technology could help bridge the intelligence gap in society.

An asteroid discovered late last year is continuing to stir public interest as its odds of striking planet Earth less than eight years from now continue to increase.

Two weeks ago, when Ars first wrote about the asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. NASA's most recent estimate has the likelihood of a strike increasing to 3.2 percent. Now that's not particularly high, but it's also not zero.

Naturally the prospect of a large ball of rock tens of meters across striking the planet is a little worrisome. This is large enough to cause localized devastation near its impact site, likely on the order of the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia.

To understand why the odds from NASA are changing, and whether we should be concerned about 2024 YR4, Ars connected with Robin George Andrews, author of the recently published book How to Kill an Asteroid. Good timing with the publication date, eh?

Ars: Why are the impact odds increasing?

Robin George Andrews: The asteroid’s orbit is not known to a great deal of precision right now, as we only have a limited number of telescopic observations of it. However, even as the rock zips farther away from Earth, certain telescopes are still managing to spy it and extend our knowledge of the asteroid’s orbital arc around the Sun. The odds have fluctuated in both directions over the last few weeks, but overall, they have risen; that’s because the amount of uncertainty astronomers have as to its true orbit has shrunk, but Earth has yet to completely fall out of that zone of uncertainty. As a proportion of the remaining uncertainty, Earth is taking up more space, so for now, its odds are rising.

Think of it like a beam of light coming out of the front of that asteroid. That beam of light shrinks as we get to know its orbit better, but if Earth is yet to fall out of that beam, it takes up proportionally more space. So, for a while, the asteroid’s impact odds rise. It’s very likely that, with sufficient observations, Earth will fall out of that shrinking beam of light eventually, and the impact odds will suddenly fall to zero. The alternative, of course, is that they'll rise close to 100 percent.

Ars: What are we learning about the asteroid's destructive potential?

Andrews: The damage it could cause would be localized to a roughly city-sized area, so if it hits the middle of the ocean or a vast desert, nothing would happen. But it could trash a city, or completely destroy much of one, with a direct hit.

The key factor here (if you had to pick one) is the asteroid’s mass. Each time the asteroid gets twice as long (presuming it’s roughly spherical), it brings with it 8 times more kinetic energy. So if the asteroid is on the smaller end of the estimated size range—40 meters—then it will be as if a small nuclear bomb exploded in the sky. At that size, unless it’s very iron-rich, it wouldn’t survive its atmospheric plunge, so it would explode in mid-air. There would be modest-to-severe structural damage right below the blast, and minor to moderate structural damage over tens of miles. A 90-meter asteroid would, whether it makes it to the ground or not, be more than 10x more energetic; a large nuclear weapon blast, then. A large city would be severely damaged, and the area below the blast would be annihilated.

Ars: Do we have any idea where the asteroid might strike on Earth?

Andrews: The "risk corridor" is currently spread over parts of the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, parts of Africa, the Arabian Sea and South Asia. Additional observations will ultimately narrow this down, if an impact remains possible.

Ars: What key observations are we still waiting for that might clarify the threat?

Andrews: Most telescopes will lose sight of this "small" asteroid in the coming weeks. But the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to track it until May. For the first time, it’s been authorized for planetary defense purposes, largely because its infrared eye allows it to track the asteroid further out than optical light telescopes. JWST will not only improve our understanding of its orbit, but also constrain its size. First observations should appear by the end of March.

JWST may rule out an impact in 2032. But there's a chance we may be stuck with a few-percentage impact probability until 2028, when the asteroid makes its next Earth flyby. Bit awkward, if so.

Ars: NASA's DART mission successfully shifted an asteroid's orbit in 2022. Could this technology be used?

Andrews: Not necessarily. DART—a type of spacecraft called a kinetic impactor—was a great success. But it still only changed Dimorphos' orbit by a small amount. Ideally, you want many years of advance notice to deflect an asteroid with something like DART to ensure the asteroid has moved out of Earth’s way. I've often been told that at least 10 years prior to impact is best if you want to be sure to deflect a city killing-size asteroid. That’s not to say deflection is impossible; it just becomes trickier to pull off. You can’t just hit it with a colossal spacecraft, because you may fragment it into several still-dangerously sized pieces. Hit it too softly, and it will still hit Earth, but somewhere that wasn’t originally going to be hit. You have to be super careful here.

Some rather clever scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (which has a superb planetary defense contingent) worked out that, for a 90-meter asteroid, you need 10 years to confidently deflect it with a kinetic impactor to prevent an Earth impact. So, to deflect 2024 YR4, if it’s 90 meters long and we have just a few years of time, we’d probably need a bigger impactor spacecraft (but don’t break it!)—or we’d need several kinetic impactors to deflect it (but each has to work perfectly).

Eight years until impact is a little tight. It’s not impossible that the choice would be made to use a nuclear weapon to deflect it; this could be very awkward geopolitically, but a nuke would impart a bigger deflection than an equivalent DART-like spacecraft. Or, maybe, they’d opt to try and vaporize the asteroid with something like a 1 megaton nuke, which LLNL says would work with an asteroid this size.

Ars: So it's kind of late in the game to be planning an impact mission?

Andrews: This isn’t an ideal situation. And humanity has never tried to stop an asteroid impact for real. I imagine that if 2024 YR4 does become an agreed-upon emergency, the DART team (JHUAPL + NASA, mostly) would join forces with SpaceX (and other space agencies, particularly ESA but probably others) to quickly build the right mass kinetic impactor (or impactors) and get ready for a deflection attempt close to 2028, when the asteroid makes its next Earth flyby. But yeah, eight years is not too much time.

A deflection could work! But it won’t be as simple as just hitting the asteroid really hard in 2028.

Ars: How important is NASA to planetary defense?

Andrews: Planetary defense is an international security concern. But right now, NASA (and America, by extension) is the vanguard. Its planetary defenders are the watchers on the wall, the people most responsible for not just finding these potentially hazardous asteroids before they find us, but also those most capable of developing and deploying tech to prevent any impacts. America is the only nation with (for now!) a well-funded near-Earth object hunting program, and is the only nation to have tested out a planetary defense technique. It’s a movie cliché that America is the only nation capable of saving the world from cosmic threats. But, for the time being—even with amazing planetary defense mission contributions from ESA and JAXA—that cliché remains absolutely true.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Astronomers have detected over 5,800 confirmed exoplanets. One extreme class is ultra-hot Jupiters, of particular interest because they can provide a unique window into planetary atmospheric dynamics. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have mapped the 3D structure of the layered atmosphere of one such ultra-hot Jupiter-size exoplanet, revealing powerful winds that create intricate weather patterns across that atmosphere. A companion paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics reported on the unexpected identification of titanium in the exoplanet's atmosphere as well.

As previously reported, thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.

Like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), Kepler identifies planets using the transit method. This works for systems in which the planets orbit in a plane that takes them between their host star and Earth. As this occurs, the planet blocks a small fraction of the starlight that we see from Earth (or nearby orbits). If these dips in light occur with regularity, they're diagnostic of something orbiting the star.

The frequency of the dips in the star's light tells us how long an orbit takes, which tells us how far the planet is from its host star. That, combined with the host star's brightness, tells us how much incoming light the planet receives, which will influence its temperature. (The range of distances at which temperatures are consistent with liquid water is called the habitable zone.) And we can use that, along with how much light is being blocked, to figure out how big the planet is.

Last year, astronomers discovered an unusual Earth-size exoplanet they believe has a hemisphere of molten lava, with its other hemisphere tidally locked in perpetual darkness. And at about the same time, a different group discovered a rare small, cold exoplanet with a massive outer companion 100 times the mass of Jupiter.

Meet Tylos

The different layers of the atmosphere on WASP-121b.

This latest research relied on observational data collected by the European South Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope, specifically, a spectroscopic instrument called ESPRESSO that can process light collected from the four largest VLT telescope units into one signal. The target exoplanet, WASP-121b—aka Tylos—is located in the Puppis constellation about 900 light-years from Earth. One year on Tylos is equivalent to just 30 hours on Earth, thanks to the exoplanet's close proximity to its host star. Since one side is always facing the star, it is always scorching, while the exoplanet's other side is significantly colder.

Those extreme temperature contrasts make it challenging to figure out how energy is distributed in the atmospheric system, and mapping out the 3D structure can help, particularly with determining the vertical circulation patterns that are not easily replicated in our current crop of global circulation models, per the authors. For their analysis, they combined archival ESPRESSO data collected on November 30, 2018, with new data collected on September 23, 2023. They focused on three distinct chemical signatures to probe the deep atmosphere (iron), mid-atmosphere (sodium), and shallow atmosphere (hydrogen).

“What we found was surprising: A jet stream rotates material around the planet’s equator, while a separate flow at lower levels of the atmosphere moves gas from the hot side to the cooler side. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet,” said Julia Victoria Seidel of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, as well as the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France. "This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works—not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction."

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08664-1

Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2025. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202452405  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

If humanity is ever to spread out into the Solar System, we're going to need to find a way to put fuel into rockets somewhere other than the cozy confines of a launchpad on Earth. One option for that is in low-Earth orbit, which has the advantage of being located very close to said launch pads. But it has the considerable disadvantage of requiring a lot of energy to escape Earth's gravity—it takes a lot of fuel to put substantially less fuel into orbit.

One alternative is to produce fuel on the Moon. We know there is hydrogen and oxygen present, and the Moon's gravity is far easier to overcome, meaning more of what we produce there can be used to send things deeper into the Solar System. But there is a tradeoff: any fuel production infrastructure will likely need to be built on Earth and sent to the Moon.

How much infrastructure is that going to involve? A study released today by PNAS evaluates the energy costs of producing oxygen on the Moon, and finds that they're substantial: about 24 kWh per kilogram. This doesn't sound bad until you start considering how many kilograms we're going to eventually need.

Free the oxygen!

The math that makes refueling from the Moon appealing is pretty simple. "As a rule of thumb," write the authors of the new study on the topic, "rockets launched from Earth destined for [Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1] must burn ~25 kg of propellant to transport one kg of payload, whereas rockets launched from the Moon to [Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1] would burn only ~four kg of propellant to transport one kg of payload." Departing from the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point for locations deeper into the Solar System also requires less energy than leaving low-Earth orbit, meaning the fuel we get there is ultimately more useful, at least from an exploration perspective.

But, of course, you need to make the fuel there in the first place. The obvious choice for that is water, which can be split to produce hydrogen and oxygen. We know there is water on the Moon, but we don't yet know how much, and whether it's concentrated into large deposits. Given that uncertainty, people have also looked at other materials that we know are present in abundance on the Moon's surface.

And there's probably nothing more abundant on that surface than regolith, the dust left over from constant tiny impacts that have, over time, eroded lunar rocks. The regolith is composed of a variety of minerals, many of which contain oxygen, typically the heavier component of rocket fuel. And a variety of people have figured out the chemistry involved in separating oxygen from these minerals on the scale needed for rocket fuel production.

But knowing the chemistry is different from knowing what sort of infrastructure is needed to get that chemistry done at a meaningful scale. To get a sense of this, the researchers decided to focus on isolating oxygen from a mineral called ilmenite, or FeTiO₃. It's not the easiest way to get oxygen—iron oxides win out there—but it's well understood. Someone actually patented oxygen production from ilmenite back in the 1970s, and two hardware prototypes have been developed, one of which may be sent to the Moon on a future NASA mission.

The researchers propose a system that would harvest regolith, partly purify the ilmenite, then combine it with hydrogen at high temperatures, which would strip the oxygen out as water, leaving behind purified iron and titanium (both of which may be useful to have). The resulting water would then be split to feed the hydrogen back into the system, while the oxygen can be sent off for use in rockets.

(This wouldn't solve the issue of what that oxygen will ultimately oxidize to power a rocket. But oxygen is typically the heavier component of rocket fuel combinations—typically about 80 percent of the mass—and so the bigger challenge to get to a fuel depot.)

Obviously, this process will require a lot of infrastructure, like harvesters, separators, high-temperature reaction chambers, and more. But the researchers focus on a single element: how much power will it suck down?

More power!

To get their numbers, the researchers made a few simplifying assumptions. These include assuming that it's possible to purify ilmenite from raw regolith and that it will be present in particles small enough that about half the material present will participate in chemical reactions. They ignored both the potential to get even more oxygen from the iron and titanium oxides present, as well as the potential for contamination from problematic materials like hydrogen sulfide or hydrochloric acid.

The team found that almost all of the energy is consumed at three steps in the process: the high-temperature hydrogen reaction that produces water (55 percent), splitting the water afterwards (38 percent), and converting the resulting oxygen to its liquid form (five percent). The typical total usage, depending on factors like the concentration of ilmenite in the regolith, worked out to be about 24 kW-hr for each kilogram of liquid oxygen.

Obviously, the numbers are sensitive to how efficiently you can do things like heat the reaction mix. (It might be possible to do this heating with concentrated solar, avoiding the use of electricity for this entirely, but the authors didn't analyze that.) But it was also sensitive to less obvious efficiencies. For example, a better separation of the ilmenite from the rest of the regolith means you're using less energy to heat contaminants. So, while the energetic cost of that separation is small, it pays off to do it effectively.

Based on orbital observations, the researchers map out the areas where ilmenite is present at high enough concentrations for this approach to make sense. These include some of the mares on the near side of the Moon, so they're easy to get to.

A map of the lunar surface, with areas with high ilmenite concentrations shown in blue.

Credit: Leger, et. al.

On its own, 24 kWh doesn't seem like a lot of power. The problem is that we will need a lot of kilograms. The researchers estimate that getting an empty SpaceX Starship from the lunar surface to the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point takes 80 tonnes of liquid oxygen. And a fully fueled starship can hold over 500 tonnes of liquid oxygen.

We can compare that to something like the solar array on the International Space Station, which has a capacity of about 100 kW. That means it could power the production of about four kilograms of oxygen an hour. At that rate, it'll take a bit over 10 days to produce a tonne, and a bit more than two years to get enough oxygen to get an empty Starship to the Lagrange Point—assuming 24-7 production. Being on the near side, they will only produce for half the time, given the lunar day.

Obviously, we can build larger arrays than that, but it boosts the amount of material that needs to be sent to the Moon from Earth. It may potentially make more sense to use nuclear power. While that would likely involve more infrastructure than solar arrays, it would allow the facilities to run around the clock, thus getting more production from everything else we've shipped from Earth.

This paper isn't meant to be the final word on the possibilities for lunar-based refueling; it's simply an early attempt to put hard numbers on what ultimately might be the best way to explore our Solar System. Still, it provides some perspective on just how much effort we'll need to make before that sort of exploration becomes possible.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2306146122 (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Like it or not, generative AI is carving out its place in the world. And some Reddit users are definitely in the “don't like it" category. While some subreddits openly welcome AI-generated images, videos, and text, others have responded to the growing trend by banning most or all posts made with the technology.

To better understand the reasoning and obstacles associated with these bans, Ars Technica spoke with moderators of subreddits that totally or partially ban generative AI. Almost all these volunteers described moderating against generative AI as a time-consuming challenge they expect to get more difficult as time goes on. And most are hoping that Reddit will release a tool to help their efforts.

It's hard to know how much AI-generated content is actually on Reddit, and getting an estimate would be a large undertaking. Image library Freepik has analyzed the use of AI-generated content on social media but leaves Reddit out of its research because “it would take loads of time to manually comb through thousands of threads within the platform,” spokesperson Bella Valentini told me. For its part, Reddit doesn't publicly disclose how many Reddit posts involve generative AI use.

To be clear, we're not suggesting that Reddit has a large problem with generative AI use. By now, many subreddits seem to have agreed on their approach to AI-generated posts, and generative AI has not superseded the real, human voices that have made Reddit popular.

Still, mods largely agree that generative AI will likely get more popular on Reddit over the next few years, making generative AI modding increasingly important to both moderators and general users. Generative AI's rising popularity has also had implications for Reddit the company, which in 2024 started licensing Reddit posts to train the large language models (LLMs) powering generative AI.

(Note: All the moderators I spoke with for this story requested that I use their Reddit usernames instead of their real names due to privacy concerns.)

No generative AI allowed

When it comes to anti-generative AI rules, numerous subreddits have zero-tolerance policies, while others permit posts that use generative AI if it's combined with human elements or is executed very well. These rules task mods with identifying posts using generative AI and determining if they fit the criteria to be permitted on the subreddit.

Many subreddits have rules against posts made with generative AI because their mod teams or members consider such posts “low effort” or believe AI is counterintuitive to the subreddit’s mission of providing real human expertise and creations.

"At a basic level, generative AI removes the human element from the Internet; if we allowed it, then it would undermine the very point of r/AskHistorians, which is engagement with experts," the mods of r/AskHistorians told me in a collective statement.

The subreddit's goal is to provide historical information, and its mods think generative AI could make information shared on the subreddit less accurate. "[Generative AI] is likely to hallucinate facts, generate non-existent references, or otherwise provide misleading content," the mods said. "Someone getting answers from an LLM can’t respond to follow-ups because they aren’t an expert. We have built a reputation as a reliable source of historical information, and the use of [generative AI], especially without oversight, puts that at risk."

Similarly, Halaku, a mod of r/wheeloftime, told me that the subreddit's mods banned generative AI because “we focus on genuine discussion.” Halaku believes AI content can’t facilitate “organic, genuine discussion” and “can drown out actual artwork being done by actual artists.”

The r/lego subreddit banned AI-generated art because it caused confusion in online fan communities and retail stores selling Lego products, r/lego mod Mescad said. “People would see AI-generated art that looked like Lego on (i)nstagram or [F]acebook and then go into the store to ask to buy it,” they explained. “We decided that our community's dedication to authentic Lego products doesn't include AI-generated art.”

Not all of Reddit is against generative AI, of course. Subreddits dedicated to the technology exist, and some general subreddits permit the use of generative AI in some or all forms.

"When it comes to bans, I would rather focus on hate speech, Nazi salutes, and things that actually harm the subreddits," said 3rdusernameiveused, who moderates r/consoom and r/TeamBuilder25, which don't ban generative AI. "AI art does not do that... If I was going to ban [something] for 'moral' reasons, it probably won’t be AI art."

“Overwhelmingly low-effort slop”

Some generative AI bans are reflective of concerns that people are not being properly compensated for the content they create, which is then fed into LLM training.

Mod Mathgeek007 told me that r/DeadlockTheGame bans generative AI because its members consider it “a form of uncredited theft," adding:

You aren't allowed to sell/advertise the workers of others, and AI in a sense is using patterns derived from the work of others to create mockeries. I'd personally have less of an issue with it if the artists involved were credited and compensated—and there are some niche AI tools that do this.

Other moderators simply think generative AI reduces the quality of a subreddit's content.

"It often just doesn't look good... the art can often look subpar," Mathgeek007 said.

Similarly, r/videos bans most AI-generated content because, according to its announcement, the videos are “annoying” and “just bad video” 99 percent of the time. In an online interview, r/videos mod Abrownn told me:

It's overwhelmingly low-effort slop thrown together simply for views/ad revenue. The creators rarely care enough to put real effort into post-generation [or] editing of the content [and] rarely have coherent narratives [in] the videos, etc. It seems like they just throw the generated content into a video, export it, and call it a day.

An r/fakemon mod told me, “I can’t think of anything more low-effort in terms of art creation than just typing words and having it generated for you."

Some moderators say generative AI helps people spam unwanted content on a subreddit, including posts that are irrelevant to the subreddit and posts that attack users.

"[Generative AI] content is almost entirely posted for purely self promotional/monetary reasons, and we as mods on Reddit are constantly dealing with abusive users just spamming their content without regard for the rules," Abrownn said.

A moderator of the r/wallpaper subreddit, which permits generative AI, disagrees. The mod told me that generative AI "provides new routes for novel content" in the subreddit and questioned concerns about generative AI stealing from human artists or offering lower-quality work, saying those problems aren't unique to generative AI:

Even in our community, we observe human-generated content that is subjectively low quality (poor camera/[P]hotoshopping skills, low-resolution source material, intentional "shitposting"). It can be argued that AI-generated content amplifies this behavior, but our experience (which we haven't quantified) is that the rate of such behavior (whether human-generated or AI-generated content) has not changed much within our own community.

 

But we're not a very active community—[about] 13 posts per day ... so it very well could be a "frog in boiling water" situation.

Generative AI “wastes our time”

Many mods are confident in their ability to effectively identify posts that use generative AI. A bigger problem is how much time it takes to identify these posts and remove them.

The r/AskHistorians mods, for example, noted that all bans on the subreddit (including bans unrelated to AI) have “an appeals process,” and “making these assessments and reviewing AI appeals means we’re spending a considerable amount of time on something we didn’t have to worry about a few years ago.”

They added:

Frankly, the biggest challenge with [generative AI] usage is that it wastes our time. The time spent evaluating responses for AI use, responding to AI evangelists who try to flood our subreddit with inaccurate slop and then argue with us in modmail, [direct messages that message a subreddits’ mod team], and discussing edge cases could better be spent on other subreddit projects, like our podcast, newsletter, and AMAs, … providing feedback to users, or moderating input from users who intend to positively contribute to the community.

Several other mods I spoke with agree. Mathgeek007, for example, named "fighting AI bros" as a common obstacle. And for r/wheeloftime moderator Halaku, the biggest challenge in moderating against generative AI is “a generational one.”

“Some of the current generation don't have a problem with it being AI because content is content, and [they think] we're being elitist by arguing otherwise, and they want to argue about it,” they said.

A couple of mods noted that it’s less time-consuming to moderate subreddits that ban generative AI than it is to moderate those that allow posts using generative AI, depending on the context.

“On subreddits where we allowed AI, I often take a bit longer time to actually go into each post where I feel like... it’s been AI-generated to actually look at it and make a decision,” explained N3DSdude, a mod of several subreddits with rules against generative AI, including r/DeadlockTheGame.

MyarinTime, a moderator for r/lewdgames, which allows generative AI images, highlighted the challenges of identifying human-prompted generative AI content versus AI-generated content prompted by a bot:

When the AI bomb started, most of those bots started using AI content to work around our filters. Most of those bots started showing some random AI render, so it looks like you're actually talking about a game when you're not. There's no way to know when those posts are legit games unless [you check] them one by one. I honestly believe it would be easier if we kick any post with [AI-]generated image... instead of checking if a button was pressed by a human or not.

Mods expect things to get worse

Most mods told me it’s pretty easy for them to detect posts made with generative AI, pointing to the distinct tone and favored phrases of AI-generated text. A few said that AI-generated video is harder to spot but still detectable. But as generative AI gets more advanced, moderators are expecting their work to get harder.

In a joint statement, r/dune mods Blue_Three and Herbalhippie said, “AI used to have a problem making hands—i.e., too many fingers, etc.—but as time goes on, this is less and less of an issue.”

R/videos' Abrownn also wonders how easy it will be to detect AI-generated Reddit content “as AI tools advance and content becomes more lifelike.”

Mathgeek007 added:

AI is becoming tougher to spot and is being propagated at a larger rate. When AI style becomes normalized, it becomes tougher to fight. I expect generative AI to get significantly worse—until it becomes indistinguishable from ordinary art.

Moderators currently use various methods to fight generative AI, but they're not perfect. r/AskHistorians mods, for example, use “AI detectors, which are unreliable, problematic, and sometimes require paid subscriptions, as well as our own ability to detect AI through experience and expertise,” while N3DSdude pointed to tools like Quid and GPTZero.

To manage current and future work around blocking generative AI, most of the mods I spoke with said they’d like Reddit to release a proprietary tool to help them.

“I've yet to see a reliable tool that can detect AI-generated video content,” Aabrown said. “Even if we did have such a tool, we'd be putting hundreds of hours of content through the tool daily, which would get rather expensive rather quickly. And we're unpaid volunteer moderators, so we will be outgunned shortly when it comes to detecting this type of content at scale. We can only hope that Reddit will offer us a tool at some point in the near future that can help deal with this issue.”

A Reddit spokesperson told me that the company is evaluating what such a tool could look like. But Reddit doesn’t have a rule banning generative AI overall, and the spokesperson said the company doesn't want to release a tool that would hinder expression or creativity.

For now, Reddit seems content to rely on moderators to remove AI-generated content when appropriate. Reddit's spokesperson added:

Our moderation approach helps ensure that content on Reddit is curated by real humans. Moderators are quick to remove content that doesn't follow community rules, including harmful or irrelevant AI-generated content—we don't see this changing in the near future.

Making a generative AI Reddit tool wouldn’t be easy

Reddit is handling the evolving concerns around generative AI as it has handled other content issues, including by leveraging AI and machine learning tools. Reddit's spokesperson said that this includes testing tools that can identify AI-generated media, such as images of politicians.

But making a proprietary tool that allows moderators to detect AI-generated posts won't be easy, if it happens at all. The current tools for detecting generative AI are limited in their capabilities, and as generative AI advances, Reddit would need to provide tools that are more advanced than the AI-detecting tools that are currently available.

That would require a good deal of technical resources and would also likely present notable economic challenges for the social media platform, which only became profitable last year. And as noted by r/videos moderator Abrownn, tools for detecting AI-generated video still have a long way to go, making a Reddit-specific system especially challenging to create.

But even with a hypothetical Reddit tool, moderators would still have their work cut out for them. And because Reddit's popularity is largely due to its content from real humans, that work is important.

Since Reddit's inception, that has meant relying on moderators, which Reddit has said it intends to keep doing. As r/dune mods Blue_Three and herbalhippie put it, it’s in Reddit’s “best interest that much/most content remains organic in nature." After all, Reddit's profitability has a lot to do with how much AI companies are willing to pay to access Reddit data. That value would likely decline if Reddit posts became largely AI-generated themselves.

But providing the technology to ensure that generative AI isn't abused on Reddit would be a large challege. For now, volunteer laborers will continue to bear the brunt of generative AI moderation.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of Reddit.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Quantum computing has enormous potential, but it faces a scalability problem. For such a machine to be useful in real terms, multiple quantum processors need to be assembled in a single location. This increases a processor's power but also its size, making it less practical and more delicate. Scientists are working on a solution that sounds like something out of a science fiction series: connecting remote cores to each other through “quantum teleportation” to create even more powerful machines.

The path to such information transmission is beginning to appear. Recently, a team of scientists at the University of Oxford was able to send the first quantum algorithm wirelessly between two separate quantum processors. The two small cores took advantage of their unique nature, pooled their capabilities, and formed a superior computer to solve problems that neither of them could solve independently.

The team, led by graduate student Dougal Main, managed to get distant systems to interact with each other and share logic gates using quantum entanglement. Thanks to this quantum mechanical phenomenon, a pair of linked particles, even at a distance, can share the same state and therefore transmit the same information. If one changes state, the other instantly reflects it.

The Oxford scientists used quantum entanglement to almost instantaneously send basic information between computers. When data travels long distances under this principle, "quantum teleportation" is said to have occurred. This is not to be confused with the conventional idea of teleportation, which involves a hypothetical immediate exchange of matter in space. In the experiment, the light particles remained in the same place, but entanglement allowed the computers to "see" each other's information and work in parallel.

According to the team's research paper published in Nature, the quantum teleportation of an algorithm was possible with photons and with modules separated by two meters. The fidelity of the information had a rate of 86 percent. The result of this distributed quantum computing architecture is good enough to be a viable path to large-scale technology and the quantum internet.

Demonstrations of quantum teleportation in computational contexts have previously emerged, but have been limited to the transfer of states between systems. The Oxford University trial is distinctive because it used teleportation to create interactions between distant nuclei. "This breakthrough allows us to effectively ‘connect’ different quantum processors into a single, fully connected quantum computer," Main recounted.

If distributed quantum computing technology continues to develop, the era of giant quantum machines may be behind us. The problem of scalability could potentially be solved with more machines operating together through quantum teleportation. For now, a basic processor can handle 50 qubits, a unit of quantum information. Some scientists estimate that a machine with the capacity to process thousands or millions of qubits will be needed to solve complex problems.

Even without entanglement, quantum machines are already powerful enough to solve seemingly impossible problems. Willow, Google's quantum chip, recently solved a benchmark task called random circuit sampling in five minutes; it would have taken up to 10 quadrillion years for a conventional supercomputer to get the same result.

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

The world's best chocolate makers often ask that you eat their bonbons within mere days of when they were produced. But does chocolate go bad? The answer is complicated, but one thing is clear. Once you've procured some of the finest chocolate that money can buy (see WIRED's guide to the best delivery chocolate boxes in the country), you'll want to preserve that deliciousness.

“A bonbon is a fresh product, with filling and some degree of moisture. The flavors will lose potency over time,” said Estelle Tracy, a chocolate sommelier in the Philadelphia area who has hosted hundreds of chocolate tastings. “If there was one thing I wish people knew, it's that you should look at a bonbon the way you look at cake. You don't buy cake to eat it in three weeks!”

The best artisan chocolate makers speed delivery of their bonbons to your doorstep, often within days of being made. And yet if you've bought that chocolate as a gift, whether for Valentine's Day or a birthday, you might not be able to eat it right away.

I consulted internationally renowned chocolatier and chocolate educator Melissa Coppel, and asked her advice on the best ways to keep your chocolate flavorful and fresh. I also asked Tracy, the sommelier, how to assess whether the chocolate in your cupboard is past its prime.

Treat Your Chocolate Well, It’ll Return the Favor

First off, some assurances. A chocolate bar generally won't “go bad” the way fruit goes bad.

“Generally speaking, chocolate is a very shelf-stable product,” Coppel told me, before digging into the food science. Bacteria and yeast and all the nasty little things that make food go bad need moisture to be happy. Food scientists rank food's likelihood of spoiling by checking its “water activity”—essentially the humidity of a piece of food— on a scale from 0 to 1.

Anything below 0.60 is considered a durable dry good that's unlikely to develop unwanted passengers. A chocolate bar rings in at a quite dry 0.30 to 0.40, the same range as cough drops and saltine crackers. A dark chocolate bar will keep for months and months. So if you buy bean-to-bar chocolate from WIRED's top pure chocolate pick, Dandelion, you generally won't have to look over your shoulder.

But that doesn't mean chocolate bars aren't fragile. Over time, temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit, or an ambient humidity above 50 percent, will begin to separate out the fats and sugars in chocolate, wrecking its texture and giving it not-so-lovely white speckles and streaks.

To avoid this, most chocolatiers recommend storing their chocolate at temperatures between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Monitor humidity, and store your chocolate airtight. As with other foods that contain fat—think cheese—chocolate loves to pick up stray odors from your fridge or basement if you let it. Don't let it.

The Fragility of Bonbons

But if chocolate itself keeps quite well, a high-end bonbon is far less predictable. The fillings may contain more moisture and keep less well than the chocolate itself.

A “well-formulated filling” of ganache or caramel or marzipan might allow a bonbon to last anywhere from a month to most of a year, according to Coppel, depending on its moisture content. One shouldn't worry a bonbon from a good chocolatier will spoil or go bad anytime soon unless you store your chocolate in a hot and humid place without air-conditioning. But bonbons will always taste better fresh.

Most artisan chocolatiers recommend eating within a week or two of receipt, in fact. Many high-end chocolatiers use fresh fruit or nuts, and spurn preservatives that might compromise flavor or texture. Some ship only overnight and beg you to eat their bonbons within a few days of receipt.

This is normal: Chocolatiers want you to try their chocolate at its best, so you will say nice things about it and then buy more. Coppel advises that you pay close attention to the stated shelf life of each bonbon you buy.

“I know that when we splurge on chocolate, we want it to be as fresh as possible. The last thing we want is to leave a bonbon box sitting somewhere in our house for two months before we can share it with our loved ones,” notes Coppel. She recommends storing her own bonbons for no more than 10 days in a cool, dry place between 64 and 70 degrees. New York's Kreuther, whose pie bonbons were among our favorite fruit-filled confections, allows for a few week's grace at 68 degrees.

If you're keeping your bonbons much more than a week before eating, this is when we start talking about fridges and freezers.

Nothing That Isn’t Cold Can Stay

“I rarely advise my customers to refrigerate or freeze their bonbons, but it’s not because it can’t be done. It’s more that it requires a few steps to make sure the bonbons are still as beautiful as they were when I shipped them,” Coppel notes.

If you know you're keeping your bonbons for longer than a week, Coppel says, a fridge or wine cooler is your best bet for keeping chocolate flavors fresh and potent. Most sources recommend wrapping bonbons tightly in plastic—or in an airtight container—before storing in a refrigerator, to avoid your chocolates picking up funny flavors from whatever else is in the fridge.

“If you have a wine cooler, you’re in luck. That’s the best appliance you can use to store bonbons. Place your bonbons there at 16°C or 60°F (if you want to be even more precise, the cooler should have a relative humidity between 60-70%),” according to written instructions sent by Coppel.

Failing wine coolers, a more standard fridge will do. Coppel cautions that after you keep your chocolates in the fridge, you should take them out and let them reach room temperature again before eating.

“Otherwise, the fillings will be hard, and the flavors won’t come through as much as they should, because cold inhibits flavor perception,” Coppel remarks.

How to Freeze and Travel With Chocolate

Let's say you're sending chocolate long distances, or you otherwise need to keep your bonbons longer than two weeks? You can freeze your chocolate for up to a year. “Yes, you can do this,” Coppel notes, “and all the big chocolate productions do.”

Here are Coppel's instructions for freezing at home, without subjecting your chocolate to rapid shifts in temperature:

• Wrap your chocolate box very well in plastic and place it in the freezer.
• When you’re ready to take the bonbons out, don’t unwrap or open the box right away, as condensation might build up and ruin the gloss of your bonbons.
• The temperature of the box needs to be brought up very gently, so transfer them (still wrapped in plastic) from the freezer to the fridge for 24 hours.
• The next day, take them out of the fridge and let them come to room temperature (one hour before eating them, more or less).
• Now you can remove the plastic and open the box. Your bonbons should be perfect.

If you plan to travel with chocolate, or mail it long distances, Coppel also recommends freezing it first. Here are her instructions for a pleasant, chocolate-filled trip.

• Wrap your chocolate box very well in plastic and place it in the freezer.
• Place the wrapped, frozen box in a bag, and insert some ice packs to keep it frozen.
• Take them out and let them come at room temperature.
• Unwrap them and eat.

Much the same process goes for mailing chocolate, but in this case, your recipient will be the one who needs to gently let the chocolate come back to room temperature before eating. Coppel notes that in place of wrapping a chocolate box in plastic, one can also vacuum seal chocolate in a sous-vide bag, as long as you don't wrap it too tightly.

How to Know When Your Chocolate Is No Longer Good

But sometimes, things go wrong. Not every batch of chocolate is perfect. And sometimes you've simply waited too long. I've bitten into a moldy truffle before, and I don't recommend it.

Chocolate sommelier Estelle Tracy, who's held hundreds of chocolate tastings, has a few tips for knowing when your chocolate arrived in less than perfect condition—or when you've stored it wrong or too long.

Examine the surface of the chocolate: Is there mottling? Specks? Streaks? Does the decoration on the chocolate look battered or faded? Are the chocolates uneven? In particular, if the outer shell of a bonbon separates or crumbles off of the ganache or other filling? It's not a great sign. It often denotes an old or badly tempered batch.

Distrust whiteness: White mottling on the surface of chocolate usually denotes “sugar bloom,” which means the chocolate has been subjected to high moisture and the sugar has risen to the surface. Aside from being ugly, your chocolate will be grainy and crumbly and a little sad.

If you see gray-white streaking, it may denote “fat bloom,” meaning that the chocolate's fats have separated from the cocoa butter inside the chocolate. Less-than-fresh nuts within the chocolate may also release their fats and cause the same visual effect. The result of fat bloom, generally, is that the rest of the chocolate will have a gritty texture and be less smooth and pleasant. In the worst case, fats that have separated out from crunchy nuts or seeds might taste a little rancid. It probably won't hurt you, but it isn't great.

Look especially on the bottom of the bonbon: The bottoms of truffles can hide their skeletons. Watch for separation between shell and filling, or an uneven surface or coloration at the bottom of a bonbon. This can be a sign of moisture or just bad tempering. “I always look at the bottom, because that's where it gets moldy,” said DC Chocolate Society founder Barb Genuario, during a recent tasting panel where we, alas, got a bit of musty mold in a truffle. When in doubt, cut into the bonbon with a knife and look at its interior.

Use your nose: The nose often knows. Ingredients in old bonbons can degrade over time, especially agricultural ingredients such as fruit and nuts. Chocolate can also pick up odd flavors from the air and become unpleasant. If a bonbon smells musty, or like sour milk? That's probably how it will taste. Act accordingly.

Order fresh, and eat fresh: But the best way to ensure the best chocolate flavor and texture is to plan appropriately. Buy chocolate right before you eat it. And eat it when it still tastes lovely.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

James Howells, the IT pro who lost about 8,000 bitcoins in a landfill more than a decade ago, thinks he has one last chance to dig up his buried treasure before it's lost forever.

He wants to buy the landfill.

In January, Howells lost a court battle with Newport City Council in Wales, which many expected would be his last shot at excavating the dump. But soon after, the Newport council revealed that it would be closing the landfill, arousing in Howells a new hope that the bitcoins—today worth nearly $800 million—might still be found.

Howells told The New York Times that he has offered to buy the landfill. If approved, he would remove every piece of trash—clearing out tens of thousands of tons and potentially sparing the city the cost of cleaning the site. Then, he would use "a scanner with AI-trained detection technology" and a magnetic belt to surface his long-lost hard drive containing the only copy of the 51-character private key he needs to get back into his cryptocurrency wallets, he told The Times.

But the Newport council appears unlikely to accept Howells' offer. The city has already secured permission to develop a solar farm on a portion of the landfill property. That solar farm would help the city replace diesel garbage trucks with EVs, helping the city transform a site that otherwise "would not be suitable for other uses" into a meaningful effort to reduce the city's carbon footprint, the council's press release said.

"Generating our own renewable energy to use in all the authority’s refuse vehicles will not only reduce fuel costs but also help us in our drive to further improve air quality in Newport," the council said.

Howells told The Times that he envisions cleaning up the site and turning it into a park, but the council's analysis seems to suggest that wouldn't be a suitable use. Additionally, the council noted that there aren’t viable alternative sites for the solar farm, which, therefore, must be built on the landfill site or else potentially set back the city's climate goals.

If Howells can't turn the landfill into a park, he suggested that he could simply clear it out so that it can be used as a landfill again.

But the Newport council does not appear to be entertaining his offer, the same way the council seemingly easily rejected his prior offer to share his bitcoin profits if granted access to dig up the landfill. When asked about Howells' most recent offer, a council spokesperson directed The Times to a 2023 statement holding strong to the city's claims that Howells gave up ownership of the bitcoins the moment the hard drive hit the landfill and his plans for excavation would come at "a prohibitively high cost."

"We have been very clear and consistent in our responses that we cannot assist Mr. Howells in this matter," the spokesperson said. "Our position has not changed."

Howells insists his plan is “logical”

But Howells told The Guardian that it was "quite a surprise" to learn the city planned to close the landfill, reportedly in the 2025–26 financial year. This wasn't disclosed in the court battle, he said, where the council claimed that "closing the landfill" to allow his search "would have a huge detrimental impact on the people of Newport."

"I expected it would be closed in the coming years because it’s 80–90 percent full—but didn’t expect its closure so soon," Howells told The Guardian. "If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table."

It's unclear how investors would be paid should the hard drive remain lost or unsalvageable. And it also seems unlikely that Howells will succeed in this final charge to pick through 25 years of other people's trash to find his elusive treasure. Last August, the council voted unanimously to approve the solar farm development. At that time, the only concerns raised were over potential environmental impacts. And those concerns reportedly appeared to be calmed after mitigation plans were shared and a council cabinet member for climate change, Yvonne Forsey, gave her stamp of approval for the project.

The city appears determined to turn the landfill closing into an opportunity to advance the city's climate goals. Toms Hardware suggested it was poetic that Howells' seemingly impossible quest to find a needle in a haystack suddenly ending with his bitcoins buried under a solar farm reclaiming some of Earth's energy that bitcoin mining "frittered away."

But Howells seemingly has boundless energy to pursue what could be his last chance to recover his fortune off of a hard drive that his ex-partner accidentally threw away in 2013.

"This needle is very, very, very valuable—$800 million," Howells told The Times. "Which means I’m willing to search every piece of hay in order to find the needle."

However, during a 2022 informal initial public consultation period, public support for the solar farm was split. So, perhaps Howells could stir up public support for his plan by winning over those who remain "polarized" by the solar farm plan.

"This seems logical," Howells told The Times. "Seems like a better plan for me and the city," he insisted. "The landfill gets cleaned. I get to dig for my hard drive."

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Tuesday, 18 February

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 23:00 - 03:00 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 23 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. After the launch, we can expect the first stage of the rocket to perform a landing so that it can be reused. This batch of satellites is known as Starlink Group 10-12; you can use this identifier on apps like ISS Detector to see the satellites if they are ever visible in the sky.

Thursday, 20 February

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Starlink
• When: 00:00 - 04:00 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 23 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. After the launch, we can expect the first stage of the rocket to perform a landing so that it can be reused. This batch of satellites is known as Starlink Group 15-1; you can use this identifier on apps like ISS Detector to see the satellites if they are ever visible in the sky.

Friday, 21 February

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 3B/E
• When: 01:30 UTC
• Where: Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China
• Why: In this mission, China is expected to launch the Zhongxing 9C communications satellite. The satellite was built by the China Academy of Space Technology and it will be operated by China Satcom.

Recap

• On Monday, February 10 at 6:09 p.m. PT, Falcon 9 launched 23 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. You can watch this launch on SpaceX's website.
• Next up, China used a Long March 8A to launch nine Hulianwang Digui satellites for the China SatNet Guowang internet constellation into orbit. You can check out the launch over on YouTube.
• On Tuesday, February 11 at 1:53 p.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched 21 Starlink satellites, including 13 with Direct to Cell capabilities, to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. You can watch this launch on the SpaceX website.
• The mission took place on Saturday, February 15 at 1:14 a.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched 21 Starlink satellites, including 13 with Direct to Cell capabilities, to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It's also available to watch on SpaceX's website.

That's all for this week; check in next time!

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

by Timothy James M. Dimacali, Ateneo de Manila University

Transparent aluminum oxide (TAlOx), a real material despite its sci-fi name, is incredibly hard and resistant to scratches, making it perfect for protective coatings on electronics, optical sensors, and solar panels.

On the sci-fi show Star Trek, it is even used for starship windows and spacefaring aquariums.

Current methods of making TAlOx are expensive and complicated, requiring high-powered lasers, vacuum chambers, or large vats of dangerous acids.

That may change thanks to research co-authored by Filipino scientists from the Ateneo de Manila University.

Instead of immersing entire sheets of metal into acidic solutions, the researchers applied microdroplets of acidic solution onto small aluminum surfaces and applied an electric current.

Just two volts of electricity—barely more than what's found in a single AA household flashlight battery—was all that was needed to transform the metal into glass-like TAlOx.

The findings were published in the journal Langmuir.

This process, called "droplet-scale anodization," is not only simpler than existing manufacturing methods but also environmentally friendly, cutting down on chemical waste and energy use.

The technique relies on a special effect called "electrowetting," where an electric field changes the properties of a liquid droplet, allowing precise control over the anodization process.

This new approach might make TAlOx cheaper and more accessible for applications in everything from touchscreens and lenses to ultra-durable coatings for vehicles and buildings.

It could also lead to advances in miniaturized electronics, as scientists now have a way to convert metal surfaces into insulating, transparent layers on a microscopic scale.

Source

Enzymes are amazing catalysts. These proteins are made of nothing more than a handful of Earth-abundant elements, and they promote a vast array of reactions, convert chemical energy to physical motion, and act with remarkable specificity. In many cases, we have struggled to find non-enzymatic catalysts that can drive some of the same chemical reactions.

Unfortunately, there isn't an enzyme for many reactions we would sorely like to catalyze—things like digesting plastics or incorporating carbon dioxide into more complex molecules. We've had a few successes using directed evolution to create useful variations of existing enzymes, but efforts to broaden the scope of what enzymes can do have been limited.

With the advent of AI-driven protein design, however, we can now potentially design things that are unlike anything found in nature. A new paper today describes a success in making a brand-new enzyme with the potential to digest plastics. But it also shows how even a simple enzyme may have an extremely complex mechanism—and one that's hard to tackle, even with the latest AI tools.

Ending esters

The reaction the research team worked on (involving some of the same people who designed snake venom inhibitors) is the breakdown of what's called an ester bond. Ester bonds are formed by linking two chains of carbon atoms by an oxygen atom, with one of the flanking carbons being linked to a second oxygen. These can be broken apart by adding a water molecule, which leaves one carbon chain linked to an alcohol (COH) group and the other an organic acid (COOH).

These bonds show up in a variety of biomolecules, so there are many enzymes that can manipulate them. But beyond biology, they also show up in a number of plastic polymers that we use on a large scale—polyester got its name due to how many instances of the chemical bond show up in it. So there's a lot of potential value in being able to break down ester bonds. And we have plenty of examples from biology to show us how it's done.

In this case, though, biology tells us that what looks like a simple chemical reaction can be made incredibly complex. As part of a series of reactions that break the ester into two parts, one of the parts ends up being chemically linked to an amino acid in the enzyme itself. That bond must be broken again by one of the other reactions, or the enzyme becomes inactivated.

To get all these reactions to work, the enzymes all have a key amino acid that's at a critical point relative to the typical pH of living things. That means it can pull a proton from the water surrounding it and donate it to one of the amino acids in the protein. At other points, it rips a proton off an amino acid instead, losing it to one of the parts of the ester. Overall, the simple breaking of one chemical bond has at least four distinct stages and requires multiple amino acids to be positioned within the enzyme's active site with atomic precision.

It's very easy to get an AI tool to design a protein that has the right configuration to do one of these steps. Having it cycle through all four is a different matter entirely.

Need more AI

The researchers started out by using the standard tools they developed to handle protein design, including an AI tool named RFDiffusion, which uses a random seed to generate a variety of protein backgrounds. In this case, the researchers asked RFDiffusion to match the average positions of the amino acids in a family of ester-breaking enzymes. The results were fed to another neural network, which chose the amino acids such that they'd form a pocket that would hold an ester that breaks down into a fluorescent molecule so they could follow the enzyme's activity using its glow.

Of the 129 proteins designed by this software, only two of them resulted in any fluorescence. So the team decided they needed yet another AI. Called PLACER, the software was trained by taking all the known structures of proteins latched on to small molecules and randomizing some of their structure, forcing the AI to learn how to shift things back into a functional state (making it a generative AI). The hope was that PLACER would be trained to capture some of the structural details that allow enzymes to adopt more than one specific configuration over the course of the reaction they were catalyzing.

And it worked. Repeating the same process with an added PLACER screening step boosted the number of enzymes with catalytic activity by over three-fold.

Unfortunately, all of these enzymes stalled after a single reaction. It turns out they were much better at cleaving the ester, but they left one part of it chemically bonded to the enzyme. In other words, the enzymes acted like part of the reaction, not a catalyst. So the researchers started using PLACER to screen for structures that could adopt a key intermediate state of the reaction. This produced a much higher rate of reactive enzymes (18 percent of them cleaved the ester bond), and two—named "super" and "win"—could actually cycle through multiple rounds of reactions. The team had finally made an enzyme.

By adding additional rounds alternating between structure suggestions using RFDiffusion and screening using PLACER, the team saw the frequency of functional enzymes increase and eventually designed one that had an activity similar to some produced by actual living things. They also showed they could use the same process to design an esterase capable of digesting the bonds in PET, a common plastic.

If that sounds like a lot of work, it clearly was—designing enzymes, especially ones where we know of similar enzymes in living things, will remain a serious challenge. But at least much of it can be done on computers rather than requiring someone to order up the DNA that encodes the enzyme, getting bacteria to make it, and screening for activity. And despite the process involving references to known enzymes, the designed ones didn't share a lot of sequences in common with them. That suggests there should be added flexibility if we want to design one that will react with esters that living things have never come across.

I'm curious about what might happen if we design an enzyme that is essential for survival, put it in bacteria, and then allow it to evolve for a while. I suspect life could find ways of improving on even our best designs.

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adu2454  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Welcome to Edition 7.31 of the Rocket Report! The unfortunate news this week concerns layoffs. Blue Origin announced a 10 percent cut in its workforce as the company aims to get closer to breaking even. More broadly in the space industry, there is unease about what the Trump administration's cuts to NASA and other federal agencies might mean.

We don't have all the answers, but it does seem that NASA is likely to be subject to less deep cuts than some other parts of the government. We should find out sometime in March when the Trump White House submits its initial budget request. Congress, of course, will have the final say.

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

PLD Space continues to grow. The Spain-based launch company said this week that it now has more than 300 employees as it works toward an orbital launch attempt. "In this race for space supremacy, the amount of capital raised and the talent gathered have become key indicators of a company's potential for success," the company said. "While capital acts as the fuel for these ambitious initiatives, the talent behind it is the catalyst that drives them."

Working to reach orbit ... The average age of employees at PLD Space is 34, and the company is hiring 15 people a month as it works to develop the Miura 5 rocket. It's unclear which of the commercial launch startups in Europe will succeed, but PLD Space has a decent chance to be among them. With luck, the Miura 5 launch vehicle will make its debut sometime in 2026.

Will NASA launch on a Transporter mission? NASA announced this week that it has selected SpaceX to launch a small exoplanet science mission as a rideshare payload as soon as September, Space News reports. The task order to launch the Pandora mission was made through the Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare launch services contract, intended for small missions with higher acceptance of risk.

Could fly on a Falcon 9 ... Pandora is an ESPA Grande-class spacecraft, a category that includes spacecraft weighing up to 320 kilograms, and is designed to operate in a Sun-synchronous orbit. That suggests Pandora could launch on SpaceX’s Transporter series of dedicated rideshare missions that send payloads to such orbits, but neither NASA nor SpaceX disclosed specifics. The NASA announcement also did not disclose the value of the task order to SpaceX.

Stoke Space dishes on Andromeda upper stage. The Washington-based launch company has revealed the name of its Nova rocket's upper stage, Andromeda, and provided some new details about the design. Andromeda will incorporate hot staging, Stoke says, and will use fewer but larger thrusters—24 instead of 30. The upper stage is now mounted on Stoke's test stand in Moses Lake, Washington, the company said.

Hot staging, hot talk ... The new design is focused on rapid reusability, with easier access and serviceability to components of the engines and heat shield. "These changes further reduce complexity and allow the entire engine to be serviced—or even replaced—within hours or minutes. Rapid turnaround isn’t merely a goal, it’s baked into the design," the company said. The upper stage will also incorporate "hot staging" to improve the capacity to orbit. You've got to appreciate the subtle dig at SpaceX's Starship program, too: the design allows for hot staging "without the need for a heavy one-time-use interstage shield to protect Stage 1." Shots fired!

European space commissioner worried about launch. During a keynote address at the Perspectives Spatiales 2025 event in Paris, European Commissioner for Defence Industry and Space Andrius Kubilius outlined the challenging position the continent's space sector finds itself in, European Spaceflight reports. "Commercial sales are down. Exports are down. Profits are down. And this comes at a time when we need space more than ever. For our security. For our survival."

Actions, not words, needed ... Rhetorical language and bold declarations are inspiring, but when it comes to securing Europe’s place in the global space race, adopted policy and appropriated funding are where aspirations are tested, the European publication stated. Without concrete investments, streamlined regulations, and clear strategic priorities, Europe’s ambition to once again lead the global launch market is likely to amount to little.

Election set to create Starbase, the city. A Texas county on Wednesday approved holding an election sought by SpaceX that would let residents living around the company's launch and production facilities in South Texas decide whether to formally create a new city called Starbase, ABC News reports. The election was set for May 3, and votes can only be cast by residents living near the launch site, which is currently part of an unincorporated area of Cameron County located along the US-Mexico border. Approval is expected.

A busy beehive ... In December, more than 70 area residents signed a petition requesting an election to make Starbase its own municipality. Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño said the county reviewed the petition and found it met the state's requirements for the incorporation process to move forward. Kathy Lueders, Starbase's general manager, has previously said that the incorporation would streamline certain processes to build amenities in the area. More than 3,400 full-time SpaceX employees and contractors work at the site. (submitted by teb)

China taps into commercial space for station missions. China will launch a pair of low-cost space station resupply spacecraft this year on new commercial launch vehicles, Space News reports. The Haolong cargo space shuttle from the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute will launch on Landspace’s Zhuque-3. The reusable stainless steel, methane-liquid oxygen Zhuque-3 rocket is due to have its first flight in the third quarter of this year. The reusable Haolong vehicle will be 10 meters in length, around 7,000 kilograms in mass, and capable of landing on a runway.

Following a commercial trail laid by NASA ... Meanwhile, the Qingzhou cargo spacecraft from the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences will launch on the first flight of the CAS Space Kinetica-2 (Lijian-2) rocket no earlier than September. The development is analogous to NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program, diversifying China’s options for supplying the Tiangong space station. If even one of these missions takes place successfully within the next year, it would represent a major step forward for China's quasi-commercial space program. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

H3 rocket launches its fifth mission. Japan’s flagship H3 rocket successfully launched the Michibiki 6 navigation satellite early Sunday, enhancing the country’s regional GPS capabilities, Space News reports. The launch was Japan’s first of 2025 and suggests that the relatively new H3 rocket is starting to hit its stride.

Getting up to speed ... The expendable launcher's inaugural launch in March 2023, after numerous delays, suffered a second-stage engine failure, leading controllers to issue a destruct command to destroy the stage and its ALOS-3 payload. Since then, it has had a successful run of launches, most recently the Kirameki 3 communications satellite for defense purposes in November last year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin lays off 10 percent of its employees. A little less than a month after the successful debut of its New Glenn rocket, Blue Origin's workforce will be trimmed by 10 percent, Ars reports. The cuts were announced during an all-hands meeting on Thursday morning led by the rocket company's chief executive, Dave Limp. During the gathering, Limp cited business strategy as the rationale for making the cuts to a workforce of more than 10,000 people.

Growing too fast ... "We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed," Limp wrote in an email to the entire workforce after the meeting. Even before Thursday's announcement, Blue Origin sought to control costs. According to sources, the company has had a hiring freeze for the last six months. And in January, it let the majority of its contractors go. Layoffs suck—here's hoping that those let go this week find a soft landing.

Speaking of Blue, they're targeting spring for next launch. Blue Origin expects to attempt its second New Glenn launch in late spring after correcting problems that prevented the booster from landing on the first launch last month, Space News reports. Speaking at the 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference on Wednesday, Dave Limp suggested a propulsion issue caused the loss of the New Glenn booster during its landing attempt on the Jan. 16 NG-1 launch.

Understanding the issues ... "We had most of the right conditions in the engine but we weren’t able to get everything right to the engine from the tanks," Limp said. "We think we understand what the issues are." A second booster is in production. "I don’t think it’s going to delay our path to flight," Limp said of the investigation. "I think we can still fly late spring." June seems overly optimistic. One source with knowledge of the second booster's production said October might be a more reasonable timeframe for the second launch.

Boeing warns of potential SLS workforce cuts. The primary contractor for the Space Launch System rocket, Boeing, is preparing for the possibility that NASA cancels the long-running program, Ars reports. Last Friday, with less than an hour's notice, David Dutcher, Boeing's vice president and program manager for the SLS rocket, scheduled an all-hands meeting for the approximately 800 employees working on the program. The apparently scripted meeting lasted just six minutes, and Dutcher didn't take questions. Afterward, Ars learned that NASA was not informed the meeting would take place.

Waiting on the president's budget request ... During his remarks, Dutcher said Boeing's contracts for the rocket could end in March and that the company was preparing for layoffs in case the contracts with the space agency were not renewed. The aerospace company, which is the primary contractor for the rocket's large core stage, issued the notifications as part of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (or WARN) Act. The timing of Friday's hastily called meeting aligns with the anticipated release of President Trump's budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, which should signal the administration's direction on the SLS rocket.

Space Force is still waiting on Vulcan. Last October, United Launch Alliance started stacking its third Vulcan rocket on a mobile launch platform in Florida in preparation for a mission for the US Space Force by the end of the year. However, that didn't happen, Ars reports. Now, ULA is still awaiting the Space Force's formal certification of its new rocket, further pushing out delivery schedules for numerous military satellites booked to fly to orbit on the Vulcan launcher.

Falling short of ambitious goals ... In fact, ULA has started to take the rocket apart. This involves removing the rocket's Centaur upper stage, interstage adapter, and booster stage from its launch mount. Instead, ULA will now focus on launching a batch of Project Kuiper satellites for Amazon on an Atlas V rocket in the next couple of months before pivoting back to Vulcan. ULA hoped to launch as many as 20 missions in 2025, with roughly an even split between its new Vulcan rocket and the Atlas V heading for retirement. Clearly, this now won't happen.

Next three launches

Feb. 15: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-8 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06:14 UTC

Feb. 17: Falcon 9 | NROL-57 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13:18 UTC

Feb. 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 23:00 UTC

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend