With the closure of its last coal-fired power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, on September 30, 2024, the United Kingdom has taken a significant step toward its net-zero goals. It’s no small feat to end the 142-year era of coal-powered electricity in the country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution. Yet the UK's journey away from coal has been remarkably swift, with coal generation plummeting from 40 percent of the electricity mix in 2012 to just two percent in 2019, and finally to zero in 2024.

As of 2023, approximately half of UK electricity generation comes from zero-carbon sources, with natural gas serving as a transitional fuel. The UK aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent to 48 percent by 2027 and achieve net-zero by 2050. The government set a firm target to generate all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2040, emphasizing offshore wind and solar energy as the keys.

What will things look like in the intervening years, which will lead us from today to net-zero? Everyone’s scenario, even when based in serious science, boils down to a guessing game. Yet some things are more certain than others, the most important of these factors being the ones that are on solid footing beneath all of the guesswork.

Long-term goals

The closure of all UK coal-fired power stations in 2024 marked a crucial milestone in the nation's decarbonization efforts. Coal was once the dominant source of electricity generation, but its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions made it a primary target for phase-out. The closure of these facilities has significantly reduced the UK's carbon footprint and paved the way for cleaner energy sources.

With transition from coal, natural gas is set to play a crucial role as a "transition fuel." The government’s “British Energy Security Strategy” argued that gas must continue to be an important part of the energy mix. It positioned gas as the "glue" that holds the electricity system together during the transition. Even the new Starmer government recognizes that, as the country progresses towards net-zero by 2050, the country may still use about a quarter of the gas it currently consumes.

Natural gas emits approximately half as much carbon dioxide as coal when combusted, making it a cleaner alternative during the shift to renewable energy sources. In 2022, natural gas accounted for around 40 percent of the UK’s electricity generation, while coal contributed less than two percent. This transition phase is deemed by the government to be essential as the country ramps up the capacity of renewable energy sources, particularly wind and solar power, to fill gaps left by the reduction of fossil fuels. The government aims to phase out natural gas that’s not coupled with carbon capture by 2035, but in the interim, it serves as a crucial bridge, ensuring energy security while reducing overall emissions.

But its role is definitely intended to be temporary; the UK’s long-term energy goal is to reduce reliance on all fossil fuels (starting with imported supplies), pushing for a rapid transition to cleaner, domestic sources of energy.

The government’s program has five primary targets:

• Fully decarbonizing the power system (2035)
• Ending the sale of new petrol and diesel cars (2035)
• Achieving "Jet Zero" - net-zero UK aviation emissions (2050)
• Creating 30,000 hectares of new woodland per year (2025)
• Generating 50 percent of its total electricity from renewable sources by 2030

Offshore wind energy has emerged as this strategy’s key component, with significant investments being made in new wind farms. Favorable North Sea wind conditions have immense potential. In recent years, a surge in offshore wind investment has translated into several large-scale developments in advanced planning stages or now under construction.

The government has set a target to increase offshore wind capacity to 50 GW by 2030, up from around 10 GW currently. This initiative is supported by substantial financial commitments from both the public and private sectors. Recent investment announcements underscore the UK's commitment to this goal and the North Sea’s central role in it. In 2023, the government announced plans to invest $25 billion (20 billion British pounds) in carbon capture and offshore wind projects in the North Sea over the next two decades. This investment is expected to create up to 50,000 jobs and help position the UK as a leader in clean energy technologies.

This was part of investments totaling over $166 million (133 million pounds) to support the development of new offshore wind farms, which are expected to create thousands of jobs and stimulate local economies.

In 2024, further investments were announced to support the expansion of offshore wind capacity. The government committed to holding annual auctions for new offshore wind projects to meet its goal of quadrupling offshore wind capacity by 2030. These investments are part of a broader strategy to leverage the UK's expertise in offshore industries and transition the North Sea from an oil and gas hub to a clean-energy powerhouse.

Offshore wind

As the UK progresses toward its net-zero target, it faces both challenges and opportunities. While significant progress has been made in decarbonizing the power sector, the national government’s Climate Change Committee has noted that emissions reductions need to accelerate in other sectors, particularly agriculture, land use, and waste. However, with continued investment in renewable energy and supportive policies, the UK is positioning itself to become a leader in the global transition to a low-carbon economy.

Looking ahead, 2025 promises to be a landmark year for the UK’s green energy sector, with further investment announcements and projects in the pipeline.

The Crown Estate, which manages the seabed around England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, has made significant strides in facilitating new leases for offshore wind development. In 2023, the Crown Estate Scotland announced the successful auction of seabed leases for new offshore wind projects, totaling a capacity of 5 gigawatts. And in 2024, the government plans to hold its next major leasing round, which could see the deployment of an additional 7 GW of offshore wind capacity.

The UK government also approved plans for the Dogger Bank Wind Farm, which will be the world's largest offshore wind farm when completed. Located off the coast of Yorkshire, this massive project will ultimately generate enough electricity to power millions of homes. Dogger is a joint venture linking SSE Renewables, Equinor, and Vattenfall.

This is in line with the government’s broader strategy to enhance energy independence and resilience, particularly in light of the geopolitical uncertainties affecting global energy markets. The UK’s commitment to renewable energy is not merely an environmental imperative; it is also an economic opportunity. By harnessing the vast potential of the North Sea, the UK aims not only to meet its net-zero targets but also to drive economic growth and job creation in the green energy sector, ensuring a sustainable future for generations to come.

Recognizing wind’s importance, the UK government launched a 2024 consultation on plans to develop a new floating wind energy sector.

The transition to a greener economy is projected to create up to 400,000 jobs by 2030 across various sectors, including manufacturing, installation, and maintenance of renewable energy technologies.

Its growing offshore wind industry is expected to attract billions in investment, solidifying the UK’s position as a leader in the global green energy market. The government’s commitment to offshore wind development, underscored by substantial investments in 2023 and anticipated announcements for 2024, signals a robust path forward.

Moving away from gas

Still, the path ahead remains challenging, requiring a multifaceted approach that balances economic growth, energy security, and environmental sustainability.

With the transition from coal, natural gas is now poised to play the central role as a bridge fuel. While natural gas emits fewer greenhouse gases than coal, it is still a fossil fuel and contributes to carbon emissions. However, in the short term, natural gas can help maintain energy security and provide a reliable source of electricity during periods of low renewable energy output. Additionally, natural gas can be used to produce hydrogen, potentially coupled with carbon capture, enabling a clean energy carrier that can be integrated into the existing energy infrastructure.

To support the country’s core clean energy goals, the government is implementing specific initiatives, although the pace has been quite uneven. The UK Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is being strengthened to incentivize industrial decarbonization. The government has also committed to investing in key green industries alongside offshore wind: carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS), and nuclear energy.

Combined, these should allow the UK to limit its use of natural gas and capture the emissions associated with any remaining fossil fuel use.

While both countries are relying heavily on wind power, the UK’s energy-generation transformations are different from Germany’s. While both governments push to make some progress on the path to net-zero carbon emissions, their approaches and timelines differ markedly.

Energiewende, Germany's energy transition, is characterized by what some critics consider to be overly ambitious goals for achieving net greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045. Those critics think that the words don’t come close to matching the required levels of either government or private sector financial commitment. Together with the Bundestag, the chancellor has set interim targets to reduce emissions by 65 percent by 2030 and 88 percent by 2040 (both compared to 1990 levels). Germany's energy mix is heavily reliant on renewables, with a goal of sourcing 80 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030—and achieving 100 percent by 2035.

However, Germany has faced challenges due to continued reliance on coal and natural gas, which made it difficult to reach its emissions goals.

The UK, however, appears to be ahead in terms of immediate reductions in coal use and the integration of renewables into its energy mix. Germany's path is more complex, as it balances its energy transition with energy security concerns, particularly in light of how Russia’s war affects gas supplies.

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Something in the sky captured the attention of astronomers in the final days of 2024. A telescope in Chile scanning the night sky detected a faint point of light, and it didn't correspond to any of the thousands of known stars, comets, and asteroids in astronomers' all-sky catalog.

The detection on December 27 came from one of a network of telescopes managed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a NASA-funded project to provide warning of asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

Within a few days, scientists gathered enough information on the asteroid—officially designated 2024 YR4—to determine that its orbit will bring it quite close to Earth in 2028, and then again in 2032. Astronomers ruled out any chance of an impact with Earth in 2028, but there's a small chance the asteroid might hit our planet on December 22, 2032.

How small? The probability has fluctuated in recent days, but as of Thursday, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. The European Space Agency (ESA) put the probability at 1.8 percent. So as of now, NASA believes there's a 1-in-53 chance of 2024 YR4 striking Earth. That's about twice as likely as the lifetime risk of dying in a motor vehicle crash, according to the National Safety Council.

These numbers are slightly higher than the probabilities published last month, when ESA estimated a 1.2 percent chance of an impact. In a matter of weeks or months, the number will likely drop to zero.

No surprise here, according to ESA.

"It is important to remember that an asteroid’s impact probability often rises at first before quickly dropping to zero after additional observations," ESA said in a press release. The agency released a short explainer video, embedded below, showing how an asteroid's cone of uncertainty shrinks as scientists get a better idea of its trajectory.

Refining the risk

Scientists estimate that 2024 YR4 is between 130 to 300 feet (40 and 90 meters) wide, large enough to cause localized devastation near the impact site. The asteroid responsible for the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia, was probably about the same size. The meteor that broke apart in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was about 20 meters wide.

Astronomers use the Torino scale for measuring the risk of potential asteroid impacts. Asteroid 2024 YR4 is now rated at Level 3 on this scale, meaning it merits close attention from astronomers, the public, and government officials. This is the second time an asteroid has reached this level since the scale's adoption in 1999. The other case happened in 2004, when asteroid Apophis briefly reached a Level 4 rating until further observations of the asteroid eliminated any chance of an impact with the Earth in 2029.

In the unlikely event that it impacts the Earth, an asteroid the size of 2024 YR4 could cause blast damage as far as 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the location of the impact or airburst if the object breaks apart in the atmosphere, according to the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), established in the aftermath of the Chelyabinsk event.

The asteroid warning network is affiliated with the United Nations. Officials activate the IAWN when an asteroid bigger than 10 meters has a greater than 1 percent chance of striking Earth within the next 20 years. The risk of 2024 YR4 meets this threshold.

Determining the asteroid's exact size will be difficult. Scientists would need deep space radar observations, thermal infrared observations, or imagery from a spacecraft that could closely approach the asteroid, according to the IAWN. The asteroid won't come close enough to Earth for deep space radar observations until shortly before its closest approach in 2032.

Astronomers need numerous observations to precisely plot an asteroid's motion through the Solar System. Over time, these observations will reduce uncertainty and narrow the corridor the asteroid will follow as it comes near Earth.

Scientists already know a little about asteroid 2024 YR4's orbit, which follows an elliptical path around the Sun. The orbit brings the asteroid inside of Earth's orbit at its closest point to the Sun and then into the outer part of the asteroid belt when it is farthest from the Sun.

But there's a complication in astronomers' attempts to nail down the asteroid's path. The object is currently moving away from Earth in almost a straight line. This makes it difficult to accurately determine its orbit by studying how its trajectory curves over time, according to ESA.

It also means observers will need to use larger telescopes to see the asteroid before it becomes too distant to see it from Earth in April. By the end of this year's observing window, the asteroid warning network says the impact probability could increase to a couple tens of percent, or it could more likely drop back below the notification threshold (1 percent impact probability).

"It is possible that asteroid 2024 YR4 will fade from view before we are able to entirely rule out any chance of impact in 2032," ESA said. "In this case, the asteroid will likely remain on ESA’s risk list until it becomes observable again in 2028."

Planetary defenders

This means that public officials might need to start planning what to do later this year.

For the first time, an international board called the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group met this week to discuss what we can do to respond to the risk of an asteroid impact. This group, known as SMPAG, coordinates planning among representatives from the world's space agencies, including NASA, ESA, China, and Russia.

The group decided on Monday to give astronomers a few more months to refine their estimates of the asteroid's orbit before taking action. They will meet again in late April or early May or earlier if the impact risk increases significantly. If there's still a greater than 1 percent probability of 2024 YR4 hitting the Earth, the group will issue a recommendation for further action to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

So what are the options? If the data in a few months still shows that the asteroid poses a hazard to Earth, it will be time for the world's space agencies to consider a deflection mission. NASA demonstrated its ability to alter the orbit of an asteroid in 2022 with a first-of-its-kind experiment in space. The mission, called DART, put a small spacecraft on a collision course with an asteroid two to four times larger than 2024 YR4.

The kinetic energy from the spacecraft's death dive into the asteroid was enough to slightly nudge the object off its natural orbit around a nearby larger asteroid. This proved that an asteroid deflection mission could work if scientists have enough time to design and build it, an undertaking that took about five years for DART.

A deflection mission is most effective well ahead of an asteroid's potential encounter with the Earth, so it's important not to wait until the last minute.

Fans of Hollywood movies know there's a nuclear option for dealing with an asteroid coming toward us. The drawback of using a nuclear warhead is that it could shatter one large asteroid into many smaller objects, although recent research suggests a more distant nuclear explosion could produce enough X-ray radiation to push an asteroid off a collision course.

Waiting for additional observations in 2028 would leave little time to develop a deflection mission. Therefore, in the unlikely event that the risk of an impact rises over the next few months, it will be time for officials to start seriously considering the possibility of an intervention.

Even without a deflection, there's plenty of time for government officials to do something here on Earth. It should be possible for authorities to evacuate any populations that might be affected by the asteroid.

The asteroid could devastate an area the size of a large city, but any impact is most likely to happen in a remote region or in the ocean. The risk corridor for 2024 YR4 extends from the eastern Pacific Ocean to northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia.

There's an old joke that dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program. Whatever happens in 2032, we're not at risk of extinction. However, occasions like this are exactly why most Americans think we should have a space program. A 2019 poll showed that 68 percent of Americans considered it very or extremely important for the space program to monitor asteroids, comets, or other objects from space that could strike the planet.

In contrast, about a quarter of those polled placed such importance on returning astronauts to the Moon or sending people to Mars. The cost of monitoring and deflecting asteroids is modest compared to the expensive undertakings of human missions to the Moon and Mars.

From taxpayers' point of view, it seems this part of NASA offers the greatest bang for their buck.

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With the rise of omicron came the fall of long-lasting protection from reinfection with the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, according to a study published in Nature.

Using population-wide data from Qatar, researchers found that a COVID-19 infection from a pre-omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 (such as alpha or delta) yielded around 80 percent protection from reinfection with another pre-omicron variant—and that level of protection lasted over the course of at least a year. But, things changed in late 2021 with the emergence of omicron, which still reigns supreme today. According to the data, an infection with omicron provided an initial protection of nearly 80 percent between the first three to six months after infection, but that protection rapidly declined. Between nine months and a year, protection fell to around 27.5 percent, then dropped to a negligible 5 percent after a year.

The results of infection-derived protection were similar regardless of whether people were vaccinated or unvaccinated, a sub analysis found. The study did not evaluate vaccine efficacy. A study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that the 2023-2024 mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were 52 percent effective at preventing infection after four weeks, with effectiveness falling to 20 percent at 20 weeks (a little over four and half months).

The only bright spot in the new data was that regardless of what a person was infected with—pre-omicron or omicron—protection from severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 during a reinfection was nearly 100 percent, and that level of protection was sustained for over a year.

It should be noted, though, that the population of Qatar is predominately male and relatively young. The median age of the over 1.5 million people who represented cases and controls in the study was between 32 and 33. So, the findings here may not be generalizable to populations that skew older. For context, the median age of the US population is around 39.

“Here to stay”

Still, the stark difference in protection from reinfection between the pre- and post-omicron eras of the pandemic is clear—and it's critically important for our current handling of SARS-CoV-2. The reduction of long-term protection from reinfection means that we will continue to face periodic waves of infection and that annual updated vaccines will be critical for dulling potential disease spikes and protecting vulnerable people.

"The short-lived immunity leads to repeated waves of infection, mirroring patterns observed with common cold coronaviruses and influenza," Hiam Chemaitelly, first author of the study and assistant professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, said in a statement. "This virus is here to stay and will continue to reinfect us, much like other common cold coronaviruses. Regular vaccine updates are critical for renewing immunity and protecting vulnerable populations, particularly the elderly and those with underlying health conditions."

Chemaitelly and colleagues speculate that the shift in the pandemic came from shifts in evolutionary pressures that the virus faced. In early stages of the global crisis, the virus evolved and spread by increasing its transmissibility. Then, as the virus lapped the globe and populations began building up immunity, the virus faced pressure to evade that immunity.

However, the fact that researchers did not find such diminished protection against severe, deadly COVID-19 suggests that the evasion is likely targeting only certain components of our immune system. Generally, neutralizing antibodies, which can block viral entry into cells, are the primary protection against non-severe infection. On the other hand, immunity against severe disease is through cellular mechanisms, such as memory T cells, which appear unaffected by the pandemic shift, the researchers write.

Overall, the study "highlights the dynamic interplay between viral evolution and host immunity, necessitating continued monitoring of the virus and its evolution, as well as periodic updates of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines to restore immunity and counter continuing viral immune evasion," Chemaitelly and colleagues conclude.

In the US, the future of annual vaccine updates may be in question, however. Prominent anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is poised to become the country's top health official, pending Senate confirmation next week. In 2021, as omicron was rampaging through the country for the first time, Kennedy filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration to revoke access and block approval of all current and future COVID-19 vaccines.

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NASA should soon announce a new plan for the return of two of its astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to Earth as early as March 19. This is about two weeks earlier than the existing public timeline for their flight home from the International Space Station.

Bringing the two astronauts back to Earth next month will require some shuffling of spacecraft here on the ground and a delay of the privately operated Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station to later in the spring.

Wilmore and Williams flew to the station on Boeing's Starliner in June 2024. The plight of "Butch and Suni," as they are often referred to, was a major story in the space community last summer after their Starliner spacecraft experienced significant propulsion issues before docking. NASA ultimately decided the safest course would be for the pair to return home on a SpaceX Dragon vehicle, and launched the Crew-9 mission last September with two empty seats. Thus, Butch and Suni's ride home has been docked to the station since last fall.

Shuffling spacecraft

At that point the pair joined the Crew-9 mission, alongside NASA's Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, and were scheduled to fly home in February. However, there was a late-developing technical issue with a new Dragon vehicle SpaceX is building, C213. Its first flight was to be Crew-10, the next NASA mission to the station. These four astronauts were to relieve Crew-9, allowing Butch and Suni to fly home. In December, NASA publicly announced a delay of the Crew-10 launch to no earlier than "late March." This would bring Crew-9 home in early April.

SpaceX and NASA are still working to resolve the C213 Dragon issue, which may be related to batteries on the spacecraft. NASA now believes the vehicle will not be ready for its debut launch until late April. Therefore, according to sources at the agency, NASA has decided to swap vehicles for Crew-10. The space agency has asked SpaceX to bring forward the C210 vehicle, which returned to Earth last March after completing the Crew-7 mission.

Known as Endurance, the spacecraft was next due to fly the private Axiom-4 mission to the space station later this spring. Sources said SpaceX is now working toward a no-earlier-than March 12 launch date for Crew-10 on Endurance. If this flight occurs on time—and the date is not certain, as it depends on other missions on SpaceX's Falcon 9 manifest—the Crew-9 astronauts, including Wilmore and Williams, could fly home on March 19. They would have spent 286 days in space. Although not a record for a NASA human spaceflight, this would be far longer than their original mission, which was expected to last eight to 30 days.

Politics versus pragmatism

With NASA now potentially advancing the return of Wilmore and Williams by about two weeks, from early April to mid-March, Trump and Musk may seek to score a political win. But the underlying facts paint a different picture, suggesting pragmatic rather than political rationale.

The plan for Butch and Suni's return was finalized by NASA last August, and Musk signed off on it as chief executive of SpaceX at the time. Their original return date on Crew-9 was delayed due to a technical problem with a SpaceX vehicle. In recent months, as NASA has monitored development of the C213 vehicle, they worked on a contingency plan involving the swapping of Axiom's spacecraft. This plan was set into motion before Trump came into office. It has now been greenlit.

At this point, if NASA waited for C213 to be ready to launch the Crew-10 mission, the space station program would start to approach 'redlines' on food, water, and other supplies for crew members on board the station. The agency is also juggling a lot of competing priorities in terms of cargo and crew missions to the station. The bottom line is that they really needed this crew rotation to occur sooner rather than later.

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Cows in Nevada have been infected with a strain of H5N1 bird flu different from the strain detected in all other herds to this point in the ongoing dairy outbreak. It's the same strain that killed a Louisiana resident in early January and sent a Canadian teenager to intensive care in early November.

The new Nevada dairy infections were first detected through milk testing conducted on January 31, according to an update Wednesday by the US Department of Agriculture. Whole genome sequencing confirmed the finding of H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype D1.1. To this point, all other dairy herds affected by the outbreak have been infected with H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype B3.13.

To date, 957 herds across 16 states have been infected with H5N1 since the outbreak began last March. That tally includes four new herds from Nevada.

The D1.1 genotype is the predominant strain spreading in migratory birds in the North American flyway this fall and winter, the USDA notes. It has been sporadically spilling over to mammals and commercial poultry in recent months. In December, it spilled over to a resident of Louisiana after contact with wild and backyard birds. The person became critically ill and died, marking the first US H5N1 bird flu death.

Until now, federal officials have thought of the current dairy outbreak as the result of a single spillover event, which likely occurred from the virus jumping from wild birds to cows in Texas, possibly sometime in late 2023. The virus then swiftly moved through dairy farms and across state lines as people, equipment, and animals moved around. Health experts worldwide have been appalled by the inability of US officials to halt the single-source transmission as more and more herds have continued to test positive. Now, with a second introduction of the virus, hopes are likely dashed that containment is possible.

The spread of H5N1 bird flu in dairy cows is unprecedented; the US outbreak is the first of its kind in cows. Virologists and infectious disease experts fear that the continued spread of the virus in domestic mammals like cows, which have close interactions with people, will provide the virus countless opportunities to spill over and adapt to humans.

So far, the US has tallied 67 human cases of H5N1 since the start of 2024. Of those, 40 have been in dairy workers, while 23 were in poultry workers, one was the Louisiana case who had contact with wild and backyard birds, and three were cases that had no clear exposure.

Whether the D1.1 genotype will pose a yet greater risk for dairy workers remains unclear for now. Generally, H5N1 infections in humans have been rare but dangerous. According to data collected by the World Health Organization, 954 H5N1 human cases have been documented globally since 2003. Of those, 464 were fatal, for a fatality rate among documented cases of 49 percent. But, so far, nearly all of the human infections in the US have been relatively mild, and experts don't know why. There are various possible factors, including transmission route, past immunity of workers, use of antivirals, or something about the B3.13 genotype specifically.

For now, the USDA says that the detection of the D1.1 genotype in cows doesn't change their eradication strategy. It further touted the finding as a "testament to the strength of our National Milk Testing Strategy."

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Early car sales data for January is starting to arrive from countries across the pond, and they paint an alarming picture for Tesla. Sales are crashing in France, Germany, and the UK—all affluent countries that are key markets for Tesla's electric vehicles. Coming on the heels of a large financial miss, it's just one more problem for the automaker.

Tesla sales dropped around 13 percent across Europe in 2024, but so far this year, the scale of the problem is far greater. In France, sales of new Teslas fell by 63 percent, while total car sales in the country fell by just 6 percent, with EV sales dropping just half a percent.

Germany was already looking like lost ground for Tesla—its 41 percent drop in 2024 accounted for most of Tesla's lost sales across Europe. That must make the 59 percent drop in German Tesla sales recorded during January even more painful on the profit and loss statements.

Across the Channel, the British auto industry just released its sales data for January. Here, Tesla sales fell less precipitously—just 12 percent. However, battery EV sales were 35 percent higher in the UK in January 2025 than in January 2024. The cake is growing, but Tesla is getting to eat less and less of it.

In fact, no Tesla cracked the UK's top 10 best-seller list last month, something that has regularly happened in the past, although that may be due to having just two models for sale in most markets.

Large declines have also been recorded in Sweden (44 percent), Norway (38 percent), and the Netherlands (42 percent).

Tesla's limited and outdated model range is undoubtedly a contributing factor to its poor sales in Europe, and the company must be hoping that the recently facelifted Model Y crossover can stimulate more traffic at its showrooms. Its investment in the Cybertruck is of no help in the region, as the steel-clad pickup truck is too large and heavy for use with a normal driver's license and does not conform to road legality regulations.

But the behavior of Tesla CEO Elon Musk could also be to blame for much of Europe's distaste for his cars. Lately, Musk has repeatedly inserted himself into European politics to create friction and promote his far-right causes. Over there, at least, it seems car buyers may be sick of him.

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Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.

"It’s my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it," Doctorow explained in a follow-up article. "We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying."

Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.

If you want a real-world, literal example of enshittification, let's look at actual poop. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100 million on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com folded. With another competitor tossed aside, Amazon was then free to sell diapers at its price from wherever it wanted to source them.

Anyway, we at Ars have covered a lot of things that have been enshittified. Here are some of the worst examples we've come across. Hopefully, you'll share some of your own experiences in the comments. We might even do a follow-up story based on those.

Smart TVs

Amazon can use its smart display to track streaming habits.

Credit: Amazon

Smart TVs have come a long way since Samsung released the first model readily available for the masses in 2008. While there have certainly been improvements in areas like image quality, sound capabilities, usability, size, and, critically, price, much of smart TVs’ evolution could be viewed as invasive and anti-consumer.

Today, smart TVs are essentially digital billboards that serve as tools for companies—from advertisers to TV OEMs—to extract user data. Corporate interest in understanding what people do with and watch on their TVs and in pushing ads has dramatically worsened the user experience. For example, the remotes for LG’s 2025 TVs don’t have a dedicated input button but do have multiple ways for accessing LG webOS apps.

This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases—even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy. When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something’s up.

With this approach, TVs miss the opportunity to appeal to customers with more relevant and impressive upgrades. There's also a growing desire among users to disconnect their connected TVs, defeating their original purpose. Suddenly, buying a dumb TV seems smarter than buying a smart one. But smart TVs and the ongoing revenue opportunities they represent have made it extremely hard to find a TV that won't spy on you.

—Scharon Harding

Google’s voice assistant

Doctorow has written a lot about how Google, on the whole, fits the concept of enshittification. I want to mention one part of Google that suffers a kind of second-order enshittification, one that people might have seen coming but which was far from inevitable: the spoken-out-loud version of Google Assistant.

Every so often, an Ars reader will write in to ask why their Google Assistant devices—be they Nest Hubs or Nest Minis or just Android phones—seem to be worse than when they bought them. Someone on the r/GoogleHome subreddit will ask why something that worked for years suddenly stops working. Every so often, a reporter will try to quantify this seemingly slow rot, only to fall for the same rhetorical traps I once did.

"Everybody’s setup is different," "Our expectations are different now," or "There is no real way to quantify it." And sometimes there are just outages, which get fixed but leave you with the sense that your Assistant is hard of hearing, takes a lot of days off, and knows it's due for retirement.

I’m fine just saying it now: Google Assistant is worse now than it was soon after it started.

Even if Google is turning its entire supertanker toward AI now, it’s not clear why "Start my morning routine," "Turn on the garage lights," and "Set an alarm for 8 pm" had to suffer. If Google's plan is to cut funding and remove features, make everybody regret surrendering their audio privacy and funds to speakers, and then wow them when its generative-AI-based stand-in shows up, I’m not sure how that plays out. After so many times repeating myself or yelling at Assistant to stop, I’ve muted my speakers, tried out open alternatives, and accepted that you can’t buy real help for $50–$100.

—Kevin Purdy

The Portable Document Format

I'm not entirely convinced the PDF was ever really good, but it certainly performed a useful purpose once upon a time: If you could print, you could make a PDF. And if you could turn your document into a PDF, anyone on any platform could read it. It also allowed for elaborate formatting, the sort that could be nightmarish to achieve in Word or some of the page layout software of the time. And finally, unlike an image, you could copy and paste text back out of it.

But Acrobat was ultimately an Adobe product, with all that came with it. It was expensive, it was prone to bloat and poor performance, and there was no end to its security issues. Features were added that greatly expanded its scope but were largely useless for most people. Eventually, you couldn't install it without also installing what felt like half a dozen seemingly unrelated Adobe products.

By building PDF capabilities into its OS, Apple allowed me to go Adobe-free and avoid some of this enshittification on my computers. But the PDF has still gotten ever less useful. The vast majority of PDFs I deal with now come from academic journals, and whatever witchcraft is needed to put footnotes, formulas, and embargo details into the text wrecks the thing I care most about: copying and pasting details that I need to write articles. Instead, I often get garbled, shortened pieces of other parts of the document intermingled with the text I want—assuming I can even select it in the first place.

Apple, which had given the PDF a reprieve, has now killed its main selling point. Because Apple has added OCR to the MacOS image display system, I can get more reliable results by screenshotting the PDF and then copying the text out of that. This is the true mark of its enshittification: I now wish the journals would just give me a giant PNG.

—John Timmer

Televised sports

In some ways, the development of technology has been a godsend for watching non-mainstream sports, like professional cycling, in the United States.

Back in the olden days at the turn of the century, the Outdoor Life Network carried the Tour de France on cable, and NBC Sports gradually started to cover more races. But their calendar was incomplete and riddled with commercials. To find all professional cycling races, one had to look far and wide, subscribe to some services, and maybe do a little pirating.

Nirvana arrived in 2020 when a media company called Global Cycling Network obtained the rights to stream virtually every professional cycling race in Europe. Anyone with a VPN in the United States could pay $40 a year and watch race coverage, from start to finish, without commercials. This was absolutely spectacular—until enshittification set in.

In 2023, the parent company of the cycling network, Warner Bros. Discovery, started the process of "consolidating" its services. Global Cycling Network, or GCN+, was toast. European viewers could watch most of the same races on Discovery+ for about $80 a year, so the deal wasn't terrible. US fans were hosed, however. You needed a UK credit card to sign up for Discovery+ cycling. To watch the majority of races in the United States, therefore, one needed to sign up for Max, Peacock, and a service called FloBikes. The total annual price, without ads, is about $550.

This year, it was Europe's turn. In many countries, fans must now subscribe to TNT Sports at a price of 30.99 pounds a month ($38.50). So many Europeans are now being asked to pay more than $450 a year. Even the Tour de France, which had long been broadcast on free television, is going away after next year. The bottom line? The new monthly price is the same as we used to pay for a year of the superior service, GCN+, only two years ago.

This is an incredibly stupid decision for the sport, which now has no chance of reaching new viewers under this model. And it takes advantage of fans who are left to pay outrageous sums of money or turn to dodgy pirated streams.

And it's not just cycling. Formula 1 racing has largely gone behind paywalls, and viewership is down significantly over the last 15 years. Major US sports such as professional and college football had largely been exempt, but even that is now changing, with NFL games being shown on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. None of this helps viewers. It enshittifies the experience for us in the name of corporate greed.

—Eric Berger

Google search

A screenshot of an AI Overview query, "How many rocks should I eat each day" that went viral on X.

Credit: Tim Onion / X

Google's rapid spiral toward enshittification—where the "don't be evil company" went from altruistic avoider of ads that its founders knew could ruin search to dominating ad markets by monopolizing search while users grew to hate its search engine—could finally be disrupted by potential court-ordered remedies coming this year. Required to release its iron grip on global search, the search giant could face more competition than ever as rivals potentially get broader access to Google data, ideally leading to search product innovations that actually benefit Internet users. Having to care about Google search users' preferences could even potentially slow down the current wave of AI-flavored enshittification, as Google is currently losing its fight to keep AI out of discussions of search trial remedies.

Plenty of people have griped about Google's AI overviews since their rollout. A Google search today might force you to scroll through more than 200 words of AI-generated guesswork before you get to a warning that everything you just read is "experimental." Only then can you finally start scrolling real results. Ars has pointed out that these AI overviews often misunderstand why people are even using Google.

As a journalist, I frequently try to locate official documents by searching quoted paragraphs of text, and that used to be a fast way to surface source material. But now Google's AI thinks I want an interpretation of the specific text I'm trying to locate, burying the document I'm seeking in even longer swaths of useless AI babble and seemingly willfully confusing the intention of the search to train me to search differently. Where sponsored posts were previously a mildly irritating roadblock to search results, AI has emerged as a forced detour you have to take before coming anywhere close to your destination.

Admittedly, some AI summaries may be useful, but they can just as easily provide false, misleading, and even dangerous answers. And in a search context, placing AI content ahead of any other results elevates an undoubtedly less trustworthy secondary source over primary sources at a time when social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are increasingly relying on users to fact-check misinformation.

But Google, like many big tech companies, expects AI to revolutionize search and is seemingly intent on ignoring any criticism of that idea. The tech giant has urged the judge in the monopoly trial, Amit Mehta, to carefully weigh whether the AI remedies the US seeks could hobble Google's ability to innovate in AI search markets. The remedies include allowing publishers to opt out of web crawling for AI training without impacting search rankings or banning Google from exclusive deals that could block AI rivals from licensing Google-exclusive training data.

We'll know more this August, when Mehta is expected to rule on final remedies. However, in November, Mehta said that "AI and the integration of AI is only going to play a much larger role, it seems to me, in the remedy phase than it did in the liability phase."

—Ashley Belanger

Email AI tools

No, thank you.

Credit: Dan Goodin

Gmail won't take no for an answer. It keeps asking me if I want to use Google's Gemini AI tool to summarize emails or draft responses. As the disclaimer at the bottom of the Gemini tool indicates, I can't count on the output being factual, so no, I definitely don't want it. The dialog box only allows me to decline by clicking the "not now" option. I still haven't found the "not ever" option, and I doubt I ever will.

I still haven't found a satisfactory way to turn Gemini off completely in Gmail. Discussions in forums on Reddit and Google support came up short, so I asked Gemini. It told me to turn off smart features in Gmail settings. I did, but I still have the Gemini icon at the top of my inbox and the top of each email I send or receive.

—Dan Goodin

Windows

I usually try to moderate my criticism of Windows 11 because most of the things that people on the Internet really like to complain about (updates breaking things, attempts at mandatory Microsoft account sign-in, apps that auto-download to your computer when you set it up whether you want them or not, telemetry data being sent to Microsoft, forceful insistence that users switch to the Edge browser and Bing search engine) all actually started during the reign of Windows 10. Windows 10 is lodged in the popular imagination as one of the "good" versions of Windows partly because it retreated from most of the changes in Windows 8 (a "bad" version). But yeah, most of the Windows 11 stuff you hate has actually been happening for a while.

With that being said, it sure is easy to resent Windows 11 these days, between the well-documented annoyances, the constant drumbeat of AI stuff (some of it gated to pricey new PCs), and a batch of weird bugs that mostly seem to be related to the under-the-hood overhauls in October's Windows 11 24H2 update. That list includes broken updates for some users, inoperable scanners, and a few unplayable games. With every release, the list of things you need to do to get rid of and turn off the most annoying stuff gets a little longer.

Microsoft has proclaimed 2025 "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh," partly because Windows 10 support is going away in October and there are a bunch of old PCs that can't easily be upgraded to the new version. But maybe Microsoft wouldn't need to poke people quite so hard if Windows 11 were a more streamlined version of itself, one without the unasked-for cruft that did a better job of respecting users' preferences.

—Andrew Cunningham

Web discourse

Most media has never been that original—somebody creates something witty, clever, or popular, and others rush to mimic it; things have always been this way in my lifetime.

But I still bemoan how many people or companies rush to copy nearly anything that resembles a viral moment, whether it's a trope, an aesthetic, or a word that is subsequently beaten to death by overuse. Memes can be funny until they turn into a plague.

I physically cringe when "cringe" is used as a ubiquitous catch-all for anything that people don't like. Every job change posted to social media is prefaced by "personal news." I have asked colleagues what exactly is "quiet" about the verb in their headline. And the corporate jargon on LinkedIn causes me the most despair.

Look, this is mostly a rant from someone who's supposed to pick words apart, so I understand that language changes, not everyone is a professional writer, and workday constraints lead to some pet phrases. But the enshittifcation of social media, particularly due to its speed and virality, has led to millions vying for their moment in the sun, and all I see is a constant glare that makes everything look indistinguishable. No wonder some companies think AI is the future.

—Jacob May

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Gecko feet have inspired many intriguing applications, including a sticky tape, adhesives, a "stickybot" climbing robot, and even a strapless bra design. Now, scientists have developed a new kind of anti-slip polymer that sticks to ice, inspired by the humble gecko. Incorporating these polymers into shoe soles could reduce the number of human slip-and-fall injuries, according to a paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

As previously reported, geckos are known for being expert climbers; they're able to stick to any surface thanks to tiny hair-like structures on the bottoms of their feet. Those microscopic hairs are called setae, each of which splits off into hundreds of even smaller bristles called spatulae. It has long been known that at microscopic size scales, the so-called van der Waals forces—the attractive and repulsive forces between two dipole molecules—become significant.

Essentially, the tufts of tiny hairs on gecko feet get so close to the contours in walls and ceilings that electrons from the gecko hair molecules and electrons from the wall molecules interact with each other and create an electromagnetic attraction. That's what enables geckos to climb smooth surfaces like glass effortlessly. Spiders, cockroaches, beetles, bats, tree frogs, and lizards all have varying-sized sticky footpads that use these same forces.

Geckos and their unusual feet have long been of great interest to scientists. In 2013, for instance, researchers designed a reusable dry adhesive inspired by the gecko's feet that easily stuck to smooth surfaces, adhering strongly when pushed forward and sliding off when pulled backward. In 2020, Berkeley scientists investigated why soft, hairy gecko toes only "stick" in one direction. And in 2022, scientists found that gecko feet are coated with an ultra-thin layer of lipid molecules in an upright orientation. This might serve to push away any water beneath the spatulae, allowing the spatulae to make closer contact with the surface, thereby helping the geckos maintain their grip on wet surfaces.

Just add zirconia nanoparticles...

It's the "hydrophilic capillary-enhanced adhesion"of gecko feet that most interested the authors of this latest paper. Per the World Health Organization, 684,000 people die and another 38 million are injured every year in slips and falls, with correspondingly higher health care costs. Most antislip products (crampons, chains, studs, cleats), tread designs, or materials (fiberglass, carbon fiber, rubber) are generally only effective for specific purposes or short periods of time. And they often don't perform as well on wet ice, which has a nanoscale quasi-liquid layer (QLL) that makes it even more slippery.

So Vipin Richhariya of the University of Minho in Portugal and co-authors turned to gecko toe pads (as well as those of toads) for a better solution. To get similar properties in their silicone rubber polymers, they added zirconia nanoparticles, which attract water molecules. The polymers were rolled into a thin film and hardened, and then a laser etched groove patterns onto the surface—essentially creating micro cavities that exposed the zirconia nanoparticles, thus enhancing the material's hydrophilic effects.

Infrared spectroscopy and simulated friction tests revealed that the composites containing 3 percent and 5 percent zirconia nanoparticles were the most slip-resistant. "This optimized composite has the potential to change the dynamics of slip-and-fall accidents, providing a nature-inspired solution to prevent one of the most common causes of accidents worldwide," the authors concluded. The material could also be used for electronic skin, artificial skin, or wound healing.

DOI: ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2025. 10.1021/acsami.4c14496  (About DOIs).

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A new large-scale study of crevasses on the Greenland Ice Sheet shows that those cracks are widening faster as the climate warms, which is likely to speed ice loss and global sea level rise.

Crevasses are wedge-shaped fractures and cracks that open in glaciers where the ice begins to flow faster. They can grow to more than 300 feet wide, thousands of feet long, and hundreds of feet deep. Water from melting snow on the surface can flow through crevasses all the way to the base of the ice, joining with other hidden streams to form a vast drainage system that affects how fast glaciers and ice sheets flow.

The study found that crevasses are expanding more quickly than previously detected, and somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of the water flowing through the Greenland Ice Sheet goes through crevasses, which can warm deeply submerged portions of the glacier and increase lubrication between the base of the ice sheet and the bedrock it flows over. Both those mechanisms can accelerate the flow of the ice itself, said Thomas Chudley, a glaciologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who is lead author of the new study.

“Understanding crevasses is a key to understanding how this discharge will evolve in the 21st century and beyond,” he said. 

Greenland ice researchers expect that more crevasses will form in a warming world because “glaciers are accelerating in response to warmer ocean temperatures, and because meltwater filling crevasses can force fractures deeper into the ice,” he said. “However, until now we haven’t had the data to show where and how fast this is happening across the entirety of the Greenland Ice Sheet.”

Using three-dimensional images of the crevasses enabled the researchers to get the most accurate estimate of their total volume to date. The results show that crevasses grew significantly wider between 2016 and 2021.

“And they grow pretty much in lockstep with increased discharge” of icebergs and meltwater into the ocean, Chudley said. “That makes sense, right? Because the glaciers are speeding up because of influence from the warming ocean. As they speed up, they flow faster.”

Ice at the surface of glaciers generally flows faster than at their bases, which are slowed by friction with the surface they travel on. The difference in speeds cause the fissures, he explained.

The research highlights a new feedback that accelerates changes in ice sheets and the loss of mass from glaciers through iceberg discharges, said Xavier Fettweis, a professor of climatology at the University of Liège, who was not part of the new study.

“It’s difficult to evaluate the importance of this positive feedback,” he said, “but it is something which is currently underestimated in the ice sheet models used for performing future projections.” 

Calculating the total annual discharge of ice from Greenland also requires considering how a variety of complex interactions play out, he said.

For example, models show there will be less direct discharges of icebergs into the ocean as glaciers retreat from the coast. That would slow the contribution of melting icebergs to sea level rise, he said.

But that same retreat also steepens the edge of the ice sheet, both when sloped tongues of floating ice recede onto land from the sea, and when increased melting and calving of icebergs at the low leading edge undercuts the rest of the ice. 

That stress widens and deepens the crevasses that Chudley studied—a feedback cycle that could speed the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Greenland’s melting ice will affect millions

In 2020, researchers calculated that Greenland’s ice sheet annually loses about 9 billion tons of water every hour. The total annual freshwater flow off Greenland is about equal to the annual flow of the Amazon River, at about 1,000 gigatons per year, said Ken Mankoff, a researcher with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland who led the comprehensive 2020 study tracking discharge from Greenland from 1986 to 2020. If all its ice melts, it would raise sea level by about 23 feet (7 meters).

A complete meltdown is projected to take thousands of years, but there is a lot of scientific evidence from periods of rapid climate warming in the not-so-distant geological past that show pulses of rapid global ice melt, with sea levels sometimes rising in surges of up to 13 feet (4 meters) per century. At the current rate of melting, Greenland’s ice could contribute about 3 feet (1 meter) of sea level rise by 2100.

Some coastal areas are already struggling to adapt to sea level rise, and millions of people around the world are at risk of losing land and livelihoods. Greenland’s ice is one of the largest contributors to sea level rise, and projecting the speed of the meltdown is a key climate science goal to help people prepare. 

This first-ever inventory of crevasses across the entire Greenland Ice Sheet will help do that, said William Colgan, a glaciology and climate professor with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who was not involved with the study.

“This is the first study to unequivocally say that the expansion of crevasse zones is ubiquitous across Greenland’s outlet glaciers that have accelerated in recent years,” he said.

“The absolute numbers are large,” he added. “We’re talking about thousands of square kilometers of ice sheet being crevassed, and hundreds of square kilometers becoming crevassed at different glaciers during the observation period.”

The study provides unprecedented detail of the distribution of crevasses at different elevations of the ice sheet, and how the fissures and their distribution have been changing, Colgan said. “I’d imagine there was a similar feeling when the first inventory of Moon craters was made; you’ve always known they were there, but you hadn’t been able to count them individually.”

Various reports from ice sheet researchers in the field affirm the study’s findings.

“If you have been working on the ice sheet, year after year, I think you get familiar with the increase in crevasses at your local sites,” he said. “In the blue ice areas especially, glaciers are generally speeding up and snowfall is generally declining. We expect to see more crevasses.”

Colgan also emphasized that the new findings show the increasing risk of some feedbacks that aren’t included in models of climate impacts. That suggests that melting could accelerate beyond what the science already anticipates.

“We know that the appearance of crevasses can trigger a lot of feedback for ice loss,” he said. “With so many feedbacks to enhance ice loss, crevasses are poised to play a large role in the faster-than-forecast response of the ice sheet to climate change.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Monday, 3 February

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 08:54 - 12:54 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 21 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. Among the satellites will be 13 direct-to-cell satellites that can provide internet to supported mobile devices. Following the launch, the first stage of the rocket will perform a landing so that it can be reused.

• Who: Rocket Lab
• What: Electron
• When: 20:43 UTC
• Where: Mahia, New Zealand
• Why: Rocket Lab will use its Electron rocket to launch five Kinéis satellites into orbit. These satellites will make up a constellation of 25 satellites that will provide Internet of Things communications. This mission was delayed from late 2024.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 23:32 - 00:32 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch the third pair of WorldView Legion Earth observation satellites for Maxar Technologies. The satellites will be used for various applications, including defense, intelligence, environmental monitoring, and urban planning.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Starlink Group 12-7 to a low Earth orbit. The first stage of the rocket landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.

• Next, India launched the GSLV-F15 rocket carrying the NVS-02 navigation satellite into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO). The satellite will join India's regional satellite navigation constellation.

• The final launch was another SpaceX Falcon 9, but this time, it was carrying SpainSat NG I communications satellite for Hisdesat. Unusually, the first stage of this rocket was not recovered because extra performance was needed to orbit this satellite.

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

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THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The Artemis program has been NASA’s best chance to get “boots on the moon” again. But with the new US administration taking guidance from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is focused on Mars colonization, will they end up abandoning or pushing back lunar missions?

For example, there’s been speculation that returning US president Donald Trump may cancel the Space Launch System rocket, which NASA intended to use to get from the moon to Mars. But is this approach likely to help them get to Mars quicker?

The last human presence on the lunar surface was Apollo 17 in 1972. So you may imagine that it should be easy for the US to return. However there have been plans to once again send people there since 2004, which have changed name with each incoming president, until its current incarnation as the Artemis program.

The 2022 Artemis-1 test flight was successful in its mission to send an unmanned satellite around the lunar orbit and return using the new SLS rocket system. But Artemis-2, which will carry crew, is not scheduled for launch until 2026. When we consider private companies and other nations, this is comparatively slow progress.

The first successful landing of a spacecraft on the moon by the Indian Space Agency, Isro, took place in 2023 with Chaandrayan-3, which was an amazing achievement with a low budget. China landed in 2013 with Chang'e 3, and Chang'e 4 in 2019 on the dark side.

Russia has previously had landers on the moon. Its more recent attempt at a lunar landing with Luna-25 was unsuccessful, though. There are also future lander missions planned by the European Space Agency with Argonaut, a private Israeli company, and other private companies. Clearly, there is no shortage of potential competitors that could eventually develop to send humans too.

Implications for Mars

So would turning to Martian exploration be a sensible move instead of heading for the moon? It would likely mean abandoning the Lunar Gateway project, a space station in orbit around the moon where astronauts could live. But as this is not planned until 2027 at the earliest, this would seem acceptable.

However the difference between going to the moon and going to Mars is like the difference between walking to the end of your road versus walking to another country.

Besides the incredible difference in distance (the distance to travel to Mars is 833 times greater than that of the distance to the moon), the time taken to get there is far longer as well. The optimal lunar launch conditions repeat once a month. And you could still launch at times that are not ideal.

The optimal fuel route for Mars involves arriving when the two planets are roughly on opposite sides of the sun. This launch window repeats every 18 months, and the journey time of nine months means any problems onboard will need to be fixed by the crew, with no rescue option. Faster routes can be achieved (roughly six months) but this then becomes very energy-intensive.

This is why the Lunar Gateway would come in handy, allowing astronauts to take off from the moon, away from the Earth’s immense gravity, and head to Mars from there. Of course the material for the gateway would need to be sent to the Lunar Gateway first. But by splitting the energy requirements up it means slower but more efficient propulsion methods can be used for part of the Mars journey.

There is no doubt that, with some work, SpaceX will be able to make a landing on Mars. But will they be able to safely take people there and get them back? As a company the idea of profit will be a strong factor, along with astronaut safety. We only have to look at some of the more recent Boeing problems (astronauts have been stuck on the International Space Station for seven months at time of writing) to see that private companies may want to slow down a bit when it comes to transporting people.

This is unlikely to happen though, with the considerable influence of Musk on the White House administration, and the suggestion of fellow billionaire Jared Isaacman (a private astronaut) as the new head of NASA.

Critical Decisions

So there are two options for NASA to choose from: Either keep going with its Artemis program and the Lunar Gateway, or aim for Mars and be primarily dependent on Musk.

Funding both options would likely mean that neither ever happens. Of course, the Mars mission would be easier if the gateway was already present at the moon.

The timelines involved here are important. SpaceX states that it will send five uncrewed Starships to Mars next year with an aim to send humans to Mars in 2028. This seems ambitious, particularly as it involves refueling in orbit, but if additional funds and material are put toward the project, it could potentially be sooner than this.

As the Lunar Gateway would be built at the earliest in 2027, then it’d be unlikely to be operational in 2028 anyway. So prioritizing Mars exploration over the Lunar Gateway may indeed get us to Mars quicker—but it will be risky.

If the US pulls out of plans to explore the moon, other nations can expand their presence in those areas more easily—with the potential to have an easier route to launch to Mars. These are likely to be on much longer timescales though, but if Musk fails to get humans to Mars in the next few years, these countries may have an edge.

The conditions on Mars are slightly more favorable for human presence, with at least some atmospheric pressure and the potential for mining water. But as many studies have shown, it has no potential for terraforming, the process of altering a planet to make it more habitable for humans.

The increased distance from the sun also means that solar panels are slightly less effective, and Mars is not rich in deposited solar helium-3, which can be used as a fuel for nuclear fusion.

Of course the challenge is what excites many people, and it may be a risk worth taking. But this decision should be left with the experts in the field, rather than politicians and billionaires.

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. January's list includes papers on using lasers to reveal Peruvian mummy tattoos; the physics of wobbly spears and darts; how a black hole changes over time; and quantum "cat states" for error correction in quantum computers, among other fascinating research.

Tracking changes in a black hole over time

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope announced the first direct image ever taken of a black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), located in the constellation of Virgo some 55 million light-years away. Astronomers have now combined earlier observational data to learn more about the turbulent dynamics of plasma near M87*'s event horizon over time, according to a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Co-author Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany likened the new analysis to comparing two photographs of Mount Everest, one year apart. While the mountain's basic structure is unlikely to change much in that time, one could observe changes in clouds near the peak and deduce from that properties like wind direction. For instance, in the case of M87*, the new analysis confirmed the presence of a luminous ring that is brightest at the bottom, which in turn confirmed that the rotational axis points away from Earth. "More of these observations will be made in the coming years and with increasing precision, with the ultimate goal of producing a movie of what happens near M87*," said Rezolla.

Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2025. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202451296 (About DOIs).

Lasers reveal Peruvian mummy tattoos

Humans across the globe have been getting tattoos for more than 5,000 years, judging by traces found on mummified remains from Europe to Asia and South America. But it can be challenging to decipher details of those tattoos, given how much the ink tends to "bleed" over time, along with the usual bodily decay. Infrared imaging can help, but in an innovative twist, scientists decided to use lasers that make skin glow ever so faintly, revealing many fine hidden details of tattoos found on 1,200-year-old Peruvian mummies, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's the first time the laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF) technique has been used on mummified human remains. The skin's fluorescence essentially backlights any tattoos, and after post-processing, the long-exposure photographs showed white skin behind black outlines of the tattoo art—images so detailed it's possible to measure density differences in the ink and eliminate any bleed effects. The authors determined that the tattoos on four mummies—geometric patterns with triangles and diamonds—were made with carbon-based black ink skillfully applied with a pointed object finer than a standard modern tattoo needle, possibly a cactus needle or sharpened bone.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2421517122 (About DOIs).

Sforza Castle’s hidden passages

Among the many glories of Milan is the 15th-century Sforza Castle, built by Francesco Sforza on the remnants of an earlier fortification as his primary residence. Legends about the castle abound, most notably the existence of secret underground chambers and passages. For instance, Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan from 1494–1499, was so heartbroken over the loss of his wife in childbirth that he used an underground passageway to visit her tomb in the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie—a passageway that appears in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, who was employed at the court for a time.

Those underground cavities and passages are now confirmed, thanks to a geophysical survey using ground-penetrating radar and laser scanning, performed as part of a PhD thesis. Various underground cavities and buried passageways were found within the castle's outer walls, including Ludovico's passageway and what have may have been secret military passages. Those involved in the project plan to create a "digital twin" of Sforza Castle based on the data collected, one that incorporates both its current appearance and its past. Perhaps it will also be possible to integrate that data with augmented reality to provide an immersive digital experience.

Physics of wobbly spears and darts

Among the things that make humans unique among primates is our ability to throw various objects with speed and precision (with some practice)—spears or darts, for example. That's because the human shoulder is anatomically conducive to storing and releasing the necessary elastic energy, a quality that has been mimicked in robotics to improve motor efficiency. According to the authors of a paper published in the journal Physical Review E, the use of soft elastic projectiles can improve the efficiency of throws, particularly those whose tips are weighted with a mass like a spearhead.

Guillaume Giombini of the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice, France, and co-authors wanted to explore this "superpropulsion" effect more deeply, using a combination of experimental data, numerical simulation, and theoretical analysis. The projectiles they used in their experiments were inspired by archery bows and consisted of two flat steel cantilevers connected by a string, essentially serving as springs to give the projectile the necessary elasticity. They placed a flat piece of rigid plastic in the middle of the string as a platform. Some of the projectiles were tested alone, while others were weighted with end masses. A fork held each projectile in place before launch, and the scientists measured speed and deformation during flight. They found that the wobble produced by the weighted tip projectiles yielded a kinetic energy gain of 160 percent over more rigid, unweighted projectiles.

Physical Review E, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.00.005500  (About DOIs).

Quantum “cat states” for error detection

The Schrödinger’s cat paradox in physics is an excellent metaphor for the superposition of quantum states in atoms. Over the last 20 years, physicists have managed to build various versions of Schrödinger's cat in the laboratory whereby two or more particles manage to be in two different states at the same time—so-called "cat states," such as six atoms in simultaneous "spin up" and "spin down" states, rather like spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Such states are fragile, however, and quickly decohere. Physicists at the University of New South Wales came up with a fresh twist on a cat-state that is more robust, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Physics.

They used an antimony atom embedded within a silicon quantum chip. The atom is quite heavy and has a large nuclear spin that can go in eight directions rather than just two (spin up and spin down). This could help enormously with quantum error correction, one of the biggest obstacles in quantum computing, because there is more room for error in the binary code. "As the proverb goes, a cat has nine lives," said co-author Xi Yu of UNSW. "One little scratch is not enough to kill it. Our metaphorical 'cat' has seven lives: it would take seven consecutive errors to turn the '0' into a '1.'" And embedding the atom in a silicon chip makes it scalable.

Nature Physics, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02745-0  (About DOIs).

New twist on chain mail armor

Scientists have developed a new material that is like "chain mail on steroids," capable of responding as both a fluid or a solid, depending on the kind of stress applied, according to a paper published in the journal Science. That makes it ideal for manufacturing helmets or other protective gear, as well as biomedical devices and robotics components. The technical term is polycatenated architected materials (PAMs). Much like how chain mail is built from small metal rings linked together into a mesh, PAMs are composed of various interlocking shapes that can form a wide range of different 3D patterns.

The authors were partly inspired by the lattice structure of crystals; they just replaced fixed particles with rings or cage-like shapes made out of different materials—such as acrylic polymers, nylon, or metals—to make small 3D-printed structures small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand. They then subjected these materials to various stressors in the laboratory: compression, a lateral shearing force, and twisting. Some of the materials felt like hard solids, others were squishier, but they all exhibited the same kind of telltale transition, behaving more like a fluid or a solid depending on the stressor applied. PAMs at the microscale can also expand or contract in response to electrical charges. This makes them a useful hybrid material, spanning the gap between granular materials and elastic deformable ones.

W. Zhou et al., Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adr9713  (About DOIs).

Kitty robot mimics headbutts

This is bunting, in which an animal (typically, cats) rubs its head against other objects.

University of Tsukuba

 

This "bunting cat" robot isn't quite so snuggly.

Y. Adachi and F. Tanaka, 2025

 

Any cat lover will tell you that cats show humans affection by rubbing their heads against the body (usually shins or hands). It's called "bunting," often accompanied by purring, and it's one of the factors that make companion animal therapy so effective, per the authors of a paper published in ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions. That's why they built a small robot designed to mimic bunting behavior, conducting various experiments to assess whether human participants found their interactions with the kitty-bot therapeutic. The robot prototypes were small enough to fit on a human lap, featuring a 3D-printed frame and a head covered with furry polyester fabric.

The neck needed to be flexible to mimic the bunting behavior, so the authors incorporated a mechanism that could adjust the stiffness of the neck via wire tension. They then tested various prototypes with university students, setting the neck stiffness to low, high, and variable. The students said they felt less tense after interacting with the robots. There was no significant difference between the settings, although participants slightly preferred the variable setting. We know what you're thinking: Why not just get an actual cat or visit your local cat cafe? The authors note that many people are allergic to cats, and there is also a risk of bites, scratches, or disease transmission—hence the interest in developing animal-like robots for therapeutic applications.

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions, 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3700600  (About DOIs).

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Welcome to Edition 7.29 of the Rocket Report! It may be difficult to believe, but we are already one full month into the new year. It will be hard to top this month in launch, however, given the historic debut of New Glenn, and fiery end of the seventh Starship flight test. And in truth, February does look a bit sleepier in terms of launch.

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.

UK government injects $25 million into Orbex. As some European launch companies have struggled to raise funding, the United Kingdom government stepped up to make a significant investment in the Scotland-based launch firm Orbex, The Financial Times reports. As part of the company's latest fundraising round, valued at $50 million (GBP 40 million), the UK government will become a shareholder in Orbex. The company is working to develop both a small- and medium-lift rocket. Phil Chambers, Orbex's chief executive, said the UK support would be "a strong signal to other private investors, and to the European Space Agency and the EU, that we’re serious about being a part of the future of European launch."

What's the plan, fellas? ... If we're being frank, which is how we roll in the Rocket Report, some of Orbex's recent activity does not inspire confidence. The company, for example, suspended plans to develop a spaceport at Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands to focus resources on developing the Prime microlauncher. And then it said it would develop the larger Proxima rocket as well. That seems pretty ambitious for what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively modest round of fundraising. Given that we have not seen a whole lot of hardware from Orbex, some skepticism is warranted. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Turkey may develop a spaceport in Somalia. Turkey has begun advancing plans to construct a rocket launch facility in Somalia, Space in Africa reports. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said the project began in December. Mohamud emphasized the project’s potential benefits, highlighting its capacity to generate significant employment opportunities and revenue for the East Africa nation. "I believe that the importance of Somalia hosting a launchpad for Turkish satellites goes beyond the billions of dollars and opportunities the project will generate," Mohamud said.

Nothing has been finalized yet ... Located along the equator, Somalia fronts the Indian Ocean, offering an ideal launch location. The potential Somali launch site is part of Turkey’s broader aspirations to assert itself in the global space race, traditionally dominated by major powers. In 2021, Turkey unveiled a 10-year space road map that includes plans for missions to the moon, establishing a spaceport, and developing advanced satellite systems. Somalia, a key Turkish security partner since 2011, already hosts Turkey’s largest overseas training base.

Firefly expands Alpha launch plans to Wallops and Sweden. Firefly Aerospace expects to start launching its Alpha rocket from launch sites in Virginia and Sweden as soon as 2026 to help the company avoid growing congestion at launch sites in Florida and California, Space News reports. So far, Alpha has only launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Firefly is planning five Alpha launches in 2025, all from Vandenberg. The company has performed five Alpha launches to date, going back to the failed inaugural launch in 2021.

Sweden, you say? ... So what is up with those plans to launch from Sweden? Adam Oakes, vice president of launch vehicles at Firefly, said the Esrange Space Centre in Sweden was an ideal partner. "Esrange has basically done everything for the science community in space except an orbital rocket," he said, citing the more than 600 sounding rocket launches there as well as experience with ground stations. "It was the perfect partnership and the biggest softball of all the opportunities out there." It still feels a bit odd, as Vandenberg already offers polar launch corridors, as well as Alpha-size commercial European launch vehicles coming along soon. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

MaiaSpace targets 2026 for debut launch. A subsidiary of ArianeGroup that is developing a two-stage partially reusable rocket, MaiaSpace is one of the more interesting European launch startups. The company's chief executive, Yohann Leroy, recently spoke with Europe in Space to discuss the company's plans. The company will likely start off with a suborbital test flight of a launcher capable of boosting 500 kg to low-Earth orbit in reusable mode and 1,500 kg in expendable mode during the middle of next year.

Following an iterative design method ... "Our approach is to test our rocket in flight as early as possible, following our test-and-learn iterative approach," Leroy said. "We are convinced we will go faster this way, rather than spending time in the lab making sure the first flight reaches 100 percent of our performance targets. In short, we are ready to trade lift-off performance for time-saving, knowing that we will quickly recover our performance afterward. What’s important is to stick to our objective of starting commercial operations in the second half of 2026, and we’re on track to reach this goal." (submitted by RB)

Arianespace inking deals for its new rocket. Arianespace currently has a backlog of 30 Ariane 6 launches, 18 of which are for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation. However, it has recently begun to add Europe-based launch contracts for the rocket. During signing events at the 17th European Space Conference in late January, Arianespace secured contracts for three Ariane 6 flights, European Spaceflight reports.

Getting into operations ... The missions are the European Space Agency's PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission, the Sentinel-1D Earth observation satellite that will replace Sentinel-1A, and a pair of second-generation Galileo satellites. After completing a largely successful debut flight last year, the first operational flight of Ariane is scheduled for February 26, carrying the CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite for the French Armed Forces. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX expends a Falcon 9 rocket. On Wednesday, SpaceX launched the SpainSat NG-1 satellite from Kennedy Space Center's Pad 39A. The Falcon 9 first-stage booster used on this launch saw its 21st and final flight, Florida Today reports. SpaceX said the reason it was not trying to recover the booster was due to the extra power needed to reach the satellite's intended orbit.

Into the drink ... The well-traveled booster had launched a variety of missions during its lifetime: 13 Starlink missions, SES-22, ispace's HAKUTO-R MISSION 1, Amazonas-6, CRS-27, Bandwagon-1, GSAT-20, and Thuraya-4. The Airbus-built satellite, known as SpainSat NG-1 (New Generation), is the first of two satellites for Hisdesat. It was developed under a partnership with the European Space Agency, making its launch on a Falcon 9 somewhat notable.

India marks first launch of 2025. India conducted its first launch of the year late Tuesday, sending a new-generation navigation satellite toward geostationary orbit, Space News reports. A Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk II lifted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Aboard was the NVS-02 satellite, sent into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The satellite is the second of five new-generation spacecraft for the Navigation with Indian Constellation.

A busy year planned ... The mission was the first of 10 orbital launches planned by India in 2025, which would mark a domestic launch record. Major missions include a joint Earth science mission between NASA and ISRO, named NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, expected to launch around March on a GSLV rocket, and an uncrewed test flight for the Gaganyaan human spaceflight program on a human-rated LVM-3 launcher. The first launch of the Vikram-1 for private company Skyroot Aerospace could also take place this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

New Glenn represents a milestone moment for Blue Origin. In a feature, Ars Technica explores what the successful launch of the New Glenn rocket means for Blue Origin. The near-term step is clear: getting better at building engines and rockets and flying New Glenn regularly. In an interview, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos sounded a lot like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has spoken about "building the machine that builds the machine" over the last decade with respect to both Tesla vehicles and SpaceX rockets. Asked about Blue's current priorities, Bezos responded, "Rate manufacturing and driving urgency around the machine that makes the machine."

The tortoise and the hare ... There are those who wonder why Blue Origin, which has a "tortoise" as its unofficial mascot, has moved so slowly when compared to SpaceX's progress over the last quarter of a century. Bezos responded that the space age is just beginning. "It's still absolutely day one," he said. "There are going to be multiple winners. SpaceX is going to be successful. Blue Origin is going to be successful. And there are other companies who haven't even been founded yet that are going to grow into fantastic, giant space companies. So the vision that I think people should have is that this is the absolute beginning."

Space Force has big dreams for ULA this year. The US Space Force is projecting 11 national security launches aboard United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket in 2025, Space News reports. This ambitious schedule comes as the National Security Space Launch program continues to wait on Vulcan's readiness. The heavy lift rocket, which debuted last year after prolonged schedule setbacks, is a cornerstone of the national security's Phase 2 program, under which ULA was selected in 2020 as the primary launch provider for national security missions through 2027.

That seems like a lot ... However, Vulcan remains under review, with certification expected in late February following its second demonstration flight in October 2024. There is a lot of pressure on ULA to execute with Vulcan, due not only to the need to fly out Phase 2 launches, but because the military is nearing a decision on how to award launch contracts under Phase 3 of the program. The more complex "Lane 2" missions are likely to be divided up between ULA and SpaceX. Reaching 11 national security launches on Vulcan this year seems like a stretch for ULA. The company probably will only launch two rockets during the first half of this year, one of which probably will be an Atlas V booster. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

April 2026 a “no later than” date for Artemis II. In a Space News article citing current contractors defending NASA's Artemis plan to return humans to the Moon, a space agency official said the current timeline for Artemis II is achievable. April 2026 is actually a no-later-than date for the mission, Matt Ramsay, Artemis 2 mission manager at NASA, said during a panel discussion. "The agency has challenged us to do better, and we’re in the process of figuring out what better looks like," he said, with a "work-to" launch date coming in the next few weeks.

NET or NLT? ... This is interesting, because a good source told Ars about a month ago that the present date for the Artemis II mission to fly astronauts around the Moon has almost no schedule margin. However, Ramsay said the key factor driving the launch date will be work assembling the vehicle. Crews are currently stacking segments of the SLS’s twin solid rocket boosters, a process that should be complete in the next two to three weeks. This all assumes the Artemis II mission goes forward as designed. I guess we'll see what happens.

Next three launches

Jan. 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-4 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 23:11 UTC

Feb. 2: H3 | Demo Flight | Michibiki 6 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 8:30 UTC

Feb. 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-3 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 8:54 UTC

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This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

Credit: NASA

A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers, and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek into the birth of the solar system.

Nearly 60 years later, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to the one that rained rocks over Revelstoke. Our research team has published a chemical analysis of those samples, providing insight into how some of the ingredients for life may have first arrived on Earth.

Born in the years bracketing the Revelstoke meteorite’s fall, the two of us have spent our careers in the meteorite collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Natural History Museum in London. We’ve dreamed of studying samples from a Revelstoke-like asteroid collected by a spacecraft.

Then, nearly two decades ago, we began turning those dreams into reality. We joined NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission team, which aimed to send a spacecraft to collect and return an asteroid sample to Earth. After those samples arrived on Sept. 24, 2023, we got to dive into a tale of rock, ice, and water that hints at how life could have formed on Earth.

In this illustration, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collects a sample from the asteroid Bennu.

Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

The CI chondrites and asteroid Bennu

To learn about an asteroid—a rocky or metallic object in orbit around the Sun—we started with a study of meteorites.

Asteroids like Bennu are rocky or metallic objects in orbit around the Sun. Meteorites are the pieces of asteroids and other natural extraterrestrial objects that survive the fiery plunge to the Earth’s surface.

We really wanted to study an asteroid similar to a set of meteorites called chondrites, whose components formed in a cloud of gas and dust at the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago.

The Revelstoke meteorite is in a group called CI chondrites. Laboratory-measured compositions of CI chondrites are essentially identical, minus hydrogen and helium, to the composition of elements carried by convection from the interior of the Sun and measured in the outermost layer of the Sun. Since their components formed billions of years ago, they’re like chemically unchanged time capsules for the early solar system.

So, geologists use the chemical compositions of CI chondrites as the ultimate reference standard for geochemistry. They can compare the compositions of everything from other chondrites to Earth rocks. Any differences from the CI chondrite composition would have happened through the same processes that formed asteroids and planets.

CI chondrites are rich in clay and formed when ice melted in an ancient asteroid, altering the rock. They are also rich in prebiotic organic molecules. Some of these types of molecules are the building blocks for life.

This combination of rock, water and organics is one reason OSIRIS-REx chose to sample the organic-rich asteroid Bennu, where water and organic compounds essential to the origin of life could be found.

Evaporites—the legacy of an ancient brine

Ever since the Bennu samples returned to Earth on September 24, 2023, we and our colleagues on four continents have spent hundreds of hours studying them.

The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made observations of reflected light that revealed the most abundant minerals and organics when it was near asteroid Bennu. Our analyses in the laboratory found that the compositions of these samples lined up with those observations.

The samples are mostly water-rich clay, with sulfide, carbonate, and iron oxide minerals. These are the same minerals found in CI chondrites like Revelstoke. The discovery of rare minerals within the Bennu samples, however, surprised both of us. Despite our decades of experience studying meteorites, we have never seen many of these minerals.

We found minerals dominated by sodium, including carbonates, sulfates, chlorides, and fluorides, as well as potassium chloride and magnesium phosphate. These minerals don’t form just when water and rock react. They form when water evaporates.

We’ve never seen most of these sodium-rich minerals in meteorites, but they’re sometimes found in dried-up lake beds on Earth, like Searles Lake in California.

Bennu’s rocks formed 4.5 billion years ago on a larger parent asteroid. That asteroid was wet and muddy. Under the surface, pockets of water perhaps only a few feet across were evaporating, leaving the evaporite minerals we found in the sample. That same evaporation process also formed the ancient lake beds we’ve seen these minerals in on Earth.

Bennu’s parent asteroid likely broke apart 1 to 2 billion years ago, and some of the fragments came together to form the rubble pile we know as Bennu.

These minerals are also found on icy bodies in the outer solar system. Bright deposits on the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, contain sodium carbonate. The Cassini mission measured the same mineral in plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

We also learned that these minerals, formed when water evaporates, disappear when exposed to water once again—even with the tiny amount of water found in air. After studying some of the Bennu samples and their minerals, researchers stored the samples in air. That’s what we do with meteorites.

Unfortunately, we lost these minerals as moisture in the air on Earth caused them to dissolve. But that explains why we can’t find these minerals in meteorites that have been on Earth for decades to centuries.

Fortunately, most of the samples have been stored and transported in nitrogen, protected from traces of water in the air.

Until scientists were able to conduct a controlled sample return with a spacecraft and carefully curate and store the samples in nitrogen, we had never seen this set of minerals in a meteorite.

An unexpected discovery

Before returning the samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years making observations around Bennu. From that two years of work, researchers learned that the surface of the asteroid is covered in rocky boulders.

We could see that the asteroid is rich in carbon and water-bearing clays, and we saw veins of white carbonate a few feet long deposited by ancient liquid water. But what we couldn’t see from these observations were the rarer minerals.

We used an array of techniques to go through the returned sample one tiny grain at a time. These included CT scanning, electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction, each of which allowed us to look at the rock at a scale not possible on the asteroid.

Cooking up the ingredients for life

From the salts we identified, we could infer the composition of the briny water from which they formed and see how it changed over time, becoming more sodium-rich.

This briny water would have been an ideal place for new chemical reactions to take place and for organic molecules to form.

While our team characterized salts, our organic chemist colleagues were busy identifying the carbon-based molecules present in Bennu. They found unexpectedly high levels of ammonia, an essential building block of the amino acids that form proteins in living matter. They also found all five of the nucleobases that make up part of DNA and RNA.

Based on these results, we’d venture to guess that these briny pods of fluid would have been the perfect environments for increasingly complicated organic molecules to form, such as the kinds that make up life on Earth.

When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate, and ammonia. Together, these components could have seeded Earth’s initially barren landscape to produce a habitable world.

Without this early bombardment, perhaps when the pieces of the Revelstoke meteorite landed several billion years later, these fragments from outer space would not have arrived into a landscape punctuated with glaciers and trees.

Timothy J McCoy is a supervisory research geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and Sara Russell is a professor of planetary sciences at the Natural History Museum.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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When we developed the ability to convert various cells into a stem cell, it held the promise of an entirely new type of therapy. Rather than getting the body to try to fix itself with its cells or deal with the complications of organ transplants, we could convert a few adult cells to stem cells and induce them to form any tissue in the body. We could potentially repair or replace tissues with an effectively infinite supply of a patient's own cells.

However, the Nobel Prize for induced stem cells was handed out over a decade ago, and the therapies have been slow to follow. But a group of German researchers is now describing tests in primates of a method of repairing the heart using new muscle generated from stem cells. The results are promising, if not yet providing everything that we might hope for. But they've been enough to start clinical trials, and similar results are being seen in humans.

Heart problems

The heart contains a lot of specialized tissues, including those that form blood vessels or specialize in conducting electrical signals. But the key to the heart is a form of specialized muscle cell, called a cardiomyocyte. Once the heart matures, the cardiomyocytes stop dividing, meaning that you end up with a fixed population. Any damage to the heart due to injury or infection does not get repaired, meaning damage will be cumulative.

This is especially problematic in cases of blocked blood vessels, which can repeatedly starve large areas of the heart of oxygen and nutrients, killing the cardiomyocytes there. This leads to a reduction in cardiac function and can ultimately result in death.

It turns out, however, that it's relatively easy to convert induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC, with pluripotent meaning they can form any cell type). So researchers tried injecting these stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes into damaged hearts in experimental animals, in the hope that they would be incorporated into the damaged tissue. But these experiments didn't always provide clear benefits to the animals.

The group in Germany tried a somewhat different approach. Rather than disperse loose cells, they grew a sheet of cardiomyocytes, and a separate sheet of what's called stroma—a mixed population of cells that form the connective tissue and blood vessels that help support cardiomyocytes in mature hearts. These two sheets of cells were combined into a single patch that could be attached to the heart's exterior.

In experiments with mice, this worked to improve heart function. So the team went to a German research ethics body to check which large animal they should use for further testing before starting human trials. The answer that came back? Macaques.

Positive signs

The paper released on Wednesday describes the results from the macaque work, along with a single human heart from the ensuing clinical trial. The patient the heart belonged to later received a transplant, allowing his stem-cell-treated heart to be analyzed. And in the macaques, the researchers had a mix of animals treated with different-sized cell patches, along with controls.

Most of the work involves a basic characterization of the fates of the patches after they're implanted, addressing many of the potential concerns associated with putting a large amount of stem-cell-derived tissues into an adult animal.

The good news is that there are a couple of significant worries that don't seem to be issues at all. One is that immature stem cells may still be lurking among the mature cardiomyocytes, and they could go on to form tumors after implants. That wasn't seen in this case. Another worry is that the added tissue wouldn't be able to integrate into the hearts functionally. Cardiomyocytes in culture start contracting on their own, and people were concerned that they would continue to beat to their own rhythm rather than working in concert with the heart. But there were no signs of arrhythmias in any of the transplanted animals, suggesting the implanted sheets of cells had integrated with their surroundings.

That said, the implants were not problem-free. For one, some of them ended up with cells belonging to the cartilage/bone lineage, suggesting that there were still a few stem cells in the sheets that were not committed to a mature state.

Another problem is that one animal generated an immune response to the implanted cells despite the fact that the animals were given immunosuppressive drugs. This is a somewhat surprising problem, as it was hoped that using stem cells derived from the same animal would avoid any immune response. This is obviously something that will need to be examined further.

All that said, the grafts seemed to work. The grafts led to increased heart wall thickness and contraction, and grafted hearts moved larger amounts of blood around.

Still some questions

That said, the implants don't seem to be the equivalent of the heart tissues they are meant to replace. While the cardiomyocytes of the implant sheets were mature, they didn't grow to the same size as the ones in the mature heart. That may be related to another issue: The implants didn't fully integrate into the blood supply of the heart. There are potential ways of handling this—we've identified a number of signaling molecules that boost the formation of blood vessels. However, testing them will require additional work in animals, which may also allow us to test whether a better blood supply improves the cardiomyocyte size.

Meanwhile, the single human heart that was available for analysis produced results that were consistent with those generated in the macaques. But we'll have a clearer picture of whether that's the typical result once the full data from the trial becomes available. At that point, we'll be in a better position to evaluate whether stem cells are really ready to live up to their potential.

Nature, 20225. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08463-0  (About DOIs).

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We usually think of robots as being made out of hard, rigid materials, but soft robotics seeks to build robotic devices out of more flexible materials that mimic the properties of those found in living animals. Case in point: Korean engineers have built soft robots capable of rapid and powerful joint movements by employing the same mechanism that gives the mantis shrimp such a powerful punch, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

As we've reported previously, mantis shrimp come in many different varieties; there are some 450 known species. But they can generally be grouped into two types: those that stab their prey with spear-like appendages ("spearers") and those that smash their prey ("smashers") with large, rounded, and hammer-like claws ("raptorial appendages"). Those strikes are so fast (as much as 23 meters per second, or 51 mph) and powerful, they often produce cavitation bubbles in the water, creating a shock wave that can serve as a follow-up strike, stunning and sometimes killing the prey. Sometimes a strike can even produce sonoluminescence, whereby the cavitation bubbles produce a brief flash of light as they collapse.

According to a 2018 study, the secret to that powerful punch seems to arise not from bulky muscles but from the spring-loaded anatomical structure of the shrimp's arms, akin to a bow and arrow or a mousetrap. The shrimp's muscles pull on a saddle-shaped structure in the arm, causing it to bend and store potential energy, which is released with the swinging of the club-like claw. It's essentially a latch-like mechanism (technically, Latch-mediated spring actuation, or LaMSA), with small structures in the muscle tendons called sclerites serving as the latch.

This isn't the first time scientists have looked to the mantis shrimp as an inspiration for robotics. In 2021, we reported on a Harvard researcher who developed a biomechanical model for the mantis shrimp's mighty appendage and built a tiny robot to mimic that movement. What's unusual in the mantis shrimp is that there is a one-millisecond delay between when the unlatching and the snapping action occurs.

The Harvard team identified four distinct striking phases and confirmed it's the geometry of the mechanism that produces the rapid acceleration after the initial unlatching by the sclerites. The short delay may help reduce wear and tear of the latching mechanisms over repeated use.

New types of motion

Co-author Kyu-Jin Cho of Seoul National University became interested in soft robotics as a graduate student, when he participated in the RoboSoft Grand Challenge. Part of his research involved testing the strength of so-called "soft robotic manipulators," a type often used in assembly lines for welding or painting, for example. He noticed some unintended deformations in the shape under applied force and realized that the underlying mechanism was similar to how the mantis shrimp punches or how fleas manage to jump so high and far relative to their size.

In fact, Cho's team previously built a flea-inspired catapult mechanism for miniature jumping robots, using the Hyperelastic Torque Reversal Mechanism (HeTRM) his lab developed. Exploiting torque reversal usually involves incorporating complicated mechanical components. However, "I realized that applying [these] principles to soft robotics could enable the creation of new types of motion without complex mechanisms," Cho said.

Now he's built on that work to incorporate the HeTRM into a soft robotic arm that relies upon material properties rather than structural design. It's basically a soft beam with alternating hyperelastic and rigid segments.

“Our robot is made of soft, stretchy materials, kind of like rubber," said Cho. "Inside, it has a special part that stores energy and releases it all at once—BAM!—to make the robot move super fast. It works a bit like how a bent tree branch snaps back quickly or how a flea jumps really far. This robot can grab things like a hand, crawl across the floor, or even jump high, and it all happens just by pulling on a simple muscle.”

Making the soft robotic arm involved a combination of 3D printing and silicone molding, per the authors. The mold had a top and bottom part, with rigid segments fixed within the bottom mold; the top mold had corresponding holes to the cavities for the soft segments. The researchers used laser cutting to make acrylic sheet "slit molds" inserted between the rigid segments. They then poured silicone into the bottom mold, placed the top mold over it, and poured more silicone through the top mold's holes to create the soft segments.

The molds and plate were removed after three hours of curing, and the team applied silicon adhesive to bond the rigid segments to the soft joints. They used a titanium wire as an actuating tendon, using Teflon grease to reduce friction. They also used 3D-printed markers along the rigid segments for image tracking.

Cho et al. next tested the capabilities of their robotic arm by mounting it onto a platform, using a motor to pull the tendon and a three-pulley measurement system to measure the tendon force. When the motor pulled the tendon in one direction, the beam compressed. Tension was gradually increased until the beam snapped in the opposite direction, eventually returning to its original position.

The team demonstrated the robotic arm both gently stroking an egg (without the HeTRM) and cracking the shell (with the HeTRM). The researchers built a two-legged robot that could crawl like a turtle and use the HeTRM and twining octopus-like tentacles comprised of six HeTRM joints arranged in pairs to propel itself across uneven wet sand. They also devised a soft gripper capable of grabbing a falling ping-pong ball or a tangerine or holding delicate objects like a piece of jelly or an origami box without crushing them.

Science Robotics, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.ado7696  (About DOIs).

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Each year, about 185,000 people in the United States undergo amputation. Nearly half of those are due to injured blood vessels cutting off circulation to a limb. Surgeons can transplant an intact vein from somewhere else in a patient’s body to avoid amputation, but not everyone has a suitable vein to harvest.

A new advance in tissue engineering could help. In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved a bioengineered blood vessel to treat vascular trauma. Made by North Carolina–based biotech company Humacyte, it’s designed to restore blood flow in patients with traumatic injuries, such as from gunshots, car accidents, industrial accidents, or combat.

“Some patients are so badly injured that they don't have any veins available,” says Laura Niklason, founder and CEO of Humacyte. Even when a patient has a usable one, a vein often isn’t a good replacement for an artery. “Your veins are very thin. They're weak little structures, and your arteries are very strong,” she says.

Niklason first became interested in the idea of growing spare blood vessels in the 1990s, when she was training to be a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. She remembers observing a patient undergoing a heart bypass, which involves using a healthy vessel to reroute blood flow around a blocked coronary artery. The surgeon opened up both of the patient’s legs, arms, and finally, the stomach, in search of a suitable blood vessel to use. “It was just really barbaric,” Niklason says. She figured there had to be a better way.

She started with growing blood vessels in the lab from just a few cells collected from pig arteries. When she transplanted them into the animal, they worked like the real thing.

After those early experiments, it was a long road to an FDA-approved product for humans. Niklason and her team spent more than a decade isolating blood vessel cells from human organ and tissue donors. They tested cells from more than 700 donors and found that those from five of those donors were the most efficient at growing and expanding in the lab. Niklason says Humacyte now has enough cells banked from these five donors to make between 500,000 and a million engineered blood vessels.

The company currently makes the vessels in batches of 200, using custom-designed degradable polymer scaffolds that are 42 centimeters long and 6 millimeters thick. The scaffolds are placed in individual bags and seeded with millions of the donor cells. The bags then go into a school-bus-sized incubator to soak in a nutrient bath for two months. While the tissue grows, it secretes collagen and other proteins that provide structural support. Eventually, the polymer scaffold dissolves and the cells are washed away with a special solution. What’s left is “de-cellularized” flexible tissue in the shape of a blood vessel. Because it doesn’t contain living human cells, it won’t cause rejection when implanted into a patient.

“People have been trying to come up with a tubular material like this one for a long time,” says Anton Sidawy, president-elect of the American College of Surgeons and a vascular surgeon at the George Washington University Medical Center, who isn’t involved with Humacyte.

Currently, synthetic alternatives made of Teflon or a type of polyester called Dacron are sometimes used when a patient doesn’t have an available blood vessel. But they’re not ideal. “Every time you put a foreign body in the human body, the chance of infection goes up. Bacteria love to sit on the foreign body and cause an infection,” Sidawy says.

The safety and effectiveness of the engineered vessel was tested in 51 civilian patients and 16 military patients with traumatic injuries, and the results were compared with previous studies of people who received synthetic versions. At 30 days after implantation, nearly 92 percent of the vessels remained open and functioning, compared with 79 percent for synthetic grafts. About 4.5 percent of patients required amputation, much lower than the 24 percent in tests of synthetic grafts. In addition, less than 1 percent of the bioengineered vessels became infected compared with more than 8 percent for the synthetic options. The results were published in the journal JAMA Surgery in November.

“This actually becomes part of the patient's body,” says Michael Curi, chief of vascular surgery at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, who coauthored the paper. “The body grows its own cells into this vessel wall, and it mimics a natural vessel.”

While the December approval means Humacyte’s vessel can only be used in trauma patients, the company is pursuing other uses for its technology. It has tested the bioengineered vessel in patients on kidney dialysis, which requires connecting an artery or vein to a dialysis machine, as well as in individuals with peripheral artery disease, when arteries in the legs or arms become blocked. In monkeys, a smaller version of the engineered blood vessel has also shown promise in treating heart bypass.

“It’s truly a remarkable scientific achievement,” Curi says. “And in my opinion, it is the future of medicine.”

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A Chinese company’s claim of a $5.6 million artificial intelligence breakthrough wiped almost $600 billion from Nvidia’s market value on Monday, shattering Wall Street’s confidence that tech companies’ AI spending spree will continue and dealing an apparent blow to US tech leadership.

Yet many in Silicon Valley believe the broad sell-off is an overreaction to DeepSeek’s latest model, which they argue could spur wider adoption and utility of AI by radically lowering the technology’s cost, sustaining demand for Nvidia’s chips.

Pat Gelsinger, recently forced out as chief executive of Intel, was among those buying his former rival Nvidia’s stock on Monday. “The market reaction is wrong: lowering the cost of AI will expand the market,” he said in a LinkedIn post. “DeepSeek is an incredible piece of engineering that will usher in greater adoption of AI.”

Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company last year as investors bet on Big Tech companies’ insatiable appetite for its powerful AI processors. The chipmaker’s chief executive Jensen Huang has predicted $1 trillion worth of AI data centers will be built in the next few years.

Underpinning that confidence was the concept of an AI “scaling law,” popularized by senior leaders at AI start-ups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, that suggested AI models got smarter as they were fed more data and computing resources.

DeepSeek’s release of its highly capable R1 model—and the research paper explaining openly how it was made—seemed to break the scaling law’s spell, as its chatbot leapt to the top of the iPhone’s US App Store chart over the weekend. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index shed 9.2 percent, its worst daily drop since March 2020.

Chinese tech champion Huawei has emerged as Nvidia’s primary competitor in China for inference chips. The Financial Times has previously reported that it has been working with AI companies, including DeepSeek, to adapt models trained on Nvidia GPUs to run inference on its Ascend chips.

“Huawei is getting better. They have an opening as the government is telling the big tech companies that they need to buy their chips and use them for inference,” said one semiconductor investor in Beijing.

The announcement that triggered Monday’s stock market spasm over Nvidia came as the US moves to assert its leadership in AI over China, and as the biggest US tech companies prepare to report their latest earnings. US President Donald Trump said DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win.”

In December, DeepSeek released the V3 model, which it claimed was comparable to ones from OpenAI and Google, but trained it on a fraction of the budget with $5.6 million. The Chinese company said it used just 2,048 Nvidia chips, which could have been obtained without breaching US export controls that have throttled China’s access to US chipmakers’ latest products.

Then, last week, it unveiled its latest R1 model, a “reasoning model” that is comparable to OpenAI’s o1.

Further spooking investors, DeepSeek’s engineers were able to unlock greater performance by writing code without relying on Nvidia’s Cuda software platform, which is widely seen as crucial to the Silicon Valley chipmaker’s dominance of AI development.

“DeepSeek has leveled the playing field,” said Stephen Yiu, chief investment officer of Blue Whale Growth, the investment fund backed by billionaire Peter Hargreaves, which last month reduced its exposure to the Magnificent Seven group of big US tech companies on concerns over their huge expenditure on AI.

The biggest US tech companies “have had monopoly access to AI—the entry ticket price was in the billions of dollars, otherwise there was no chance you could challenge the status quo,” Yiu said. That made DeepSeek’s arrival a “very positive development for the adoption, development, and penetration of AI,” he added.

Short sellers, who have placed a flurry of bets against Nvidia’s sky-high share price in recent weeks, were jubilant on Monday. Nvidia’s 17 percent share price decline generated $6.75 billion in profits for short sellers, according to calculations by data group S3 Partners.

“A Chinese entity put out open-sourced code right before earnings of all the big American tech companies,” said one short seller with interests in a number of large AI companies. “They’re telling you there’s no value [in those companies’ AI models], it’s commoditized.”

However, some analysts have challenged the idea that DeepSeek’s breakthrough AI was so cheap to build.

Dylan Patel of chip consultancy SemiAnalysis has estimated that DeepSeek and its sister company, the hedge fund High-Flyer, have access to tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, which were used to train R1’s predecessors.

“DeepSeek has spent well over $500 million on GPUs over the history of the company,” Patel said. “While their training run was very efficient, it required significant experimentation and testing to work.”

G Dan Hutcheson at TechInsights said the market reaction did not reflect who was most exposed to DeepSeek’s breakthrough. “I don’t see it as a big hit to Nvidia, I see it as a bigger problem for the companies like OpenAI that are trying to sell these services,” he said.

Nvidia argued on Monday that DeepSeek’s innovations would benefit, not blow up, its business.

“DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling,” Nvidia said, referring to AI systems that consume more computing resources after a user poses a question or sets a task by “reasoning” or taking multiple linked steps to respond. “Inference requires significant numbers of Nvidia GPUs and high-performance networking.”

The implication of Nvidia’s statement is that by pushing the boundaries of what is possible with “open source” AI models, DeepSeek has in fact grown demand for the chips that are used to run them.

While Nvidia is best known for providing the chips that are used to “train” or build a new AI system, it has said that it now generates just as much revenue from chips for “inference” or processing user requests using a finished model.

Huang argued on a recent podcast that demand for inference “is about to go up by a billion times” due to new AI models that “reason” or take time to plan and deliver an answer to a complex query.

“There are two uses for Nvidia chips, training and inference, and we’re just at the beginning of the inference story,” said Jordan Jacobs, co-founder of AI investor Radical Ventures, who bought more Nvidia shares on Monday as the chipmaker’s stock slumped 17 percent. “As we see the world shifting to AI it requires a huge upgrade in chips. The sell-off seems to be an overreaction and a lack of understanding.”

“The market is not properly realizing this is great for Nvidia,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity, the San Francisco-based AI search start-up that counts the chipmaker among its investors. “No matter what, Jensen wins.”

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in San Francisco and Eleanor Olcott in Beijing.

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DeepSeek's models have caught the attention of Western companies because they are claimed to have been developed at a fraction of the typical cost and use significantly less computing power. To give you a quick comparison with a pioneer like ChatGPT, take a look at this table:

You get the idea. Western markets are freaking out, especially since DeepSeek has risen to the top of the App Store charts in recent days. With so many people trying to access it, there are now confirmed reports of outages and performance problems, reminiscent of ChatGPT's early days. Remember when ChatGPT would regularly log people out, glitch out, and users had to report bugs to OpenAI on Discord?

This comes after Biden's last-minute rule (before leaving office) that will place further restrictions on AI chip exports to countries like China, a rule that Nvidia fiercely opposed, condemning Biden and praising Trump.

Speaking of Nvidia, Bloomberg reports that the company's stock market value has taken a historic plunge, with over $400 billion erased from its market cap. According to Bloomberg, this 13% drop is the biggest in US stock market history, surpassing Nvidia's own record from September, when the company lost almost $280 billion in value.

Investors are concerned that the rise of competitors like DeepSeek could change the way modern LLMs are trained and used. So, you might be wondering, how are OpenAI and its employees responding to all this? Sam Altman, in an X post last month, said:

While DeepSeek wasn't mentioned explicitly, the comment is generally interpreted as being aimed at models like DeepSeek, which are replicating ChatGPT at a cheaper cost.

Altman tweeted this a day after DeepSeek V3 launched (December 27, 2024), as the initial hype took off on X.

Image via Depositphotos.com

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Far from being solo operators, most single-celled microbes are in complex relationships. In the ocean, the soil, and your gut, they might battle and eat each other, exchange DNA, compete for nutrients, or feed on one another’s by-products. Sometimes they get even more intimate: One cell might slip inside another and make itself comfortable. If the conditions are just right, it might stay and be welcomed, sparking a relationship that could last for generations—or billions of years. This phenomenon of one cell living inside another, called endosymbiosis, has fueled the evolution of complex life.

Examples of endosymbiosis are everywhere. Mitochondria, the energy factories in your cells, were once free-living bacteria. Photosynthetic plants owe their sun-spun sugars to the chloroplast, which was also originally an independent organism. Many insects get essential nutrients from bacteria that live inside them. And last year researchers discovered the “nitroplast,” an endosymbiont that helps some algae process nitrogen.

So much of life relies on endosymbiotic relationships, but scientists have struggled to understand how they happen. How does an internalized cell evade digestion? How does it learn to reproduce inside its host? What makes a random merger of two independent organisms into a stable, lasting partnership?

Now, for the first time, researchers have watched the opening choreography of this microscopic dance by inducing endosymbiosis in the lab. After injecting bacteria into a fungus—a process that required creative problem-solving (and a bicycle pump)—the researchers managed to spark cooperation without killing the bacteria or the host. Their observations offer a glimpse into the conditions that make it possible for the same thing to happen in the microbial wild.

The cells even adjusted to each other faster than anticipated. “To me, this means that organisms want to actually live together, and symbiosis is the norm,” said Vasilis Kokkoris, a mycologist who studies the cell biology of symbiosis at VU University in Amsterdam and wasn’t involved in the new study. “So that’s big, big news for me and for this world.”

Early attempts that fell short reveal that most cellular love affairs are unsuccessful. But by understanding how, why, and when organisms accept endosymbionts, researchers can better understand key moments in evolution, and also potentially develop synthetic cells engineered with superpowered endosymbionts.

The Cell Wall Breakthrough

Julia Vorholt, a microbiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland, has long puzzled over the circumstances of endosymbiosis. Researchers in the field theorized that once a bacterium sneaks into a host cell, the relationship teeters between infection and harmony. If the bacterium reproduces too quickly, it risks depleting the host’s resources and triggering an immune response, resulting in the death of the guest, the host, or both. If it reproduces too slowly, it won’t establish itself in the cell. Only in rare cases, they thought, does the bacterium achieve a Goldilocks reproductive rate. Then, to become a true endosymbiont, it must infiltrate its host’s reproductive cycle to hitch a ride to the next generation. Finally, the host’s genome must eventually mutate to accommodate the bacterium—allowing the two to evolve as a unit.

“They become addicted to each other,” Vorholt said.

These ideas made logical sense, but no one had ever witnessed the early steps of microbial endosymbiosis. So Vorholt decided to try to make it happen in the lab. Rather than reinventing the endosymbiotic wheel, she thought her team would have its best shot if it re-created a partnership that had already occurred in nature.

Rice seedling blight is a disease caused by the toxic by-product of a wild, endosymbiotic affair. At some point in its evolutionary history, the fungus Rhizopus microsporus adopted the bacterium Mycetohabitans rhizoxinica. The bacterial resident produces poison, which the fungus uses to infect rice plants; both partners benefit by absorbing nutrients from the dead and dying plant cells. Over generations, the pair have become so intertwined that now the fungus can’t reproduce without its endosymbiont.

However, there is a strain of the fungus that lives without the endosymbiont. Vorholt thought she could use it to re-create the poisonous partnership. Before she got to the harder steps of cellular matchmaking, though, her team had to overcome a basic physical constraint: How do you physically squeeze a bacterium through a fungus’s rigid cell wall?

Gabriel Giger, lead author on the paper and Vorholt’s graduate student, started by cooking up a cocktail of enzymes to soften the wall. Then he used an atomic force microscope equipped with a technology known as FluidFM, repurposed to serve as a tiny syringe. When Giger punctured the fungal cell with the microneedle, cytoplasm came rushing out like water from a burst dam.

“We had so much backflush,” Giger said. “[The cell fluid] just comes shooting right at you.”

He needed something with more oomph to resist the intracellular pressure and push the bacteria in. Giger jury-rigged a connection between his bike pump and the microscope. It worked: The bike pump boosted the pressure and forced the bacteria through the cell wall and into the cytoplasm.

After tinkering with different amounts of pressure, they refined the system. “The way they adapted technology to inject the bacteria into fungus is really, really cool,” said Thomas Richards, an evolutionary biologist who studies endosymbiosis at the University of Oxford and wasn’t involved in the study. “They had to use special sharpened needles and then three times the tire pressure of car tires to push that bacteria inside. That represents a big technological step forward.”

Giger and Vorholt first injected the fungus with Escherichia coli, a standard bacterial lab organism. Once inside, E. coli reproduced quickly as it fed on nutrients within the cell. The bacteria grew so fast that the fungal immune system noticed them—and handily locked them away for disposal.

Then the researchers moved on to M. rhizoxinica, the bacteria already established within other R. microsporus strains. Once inside, it divided at an agreeable rate and evaded the immune response. Most importantly, neither partner died. “It was already super exciting to see that both the fungus and the bacteria grew after injection,” Giger said

The pair had initially accepted each other, but that was only the first step. Giger patiently waited, and then he saw what he was looking for under the microscope: The bacteria had wiggled their way into the fungal spores to hitchhike to the next generation.

“I had to make sure the signal was the real deal, and you don’t sleep soundly until you know,” he said. “The excitement lasted for quite a while.”

Giger and the team hand-selected spores and germinated 10 successive generations of fungi. More bacteria survived in each reproductive round, and the spores got healthier and more efficient. For the first time, researchers watched endosymbiotic and host microbes adapt to each other. “Neither of these organisms is poisoning each other, and their growth rates roughly match this spectrum of viability for both,” Giger recalled. The bacteria survived, protected and fed by the fungus—and the fungus scored a poisonous partner.

To confirm the microbial partnership, the lab isolated both parties to analyze their genomes. Already, the fungus genome had gained mutations to accommodate the bacteria. Clearly, these relationships can stabilize quickly, the researchers saw. Soon the two species couldn’t live without each other.

Striking the Right Balance

By re-creating a natural relationship, Vorholt and Giger have “rerun that tape of evolution,” Richards said, to learn lessons about how endosymbiosis happens. They concluded that the process can’t happen if there is a mismatch between host and endosymbiont at any point in the adaptation process. “That’s probably what happens in nature a lot,” Vorholt said. “Maybe their starting points are successful, but somehow the selection is not there, or there is a cost rather than a benefit. And then you just lose the system, and it doesn’t get stabilized.”

They also learned that in pairings that work, both partners adapt to each other—a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked. It wasn’t just the bacteria adapting to a new environment; the host changed too, even in the early stages. “That is a fundamentally important question that people have ignored,” Richards said. “This opens the doors for real advances.”

While illuminating, this bacterium-fungus pairing is only one example of a process that may have a number of mechanisms or conditions. “I can imagine that in protists and other groups that have not been well studied, we will find many new patterns of how symbiosis is supported,” said Laila Partida Martínez, who discovered the rice seedling–blight endosymbiosis and is now director of Cinvestav Irapuato, a plant science research institute in Mexico.

More research in a variety of endosymbiotic systems will reveal which conditions apply generally and which are specific to certain pairs. Further down the line, those findings could lead to a new kind of synthetic biology, featuring lab-grown endosymbiotic relationships, which could be a “fascinating avenue to explore biological innovation,” Vorholt said.

Instead of editing organisms’ genes to create new traits, labs could engineer bacteria to perform specific functions and then slip them into hosts. “Many new features could be brought together in a symbiotic system by doing this and making them evolve together,” Partida Martínez said. By inducing endosymbiosis, researchers could potentially engineer plants to metabolize pollutants or manufacture medicines. “It will take time to design and to really tune the systems,” she added. “I think our imagination would be actually the limit.”

Does that mean we could one day gain chloroplasts and become photosynthetic? Giger thinks it would be difficult for a chloroplast to stabilize inside a mammalian cell. Even if it did work, photosynthesis alone wouldn’t fuel us—our energy demands are too high. “You might get fancy green skin and run a little bit on your own photovoltaics, but the energy gain that you could get from the sun would be minimal,” he said. “You’d go hungry a lot and need to supplement with other staples, such as pizza.”

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

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Monday, 27 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 19:21 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 21 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. Among them will be 13 direct-to-cell Starlink satellites, which are a newer generation designed to work with mobile phones that support the technology. This batch of satellites is known as Starlink Group 12-7 and can be observed when it's in orbit using an app like ISS Detector. After the launch, expect the Falcon 9's first stage to perform a landing.

Tuesday, 28 January

• Who: Blue Origin
• What: New Shepard
• When: 16:00 UTC
• Where: Texas, US
• Why: This mission is designated New Shepard 29 (NS-29) and will be uncrewed. This suborbital mission will be carrying 30 experiments and simulate the Moon's gravity inside the capsule for a few minutes. Discussing the mission in more depth, Blue Origin says:

The payloads will experience at least two minutes of lunar gravity forces, a first for New Shepard and made possible in part through support from NASA. The flight will test six broad lunar technology areas: In-situ resource utilization, dust mitigation, advanced habitation systems, sensors and instrumentation, small spacecraft technologies, and entry descent and landing. Proving out these technologies at lower cost is another step toward Blue Origin’s mission to lower the cost of access to space for the benefit of Earth. It also enables NASA and other lunar surface technology providers to test innovations critical to achieving Artemis program goals and exploring the Moon’s surface.

• Who: ISRO (Indian Space Agency)
• What: GSLV
• When: 22:45 - 02:45 UTC
• Where: Andhra Pradesh, India
• Why: Using the GSLV rocket, India will launch the NSV 2 navigation satellite to bolster its regional navigation constellation. It is being launched to replace an older satellite in the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System constellation. Unlike GPS or Galileo, IRNSS is a regional constellation, meaning it works in India and surrounding countries.

Wednesday, 29 January

• Who: SpaceX

   

• What: Falcon 9
• When: 04:00 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: Using a Falcon 9, SpaceX will launch the Spainsat-NG 1 comms satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit for Hisdesat. The first stage of the rocket will likely perform a landing for reuse.

Thursday, 30 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 10:44 - 14:44 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch 21 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. This batch is called Starlink Group 12-3 and will include 13 direct-to-cell satellites. The first stage of the rocket should perform a landing so that it can be reused on future missions.

Saturday, 1 February

• Who: Mitsubishi
• What: H3
• When: 08:30 - 10:30 UTC
• Where: Tanegashima Space Center, Japan
• Why: Mitsubishi will launch an H3 rocket carrying the sixth Michibiki (QZS 6) navigation satellite for JAXA into geostationary orbit.

Recap

The first launch last week came from the Chinese company Galactic Energy, which launched the Ceres-1 rocket carrying several satellites in a mission called 'On Your Shoulders':

Next, we got a Starlink launch from SpaceX, which used its Falcon 9:

The third mission was SpaceX's second Starlink mission of the week. It launched 27 Starlink sats as part of Starlink Group 11-8 before landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket:

Next up, we got the launch of a Long March 6A rocket from China carrying 18 SpaceSail Polar Orbit satellites. These satellites will provide broadband internet services:

We also saw a Long March 3B launch carrying the TJSW-14 test communications satellite:

The final launch of the week was a Falcon 9 from SpaceX carrying Starlink Group 11-6 to low Earth orbit. After launch, the first stage of the rocket performed a landing:

That's all for this week; check back next time.

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Last year, a study highlighted that your doctor's office might be taking your blood pressure wrong. The current best practice is to take seated blood pressure readings with a detailed protocol: Patients must not eat, drink, or exercise for 30 minutes prior; they must have an empty bladder and sit calmly for five minutes prior to the first reading; they must sit with their feet uncrossed and flat on the floor; their back should be supported; and—a big one that's often overlooked—they must keep the arm to be measured resting on a flat surface at the height of their heart, not higher or lower.

While the setup is often different from what happens in a bustling medical office, a new study blows away quibbles over protocol and suggests that even when done perfectly, the method is second-rate. We shouldn't be sitting at all when we take our blood pressure—we should be lying down.

According to the study, published in JAMA Cardiology and led by researchers at Harvard, blood pressure readings measured while lying down were significantly better at indicating risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart failure, and death than were seated blood pressure readings alone.

For instance, people who had high blood pressure readings while lying down but not while seated had an estimated 53 percent higher relative risk of coronary heart disease than people with normal blood pressure. They had a 51 percent higher risk of heart failure, a 62 percent higher risk of stroke, a 78 percent higher risk of fatal coronary heart disease, and a 34 percent higher risk of all-cause mortality.

For people who had high blood pressure readings only when sitting (normal readings while lying down), there was no statistically significant difference in risk of coronary heart disease, heart failure, or stroke compared to people with normal blood pressure. The only statistically significant differences were a 41 percent higher risk of fatal coronary heart disease (compared to the 78 percent seen in those with high readings lying down) and an 11 percent higher risk of all-cause mortality.

(In this study, high blood pressure readings were defined for both positions as those with systolic readings (the top number) of 130 mm Hg or greater or diastolic readings (the bottom number) of 80 mm Hg or greater.)

The people with the highest risks across the board were those who had high blood pressure readings while both sitting and lying down.

"These findings suggest that measuring supine [lying down] BP may be useful for identifying elevated BP and latent CVD risk," the researchers conclude.

Strengths and hypotheses

For now, the findings should be considered preliminary. Such an analysis and finding should be repeated with a different group of people to confirm the link. And as to the bigger question of whether using medication to lower supine blood pressure (rather than seated blood pressure) is more effective at reducing risk, it's likely that clinical trials will be necessary.

Still, the analysis had some notable strengths that make the findings attention-worthy. The study's size and design are robust. Researchers tapped into data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, a study established in 1987 with middle-aged people living in one of four US communities (Forsyth County, North Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Washington County, Maryland).

This study included data from 11,369 ARIC participants, mostly White and Black, and as such, the results are considered generalizable to a broad population. ARIC study staff underwent rigorous training to conduct the study. Measurements were highly standardized, researchers had extensive health information and data on the participants, and the data included more than three decades of follow-up.

The findings also jibe with previous studies finding that high blood pressure readings during nightly sleep (when people are generally lying down) are also strongly linked to higher cardiovascular risks. Normally, blood pressure naturally drops during sleep, but those who maintain a higher pressure face substantial risk. While the ARIC study did not include blood pressure readings during sleep, it's hypothesized that the lying-down position may be a factor in the associated risks of nocturnal high blood pressure.

As for why lying-down blood pressure may be more telling than sitting pressure, researchers only have hypotheses. It could be that lying-down readings are a more precise assessment of true resting blood pressure, which is what seated readings try to ascertain (hence the detailed protocol). It could be that the bodily mechanisms causing high blood pressure while lying down are more directly linked to cardiovascular outcomes. Or maybe high blood pressure while lying down is simply harder on the heart and brain than it is when upright.

Researchers will need more data to clarify the role of lying-down blood pressure readings in estimating cardiovascular risks. But for those with blood pressure monitors at home, it might not be a terrible idea to see how your readings compare between sitting and lying down. The authors note that in the ARIC study, lying-down readings were done after a 20-minute rest period in that position. Readings were taken up to 5 times every 20 to 30 seconds over the course of two minutes. The researchers note that future studies evaluating the use of lying-down measurement in medical appointments should look to see if shorter rest periods would also work.

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Slowly but surely, we are making good on the gadgets we imagined, as kids, that the future would hold. Penny Brown’s video watch from Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet tricoder from Star Trek? Almost there. But web-shooting? Web-slinging? That wasn't one we really thought would make the crossover. And it wasn't exactly in the plans for the scientist who has made the strong, sticky, air-spun web a reality either, Marco Lo Presti, from Tufts University’s Silklab.

Back in 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor in biomedical engineering, was working on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to work on was made up of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way that mussels stick firmly to rock surfaces in water—something that has been useful in other applications.

“While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance,” he says, “I noticed it was undergoing a transition into a solid format, into a web-looking material, into something that looked like a fiber. I showed the vials to Fio, and we immediately started thinking about how we could make a remote adhesive [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] out of it.”

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at Tufts and “puppeteer” of the Silklab. “We'd like to say that every experiment is painstakingly planned with equations and lots of forethought, but it's really about connection,” he says. “You explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots. Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say ‘hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?’ And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing.”

Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental webs, though, he had to complete his paper on underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. A lot of the Silklab’s work is “bio-inspired” by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchids—so working out whether this sticky web could become something useful might seem like an easy side-step for the team.

However, Lo Presti points out that while the new material does mimic spider threads, “there is no spider able to eject, to shoot a stream of solution, which turns into a fiber and does the remote capturing of a distant object.” This was something new, for the real world at least.

But as the research paper in Advanced Functional Materials notes—enter fictional characters. In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter Parker builds a “little device,” one fastened to each wrist and triggered by finger pressure, to produce strands of ejectable ‘spider webs.’ By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, the web-shooting switched from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget to an organic part of his superhero transformation.

From Science Fiction Into Reality

At the real-life lab in Medford, Massachusetts, the true web-slinging evolution began when Lo Presti and his colleagues shot a thin stream of their silk fibroin (Japanese silk moth cocoons, boiled down and broken into proteins) and dopamine combination through a needle. This was originally ejected straight into a “bath” of acetone, which triggers the substance's solidification into a hydrogel.

The team then decided to add this all-important acetone into the outer layer of a coaxial needle, surrounding the silk and dopamine in the inner needle layer to enable the liquid to shoot straight into the air. As the acetone evaporates mid-air, the dopamine speeds up the substance's solidifying process, creating sticky, strong, spun fibers by pulling water away from the silk—something that would usually take hours.

With the obvious pop culture inspiration in mind, this was a place the team worked hard to get to. “We were looking at doing something in air,” Lo Presti says, “so adapting and creating the engineering device, the study of the flow, the coaxial needle, to have the fiber ejected in the air—that was where we started to get truly excited.”

The team started to experiment with its strength, shooting fibers to capture and lift objects including a cocoon, a 2-gram stainless-steel bolt and a 5-gram wood block from 12 centimeters away. Bit by bit, they fine-tuned their solution with additional materials to change what it was capable of: a biopolymer named chitosan to give the fibers up to 200 times more tensile strength and a borate buffer to increase the adhesiveness to objects by 18 times.

“We can now catch an object up to 30 or 35 centimeters away and lift an object of around 15 to 20 grams,” says Lo Presti. The silk fibers performed the best on cardboard and wood, both instantly and after 10 minutes, but also work on materials like plastic, glass, and metal. Testing real-world conditions, the researchers used the air-spun fibers to remotely pick up a small plastic lab tube floating on water, and a stainless-steel scalpel, partially buried in sand.

So, Spider-Man capabilities when? “Everybody wants to know if we're going to be able to swing from buildings,” says Omenetto with a wry smile. But we're not there yet—so far the Silklab team itself has speculated about some potential uses for the material: the retrieval of an object that’s lost underwater, perhaps, or a drone that captures something in a remote environment.

“In principle, if you have the starting material and if you can control the parameters, the baseline material properties are such that you could do amazing things,” Omenetto explains. “I mean you could probably lift a very heavy object, but that’s one of the big questions—what can you lift? Can you remotely drag something? Silk is very, very strong, it’s very tough, it can lift incredible weights but this is silk in its natural form whether it’s from the spider or the silkworm. There is not a fundamental limit in these directions.”

Lo Presti is interested to hear from anyone who has read his paper and thinks they might be in need of a web-shooting silk fiber. A few months after he published his work on the underwater adhesive, a nonprofit emailed to ask if it could be used to tag sharks. “My first answer was absolutely not,” he says, “because the adhesive is too rigid and because sharks move. But I then tried to make something, and we’re still collaborating with them and working on this.”

It’s not unlikely, Lo Presti suggests, that the same could happen with this project and that the speed, distance, and strength of the object-capturing fibers could also be improved with more dedicated work from the team. These first “small” examples are to demonstrate the possibilities of the material, but improving and tailoring it for specific applications may be the key to uncovering its true potential.

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