Far above your head, constellations of satellites are working constantly to provide the positioning, navigation, and timing systems that quietly run modern life. Known as the global navigation satellite system, or GNSS, signals from these satellites provide the foundation for mobile networks, energy grids, the internet, and GPS. And increasingly, their dependability is under threat.

GPS signals can be jammed—deliberately drowned out with other powerful radio signals—and spoofed, where erroneous signals are released to fool positioning systems. GPS interference has been documented in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the South China Sea.

But startup SandboxAQ believes that artificial intelligence, when combined with navigation systems that read Earth’s magnetic field, known as MagNav, could mitigate these threats to GNSS. “Our technology does not replace [GNSS], but can enrich existing navigation systems to improve safety and serve as an alternative primary navigation source in case of GPS outages,” says Luca Ferrara, general manager of SandboxAQ’s navigation department.

SandboxAQ’s navigation technology, called AQNav, uses quantum magnetometers—devices that can detect changes in magnetic fields very precisely by measuring subatomic particles—to produce a reading of the Earth’s magnetic field. “We are looking for the unique fingerprint of magnetized rock formations in the Earth’s crust,” says Ferrara.

Artificial intelligence is then used to accurately pinpoint the position of an aircraft, through comparison with known maps of the magnetic field. The AI also eliminates any external interference generated by the aircraft, such as from sudden movements or signals from its electrical systems; individual aircraft have unique characteristics when it comes to introducing magnetic interference.

So far, the US Air Force, Boeing, and Airbus have all made test flights using the system. “Since May 2023, we have deployed and tested many iterations of our hardware and software,” Ferrara explains. “AQNav has flown hundreds of kilometers in different types of aircraft, from single-engine aircrafts to large military transports. It has been tested in real flight scenarios, including two major military exercises by the US Air Force.”

SandboxAQ’s team—and inspiration for the idea—originated at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, between 2016 and 2022. The initial idea was to find applications for artificial intelligence and quantum technologies developed within Google’s moonshot factory.

Then, in 2022, SandboxAQ was spun out from Alphabet, and founder and current CEO Jack Hidary set the company’s sights on any sector that needed high-profile AI solutions. Its work isn’t just limited to aerospace and navigation, says Ferrara. “Other technologies are producing critical advances in life sciences, chemistry and materials, financial services, cybernetics, and other areas,” he says.

Right now, the AQNav technology isn’t ready for the market. Issues that still need solving include “integration into existing platforms and the design of a system robust enough to operate reliably on a global scale.” Specifically, the reliability of the software still needs to be improved, and the signal-processing techniques need to function well in a variety of environmental conditions. The system will also need to pass compliance with international flight standards. “Since AQNav, in its current stage of development, is not yet as precise and accurate as modern GNSS, in the immediate term it is more useful as a tool for flight safety, complementing existing navigation systems,” Ferrara says.

But in the longer term, he believes the tech could be widely used both in defense and in civilian aviation. The most recent reports from the International Air Transport Association and the European Union Agency for Aviation Safety have shown a dramatic increase in GPS interference and spoofing. “As aircraft automation increases, vulnerability of GNSS will only get worse. So this technology is seen as a key factor in making the skies safer today and potentially improving range tomorrow.” The maritime and drone-manufacturing industries have also expressed needs that could be met with special versions of the AQNav. “There are also interesting possibilities with cars and trains to be explored in the future,” Ferrara adds.

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

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, have you tried to induce total existential dread by contemplating the end of the entire Universe?

If not, here’s a rundown of five ideas exploring how “all there is” might become “nothing at all.”

Enjoy.

The heat death

We’ll start our survey with the classic scenario, what you might call the default. It’s the future predicted to come about if everything we know about the Universe is largely correct and all that stuff in the cosmos continues to behave the way it has for the past few billion years. Of course, what we know about the Universe is likely to be wrong, and the contents of the Universe are likely to change and evolve with time. So while this scenario might be the default, it should be taken with a neutron star’s worth of salt. But much like a TV meteorologist trying to write up the weekend outlook five minutes before airtime, it’s the best we have given the data available.

We live in an expanding Universe, and in the late 1990s, two independent teams of astronomers discovered—much to their surprise—that the expansion is accelerating. Whatever’s driving that expansion was dubbed “dark energy,” and a quarter century later, we still have no idea what it is. But we do know what it does. We don’t know why the Universe’s expansion is accelerating; we just know that it is.

As far as we can tell, that acceleration will continue unabated forever into the future, driving all the material in the Universe ever farther apart. Right now, our observable horizon is about 45 billion light-years away. But any galaxy we see that’s more than about 13 billion light-years away is already forever lost to us. Those galaxies are receding faster than light, so there’s no hope of ever traveling to them. Their light will slowly dim and redshift until they have disappeared from view altogether.

With dark energy, our observable horizon grows ever smaller with time, despite the increasing size of the Universe. Anything that’s not already gravitationally bound to our galaxy will eventually be pulled away from us. For us, that means only the members of the Local Group will survive these tumultuous times. But anything outside of that bubble, which is only a few billion light-years on a side, will be gone forever. So if you’re close and personal with a galaxy that’s not named Andromeda or Triangulum, you might as well say your goodbyes now.

Given enough time (and the Universe has plenty of that to go around), galaxies dissolve as stars, and planets get flung into wonky orbits through countless interactions with each other. With even more time, even all macroscopic objects evaporate through quantum tunneling, and black holes shrink due to the emission of Hawking radiation.

Far enough into the future, say, 10¹⁰⁰ years from now, what we call the Universe will consist of an expanding bath of subatomic particles slowly cooling on their way to absolute zero.

This is called the “heat death” of the Universe, but you can think of it instead as the death of heat. There will be no more differences in temperature anywhere, which means thermodynamics shuts down, which means no more ability to do work. And that means no potential for life as we know it (even the really lazy kind).

The Big Rip

The heat death of the Universe is a rather morose picture, but it seems inevitable based on the fact that dark energy is a constant. No matter where or when you are in the Universe, dark energy is always there, seemingly never getting stronger, never getting weaker.

But measurements of the strength of dark energy made over the past two decades have raised questions about that “seemingly.” Instead, they lean in a threatening direction, indicating that dark energy might be getting stronger with time. These measurements aren’t enough to declare this as observational fact, however, because the uncertainties are more than large enough to accommodate a “nothing to see here” constant value. So, no alarm bells (yet), but it’s always struck me as interesting that the data tends to prefer this scenario.

When dark energy gets stronger with time, we give it a new name: phantom dark energy, because (a) its possibility violates certain assumptions about the nature of energy in the Universe, and (b) it’s a really cool name. In a universe with phantom dark energy, the accelerated expansion transitions from the slow and sedate pace that we observe today into an out-of-control frenzy that literally tears apart the Universe.

Appropriately called the Big Rip scenario, the timeline of events depends on just how strong dark energy can get. At its worst, the fun could get started in only a few billion years (which is frighteningly soon considering that the Universe itself is only 13-plus-change billion years old). Even gravitationally bound structures will not survive the ensuing phantom apocalypse. The Local Group will get torn apart, along with the Milky Way, followed by our Solar System, followed by the planets….followed by you, me, our cells, our molecules, our atoms, our everything.

And it’s not just called the Big Rip because matter gets torn apart. Space destroys itself. If you pick any two random points, no matter how close they are together, in short enough order, they will be infinitely distant. That kind of breaks down everything we know about the regularity of the fabric of spacetime, so the Big Rip is like an inside-out singularity: The entire Universe becomes nonsensical, with all notions of distances destroyed.

There are still some open theoretical questions surrounding the Big Rip. For example, the subatomic particles known as quarks are really good at binding together. In fact, if you try to separate them, you put so much energy into the effort that you just end up spawning even more quarks that then bind up with the pair you’ve pulled apart. We don’t know how the Big Rip would interact and/or interfere with this process, but frankly, not many people have been working on it because the scenario is just that unappealing.

Let’s hope we never have to find out.

The Big Crunch

The Universe is expanding; Edwin Hubble established that in the 1920s. But it didn’t have to be expanding. When Albert Einstein first formulated general relativity and applied those equations to the evolution of the Universe (because, hey, why not?), he discovered that the natural state of the cosmos was to be in motion. He tried to fix this by adding a cosmological constant because at the time, everyone thought the Universe was static, but that’s another story.

But the Universe itself didn’t care if it was expanding or contracting; as long as it was dynamic, general relativity said it was fine. A Russian physicist, Alexander Friedmann, discovered that the evolution of the Universe depended on its contents. If you start with an initial expansion, the mutual gravity of all the stuff within the Universe can alter that expansion, depending on what that stuff is made of and how much stuff there is.

Present observations of the cosmos reveal that there isn’t nearly enough matter to slow down, let alone reverse, its expansion. And that’s without even considering dark energy, which is ramping up that same expansion.

But there’s a lot we don’t know about dark energy—like, for example, what it is, why it’s doing what it’s doing, and what it will do in the future. It’s very possible that dark energy won’t just evolve but change, decaying into some other kind of energy or even into particles, increasing the matter in our Universe (this kind of thing happens all the time in quantum field theory, so it’s not out of the question).

Dark energy may evolve in such a way that the current phase of accelerated expansion is just a passing fad, and, at some point in the future, the Universe’s expansion will slow down, stop, and then reverse. Assuming that it continues in that new, reversed trajectory unabated, the cosmos will then enter into what’s called a Big Crunch.

A rather descriptive name, the Big Crunch will see a reversal of all these billions of years of cosmic history: The cosmic web will shrink, galaxies will crash together, the temperatures and pressures will rise and turn matter into a plasma, atoms and nuclei will get crushed, the soup of subatomic particles will transform into higher energy states, and then…

Well, we’re not sure what will happen then. Just like we don’t understand the initial moments of the Big Bang, we don’t understand the final moments of the Big Crunch. The answer likely sits in the world of quantum gravity, which remains an unsolved problem in physics. Perhaps there’s a smallest possible quantum state that the Universe can achieve, and it will bounce back from that. Perhaps branes (higher dimensional versions of strings) will bounce off of each other in that extreme state, igniting a new Big Bang.

Or perhaps that will be the end: a gravitational singularity, a point of infinite density, the only gravestone for the cosmos we know and love.

The phase transition

If that wasn’t unpleasant enough for you, consider this: Perhaps the Universe will take some weird physics to the extreme and disintegrate in a flash of energy. The best part? We wouldn’t even know it’s coming.

The early cosmos underwent a series of tumultuous phase transitions as the fundamental forces of nature split off from each other. The last such event separated the weak nuclear from the electromagnetic force, leaving behind a cosmos filled with the particles and radiation that we know and love today.

But it may not be done.

Obviously, the last transition led to a somewhat stable state, as things haven’t changed (at least at a fundamental quantum level) in over 13 billion years. But that does not guarantee that the present configuration of the quantum vacuum is the true lowest-energy, most-stable state. We could be merely metastable, meaning that the vacuum is stable as long as nothing severe happens.

Unfortunately, several things happen all the time in the Universe, and random quantum oscillations could send the vacuum careening into its true ground state, which would come with a collection of forces, particles, and fields that are the lowest-energy configuration possible—and unrelated to the particles and forces in our present Universe. This phase transition would start in some random spot in the cosmos and race outward at the speed of light, containing within it a brand new kind of universe almost certainly incompatible with the kind of life, chemistry, and even atomic physics that our Universe has managed to concoct.

Because this phase transition bubble expands at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival. One day, we would simply be going about our business and then blink: The new Universe takes its place. Whatever particles had composed our bodies and whatever forces held them together would vanish, to be replaced with a new quantum configuration.

Sleep tight.

The party never stops

Perhaps all this overwhelming negativity regarding the end of the Universe is what prompted Nobel laureate Roger Penrose in 2010 to propose a completely different mechanism for the long-term fate of the Universe, something dubbed conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC.

If we follow the line of thinking behind the heat death of the Universe to its ultimate conclusion, the Universe is so expansive and so cold that each individual particle becomes isolated from all others. These particles could be anything, but they’ll generally be the lightest known subatomic particles: electrons, neutrinos, maybe dark matter, and the zero-mass photons.

For CCC to work, the model assumes that all particles eventually decay into photons. No physicists think this is possible (not even Penrose), but who knows what the far-future Universe could cook up. Once all the particles have converted into photons, you’re left with a featureless spacetime: no reference points, no guideposts, no sense in which you could distinguish “here” from “there”—or really “anywhere.”

Penrose found that the end state of this Universe can map onto the beginning state of a new universe. In essence, the far future of the cosmos becomes the big bang of a new one, and our cosmos is just one of an infinite strand that always seamlessly emerge from each other.

You still have to navigate a heat death of each universe to get started on the next one, however, which is a bit of a bummer. And besides violating key principles of known physics, it’s not clear that the properties of a CCC Big Bang match the observed qualities of our early Universe, like the pattern in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover light from when the Universe transitioned out of a plasma state when it was 380,000 years old.

While CCC is almost certainly wrong, when it comes to the end of the Universe, wrong ideas can still be useful and instructive. We may learn something from the idea, or any of the other proposals for the universal endgame. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), we won’t be around to directly test which one of these ideas or related concepts is right.

But it’s still fun to think about.

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RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Aaron Colvin was doing tricep pushdowns at the gym when he spotted a cartoonishly huge bodybuilder across the mirrored room. The guy was coaching a woman through a set of cable rows, and the 18-year-old Colvin paused to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and lumbered over, Colvin got concerned. He figured he was about to be accused of ogling the man’s girlfriend—one of gym culture’s cardinal sins.

But the bodybuilder only wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin was about to begin his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm on college; he wanted to devote himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At 13, Colvin had vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special-education teacher who had raised him with little help. As an intensely driven teen, he’d launched a series of one-man ventures that never quite panned out: T-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He was currently working daily shifts at both Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal-training business.

Colvin’s brawny new acquaintance wanted to steer him toward a different opportunity: “What do you know about solar?” he asked. When he wasn’t competing on the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the man said, he worked for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the nation’s leading installers of solar-energy systems. The bodybuilder had just returned from a trip to Florida where he’d joined a “blitz”—solar-industry slang for a sales event in which packs of young men in crisp polos and khaki shorts descend on a city, crash in a cheap hotel or Airbnb, and spend weeks knocking on as many doors as possible. He boasted of having made “crazy money”—as much as $20,000 in a single month—by convincing just a handful of homeowners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

Colvin, a sinewy former high-school wrestler whose rounded silver eyeglasses give him a scholarly mien, was plenty intrigued. “I’m like, holy shit,” he recalls. “Like, yeah, awesome, I’ll look into it.”

A few weeks later, Colvin had a FaceTime call with the bodybuilder’s manager at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Though his college semester had just begun, Colvin told Will he was thinking of dropping out: As someone who’d been shaped by hardship—he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls pharmacy that was regularly burglarized by drug addicts—he was having a tough time relating to his classmates, most of whom hailed from cushier backgrounds than his own. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin says. Will pressed him to join his door-to-door sales crew, which he’d dubbed Seal Team Six. The work was a breeze, he said—just a simple matter of making homeowners aware they could save thousands by installing solar panels and selling surplus electricity back to the grid. As long as Colvin conveyed that message while standing on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions would dwarf his wages at Chipotle. “Behind every door is $5,000” was the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its 2023 gross revenue topped $1 billion.)

After a bit of mulling, Colvin declined the offer. He worried he’d regret quitting school without giving it a fair shake. But Will was a relentless recruiter. On a near-daily basis that fall and winter, he peppered Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by “solar bros” showing off their six-figure commission checks, their penthouse apartments, their exotic cars. These influencers—tanned, sculpted, brimming with confidence—stressed that anyone could reap such rewards if they had the courage to swap their mundane lives for a place in the green economy’s forward trenches.

As he slogged through accounting classes, Colvin became increasingly receptive to Will’s spiel. Midway through his second semester, he agreed to fly to Orlando for spring break to try out a blitz. If all went well, he’d even try to capture the flowering of his new career on video, in hopes of maybe becoming a solar bro himself.

No one buys solar systems to address an urgent need. They are what marketers refer to as “proactive products”—items you can live without but which may provide advantages down the line. In the industry’s early days, the systems were so pricey that they were marketed solely to wealthy homeowners who wanted to reduce their carbon footprint. But around 2010, the price of solar panels began to plummet as more manufacturing facilities came on line, particularly in China. At the same time, solar companies concocted leasing arrangements that helped limit up-front costs. Going solar could now be pitched to the masses as a decision with long-term financial benefits. But installation still ran upwards of $20,000, an investment that consumers were hesitant to make when their electrical situations seemed just fine.

To jolt them out of their complacency, the solar industry came to rely on one of the oldest—and most annoying—sales techniques: indiscriminately banging on doors. Companies such as Sunrun, which reported $2.25 billion in revenue in 2023, operate on the principle that there’s no good replacement for the intense persuasion that can be exerted in face-to-face conversations. And because commissions are much higher than those for typical door-to-door products, like magazine subscriptions or burglar alarms, there’s been no shortage of young recruits willing to heed the industry’s call for manpower.

As Colvin learned soon after landing in central Florida, the profession doesn’t coddle its newcomers. He was taken from the airport to the crew’s house in Kissimmee, a swampy city in the shadow of Disney World, to throw down his bags. Will then informed him there was no time for rest—the four-member crew was going to go “rip,” or knock on doors. They piled into Will’s Toyota Camry and drove 30 miles to the suburb of St. Cloud, where Colvin was briefed on the basics. He would be working as a “setter,” the person who makes the initial contact with homeowners and persuades them to book an appointment with the “closer,” the person who gets the contract signed. Colvin was instructed to use a script in which he told potential customers that he’d been dispatched to check on the neighborhood’s utility poles. (Exactly who had dispatched him remained vague.) He was then supposed to say the poles were about to be hardened against hurricanes, an expensive upgrade that would allegedly raise everyone’s electric bills by close to 40 percent. When a look of panic crossed a homeowner’s face, that was Colvin’s cue to tout solar panels as a money-saving solution.

Colvin rarely got that far. As Will periodically rode by on a Segway to monitor his work—Segways were for closers on Seal Team Six—Colvin flailed in his efforts to charm the residents of St. Cloud. Some people were outright hostile to his presence, perhaps because solar bros are widely stereotyped as dishonest. Their employers, including some of the biggest companies in the solar industry, have been sued hundreds of times for allegedly engaging in fraud. In May 2024, for example, the state of Nebraska sued Everlight Solar for using “misleading savings models that omit relevant information and accurate data that could result in projections that show consumers spending more on panels than they would save.” Homeowners familiar with solar’s shady reputation often feel entitled to heap abuse on any salespeople who set foot on their property.

Colvin encountered a lot of polite Floridians, too, but they were always quick to offer an excuse: They were renters, they were broke, their spouse wasn’t home, they’d already said “no” to 15 other salespeople who’d come knocking in recent months.

Managers in the solar industry are adept at making novice salespeople like Colvin push through the job’s darkness. They do so by convincing their crews that the work has a quasi-spiritual component—that it’s a path to not just wealth but also radical self-improvement. For Seal Team Six, that meant adhering to an almost monastic routine. Colvin woke up early each day to study books like Door-to-Door Millionaire and videos on how to handle customers’ objections. He and his three teammates would then hit the gym to lift weights together before ripping until 9 pm. They’d stop only to wolf down a burrito or a few tuna packets for sustenance. At the end of the day, after “bageling”—that is, logging zero appointments—Colvin would pass out to the strains of Fortnite emanating from the living room.

During the second week of his trial period, while ripping at the end of yet another featureless cul-de-sac, Colvin hit the wall. In such moments, he tried to lift his spirits by perusing a Notes file he keeps of all the nice things people have said to him over the years. But this time he was too low for that trick to work—he was sapped by the humidity and sick of being told he deserved to be arrested. But then he noticed a man sitting on the curb—presumably the father of some kids who were playing in the street. Sensing that this dad was open to being chatted up, Colvin sat next to him and tried to use raw honesty to his advantage. “My boss has got me out here working, and I’m getting my ass kicked today,” he told the man. “I’m just trying to save people money on their electric bill.” That line piqued the man’s interest, and he soon agreed to meet with Colvin’s “design specialist”—his closer.

Colvin, however, made the rookie mistake of setting the meeting for eight days in the future. That gave the customer too much time to get cold feet; the appointment never happened. Still, Colvin took heart in the minor victory. Confident that greater triumphs were just around the corner, he promised Will he’d return in May and that he’d make so much money that dropping out of college would be a no-brainer. Will said he would consider it a personal failure if Colvin didn’t end up with $40,000 in his pocket by September.

Back in New York, Colvin sleepwalked through his final weeks of school. He couldn’t stop thinking about his brief fling with solar success. So buoyed was he by the high, in fact, that he became an evangelist for solar himself. Like the bodybuilder he’d met the previous August, he was eager to recruit others to the cause. One of them was Connor Dougherty, a Niagara student who was a friend of a friend.

A hulking and preppy young man who exudes a gentle goofiness, Dougherty shared Colvin’s reverence for bold entrepreneurs; his father owns a thriving meal-prep business in Rochester, New York. He told Colvin that he wanted to hone his sales chops and that he was looking into working at an auto dealership for the summer. Colvin convinced him that door-to-door solar would provide a more intensive—if, admittedly, less pleasant—education. “It seemed like it’s just the coldest sales experience you can get,” Dougherty says. “I figured that would be the best.”

Colvin also reached out to Dakota Williams, a wispy and shaggy-haired 17-year-old who speaks with a skater’s cadence. The two had met a year earlier at a party, where they’d bonded over mutual interests—Colvin had been impressed to learn that Williams was a fan of The 48 Laws of Power, a popular self-help book. Williams also talked about the difficulties he had faced growing up, which struck Colvin as far more harrowing than his own. A member of the Tuscarora Nation, an Indian tribe whose New York reservation lies east of Buffalo, he had been intermittently homeless while earning his GED as an adolescent. When Colvin reconnected with him in the spring of 2024, Williams was living in a shelter and flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

Colvin introduced Williams to Will, who offered up a free bed in the Kissimmee house—at least to start. (The standard rent for crew members was $500 per month.) But Williams didn’t have any money for airfare, so he and Colvin decided to make the long drive together. The night before they set out, Colvin started gathering footage for his fledgling YouTube channel, which he envisioned as his ticket to becoming an inspirational media figure. He had set it up while still in high school to document his “journey from broke to billionaire.” Now, he filmed himself jubilantly clocking out of Chipotle for the last time. He then recorded a more contemplative video in his dorm room as he packed up the last of his things. “I know I’m not going to fail, because I don’t have an option,” he said into his phone’s camera as he paced around the room while wearing a white T-shirt festooned with palm trees. “Because literally if I fail, I’m fucked, I’m going to be homeless. And that’s not going to happen. I will knock until I die.”

He was more upbeat the following morning as he gathered a few last items at his mother’s house. “I’m ready to be the best rep,” he said as he weaved through the kitchen wearing the broadest possible smile. “Go down there, give it my all, and start making some fuck-you money!”

After 20 straight hours on the road, Colvin and Williams were given just three hours to rest before being sent out to rip with Seal Team Six. The crew was in the process of doubling in size from March—it would soon have up to 10 members on any given day, some of whom slept on air mattresses in the living room because all the bunks were taken. Will had also moved the crew to a different solar company, Sunder Energy, that he said offered more generous commissions than Freedom Pros.

The sales script remained the same, however—as did the poor results. When Colvin looked at the large group chat that Sunder Energy’s setters used to log their activity, his frustration would bubble to the surface. Peers would announce that they’d snagged multiple appointments in a single day, an achievement that too often eluded him. Sometimes he was forced to do punishment push-ups when he bageled hard. (The reward for setting more appointments than expected was the Ric Flair—two claps and a loud “WOOOO!” from the rest of the crew.)

Desperate to juice his lackluster numbers, Colvin deepened his commitment to self-improvement. He spent the mornings memorizing techniques such as “tie-downs,” questions designed to make a potential customer see no way forward but to adopt solar. (“Are you guys planning to stop using electricity and go Amish anytime soon?”) He and Williams also practiced trying to sell each other a ballpoint pen, a classic drill from how-to books about sales.

“Do I want to be the best? Yeah,” Colvin said in one of his YouTube videos, recorded for his 153 subscribers as he sat cross-legged on a patio sofa beneath a radiant late-afternoon sun. “Am I doing everything in my power to become the best? Yeah. I’m doing the trainings, I’m reading the books, I’m putting the hours in on the doors. In between doors I’m taking notes on what I did right and what I did wrong. So, yeah, I’m getting better every day. And I know as long as I continue to do this every day, I’m going to win. And for me, it’s less about the work and more about the work that’s being done to myself.”

A big point of emphasis in door-to-door culture is that salespeople must always maintain a “positive mental attitude” no matter how many disappointments they encounter. Yet when Seal Team Six relocated to an Airbnb in Tampa in late May for a 10-day blitz, Colvin admitted he was struggling to put up an optimistic front. “I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t getting discouraged,” he said in a video one night as he nervously twisted the edges of his hair. “I’ve been doing solar at least 20 days, I have not got a single sale yet.” But then, having seemingly remembered that vulnerability is taboo in the world of sales, he stared into the camera and expressed his resolve: “I don’t give a fuck if I have zero dollars in my bank account. I’m not quitting until this shit works.”

On his sixth day in Tampa, shit finally worked: An appointment Colvin had set up resulted in a closed deal. Since he’d been promised a 50-50 commission split with the closer, Colvin calculated he was due to make at least $3,500. “It’s like I cannot fathom—I’ve never seen so much money at once in my life,” he said in that night’s celebratory video. “I can’t believe it’s real.” Looking at the records he’d been keeping, he estimated that he’d been through about 850 face-to-face rejections before this one success.

Colvin kept a close eye on his bank account in the days that followed, checking to see whether the first of his two payments had arrived. Then, more than a week later, it finally did: The amount was $180.

Will offered a circuitous story when Colvin confronted him about the payment issue. He said the closer had been forced to do more work than usual because Colvin had failed to provide the homeowners with adequate information; as a result, Colvin was entitled to only an 18 percent cut of the commission. Will added that the customer’s roof also needed unforeseen work to accommodate the panels, which further ate into the project’s profit margin. Colvin would have to be grateful for what he received. It was a learning process, after all.

A Sunder Energy spokesperson told me that Colvin was either misinformed or misunderstood Will: “Shortly after the sale, the homeowner for this project decided not to move forward and canceled their agreement. This results in no further commissions for a project and a reversal of any initial commissions already paid.”

As Colvin grappled with his bewilderment over the payment discrepancy, Dougherty also had one of his appointments lead to a closed deal. He believed he’d earn a commission of roughly $6,000. He continued to knock on doors as he awaited his first payment, and one day he thought it would be fun to try out a closer’s Segway. The vehicle took off with more thrust than Dougherty expected and he was thrown to the ground, tearing his medial cruciate ligament in the process. At the emergency room, Colvin tried to lift Dougherty’s spirits by making him recite sales slogans as he bench-pressed the pole that held his IV fluid bag.

The hobbled Dougherty had to return to New York for an MRI and physical rehab. Weeks into his recovery, after being told several times there was a snafu with his banking information, he finally received his cut of the solar deal: $600. The closer couldn’t convincingly explain the reasons for the shortfall, though he claimed that he, too, had been paid less than expected. (The Sunder Energy spokesperson says that both Colvin and Dougherty could have escalated their concerns “to other sales leaders, department heads, and even company executives.”)

Despite the slightness of his paycheck, Colvin moved with the crew to the next 10-day blitz in Ocala, where they rented a pair of houses on a horse farm. He also kept posting a new video every day. “I know I’m at the point in my life where if I want to earn more money, I have to increase my skill set, and in order to increase your skill set, you’re going to have to eat shit for a short period of time,” he said in one. “Absolutely a hundred percent, when I hit month six of this, I’m going to be a completely different person spiritually, financially, physically.” In private, though, his bitterness over the commission dispute was starting to blot out his faith in Seal Team Six.

Just before the July rent was due, Colvin told Will he was quitting. He wanted to stay a few more days so he could celebrate the Fourth of July with Dakota Williams and his other solar comrades; he even volunteered to rip through the holiday to pull his weight. He was stunned when Will told him to pack up his things and leave. More than a thousand miles from Niagara Falls, Colvin was now homeless and jobless, with less than $200 to show for his two months of labor. (When I contacted Will, he told me one thing of note about Colvin before ending the conversation: “He’s a good kid, just negative.”)

Now tumbling toward despair, Colvin asked for help from a Freedom Pros closer named Doug Hotz, whom he’d met during his original March stint. Hotz, a 24-year-old born and raised in Orlando, had been aimless as a kid. Solar, he tells me, gave him the discipline he needed to get his act together. He was now a quasi-nomad, shepherding a sales crew he called Bouknight from one blitz to another around the country. “I don’t have a girlfriend. I don’t have any kids,” he says. “I miss my parents’ birthdays. I miss my siblings’ birthdays. It’s just, right now, this opportunity is not going to be here forever, right? So I’m just trying to take full advantage of it.”

After hearing Colvin’s tale, Hotz let him join his team and crash at his parents’ house, in an un-air-conditioned room filled with Florida Gators memorabilia. Colvin was free to rip with Bouknight in the Orlando area, but soon he’d have a choice to make: Hotz and his crew were about to drive to Illinois in search of virgin sales turf. That meant Colvin would have to leave behind his friend Williams, who was still very much committed to “getting 1 percent better each day” with Seal Team Six.

Colvin decided to head to Illinois to keep chasing the solar dream. On July 8, he recorded his Florida post-mortem in a wispy white tank top while preparing to drive north toward the state’s panhandle. “It seems like every time things couldn’t possibly get worse, they got worse,” he said. “But this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, which is crazy because this is also the most unstable I’ve been in my entire life. Yet I believe the true reason I feel so much fulfillment is that I’m doing what I know I’m destined to do.”

Bouknight was a smaller crew than Seal Team Six, with just three setters and Hotz as the lone closer. Colvin developed a fast friendship with a 25-year-old colleague named Nikita Dornan, a native of Russia who’d been adopted by a Nebraskan family when he was 6. Like so many other solar salesmen, he’d rejected college as the best path forward: He’d started selling burglar alarms door-to-door out of high school, later moving on to Andersen windows. After so many years of knocking on 150 doors a day, he’d developed a sixth sense for when a “no” contains a glimmer of a “yes.” “Maybe a homeowner’s attention got too focused on a dog or a kid, so they can’t see in that moment how beneficial this would be for them,” he says. “Going back to those people definitely helps.”

The crew set up shop at a Holiday Inn Express in Litchfield, Illinois, a sleepy town in the farm country south of Springfield. Then they discovered that they were the fifth solar crew to sweep through the area in recent months. Colvin also sensed that the locals didn’t take kindly to the fact that he’s Black, and that one of his colleagues, Yusuf, is from Egypt. (Nikita concealed his Russian origins by introducing himself to homeowners as Ken.) Colvin was accustomed to angry Floridian homeowners telling him they would call the police, but Illinois was the first place where someone actually followed through: The cops in Litchfield harassed the crew for operating without a solicitation license (an oft-ignored requirement in many municipalities). Bouknight brushed off the setback and fanned out to Edwardsville and Decatur to knock on more doors.

Colvin had good luck with setting appointments in Illinois, but none of his deals closed. The majority of his potential customers failed their credit checks; the rest had structural issues with their roofs. He pressed on, but the tab for the Holiday Inn room he shared with Nikita was becoming daunting. The money he’d saved from his 50-hour weeks at Chipotle was almost gone. So as the start of Niagara University’s fall semester drew near, he admitted defeat and went back to school.

Hotz was mystified. To him, college is a pointless endeavor that robs a person of prime earning years; the only reason someone would choose the classroom over the doors was fear. Colvin explained that he was drowning financially, that the $180 he’d earned in Florida wouldn’t even put a dent in his hotel bill. He would get back to ripping as soon as he could, but he needed to hedge his bets by working toward his accounting degree.

Once back in New York, though, Colvin couldn’t shake the strange grip of door-to-door. “When all you do is grind, and you come back to how the average person lives, something in you dies,” he says. “I felt so empty. I’m like, ‘I don’t know what to do with my life.’ Even though I made no money, there was so much purpose driving me every day. I had something to strive for.”

Colvin had every intention of sticking with solar as his sophomore year got underway. To stay connected to the industry until he could get back to ripping, he signed up with another solar company and started making cold calls from his dorm room. He rented an auto-dialer for $50 a day and paid a middleman for a list of supposedly promising leads. He never earned a dime and quit by late September.

Now fearing that he wouldn’t have enough money to eat or fill his gas tank, Colvin switched to working for a personal-fitness company. His job was to upsell existing customers to products like meal plans and training programs. Right off the bat, he was making $150 a day. But by the end of October, Colvin was miserable: He could no longer muster the moral blindness required to push products he thought were both useless and exorbitantly priced. “I was closing deals, and I realized I was completely fucking over customers,” he says. “That’s really what pissed me off, because at the end of the day I’m trying to do the right thing.” So he quit and found another sales position at a headhunter of sorts, a company that purports to find high-paying tech jobs for its clients. Colvin can’t say more because of a nondisclosure agreement, but he does tell me the first paycheck he received in November was the biggest of his life—more than enough to put him back on decent financial footing. He is now saving up to buy some personal coaching services. (Colvin estimates that he has cumulatively spent around $30,000 on self-help books, online courses, and coaching to boost his odds of success.)

Colvin was so busy hustling throughout the fall that he lost all interest in door-to-door solar sales. Although he has never felt any ethical compunctions about selling panels—he truly believes he was helping people save money—he came to view the profession as cultlike for how it isolates and controls its workforce. “I was out of their propaganda,” he says. “I could not be brainwashed anymore.” He doesn’t regret the days he spent knocking on doors—he’s now comfortable striking up a conversation with anyone, an essential business skill—but he also can’t believe how much the reality of his experience differed from what he’d glimpsed in the solar-bro fantasy. And he can’t help but wonder if the fault lies not with the influencers for exaggerating but rather with himself for being weak.

“Every night when I got home, I’d be like, ‘Fuck, I don’t want to go to sleep, because when I wake up in the morning I got to do this again, I got to do this shit again,’” he says. “That was my mentality. And maybe that was my downfall.”

Connor Dougherty also returned to Niagara University, and the knee he shredded in the Segway mishap is almost back to full strength. Several other students have asked him whether they, too, should try out solar for the summer. Though he doesn’t counsel against it, he tries to make sure they’re genuinely obsessed with personal enrichment. “You have to really, really, really want it bad,” he says. “If you don’t, you’re going to get into it, it’s just going to suck, and you’re going to quit.”

Dakota Williams stuck with Seal Team Six for longer than either of his New York–based compatriots. After Florida, the crew went to Southern California to rip. It disintegrated just a few weeks after the move, however, and its members dispersed back to their hometowns. But Williams—who is coy about how much he earned over the summer and early fall—has nothing but fond memories of his time on the doors. “It was a wild experience,” he tells me. “Being able to have a team of that many like-minded people together is such an amazing thing to have at such a young age.” He is now trying to start his own solar company, though he’s short on details about making that happen.

Doug Hotz remains committed to his itinerant solar lifestyle. When I talked to him in September, he was still in Illinois and had just crossed a major milestone: He had sold enough systems to generate a megawatt of electricity. The achievement would soon earn him a special shout-out on the Freedom Pros Instagram account; the post’s cover image would bear the title “The Rise of Doug Hotz.” He also acknowledged that the work has taxed his emotional endurance at times. “I don’t think it ever gets easier,” he said. “You got to be immune to it. You got to fix your heart.” With many utility providers now trying to slash the rates they’ll pay for surplus electricity, Hotz may find it increasingly hard to convince homeowners that solar is a wise decision. But he doesn’t seem to have given any meaningful thought to an exit strategy: When I pressed him about what he planned to do next, Hotz hemmed before mentioning he might put together a real-estate portfolio of some sort.

One thing Hotz does know is that he wants Colvin back in the Bouknight fold. He pesters him frequently, urging him to skip a week or two of school to go rip. Colvin has resisted the entreaties so far. He’s keeping his focus on school, work, and making videos with titles like “You Don’t Need Better Habits, You Need a New Identity” for his YouTube channel (up to 192 subscribers). “If I lose everything, I have no phone, no money, no transportation. I will fall back on door-to-door,” he tells me. If it comes to that, he’ll start off in the red—he still owes Freedom Pros more than $1,500 for his Holiday Inn bill.

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Hot on the tail of the Quadrantids meteor shower, another spectacle in the sky is about to arrive: comet Atlas C/2024 G3, which will reach perihelion—the point of its orbit closest to the sun—on January 13. On the same day, we will also see it at its closest point to Earth, and it could become 2025’s brightest comet, during a year in which no other comets are likely to be visible to the naked eye. Here’s everything you need to know.

C/2024 G3 was discovered on April 5, 2024, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (Atlas)—a network of telescopes that scans space for asteroids that could potentially hit Earth. The comet comes from the Oort Cloud, a remote region at the outer edge of the solar system that is believed to contain the remnants of the materials that formed the solar systems’s planets.

When comet C/2024 G3 reaches perihelion, it will come within just 13.5 million kilometers of the sun—for context, Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, orbits the star at a distance of 47 million kilometers. According to the latest calculations reported by the Planetary Society, C/2024 G3 could reach a brightness of magnitude –4.5, which is about the same as Venus, and is likely to be visible to the naked eye for people located in the southern hemisphere.

The comet’s unusually close journey to the sun, however, raises questions about whether it will survive. Its orbital path suggests that it is a dynamically old comet, and that this isn’t its first trip around the sun. In fact, its last approach is estimated to have been about 160,000 years ago, which means it may have already survived a close pass. “It will be very heated and may not survive,” says Nick James, director of the comet section of the British Astronomical Association. “But if it does, it could be an impressive object in the evening sky from the southern hemisphere after perihelion.”

How to Observe the Comet

Should it survive unscathed, the comet will be visible in the southern hemisphere to the west just after sunset on January 13. The comet’s orbital configuration makes it difficult to observe for those in the northern hemisphere—it will appear very low in the sky just after sunset or before sunrise, but is likely to be drowned out by twilight.

The comet’s proximity to the sun means that identifying it could be dangerous, and James says that C/2024 G3 “should only be observed if you are an experienced observer.” Looking directly at the sun without protective equipment can cause permanent eye damage.

There will also be interference from the light of the moon, which will be in its waning phases, which could make observation more difficult. Observing the comet with the naked eye in the southern hemisphere might be possible, but binoculars or a telescope might be needed.

Those who do not want to miss the show can follow the comet in images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory’s Lasco C3 coronagraph, or consult the IAU Minor Planet Center or the Comet OBServation (COBS) database.

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

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While worrying about AI takeover might seem like a modern idea that sprung from War Games or The Terminator, it turns out that a similar concern about machine dominance dates back to the time of the American Civil War, albeit from an English sheep farmer living in New Zealand. Theoretically, Abraham Lincoln could have read about AI takeover during his lifetime.

On June 13, 1863, a letter published in The Press newspaper of Christchurch warned about the potential dangers of mechanical evolution and called for the destruction of machines, foreshadowing the development of what we now call artificial intelligence—and the backlash against it from people who fear it may threaten humanity with extinction. It presented what may be the first published argument for stopping technological progress to prevent machines from dominating humanity.

Titled "Darwin among the Machines," the letter recently popped up again on social media thanks to Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. The author of the letter, Samuel Butler, submitted it under the pseudonym Cellarius, but later came to publicly embrace his position. The letter drew direct parallels between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the rapid development of machinery, suggesting that machines could evolve consciousness and eventually supplant humans as Earth's dominant species.

"We are ourselves creating our own successors," he wrote. "We are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race."

In the letter, he also portrayed humans becoming subservient to machines, but first serving as caretakers who would maintain and help reproduce mechanical life—a relationship Butler compared to that between humans and their domestic animals, before it later inverts and machines take over.

"We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man... we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them... in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals," he wrote.

The text anticipated several modern AI safety concerns, including the possibility of machine consciousness, self-replication, and humans losing control of their technological creations. These themes later appeared in works like Isaac Asimov's The Evitable Conflict and the Matrix films.

Butler's letter dug deep into the taxonomy of machine evolution, discussing mechanical "genera and sub-genera" and pointing to examples like how watches had evolved from "cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century"—suggesting that, like some early vertebrates, mechanical species might get smaller as they became more sophisticated. He expanded these ideas in his 1872 novel Erewhon, which depicted a society that had banned most mechanical inventions. In his fictional society, citizens destroyed all machines invented within the previous 300 years.

Butler's concerns about machine evolution received mixed reactions, according to Butler in the preface to the second edition of Erewhon. Some reviewers, he said, interpreted his work as an attempt to satirize Darwin's evolutionary theory, though Butler denied this. In a letter to Darwin in 1865, Butler expressed his deep appreciation for The Origin of Species, writing that it "thoroughly fascinated" him and explained that he had defended Darwin's theory against critics in New Zealand's press.

What makes Butler's vision particularly remarkable is that he was writing in a vastly different technological context when computing devices barely existed. While Charles Babbage had proposed his theoretical Analytical Engine in 1837—a mechanical computer using gears and levers that was never built in his lifetime—the most advanced calculating devices of 1863 were little more than mechanical calculators and slide rules.

Butler extrapolated from the simple machines of the Industrial Revolution, where mechanical automation was transforming manufacturing, but nothing resembling modern computers existed. The first working program-controlled computer wouldn't appear for another 70 years, making his predictions of machine intelligence strikingly prescient.

Some things never change

The debate Butler started continues today. Two years ago, the world grappled with what one might call the "great AI takeover scare of 2023." OpenAI's GPT-4 had just been released, and researchers evaluated its "power-seeking behavior," echoing concerns about potential self-replication and autonomous decision-making.

GPT-4's release inspired several open letters signed by AI researchers and tech executives warning of potential extinction-level risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence. One of the letters, reminiscent of fears about nuclear weapons or pandemics, called for a global pause on AI development. Around the same time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified of AI dangers in front of the US Senate.

A year later, California legislator Scott Wiener proposed a bill to regulate AI, backed by prominent figures that critics labeled as "AI doomers"—those who feared the uncontrolled progression of machine intelligence. Opponents of the bill argued such measures were overblown and could stifle innovation, much as Butler’s fictional society had done. Yet his 19th century call for pausing mechanical progress bears a striking resemblance to recent open letters and policy proposals about AI safety.

Perhaps the great AI takeover scare will one day be viewed as another chapter in humanity’s long struggle to reconcile progress with appropriate human oversight—a struggle Butler foreshadowed over 160 years ago. But in some ways, even if machines never become truly intelligent, he was still eerily accurate about our dependence on the ways they algorithmically regulate our lives.

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them," Butler wrote in 1863. "The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

Butler didn't end his letter with passive acceptance of this fate. Somewhat like Eliezer Yudkowsky's 2023 proposal of bombing data centers to prevent AI takeover, Butler's letter concluded with a dramatic call to arms: "War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race."

Even then, he feared it might already be too late, writing that if such destruction proved impossible because of our growing dependency on them: "This at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy."

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When an 84-year-old man in Hong Kong was admitted to a hospital for a condition related to an enlarged prostate, doctors noticed something else about him—he was oddly gray, according to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

His skin, particularly his face, had an ashen appearance. His fingernails and the whites of his eyes had become silvery. When doctors took a skin biopsy, they could see tiny, dark granules sitting in the fibers of his skin, in his blood vessels, in the membranes of his sweat glands, and in his hair follicles.

A blood test made clear what the problem was: the concentration of silver in his serum was 423 nmol/L, over 40 times the reference level for a normal result, which is less than 10 nmol/L. The man was diagnosed with a rare case of generalized argyria, a buildup of silver in the body's tissue that causes a blueish-gray discoloration—which is generally permanent.

When someone consumes silver particles, the metal moves from the gut into the bloodstream in its ionic form. It's then deposited throughout the body in various tissues, including the skin, muscles, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys. There's some evidence that it accumulates in at least parts of the brain as well.

Discoloration becomes apparent in tissues exposed to sunlight—hence the patient's notably gray face. Silver ions in the skin undergo photoreduction from ultraviolet light exposure, forming atomic silver that can be oxidized to compounds such as silver sulfide and silver selenide, creating a bluish-gray tinge. Silver can also stimulate the production of the pigment melanin, causing darkening. Once discoloration develops, it's considered irreversible. Chelation therapy—generally used to remove metals from the body—is ineffective against argyria. That said, some case studies have suggested that laser therapy may help.

Source of silver

Of course, a key question in the case is how the man was exposed to so much silver. In past case studies of argyria, a common source is hokum therapies promoted by naturopaths and their ilk. Prior to the development of antibiotics, silver was used to treat infections and wounds. However, there are no proven benefits from taking oral doses, and silver is not an essential mineral.

In 2018, doctors in Canada reported a case of argyria in a gray 84-year-old woman who had taken a 1 mg/ml silver solution every two or three months for 15 years. The woman reported purchasing it from a naturopathic practitioner as a remedy for "various ailments." Likewise, in 2009, doctors in the UK reported the case of a 64-year-old man who turned silvery after drinking a liter of water containing colloidal silver every week for a year. "He had taken the silver solution as an alternative medical treatment 'to ward off infections' as he had read that colloidal silver 'cures everything,'" his doctors reported.

In the case of the Hong Kong patient, however, the cause wasn't so clear. The man reported that the only medication he took was finasteride, which is used to treat an enlarged prostate. He reported that he did not take any silver-containing products. He didn't appear to have any occupational exposure either, as he had worked for decades as a waiter. No other residents in his apartment building had similar discoloring.

After the man was discharged from the hospital, he was referred for further toxicologic evaluation. But, ultimately, the source of the man's silver exposure was never identified.

Argyria is often only a cosmetic condition, with few associated complications, as long as the level of silver exposure is low over time. Silver is considered to have low toxicity in humans and argyria is not considered a life-threatening condition. However, a large enough dose of silver—for example, 50 mg delivered intravenously—can cause acute toxicity and even death. In such an extreme case, silver poisoning damages bone marrow, the liver, and kidneys.

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Welcome to Edition 7.26 of the Rocket Report! Let's pause and reflect on how far the rocket business has come in the last 10 years. On this date in 2015, SpaceX made the first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the rocket crash-landed. In less than a year and a half, though, SpaceX successfully landed reusable Falcon 9 boosters onshore and offshore, and now has done it nearly 400 times. That was remarkable enough, but we're in a new era now. Within a few days, we could see SpaceX catch its second Super Heavy booster and Blue Origin land its first New Glenn rocket on an offshore platform. Extraordinary.

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

Our annual ranking of the top 10 US launch companies. You can easily guess who made the top of the list: the company that launched Falcon rockets 134 times in 2024 and launched the most powerful and largest rocket ever built on four test flights, each accomplishing more than the last. The combined 138 launches is more than NASA flew the Space Shuttle over three decades. SpaceX will aim to launch even more often in 2025. These missions have far-reaching impacts, supporting Internet coverage for consumers worldwide, launching payloads for NASA and the US military, and testing technology that will take humans back to the Moon and, someday, Mars.

Are there really 10? ... It might also be fairly easy to rattle off a few more launch companies that accomplished big things in 2024. There's United Launch Alliance, which finally debuted its long-delayed Vulcan rocket and flew two Atlas V missions and the final Delta IV mission, and Rocket Lab, which launched 16 missions with its small Electron rocket this year. Blue Origin flew its suborbital New Shepard vehicle on three human missions and one cargo-only mission and nearly launched its first orbital-class New Glenn rocket in 2024. That leaves just Firefly Aerospace as the only other US company to reach orbit last year.

DoD announces lucrative hypersonics deal. Defense technology firm Kratos has inked a deal worth up to $1.45 billion with the Pentagon to help develop a low-cost testbed for hypersonic technologies, Breaking Defense reports. The award is part of the military's Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 program. The MACH-TB program, which began as a US Navy effort, includes multiple "Task Areas." For its part, Kratos will be tasked with "systems engineering, integration, and testing, to include integrated subscale, full-scale, and air launch services to address the need to affordably increase hypersonic flight test cadence," according to the company's release.

Multiple players ... The team led by Kratos, which specializes in developing airborne drones and military weapons systems, includes several players such as Leidos, Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch, and others. Kratos last year revealed that its Erinyes hypersonic test vehicle successfully flew for a Missile Defense Agency experiment. Rocket Lab has launched multiple suborbital hypersonic experiments for the military using a modified version of its Electron rocket, and Stratolaunch reportedly flew a high-speed test vehicle and recovered it last month, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology. The Pentagon is interested in developing hypersonic weapons that can evade conventional air and missile defenses. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ESA will modify some of its geo-return policies. An upcoming European launch competition will be an early test of efforts by the European Space Agency to modify its approach to policies that link contracts to member state contributions, Space News reports. ESA has long used a policy known as geo-return, where member states are guaranteed contracts with companies based in their countries in proportion to the contribution those member states make to ESA programs.

The third rail of European space ... Advocates of geo-return argue that it provides an incentive for countries to fund those programs. This incentivizes ESA to lure financial contributions from its member states, which will win guaranteed business and jobs from the agency's programs. However, critics of geo-return, primarily European companies, claim that it creates inefficiencies that make them less competitive. One approach to revising geo-return is known as "fair contribution," where ESA first holds competitions for projects, and member states then make contributions based on how companies in their countries fared in the competition. ESA will try the fair contribution approach for the upcoming launch competition to award contracts to European rocket startups. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

RFA is building a new rocket. German launch services provider Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) is currently focused on building a new first stage for the inaugural flight of its RFA One rocket, European Spaceflight reports. The stage that was initially earmarked for the flight was destroyed during a static fire test last year on a launch pad in Scotland. In a statement given to European Spaceflight, RFA confirmed that it expects to attempt an inaugural flight of RFA One in 2025.

Waiting on a booster ... RFA says it is "fully focused on building a new first stage and qualifying it." The rocket’s second stage and Redshift OTV third stage are already qualified for flight and are being stored until a new first stage is ready. The RFA One rocket will stand 98 feet (30 meters) tall and will be capable of delivering payloads of up to 1.3 metric tons (nearly 2,900 pounds) into polar orbits. RFA is one of several European startups developing commercial small satellite launchers and was widely considered the frontrunner before last year's setback. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Pentagon provides a boost for defense startup. Defense technology contractor Anduril Industries has secured a $14.3 million Pentagon contract to expand solid-fueled rocket motor production, as the US Department of Defense moves to strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities amid growing supply chain concerns, Space News reports. The contract, awarded under the Defense Production Act, will support facility modernization and manufacturing improvements at Anduril's Mississippi plant, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Doing a solid ... The Pentagon is keen to incentivize new entrants into the solid rocket manufacturing industry, which provides propulsion for missiles, interceptors, and other weapons systems. Two traditional defense contractors, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, control almost all US solid rocket production. Companies like Anduril, Ursa Major, and X-Bow are developing solid rocket motor production capability. The Navy previously awarded Anduril a $19 million contract last year to develop solid rocket motors for the Standard Missile 6 program. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Relativity's value seems to be plummeting. For several years, an innovative, California-based launch company named Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media. But the honeymoon appears to be over, Ars reports. A little more than a year ago, Relativity reached a valuation of $4.5 billion following its latest Series F fundraising round. This was despite only launching one rocket and then abandoning that program and pivoting to the development of a significantly larger reusable launch vehicle. The decision meant Relativity would not realize any significant revenue for several years, and Ars reported in September on some of the challenges the company has encountered developing the much larger Terran R rocket.

Gravity always wins ... Relativity is a privately held company, so its financial statements aren't public. However, we can glean some clues from the published quarterly report from Fidelity Investments, which owns Relativity shares. As of March 2024, Fidelity valued its 1.67 million shares at an estimated $31.8 million. However, in a report ending November 29 of last year, which was only recently published, Fidelity's valuation of Relativity plummeted. Its stake in Relativity was then thought to be worth just $866,735—a per-share value of 52 cents. Shares in the other fundraising rounds are also valued at less than $1 each.

SpaceX has already launched four times this year. The space company is off to a fast start in 2025, with four missions in the first nine days of the year. Two of these missions launched Starlink internet satellites, and the other two deployed an Emirati-owned geostationary communications satellite and a batch of Starshield surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. In its new year projections, SpaceX estimates it will launch more than 170 Falcon rockets, between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, Spaceflight Now reports. This is in addition to SpaceX's plans for up to 25 flights of the Starship rocket from Texas.

What's in store this year?... Highlights of SpaceX's launch manifest this year will likely include an attempt to catch and recover Starship after returning from orbit, a first in-orbit cryogenic propellant transfer demonstration with Starship, and perhaps the debut of a second launch pad at Starbase in South Texas. For the Falcon rocket fleet, notable missions this year will include launches of commercial robotic lunar landers for NASA's CLPS program and several crew flights, including the first human spaceflight mission to fly in polar orbit. According to public schedules, a Falcon 9 rocket could launch a commercial mini-space station for Vast, a privately held startup, before the end of the year. That would be a significant accomplishment, but we won't be surprised if this schedule moves to the right.

China is dipping its toes into satellite refueling. China kicked off its 2025 launch activities with the successful launch of the Shijian-25 satellite Monday, aiming to advance key technologies for on-orbit refueling and extending satellite lifespans, Space News reports. The satellite launched on a Long March 3B into a geostationary transfer orbit, suggesting the unspecified target spacecraft for the refueling demo test might be in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.

Under a watchful eye ... China has tested mission extension and satellite servicing capabilities in space before. In 2021, China launched a satellite named Shijian-21, which docked a defunct Beidou navigation satellite and towed it to a graveyard orbit above the geostationary belt. Reportedly, Shijian-21 satellite may have carried robotic arms to capture and manipulate other objects in space. These kinds of technologies are dual-use, meaning they have civilian and military applications. The US Space Force is also interested in satellite life extension and refueling tech, so US officials will closely monitor Shijian-25's actions in orbit.

SpaceX set to debut upgraded Starship. An upsized version of SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week, Ars reports. The rocket could lift off as soon as Monday from SpaceX's Starbase test facility in South Texas. This flight is the seventh full-scale demonstration launch for Starship. The rocket will test numerous upgrades, including a new flap design, larger propellant tanks, redesigned propellant feed lines, a new avionics system, and an improved antenna for communications and navigation.

The new largest rocket … Put together, all of these changes to the ship raise the rocket's total height by nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters), so it now towers 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. With this change, SpaceX will break its own record for the largest rocket ever launched. SpaceX plans to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in Texas and will target a controlled splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean.

Blue Origin targets weekend launch of New Glenn. Blue Origin is set to launch its New Glenn rocket in a long-delayed, uncrewed test mission that would help pave the way for the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Washington Post reports. Blue Origin has confirmed it plans to launch the 320-foot-tall rocket during a three-hour launch window opening at 1 am EDT (06:00 UTC) Sunday in the company's first attempt to reach orbit.

Finally … This is a much-anticipated milestone for Blue Origin and for the company's likely customers, which include the Pentagon and NASA. Data from this test flight will help the Space Force certify New Glenn to loft national security satellites, providing a new competitor for SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the heavy-lift segment of the market. Blue Origin isn't quite shooting for the Moon on this inaugural launch, but the company will attempt to reach orbit and try to land the New Glenn's first stage booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18:11 UTC

Jan. 12: New Glenn | NG-1 Blue Ring Pathfinder | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06:00 UTC

Jan. 13: Jielong 3 | Unknown Payload | Dongfang Spaceport, Yellow Sea | 03:00 UTC

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A view of the metal ring, nearly 8 feet wide, that fell from the sky into Mukuku village on Dec. 30 in eastern Makueni County, Kenya.

Credit: Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images

It has been more than a week since reports first emerged about a "glowing ring of metal" that fell from the sky and crashed near a remote village in Kenya.

According to the Kenya Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 pounds (500 kg) and had a diameter of more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) when measured after it landed on December 30. A couple of days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object was a piece of space debris, saying it was a ring that separated from a rocket. "Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans," the space agency told The New York Times.

Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small band of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed.

Now, some space trackers believe the object may not have come from space at all.

Did it really come from space?

Space is increasingly crowded, but large chunks of metal from rockets are generally not flying around in Earth orbit undetected and untracked.

"It was suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal," wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is highly regarded for his analysis of space objects. "The most likely space-related possibility is the reentry of the SYLDA adapter from the Ariane V184 flight, object 33155. Nevertheless, I am not fully convinced that the ring is space debris at all," he wrote.

Another prominent space tracker, Marco Langbroek, believes it's plausible that the ring came from space, so he investigated further into objects that may have returned around the time of the object's discovery in Kenya. In a blog post written Wednesday he noted that apart from the metal ring, other fragments looking consistent with space debris—including material that looks like carbon wrap and isolation foil—were found several kilometers away from the ring.

Like McDowell, Langbroek concluded that the most likely source for the object was an Ariane V launch that took place back in July 2008, in which the European rocket lofted two satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbit.

The Ariane V rocket was a rather unique rocket in that it was designed with the capacity to launch two medium-sized satellites into geostationary transfer orbit, a destination much more popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s than it is today. To accommodate both satellites, a SYstème de Lancement Double Ariane (SYLDA) shell was placed over the lower satellite to support the mounting of a second satellite on top of it. During the launch in 2008, this SYLDA shell was ejected into a 1.6-degree inclined geosynchronous transfer orbit, Langbroek said.

Could it have come from a European rocket?

Over the years, this object has been tracked by the US military, which maintains a database of space objects so that active spacecraft can avoid collisions. Due to a lack of tracking stations near the equator, this object is only periodically observed. According to Langbroek, its last observation took place on December 23, when it was in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching a perigee of just 90 miles (146 km) from the Earth. This was a week before an object crashed into Kenya.

Based on his modeling of the possible reentry of the SYLDA shell, Langbroek believes it's possible that the European object could have landed in Kenya around the time its entry was observed.

However, an anonymous X account using the handle DutchSpace, which despite the anonymity has provided reliable information about Ariane launch vehicles in the past, posted a thread that indicates this ring could not have been part of the SYLDA shell. With images and documentation, it seems clear that neither the diameter nor mass of the SYLDA component matches the ring found in Kenya.

Additionally, Arianespace officials told Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday that they do not believe the space debris was associated with the Ariane V rocket. Essentially, if the ring does not fit, you must acquit.

So what was it?

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‘Reverse’ discrimination claims may pose a class-action threat, management-side attorneys have warned. That prediction comes as class-action lawsuit settlements totaled more than $40 billion for the third year in a row, according to Duane Morris LLP’s Class Action Review 2025, released Jan. 7. 

The total value of the top 10 highest settlements in each class-action area hit $42 billion in 2024, marking the third highest value recorded by the firm in the past two decades. In 2023, settlements reached $51.4 billion, and in 2022, settlements hit $66 billion. The firm analyzed more than 1,441 class-action decisions made in 2024.

“Combined, the past three years reflect use of the class action litigation process to redistribute wealth at an unprecedented level,” the firm said. “These numbers explain why we are continuing to see growth in the class action space, where the plaintiffs’ class action bar is clamoring to identify the next ‘tort of the day’ to cash in on this veritable lottery.”

Dive Insight:

One area with a “flood of claims” was in class-action lawsuits targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admission, the firm said. 

In these cases, “employees and applicants accus[ed] employers of prioritizing diversity over merit and improperly using protected characteristics to guide decision-making,” the review said. 

More such claims could be coming, depending on how the U.S. Supreme Court resolves a federal circuit split on whether members of a majority group need to meet a higher burden of proof in alleging “reverse discrimination,” the firm said. 

“With a robust pro-plaintiff litigation environment, it is clear that class action litigation represents an increased financial risk for companies,” said Duane Morris partner Gerald L. Maatman Jr., co-author of the review and chair of the firm’s class-action defense practice team. “Plus, we are seeing the class action landscape as increasingly plaintiff-friendly in key areas, including data privacy and data breaches, and diversity and ESG initiatives.”

Plaintiffs filed the most data breach class-actions lawsuits recorded yet and doubled the number filed in 2022, the review found. Of those, courts only issued five class certification decisions in 2024, meaning motions either remain in the pipeline or plaintiffs are choosing to monetize their claims before certification. 

“So long as defendants continue to play ball on the settlement front, we are likely to see settlement payouts continue to lure plaintiffs to this space and fuel those filing numbers,” Duane Morris said.

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The Internet has become the most prevalent communications technology the world has ever seen. Though there are more fixed and mobile telephone connections, even they use Internet technology in their core. For all the many uses the Internet allows for today, its origins lie in the cold war and the need for a defense communications network that could survive a nuclear strike. But that defense communications network quickly became used for general communications and within only a few years of the first transmission, traffic on the predecessor to today’s Internet was already 75 percent email.

In the beginning

Arpanet was the vital precursor of today’s Internet, commissioned by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1969. In his interesting account of why Arpanet came about, Stephen Lukasic, director of DARPA from 1970–75, wrote that if its true nature and impact had been realized it would never have been permitted under the US government structure of the time. The concept for a decentralized communications technology that would survive a nuclear attack would have placed it outside DARPA’s remit (as defense communications specifically were assigned to a different agency), so the focus changed to how to connect computers together so that major applications could be run on the most appropriate system available.

This was in the era of time-sharing computers. Today’s familiar world of the ubiquitous “personal computer” on each desk was decades away. Computers of this time were generally very large, filling entire rooms, and comparatively rare. Users working at connected terminals would submit jobs to the computer that would allocate processing time for the job when available. The idea went that if these computers were networked together, an available remote computer could process a job even when the computers closer to the users were full. The resulting network was called Arpanet, and the first packets of data traversed the network in September 1969.

A CDC 7600 mainframe computer fills an entire room at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, mid-1970s.

Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (CC BY-NC-SA)

At this time the computing industry was dominated by a few large companies, which produced products that would work only with others from the same company. However, the Arpanet concept included a vital decision on how the network would function: it sharply distinguished and separated the technology and medium that would carry the communications (satellite link, copper cable, fiber optic), the network layer (the software that manages communications between different computers), and applications (the programs that users run over the network to do work) from one another.

This contrasted with the vertical “stove-pipe” philosophy that persisted among computer manufacturers at the time, where any networking that existed worked only in specific situations and for specific computer systems. For example, IBM computers could communicate using IBM’s SNA protocol, but not with non-IBM equipment. The direction Arpanet took was manufacturer-agnostic, where different types of computers could be networked together.

First footprint in Europe

In 1970, the leading network research outside the US was a group at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London led by Donald Davies. Davies had built a network with similar concepts to Arpanet, and as one of the inventors of packet-switching his work had influenced the direction of Arpanet. But despite his plans for a national digital network, he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly on telecommunications.

Around this time, the director of the Arpanet project, Larry Roberts, proposed connecting Arpanet to Davies’ NPL network in the UK. This would be possible because a few years previously a large seismic array in Norway run by Norwegian researchers for DARPA had been connected to Arpanet via a dedicated 2.4Kbps connection to Washington. Due to the transatlantic technology of the time, this was by satellite link via the only earth station for satellite communications in Europe, in Goonhilly, Cornwall, and thence by cable to Oslo. Larry proposed to interrupt the connection in London, connect the NPL network, and then continue to Norway.

Since the international communications were the main cost, this seemed straightforward. Unfortunately Britain was at this point negotiating to join the Common Market, and the UK government was afraid that closer links with the US would jeopardise the talks. When the government refused NPL permission to participate, as I was doing relevant research at the University of London’s Institute of Computer Science and subsequently at UCL, I was the obvious alternative.

Vaulting many nontechnical hurdles

From the beginning, I proposed a twin approach. I would connect the large computers at the University of London and the Rutherford and Appleton laboratories (RAL) in Oxfordshire, which were hubs for other UK computer networks, and I would provide services to allow UK researchers to use the networks to collaborate with colleagues in the US.

This novel approach would mean the IBM System 360/195 at RAL, then the most powerful computer in the UK, would be made available as a remote host—available to those in the US on the other side of the transatlantic link, without being directly connected to the interface message processor—the equipment which sent and received messages between Arapanet nodes, which would be installed in UCL.

An interface message processor used to connect Arpanet nodes. About the size of a wardrobe, it is the type that would have been impounded by customs.

Credit: Steve Jurvetson (CC BY-SA)

Unfortunately there then came many nontechnical hurdles. I attempted to get other universities’ computer science departments to back the project, but this foundered because the Science Research Council did not consider the opportunity worth funding. The UK Department of Industry wanted a statement of interest from industry before funding, but even though I knew executives at ICL, the UK’s principal computer manufacturer, after months of agonising it declined stating that “one would gain more from a two-week visit to the US than from a physical link.” Consequently, after a year of back and forth, I had nothing.

However, by 1973, the project was becoming a reality. By now the Norwegian seismic array, Norsar, was connected to Arpanet via a newly opened satellite earth station at Tanum in Sweden, and so there was no longer a link via the UK at all. Now, what was required was a link from UCL to Oslo. With a small grant of 5,000 pounds from Donald Davies at the NPL, and the provision by the British Post Office of a 9.6Kbps link to Oslo without charge for one year, we had the resources to proceed.

DARPA duly shipped its message processor with which to connect the new London node to Arpanet. It was promptly impounded at Heathrow Airport for import duty and the newly introduced Value Added Tax. I managed to avoid paying the duty by declaring it an “instrument on loan”, but it took all my available funds to provide a guarantee that would allow me to get hold of the equipment pending an appeal. With the equipment finally installed, in July 1973, I connected the first computers outside the US to the Arpanet, sending a transmission from London, via Norway, through the Arpanet to the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California.

First password on the Internet

Within three months my group was able to implement the Arpanet network protocols and translate them to the IBM protocols necessary to communicate with computers at RAL. And so, once connected to the wider network through our gateway at UCL, the IBM computer at RAL became one of the most powerful on the Arpanet.

Arpanet map in 1977. The satellite connection from SDAC to NORSAR and then to London visible bottom right, with the large box bottom right representing the computers available at the Rutherford and Appleton Laboratories, Royal Signals and Radar Establishment and elsewhere.

Credit: The Computer History Museum

When I gave a talk stating this fact, RAL staff first did not believe me; they still saw only my small minicomputer, without understanding that it was the gateway to the rest of the Arpanet on the other side of the link. On realizing, they became very concerned that access to their computer services would be available not only to me but with my complicity to the whole research community in the US.

However, I had been concerned that I would, in exactly this way, be criticized for improper use of both UK and US facilities. So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by DARPA in UCL, they would require a password.

In fact this was the first password on Arpanet. It proved invaluable in satisfying authorities on both sides of the Atlantic for the 15 years I ran the service—during which no security breach occurred over my link. I also put in place a system of governance that any UK users had to be approved by a committee which I chaired but which also had UK government and British Post Office representation.

The transatlantic connection included terminal services (which connected users to remote computers to run jobs), file access and later email services. It was immediately very popular. Within a couple of years, I was supported by half a dozen government ministries, with leased line links (a dedicated line) to five remote sites—some of which allowed access through their own networks. Other users could telephone into my UCL site or use the fledgling post office data network to which I also provided access.

Indeed, its profile had become so prominent that when the Queen opened a building at the Ministry of Defence’s Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern in Worcestershire in 1976 (which had taken over funding the leased line to Oslo), this was accompanied by her inaugurating the connection by sending an email—the first to be sent by a head of state.

As the UK side of Arpanet continued growing, additional message processors had to be imported, each one racking up additional VAT and duty to be paid, pending the outcome of the appeal. Finally in 1976 the appeal was refused. But a meeting with senior treasury officials subsequently led to an agreement that my research group would be permitted to import equipment free of VAT and duty. The importance of this ruling cannot be overemphasized for ensuring the independence of our operation: over the following decade, many government bodies considered trying to take it over, and each time would be discouraged by the magnitude of the VAT and duty bill they would incur.

Agreeing the language of Arpanet

In their 1975 paper, Bob Kahn at DARPA and Vint Cerf at Stanford University made the next vital contribution towards building the Internet of today when they formulated the concept of connecting together different network technologies—such as those defined by different computer manufacturers, or designed for different communications media such as cable, satellite link or radio waves—with a common inter-network layer, which would come to be known as TCP/IP.

Transport Control Protocol (TCP) managed the packaging and unpacking of data sent between computers, while Internet Protocol (IP) provided the pathfinding to ensure the data packets reached the intended destination. One of the important aspects of IP was that it allowed scalability: the 8-bit number previously used to identify a computer on the network that allowed just 256 devices suddenly increased to a 32-bit number, which allowed 4 billion devices.

I misjudged how successful TCP/IP would be. In one of the first papers on network interconnection Cerf argued that all computers should adopt TCP/IP, but I felt that this was unrealistic, and that gateways like the interface message processors were needed to “translate” communications between networks. While for the first 15 years my view prevailed, eventually, in the long run, Cerf’s view was the right one.

Stanford Research Institute’s Packet Radio Van, used in the first TCP/IP Internet experiments. The van drove across the Golden Gate Bridge while transmitting, and the steel girders interrupted the signal. But when it exited the bridge, the transmission picked up where it left off.

Credit: SRI International (CC BY-SA)

At UCL, my group participated in the first independent TCP/IP implementations, connecting in 1977 for the first time networks using a different technology to Arpanet. This saw three different types of network, Arpanet, the satellite network Satnet, and PRNET, a packet-radio network using radio transmissions from mobile vans, all connected using the same common “language”, TCP/IP. This was, in essence, the first demonstration of the Internet—a network of networks.

Later, we connected the first multi-service heterogeneous network outside the US (Janet, the UK’s academic network connecting universities) to Arpanet, and then to the Internet in the early 1980s. Indeed, UCL was the first organization on Arpanet to adopt TCP/IP as standard.

Schematic of the first Internet demonstration, connecting three different networks, PRNET, ARPANET, and SATNET, with TCP/IP. This was the first connection that created a "network of networks," as the Internet would become.

Credit: Computer History Museum

During the 1980s the Internet approach took over, where computers used TCP/IP to manage their own connections to the network. DARPA provided funding to add TCP/IP into its chosen operating system of the time, BSD, and this was later made available to the public.

After the release of the IBM PC microcomputer in 1981 there was a rapid growth of cheap (relatively speaking) personal computers in offices connected to each other by Ethernet networks. And routers (small devices to connect networks) were developed that made the huge, outdated interface message processors used with the original Arpanet obsolete.

The universal adoption of common protocols that provided useful services like virtual terminal (telnet), file transfer (FTP), directory (LDAP), and email (SMTP) made the Internet an invaluable tool for researchers. As fiber optic installations became more economical, it allowed networks to scale up to very large numbers of interconnected computers. The Internet’s most widespread and largest use by volume was still email, but a number of shared data repositories and resources developed.

Then in 1989, with the development of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee provided the killer application that would make the Internet essential to all types of commercial and government use. The simplicity and ease of use of the web and web browsers, together with the Internet as the distribution mechanism underpinning it, laid the basis for the universal use of the Internet we have today.

The little black book of the Internet

Back when there were even only a few hundred computers, discovering their addresses and maintaining a directory of them had become impractical. Bob Kahn, then director of the relevant office at DARPA, remedied this problem by commissioning the Domain Name Service. This mapped IP addresses to names organized in hierarchical structure. The effect was a sort of directory of Internet-connected computers, where top-level domains (such as .com, .org, .uk, .fr) lay above second-level domains (such as .ac.uk, .co.uk, or microsoft.com, wikipedia.org), which in turn lay above domains below them (such as www.microsoft.com or www.wikipedia.org, where the www. represents a subdomain below the domain). This domain model forms the basis of the URLs that we type into our browser address bars today.

Although 4 billion addresses seemed near infinite in 1974, by the early 1990s it was already evident that the Internet would soon run out of IP (IPv4) addresses, necessary for computers to be connected to the Internet. Work on the next generation of IP, IPv6, was to increase the number of routable network addresses from 32-bit (2^32, or 4 billion) to 128-bit (or 2¹²⁸ or 3.4x10²⁹ billion) addresses. Technical fixes managed to extend the lifetime of IPv4, but over the last few years the need to move to IPv6 has become pressing, and adoption is now happening faster.

Growth and change

Over the last two decades, the emergence of social networks, the increasing availability of Internet streaming media, and the integration of mobile telephone networks with the Internet have hugely increased demand for Internet capacity. Such demand will require large investments to meet, but probably without any radical rethink of the Internet’s architecture. The number of Internet-connected devices is growing significantly, but we can assume that it would increase only to a small multiple of the world’s population. So even if the protocols that govern how devices connect to the Internet had to change to cope with demand, this could be achieved within only a few years.

The ability to monitor the activities of people—with or without their knowledge—is one important outcome of so many people so frequently connected to the network. The ability by unauthorized individuals to hack into private systems, to obtain private data or damage operations, are very worrying developments. The advances in computer and network security needed require massive research and development, and new legal and regulatory powers. And an even more disruptive development now looms: the Internet of Things.

Increasingly, devices and equipment found in all aspects of our lives may incorporate sensors and actuators that can be operated remotely. The estimated number of devices to be network-connected is much larger: as many as hundreds of billions within ten years. Cars (for navigation or automated driving), home appliances (for automation, security), devices on the national power grid (monitoring and error correction), smart buildings (temperature or humidity control, security), smart cities (traffic control, services supply, waste management), wearable and implanted medical devices, and so on.

The characteristics of such devices are often quite different from today’s computers on the Internet. The data rate may be very low, and often but not necessarily the data may be required only for local networks, rather than full Internet availability. The devices or their controllers may have Internet interfaces, but they may not obey other Internet protocols, and would possibly need to be left in place for years, or decades.

They may not be able to carry out sophisticated security operations themselves, yet ensuring they are secure will be crucial if they are not to become a vast vulnerable network of potential points of entry for hostile actors. It is the Things on the Internet of the future, rather than typical computing devices, that may prompt a radical re-think of the ways the Internet works.

The impact of the Internet on our way of life in its first 40 years has been immeasurable. It has expanded and developed in a way none of us envisaged in 1975. While we may have a better idea of what to expect over the next couple of decades, I am sure most of us will be mistaken.

Peter T. Kirstein was Professor of Computer Communications Science at UCL.

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

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HR Dive reached out to J.P. Morgan for confirmation and did not hear back by the time of publication.

The news may come as no surprise, as J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has been notably vocal in praising in-person work. During the Atlantic Festival in Washington D.C. last September, Dimon vowed to “make Washington, D.C. go back to work.” 

Back in 2023, Dimon notably said in an interview: “In general, there’s nothing like face-to-face.”

About 1 in 5 workers say they’re ignoring return-to-office rules — but that doesn’t fly at every workplace. CEO Andy Jassy said in August 2023 that if Amazon workers can’t commit to coming in person, it’s “probably not going to work out.” Joining the likes of Zoom and Meta, Goldman Sachs also allegedly applied pressure on workers to RTO.

Many have warned against all-or-nothing work arrangements, however, underscoring how RTO leads to employee dissatisfaction in an increasingly grim labor climate. Experts also note that such hard-line mandates can also signal employer mistrust.

Still, Dimon and other finance CEOs are not an anomaly: 83% of chief business leaders are expecting a full return to office by 2027, per KPMG reporting.

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Bonta sued the oil and gas giant alleging that it deceived the public for half a century by promising the plastics it produced would be recycled.

The Texas-based company said in its lawsuit, filed Monday in that state's Eastern District, that Bonta, the Sierra Club, San Francisco Baykeeper, Heal the Bay and the Surfrider Foundation conspired to defame it with statements regarding the efficacy of its plastic recycling technology.

“Together, Bonta and the US Proxies — the former for political gain and the latter pawns for the Foreign Interests — have engaged in a deliberate smear campaign against ExxonMobil, falsely claiming that ExxonMobil’s effective and innovative advanced recycling technology is a ‘false promise’ and ‘not based on truth,’” the company said in its lawsuit.

It seeks unspecified damages and retractions of “defamatory statements” from Bonta and the groups.

A spokesperson for the California Department of Justice called the lawsuit “another attempt from ExxonMobil to deflect attention from its own unlawful deception” and said Bonta looks forward to “vigorously litigating” the case.

In its lawsuit filed in September, Bonta's office said that less than 5% of plastic is recycled into another plastic product in the U.S. even though the items are labeled as “recyclable.”

As a result landfills and oceans are filled with plastic waste, creating a global pollution crisis, while consumers diligently place plastic water bottles and other containers into recycling bins, the lawsuit alleges.

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Ice moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus are currently at the forefront of the search for extraterrestrial life, as it is believed that beneath their thick icy shells there are vast internal oceans that could potentially support life.

In October, NASA launched the Europa Clipper probe to learn more about the conditions on Europa, and now there are several R&D efforts underway to directly explore the interior oceans of these icy moons.

One such project, called SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers), is being led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The program plans to send a number of palm-sized autonomous underwater robots into the ice moons’ internal oceans to search for signs of life.

Among the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn there are several that have vast oceans beneath their thick ice shells, and they are collectively known as the “ocean worlds.” The most famous example is Europa.

Europa has a diameter of about 3,120 kilometers—which is roughly a quarter the diameter of Earth—and its surface is covered by a thick ice shell estimated to be about 3 to 30 kilometers thick.

Europa’s orbit is an ellipse, and the satellite’s shape is affected by Jupiter’s gravity, becoming deformed when it passes closer to Jupiter.

This change in shape creates friction inside Europa, generating enormous amounts of heat in a mechanism known as tidal heating, which melts some of the ice and forms a vast internal ocean beneath the moon’s thick ice shell.

Europa’s internal ocean is salty and is estimated to be about 100 kilometers deep on average, with a total volume of water twice that of all Earth’s oceans, despite this moon being considerably smaller than our planet.

In addition, it is believed that internal oceans exist on Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Callisto and Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus.

Liquid water is essential for life as we know it, which is why the ocean worlds are at the forefront of the search for extraterrestrial life.

Under the Sea (of Ice)

The autonomous underwater exploration robots envisioned by SWIM are extremely small. Their wedge-shaped bodies are about 12 centimeters long. A device called a “cryobot” will transport the robots beneath the thick ice shells of these moons, using nuclear energy to melt the ice. The idea is to pack about four dozen robots into the cryobot and have them penetrate the thick ice shell over the course of several years.

There are benefits to sending out such a large number of exploration robots. One is that they can explore a wider area. Another is that they are envisioned to operate in teams, so that multiple robots can explore the same area in overlapping directions, reducing errors in the observation data.

Each robot will be equipped with sensors to measure temperature, pressure, acidity, electrical conductivity, and chemical composition of the waters it explores. All of these sensors will be mounted on a chip measuring just a few millimeters square.

“People might ask, why is NASA developing an underwater robot for space exploration?” says Ethan Schaller, project leader at NASA’s JPL, explaining the motivation behind SWIM. “Because there are places in the solar system that we want to go to look for life—and we think life requires liquid water.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

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In 2025, human writers will reassert their worth. In recent years, the race for more and more content has been driven by technological and market imperatives such as search engine optimization, which serves neither the creator nor the consumer. Human needs and desires have been sidelined in favor of the attention economy and the drive for clicks.

Hailed as a boon for freedom of expression, the early promise of the internet has failed us. Literature and journalism have been replaced by valueless “content,” primarily aimed at filling web pages rather than informing or entertaining. Meanwhile, incomes for writers have been driven down. The Authors’ Licensing and Copywriting Society reported a 60.2 percent decrease in authors’ incomes when adjusted for inflation from 2006 to 2022. The emergence of widely available generative AI has felt, for many, like the final nail in the coffin for writers.

But 2025 will be a turning point, not for AI replacing us but for a renewed appreciation of the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of high-quality human writing. Ironically, the advent of AI-generated search, stalling traffic to original websites, will kill off the need for pointless “content” to game the system and will push people to demand better.

Generative AI has provoked a slew of litigation and industrial and regulatory action. Data protection regulators in the EU and the UK, prompted by complaints from the civil society organization NOYB, succeeded in getting a pause in Meta’s plans to train its AI on users’ posts, photos, and interactions. Traditional publishers such as The New York Times have stepped up to protect their own interests, and with them, the interests of their contributors. But some, the Financial Times and The Atlantic in particular, have entered into agreements with generative AI companies, presumably in the belief that it is impossible to hold back the tide. In 2025, they will be proved wrong.

As the copyright lawsuits rumble through the courts, in 2025, we will also see decisions on liability for the inevitable errors produced by generative AI. Defamation cases against AI companies and publishers using AI content will come to a head as slanderous untruths are circulated online and amplified by unthinking bots and AI search engines. In 2024, the academic publisher, Wiley, shut down 19 journals faced with a flood of fake science papers. To err is human, but industrial-scale fakery is very much a technological problem. AI has no professional ethics, no soul, and nothing to lose—but the people that use it, or ask others to use it for them, do.

In 2023, AI companies started to hire poets from around the world to try to infuse their dead-eyed products with something close to creativity. And in 2024, copywriters found their careers, seemingly doomed by AI, revived as humanizers for synthetic marketing content which does not pass an algorithmic, let alone a human, sniff test for quality. The value of human creators is starting to dawn on the corporations that sought to crush them, now that even the machines are not fooled by AI. But editing robot writing is boring—will writers ultimately just say no? And will readers join them?

The London premiere of The Last Screenwriter, a movie written by ChatGPT 4.0, was canceled in June 2024 after the cinema received more than 200 complaints about the very premise of it.

Publishers that have banked on people will attract the best writers, and eventually, the most lucrative audiences. With many news outlets offering little or no compensation for freelance writers, those humans will be loath to sell their souls so cheaply to train AI to replace them. Publishers that sell out their writers will see their talent go elsewhere and, with them, their readership.

In a world flooded with derivative automated drivel, human writers will allow readers a breath of air, like a green park in a polluted city. Instead of being wiped out by AI, in 2025, we will see a recognition of the inherent value in quality human writing, and perhaps, human writers will be able to start charging their worth.

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The H5N1 bird flu situation in the US seems more fraught than ever this week as the virus continues to spread swiftly in dairy cattle and birds while sporadically jumping to humans.

On Monday, officials in Louisiana announced that the person who had developed the country's first severe H5N1 infection had died of the infection, marking the country's first H5N1 death. Meanwhile, with no signs of H5N1 slowing, seasonal flu is skyrocketing, raising anxiety that the different flu viruses could mingle, swap genetic elements, and generate a yet more dangerous virus strain.

But, despite the seemingly fever-pitch of viral activity and fears, a representative for the World Health Organization today noted that risk to the general population remains low—as long as one critical factor remains absent: person-to-person spread.

"We are concerned, of course, but we look at the risk to the general population and, as I said, it still remains low," WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris told reporters at a Geneva press briefing Tuesday in response to questions related to the US death. In terms of updating risk assessments, you have to look at how the virus behaved in that patient and if it jumped from one person to another person, which it didn't, Harris explained. "At the moment, we're not seeing behavior that's changing our risk assessment," she added.

In a statement on the death late Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasized that no human-to-human transmission has been identified in the US. To date, there have been 66 documented human cases of H5N1 infections since the start of 2024. Of those, 40 were linked to exposure to infected dairy cows, 23 were linked to infected poultry, two had no clear source, and one case—the fatal case in Louisiana—was linked to exposure to infected backyard and wild birds.

"Additionally, there are no concerning virologic changes actively spreading in wild birds, poultry, or cows that would raise the risk to human health," the CDC said.

Ongoing threat

In its own announcement of the death, the Louisiana health department noted that the person who was infected was over the age of 65 and had underlying medical conditions, which made the person particularly vulnerable to severe disease.

A 13-year-old girl in Canada also developed severe disease from an H5N1 infection in November and required intensive care, intubation, and the use of the life-support therapy extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). The teenager is, fortunately, recovering, according to a medical report published December 31 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

But, fatalities are not uncommon with H5N1 infections overall. According to data collected by the WHO, there have been 954 documented cases between 2003 and 2024. Of those, 464 were fatal, leading to a fatality rate of about 49 percent among documented cases.

Without sustained human-to-human transmission or other dangerous changes to the virus, the risk to the general population remains low. But, both the CDC and Harris emphasized that people who work with birds and other animals are at greater risk of infection and should take precautions. Since March, at least 919 dairy herds across 16 states have been infected with H5N1, 703 of which have been in California. Since January 2022, over 130 million birds have been affected.

With the continued spread in birds and other animals, the virus has more opportunities to adapt to humans. Health experts have criticized the US handling of the outbreaks and not doing more to curb the spread of the virus, which has moved seemingly unabated through dairy farms.

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Who is better at maneuvering a large load through a maze, ants or humans?

The piano-mover puzzle involves trying to transport an oddly shaped load across a constricted environment with various obstructions. It's one of several variations on classic computational motion-planning problems, a key element in numerous robotics applications. But what would happen if you pitted human beings against ants in a competition to solve the piano-mover puzzle?

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, humans have superior cognitive abilities and, hence, would be expected to outperform the ants. However, depriving people of verbal or nonverbal communication can level the playing field, with ants performing better in some trials. And while ants improved their cognitive performance when acting collectively as a group, the same did not hold true for humans.

Co-author Ofer Feinerman of the Weizmann Institute of Science and colleagues saw an opportunity to use the piano-mover puzzle to shed light on group decision-making, as well as the question of whether it is better to cooperate as a group or maintain individuality. "It allows us to compare problem-solving skills and performances across group sizes and down to a single individual and also enables a comparison of collective problem-solving across species," the authors wrote.

They decided to compare the performances of ants and humans because both species are social and can cooperate while transporting loads larger than themselves. In essence, "people stand out for individual cognitive abilities while ants excel in cooperation," the authors wrote.

Feinerman et al. used crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) for their experiments, along with the human volunteers. They designed a physical version of the piano-movers puzzle involving a large t-shaped load that had to be maneuvered across a rectangular area divided into three chambers, connected via narrow slits. The load started in the first chamber on the left, and the ant and human subjects had to figure out how to transport it through the second chamber and into the third.

This version of the puzzle intentionally posed challenges for both humans and ants and was designed to maintain a similar ratio of body size to load size. "People are challenged by the precise length assessments, mental rotations, and symmetry comprehension that are required to distinguish between viable moves and dead-ends," the authors wrote. As for the ants, "Their pheromone based communication takes neither load size versus door size nor load rotations into account, and thus deems a major part of their collective navigation strategy useless." The ants were manipulated into trying to solve the puzzle by making the t-shaped load resemble food.

Collective cognition

The experiment was run multiple times with different variations: a single ant, a group of about seven ants, and a larger group of around 80 ants; and a single person, a group of six to nine people, and a larger group of 26 people. Humans were instructed to hold the load only by handles that were carefully placed to mimic how the object would be held by ants, and the handles had sensors for measuring the pulling force applied by each person. In some of the runs, humans were not allowed to communicate verbally or with gestures, and in some trials, they even wore masks and sunglasses to avoid nonverbal communication. Each trial run was videotaped for analysis.

It should come as no surprise that humans had the edge as individuals, given their superior cognitive abilities; as communicating groups, they also easily beat the ants at finding the optimal solution. And large groups of ants performed much better than individual ants. However, the picture changed when humans were limited in their ability to communicate; large groups of ants often actually performed better than humans in several runs, thanks to their emergent collective memory that helped them avoid repeated mistakes and maintain a particular direction of motion.

Humans, when told not to communicate, tended to "pull toward the lowest common denominator, the greedy option, as would a newly attached ant," the authors wrote. "Once the load starts moving, people in restricted communication groups simply align their pull with its motion. This abandonment of their individual cognitive abilities is reminiscent of the collective ant behavior." Communicating human groups, by contrast, were able to discuss and collectively decide on their next move.

“An ant colony is actually a family,” said Feinerman. “All the ants in the nest are sisters, and they have common interests. It’s a tightly knit society in which cooperation greatly outweighs competition. That’s why an ant colony is sometimes referred to as a super-organism, sort of a living body composed of multiple ‘cells’ that cooperate with one another. Our findings validate this vision. We’ve shown that ants acting as a group are smarter, that for them the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In contrast, forming groups did not expand the cognitive abilities of humans. The famous ‘wisdom of the crowd’ that’s become so popular in the age of social networks didn’t come to the fore in our experiments.”

PNAS, 2024. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2414274121  (About DOIs).

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As head of one of the world’s only dedicated research labs focused on human metapneumovirus, John Williams used to spend most of his time attempting to convince skeptical doctors the virus was real. So when the recent outbreak in northern China was met with widespread alarm, Williams allowed himself a wry smile. The forgotten burden of public health was finally being taken seriously.

Human metapneumovirus, or hMPV, was first identified 24 years ago by a group of Dutch scientists seeking to better characterize viruses responsible for acute respiratory infections. But in the years since, wider awareness of hMPV has remained remarkably low, despite its being one of many endemic respiratory viruses that circulate globally on a seasonal basis, alongside influenza, Covid, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). “In North America or the southern hemisphere, it circulates during the winter months, and then during the rainy season in the tropics,” Williams says. “Typically, you see RSV first, then comes a big peak of flu and then a big peak of hMPV. The three sort of follow each other.”

Sten Vermund, chief medical officer of the Global Virus Network, an international coalition of medical virologists, says it’s important to clarify that hMPV is not going to drive a Covid- or flu-level pandemic. Being highly infectious, it is so common that almost all children have been infected by the age of 5, but in the majority of healthy children and adults, the virus merely presents as a mild cold. It also doesn’t mutate and evolve to the same extent as Covid and influenza, meaning that while our immunity levels periodically wax and wane, depending on the level of exposure to hMPV in recent years, our immune systems aren’t having to continually learn how to fight off wildly different new forms of the virus.

Williams’ hunch is that the recent spike of cases in China reflects the fact that the levels of child immunity in the country had dipped as a consequence of the Chinese government’s “Zero Covid” policies, which saw restrictions on social mixing implemented for almost three years to try to suppress SARS-CoV-2. “China maintained Covid prevention measures a lot longer than the rest of the world, and then when you open back up, you’re a bit more susceptible,” Williams says. “So it’s probably that, rather than there being a particularly virulent strain of hMPV around.”

While hMPV levels in the US are currently low—accounting for less than 2 percent of weekly positive tests for respiratory viruses, based on the CDC’s latest data, compared to 19 percent for influenza and 7 percent for Covid—the country also experienced a sudden post-pandemic surge in hMPV infections during the winter of 2022–23.

In early 2023, Williams remembers receiving calls from surprised doctors around the country, describing hospitalized patients—mainly young children, over-75s, or immunocompromized individuals—who had tested positive for hMPV. But to Williams, this was not unexpected.

A decade earlier, he had published a seminal paper in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, showing hMPV to be the second-most-common infection identified in hospitalized children after RSV. A previous New York study carried out over four years, and published in 2008, had also found hMPV to be as common a cause of hospitalization in older adults as RSV or flu, with similar rates of ICU admissions and death. Another national study of adults hospitalized with symptoms of pneumonia showed that hMPV seemed to be as common as RSV, and nearly as common as influenza.

Like many other respiratory viruses, Williams says that hMPV tends to impact those with chronic lung diseases or existing conditions such as asthma and cancer. But despite this, he has found that many doctors are unaware that it’s a threat, largely because until relatively recently, no one was testing for it outside of academic studies.

“There’s no question that even within the medical community, a lot of physicians are just not aware of how common hMPV is,” he says. “As clinical testing has become more available, I’ve had people say to me, with surprise, ‘I had a patient in my ICU with metapneumovirus last week. It’s real, and I never believed it before.’ Until people see it themselves, I think they don’t totally believe the burden.”

Vermund says that there have likely been many spikes of hMPV infections in the past, but we were either not aware of them or mistook them for influenza. He explains that one of the consequences of Covid has been a recognition of the need for greater surveillance of circulating respiratory viruses, meaning that hMPV case numbers are being detected by epidemiologists for the first time.

“The Chinese have become quite advanced at molecular diagnostics for respiratory viruses and they’re doing a lot of public health surveillance, more than many other countries,” he says. “I think what we may be seeing is that they’re doing an especially good job at this, and so finding that metapneumovirus is more common than we used to realize.”

Williams believes that the current spike of interest in hMPV could have positive consequences for public health. Right now, he says that hMPV can only be detected as part of a so-called multiplex panel, a diagnostic that checks for the presence of up to 25 different respiratory viruses, at a cost of around $200 per patient. While this is a worthwhile investment for emergency room doctors deciding whether to admit a sick infant or send them home, such costs are often prohibitive for ordinary physicians.

“There are cheap tests for flu, Covid, and RSV that can be used by clinicians anywhere,” he says. “But there’s not really any cheap test for hMPV, just this complex diagnostic panel which assesses multiple viruses and that’s hard for the average clinic to get hold of.”

There are hopes that low-cost testing for hMPV could be on the way. According to Vermund, the Ragon Institute in Massachusetts is working on ways of trying to reduce the price of respiratory virus testing to under $6 per patient, with the ultimate goal of driving the cost down to less than $1.

Equally, another consequence of the increasing awareness surrounding hMPV is that it provides stronger incentives for fast-tracking a vaccine. As yet, no licensed vaccine is available for the virus, but a series of candidates have entered early-stage clinical trials in the last two years.

Last summer, scientists at the University of Oxford launched a clinical trial of a combined RSV and hMPV vaccine in partnership with Moderna, and Andrew Pollard, a professor of infection and immunity who directs the Oxford Vaccine Group, says that adding hMPV to existing vaccines would be the most practical means of rolling out an additional immunization.

“If you can put them in the same vaccine, so RSV and hMPV, then without needing extra needles, you’re actually covering more of the respiratory admissions to hospital,” says Pollard. “But before we can do that, we need to find out how often you need to vaccinate against hMPV. If you can provide immunity by vaccinating every few years, then you could combine with RSV.”

Overall, Vermund describes the sudden interest in hMPV as an important development. While the virus won’t trigger the next pandemic, it still afflicts such a significant number of people that it’s a major drain on public health systems, as well as being a long-underrecognized cause of mortality in the vulnerable.

“Even though metapneumovirus is not one of the more lethal viruses, it’s incredibly common,” he says. “It’s been causing a nontrivial amount of colds over the years, which is an incredible economic burden, and every once in a while, it kills somebody.”

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Sam Berns was my friend. With the wisdom of a sage, he inspired me and many others about how to make the most of life. Afflicted with the rare disease called progeria, his body aged at a rapid rate, and he died of heart failure at just 17, a brave life cut much too short.

My lab discovered the genetic cause of Sam’s illness two decades ago: Just one DNA letter gone awry, a T that should have been a C in a critical gene called lamin A. The same misspelling is found in almost all of the 200 individuals around the world with progeria.

The opportunity to address this illness by directly fixing the misspelling in the relevant body tissues was just science fiction a few years ago. Then Crispr came along—the elegant enzymatic apparatus that allows delivery of DNA scissors to a specific target in the genome. In December 2023, the FDA approved the first Crispr-based therapy for sickle cell disease. That approach required taking bone marrow cells out of the body, making a disabling cut in a particular gene that regulates fetal hemoglobin, treating the patient with chemotherapy to make room in the marrow, and then reinfusing the edited cells. A relief from lifelong anemia and excruciating attacks of pain is now being delivered to sickle cell patients, albeit at very high cost.

For progeria and thousands of other genetic diseases, there are two reasons why this same approach won’t work. First, the desired edit for most misspellings will not usually be achieved by a disabling cut in the gene. Instead, a correction is needed.  In the case of progeria, the disease-causing T needs to be edited back to a C.  By analogy with a word processor, what’s needed is not “find and delete” (first-generation Crispr), it’s “find and replace” (next-generation Crispr). Second, the misspelling needs to be repaired in the parts of the body that are most harmed by the disease. While bone marrow cells, immune cells, and skin cells can be taken out of the body to administer gene therapy, that won’t work when the main problem is in the cardiovascular system (as in progeria) or the brain (as in many rare genetic diseases). In the lingo of the gene therapist, we need in vivo options.

The exciting news in 2025 is that both of these barriers are starting to come down. The next generation of Crispr-based gene editors, pioneered particularly elegantly by David Liu of the Broad Institute, allows precise corrective editing of virtually any gene misspelling, without inducing a scissors cut. As for delivery systems, the family of adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors already provides the ability to achieve in vivo editing in eye, liver, and muscle, though there is still much work to be done to optimize delivery to other tissues and ensure safety. Nonviral delivery systems such as lipid nanoparticles are under intense development and may displace viral vectors in a few years.

Working with David Liu, Sam Berns’ mom, and Leslie Gordon of the Progeria Research Foundation, my research group has already shown that a single intravenous infusion of an in vivo gene editor can dramatically extend the life of mice that have been engineered to carry the human progeria mutation. Our team is now working to bring this forward to a human clinical trial. We are truly excited about the potential for kids with progeria, but that excitement could have even greater impact. This strategy, if successful, could be a model for the approximately 7,000 genetic diseases where the specific misspelling that causes the disease is known, but no therapy exists.

There are many hurdles, cost being a major one as private investment is absent for diseases that affect only a few hundred individuals. However, success for a few rare diseases, supported by government and philanthropic funds, will likely lead to efficiencies and economies that will help with other future applications. This is the best hope for the tens of millions of children and adults who are waiting for a cure. The rare-disease community must press on. That’s what Sam Berns would have wanted.

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In 2024, two new satellites were launched to find methane super-emitters from space: the Environmental Defense Fund’s MethaneSAT took off in March 2024; and Carbon Mapper, launched later last year as a public-private partnership.

Methane is a super-powered greenhouse gas. Pound-for-pound, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after release. Over the past two centuries, its concentration has more than doubled, a much faster increase than for carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are rising more quickly than at any time since record-keeping began.

Global methane emissions are also dominated by human activities to an extent far greater than for carbon dioxide. More than 60 percent of global methane emissions come from human activity: extracting fossil fuels; raising cows that burp (not fart); dumping trash in our landfills and waste treatment sites.

The good news is that a tiny fraction of sites are responsible for much of that pollution. Emissions of methane are dominated by so-called super-emitters: 5 percent of facilities yield more than half of all methane emissions in a given oil and gas field or industry. Quench those emissions and we’ll dent global methane pollution substantially.

MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper circle the Earth north-south in a polar orbit. As the planet turns below them—like a basketball spinning on your finger—they see a different band of potential emitting sites in each pass.

MethaneSAT has a wider field of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels it images are 15,000 square miles, about the size of Montana’s Glacier National Park. It will be good at identifying methane hot spots. Carbon Mapper, in contrast, is like the zoom on your camera. It will distinguish individual sources at the scale of a football field, attributing methane plumes to single sources (and single owners) on the ground.

There’s a caveat: Both of these satellites need sunlight to see the world. This might well lead unscrupulous owners of oil and gas companies to order their crews to perform facility maintenance at night, when such satellites can’t see them. Now I don’t believe that the owners of most oil and gas companies are unscrupulous, but some of them are and, in 2025, they’ll go night-owl on us.

Regardless, gone are the days when huge gas leaks like the 2015 blowout at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in Los Angeles will go unreported for weeks. That blowout sickened nearby residents, led to a $1.8 billion settlement from SoCalGas to almost 10,000 evacuated families, and ultimately emitted 97,000 metric ton of methane, the biggest gas leak in US history.

In 2025, these satellites will let us find the world’s largest polluters. We’ll be able to peer into coal mines and oil and gas fields in remote corners of the world and countries where we aren’t allowed to work in today, like the Raspadskaya Coal Mine in Russia and the Qingshui basin in China.

We’ll find super-emitters in the United States too, and some Fortune 500 executives will have egg on their faces. Big oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries will be flagged for pollution in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota. Landfill, feedlot, and wastewater treatment operators will also be embarrassed. In 2025, there will be nowhere for the “Most Wanted” methane polluters to hide.

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McDonald's announced Monday it is ending some practices that are part of its broader mission to be inclusive, becoming the latest major corporation to scale back on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies that critics deem "woke."

In an open letter to its franchisees, employees and suppliers, McDonald's touted its achievements in its commitment to inclusion, one of its "core values," and the company also said it wanted to "highlight a few important changes to our approach."

The changes include McDonald's scrapping its "aspirational representation goals," getting rid of its DEI pledge for its suppliers, changing the name of its diversity team to the Global Inclusion Team and ending external surveys.

Although McDonald's did not mention any external surveys by name, the decision means it joins a lengthy list of companies that have pledged to end participation in the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, which is an annual survey and report used to gauge "policies, practices and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) employees." 

McDonald's said it began discussing the changes months ago, acknowledging that it was considering the legal landscape after the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling against affirmative action as well as similar moves by other companies.

Anti-woke activist and filmmaker Robby Starbuck, who has been leading a campaign exposing major companies' woke policies, said on X after the announcement that he warned McDonald's three days ago that he would be reporting on their "woke policies" if they did not agree to change them.

Starbuck has taken credit for forcing changes at the companies named above, as well as Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Jack Daniel's parent Brown-Forman, DeWalt tools, Craftsman, Caterpillar, Boeing and Nissan.

Starbuck told his followers, "As our first corporate flip of 2025 I just want to say, HAPPY NEW YEAR!"

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Earlier in the week, a task force led by Brazilian prosecutors said it had rescued 163 Chinese nationals it said were working in “slavery-like” conditions at the site. A video from the Labor Prosecutor’s Office of dorms housing the workers showed beds with no mattresses and rudimentary cooking facilities.

A BYD spokesperson, Li Yunfei, vehemently objected in a statement posted Thursday on his Weibo social media site.

“In the matter of smearing Chinese brands, smearing China, and attempting to undermine the friendship between China and Brazil, we have seen how relevant foreign forces maliciously associate and deliberately smear,” it said, also criticizing media reports about the situation.

BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, is one of the world’s largest producers of electric cars. The company said on Monday night that it would “immediately terminate the contract” with a contractor building the factory, the Jinjiang Group, and was “studying other appropriate measures.”

BYD said that the Jinjiang workers would be housed in nearby hotels for the time being, and would not suffer from the decision to stop work at the site. The company said that over the past few weeks it had been changing working conditions at the construction site and had told its contractors that “adjustments” had to be made.

Li's Weibo post also included what it said was a “declaration” from the Chinese workers at the site, imprinted with red thumbprints of the men, who were shown in a video sitting together in a room.

The video showed one of workers reading out a statement saying the reports of the poor and “slave-like” conditions had violated their human rights and that the problems were the result of misunderstandings.

“We cherish this work and want to stay and work here,” he said. When he finished, the workers applauded.

Prosecutors said the sanitary situation at BYD’s site was especially bad, with only one toilet for every 31 workers, forcing them to wake up at 4 a.m. to line up to be ready to leave for work at 5:30 a.m.

Under Brazilian law, slavery-like conditions are characterized by submission to forced labor or exhausting working hours, subjection to degrading working conditions and restriction of the worker’s freedom of movement.

Apart from living conditions for the workers, Brazilian officials said Jinjiang Construction Brazil had confiscated their passports and withheld 60% of their wages. Those who quit would be forced to pay the company for their airfare from China, and for their return ticket, the labor office said in a statement.

The workers’ statement said the passports had been taken to allow the company to process work permits and other procedures that they could not manage on their own due to language difficulties.

Jinjiang Construction Brazil said in a statement that it had been “frequently and intensively inspected by the local labor department in Brazil.”

It said that due to cultural differences, problems with translation and understanding, “much of the information released by the labor department was inaccurate, especially statements saying the Jinjiang workers were ‘enslaved’ and ‘rescued,’ which is completely inconsistent with the facts.”

It said its workers were willing to speak with media about the situation.

Living conditions for migrant construction workers can be quite spartan in many parts of the developing world, and such labor often involves contracts that require workers to pay back large sums of money used to secure the jobs, despite laws prohibiting such arrangements.

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Workers with long COVID say a number of symptoms affect their ability to work, such as brain fog, fatigue, weakness and headaches and migraines, according to research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in October and recently publicized by The Ohio State University. Those symptoms made it challenging for employees to complete work tasks and to do so in an acceptable timeframe or volume, OSU researchers found. 

Of the 21 patients at a post-COVID recovery clinic who were interviewed, some said long COVID symptoms led to changes in their employment status. While some voluntarily left their jobs or found alternative jobs that would better accommodate their symptoms, others were fired after they couldn’t perform their work tasks, the researchers found. 

Workers said they had little energy left for other activities in their lives after work and reported struggling to both work and attend healthcare appointments due to time and energy constraints. Some of those surveyed changed jobs, while others discontinued healthcare services recommended as part of their treatment.

Dive Insight:

Workers said they experienced a loss of income from being unable to return to work, needing to switch to lower-pay jobs or having to limit work hours, per the research. 

“We’re getting by, but we’re … Jesus, I don’t know. We’re probably going to have to tap into our retirement funds. It’s really impacted our life financially, medically, just everything,” one participant said. 

Among those who could return to work, several said they could no longer perform overtime or find additional part-time work, as they had prior to contracting COVID-19. 

“For many individuals we talked to, their lives have been completely changed because of this chronic condition. And that’s really changed how they see themselves, how they experience life, how they interact with their families, how they provide for their families,” Sarah MacEwan, lead author and assistant professor of general internal medicine in Ohio State’s College of Medicine, said. “In some cases, incredible financial instability has upended their lives. They’re facing extremely difficult choices and also trying to take care of themselves.” 

Some participants said they felt safe sharing their long COVID-related limitations with their employers, but others feared retaliation in the workplace, the researchers found. Some workers said they faced challenges in receiving work accommodations, and others were terminated. Workers also reported facing resistance or waning support for their accommodation requests.

“I’ve been in hiding for over a year at my job and I can’t hide any longer. I have to either be productive or figure out how to move on,” one participant said. 

Workers identified strategies to manage their long COVID symptoms at work, such as taking frequent rest breaks to reduce fatigue and note-taking and list-making to handle brain fog. And some reported interest in workplace accommodations, like working shifted hours or working remotely, and in the use of employer disability benefits, like short-term or long-term disability. 

Long COVID can be considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Instead of worrying about determining a disability, employers should instead focus on whether a reasonable accommodation can be made for the worker, Tracie DeFreitas, director of training, services and outreach for the Job Accommodation Network, said during a webinar in March 2023. 

“Employers should always err on the side of finding coverage,” DeFreitas said.

To create a more inclusive environment for workers with long COVID, the U.S. needs to address its “ableism culture,” Disability Management Employer Coalition CEO Bryon Bass previously told HR Dive. That could involve educating the workforce on inclusivity and providing more accessible work environments for employees, Bass said.

Source

The pastime of pinball has lived a fraught existence. Whether due to public sentiment, hostile legislation, or a simple lack of popularity, the entire silver ball industry has repeatedly teetered on the brink of collapse. Yet it has always come back, today again riding a wave of popularity driven by the successes of high-tech machines capitalizing on familiar brands like X-Men and Godzilla.

Pinball arcades are springing up everywhere, but private ownership is also surging. Those modern tables with their high-definition displays and brilliant LED lights are getting the most attention, but there is a breed of pinball enthusiast who not only owns a selection of classic machines but also obsessively maintains and restores them.

These collectors have just as much love for the maze of mechanicals beneath the surface as the trajectories the silver ball follows. The goal isn't high scores; it's keeping ornately complex vintage contraptions looking and playing like new.

That's an extreme challenge given some of those pinball machines date back to the 1940s and '50s, games designed to survive in the field for a year or two before being replaced. Keeping them properly flipping, dinging, and buzzing requires a good knowledge of electronics and a passion for troubleshooting—plus access to a dizzying array of specialized parts.

But one man, Steve Young, not only obsessively collects vintage pinball machines himself but has also acquired the dusty stockrooms and manufacturing components from the since-failed brands that built them. Over the past 50 years, he has built the world's greatest collection of rare parts and schematics that keep this detail-obsessed hobby humming. Along the way, he has also developed a unique way of running the business that has become The Pinball Resource.

Sourcing the Resource

Young doesn't really advertise these days, and finding his business, The Pinball Resource, is a little bit tricky. Yes, it's on Google Maps, but when you arrive at the building, you'll find just one small sign in a nondescript complex a few miles outside of Poughkeepsie, New York. It's situated between an auto repair shop and a beauty salon.

When I finally found the entrance, Young told me he intentionally keeps the signage to a minimum. He doesn't exactly want a lot of visitors.

A casual pinball fan might walk in expecting to see a room full of big-budget, licensed pinball machines, maybe a Jaws game sitting next to a John Wick, wedged in between any of a half-dozen Marvel-themed games, all blinking and blaring in full attract mode.

But The Pinball Resource doesn't have any of that on display. You're greeted by a couple of tired conference tables and endless filing cabinets. Yes, there are a few pinball machines in the next room, but they're half-covered in paper, serving as de facto cutting surfaces for the reprints of schematics and wiring diagrams duplicated by large-format printers.

Those repurposed machines date from the early 1950s, known as "wood rail" machines thanks to their reliance on maple and the like for much of their construction. Though simple by today's standards, the classic designs of these machines have earned them a legion of ardent fans.

"The art is fantastic," Young said, referencing a game called Knock Out, which dates from 1950. The machine depicts a boxing match, but there's far more fighting happening in the crowd, stylized brawls of all sorts. A clown is being led out on a stretcher. Shake the game too much, and a little speech bubble above his head lights up and says, "Tilt!"

This machine dates from the so-called Golden Age of pinball, each game a certified piece of Americana, most designed and manufactured in Chicago. The origin of pinball itself, though, is rather more exotic.

A brief history of pinball

For a game that feels refreshingly simple and two-dimensional compared to the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X releases, pinball has a surprisingly tumultuous history, involving everything from organized crime to Supreme Court rulings.

Its roots date back to an 18th-century single-player form of billiards called bagatelle designed to give bored French nobility something to do when the croquet lawn was too soggy for the delicate heels of their buckle shoes. Players hit balls upward on an inclined table, angling shots to land in pockets and earn points.

That humble game (which also spawned pachinko) evolved into something played behind glass, with players launching silver balls with a spring-loaded plunger, nudging the game to get the balls into holes and earn points. Those holes were framed with pins, giving this odd pastime its eventual name.

By the 1930s, Chicago was the global epicenter of pinball. Games popped up in bars and corner stores across the US, gaining some unwanted attention along the way. Some religious leaders claimed pinball was a source of moral corruption, while some police said pinball was part of organized crime rings. It was banned or restricted in many municipalities. New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's goons dragged hundreds of games out of businesses and smashed them in the streets in the 1940s, creating a sea of broken glass and shattered wood not seen since the prohibition's frothier demolitions a decade earlier.

Despite all that, pinball survived. Manufacturers implemented rule changes to stay within the law, but things really took off after a game called Humpty Dumpty in 1947 made a minor addition that changed everything: the flipper. Chance and skill were now more evenly balanced, and the game's popularity exploded again.

But it still was a game lingering under a shadow of dubious legality. It wasn't until 1976, when pinball guru Roger Sharpe famously called a shot on a machine set up in a New York state courtroom, that pinball was officially designated a game of skill, not chance. This led to most of the restrictions across the country falling. The game entered another wave of popularity, setting the stage for a new generation of machines using modern, solid-state electronics.

It was about this time that something else began: The Pinball Resource.

Becoming The Resource

Young's obsession with pinball dates back to the early '70s, when he was a college student at Lehigh University studying metallurgical engineering, a discipline that would eventually lead to a career at IBM. He and his friends became fascinated by the game.

"Being a bunch of engineers and math people and so forth, we got our fingers in there, and if we couldn't fix something, the tech came, and we'd watch him and learn from him," he said.

Eventually, Young and a friend began operating multiple machines, called "running a route" in the industry. "We had, like, 26 games out on campus at Lehigh. So, to maintain that, you've got to have parts." As Young's personal and professional pinball collections grew, so did his collection of parts, which he eventually started selling to others.

"By the time I graduated college, I had probably 30 or 40 games of my own outside of the games we were operating, and then I needed to maintain and fix those. And I kind of just stumbled into doing that, and I started advertising in some of the early magazines," Young said.

He took out an ad in Pinball Trader Newsletter, the biggest publication for the hobby at the time. The magazine's editor, Dennis Dodel, dubbed Young "The Pinball Resource."

"The name stuck," Young said.

Beneath the glass

If there's one thing you need to know about pinball machines, it's that they break—a lot. You'd never know it, thanks to the surprisingly effective sound-deadening properties of the glass under which it's played, but a game of pinball is shockingly violent. Each 80-gram silver ball gains remarkable inertia as it catapults from one target to another.

Remove the glass, fire up a game, and you'll quickly be reaching for some hearing protection. It's unpleasant, but playing like this is a good way to appreciate how much of a pounding a pinball machine takes every time you pull that plunger.

Factor into that hundreds of incandescent bulbs slowly baking all the machine's internals, plus grit and debris accumulating in every mechanism as the machine wears, and you have a recipe for something that needs a lot of attention to keep operating.

That violence made for short-lived games. "If you go back in the '50s, I think those games were designed for maybe 18 months on location, then they got traded back in," Young said. "Most big operators expected two or three years out of a game. Factories only supported them for five years."

Where modern, solid-state machines rely on software flashed to embedded systems, running on SoCs smaller than your thumbnail, earlier machines feature a far more convoluted set of mechanisms. These machines, called electromechanical (EM), instead rely on a series of discs and circuits to control the game's logic.

"This is like programming for electromechanical," Young said. "It's like programming a ROM, right? This is what made the game work the way it was supposed to work."

As the player progresses through the game, electric motors turn these wheels from one position to the next, advancing through different rules and bonuses.

Special when lit? Not if the wheel that controls that aspect of the game is missing or broken. But which discs go where, and in what orientation? Each game is a complex logic puzzle of circuits, switches, and relays, all connected through a wiring harness dizzying enough to make a rat seek shelter elsewhere.

Knowing how everything goes together requires extensive documentation and plenty of experience. Over the years, Young has gathered an unprecedented collection of both.

Keeping hope alive

Gottlieb is the most historically significant brand in pinball. This is the company that introduced the flipper in 1947 and kept making games through to the mid-'90s. It survived the big pinball downturn in the early '80s brought on by the arrival of arcade video games, but it couldn't weather the next drought.

"There's a cycle of pinball. It's like a seven-year cycle, ups and downs and so forth," Young said. "Peak might have been about 1992 if you look at the number of games produced. It was like 120,000 games." But, from there, Young said, it was a steady decline of roughly 10 percent per year.

"Gottlieb closed in '95, and they moved the parts to their distributorship in New Jersey, with the idea of setting up a parts department," Young said. But, the company quickly changed its mind.

Young eventually bought out Gottlieb's backlog of parts and numerous pieces of manufacturing equipment, operating a revenue share with the company for a time before taking outright control of the inventory. That's how The Pinball Resource became the de facto source for all things Gottlieb, but it wouldn't end there.

"We've picked up all these pieces as the pinball business has shrunk and fallen apart," Young said. "I sat down once with a yellow pad, and I started writing down the number of distributors that I bought their stock, right? And I filled the side of the page and turned the page over before I got done."

Along with the truckloads of parts and specialized equipment have also come stacks and stacks of schematics for all these machines, some bearing hand-drawn corrections penned by long-retired engineers. They all lie stacked and ordered in a series of wide cabinets.

"This is probably one of the world's largest collections of schematics," Young said. "Every Gottlieb schematic in the world is in that filing cabinet." Schematics from other manufacturers sit nearby, along with endless manuals covering games from many brands and eras. I told him that the 1986 Williams machine High Speed was my favorite. Ten seconds later, he had the original manual in hand.

These manuals tell you which components you need if your machine isn't working, but a part number someone scrawled onto a sheet of draft paper in 1953 won't do you much good if that part went out of production sometime during the Eisenhower administration.

Thankfully, Young has you covered there, too. The Pinball Resource didn't just buy the parts from Gottlieb and others but also used numerous pieces in manufacturing.

Young took me into the storage and manufacturing area within The Pinball Resource, featuring shelf after shelf of parts plus tables covered with specialized machines.

"I have a lot of tooling set up over the world," he said. Rubber rings are a perpetual consumable in pinball machines. The little bumpers that cushion impacts take a beating. The Pinball Resource manufactures its own rings in Taiwan, using tooling acquired from yet another company's bankruptcy. Other parts are manufactured at a facility in pinball's traditional home of Chicago.

One item the company assembles at the company's New York headquarters is called a pop bumper cap, the colorful mushroom-shaped dome that covers the circular bumpers often found in clusters of threes on pinball playfields. There's an endless variety of colors and designs, many featuring custom embossed logos.

Creating these requires a specialized press that drives a heated brass stamp to create the logo, a process called hot stamping. Young has hundreds of these stamps to emboss everything from the American flag to Medusa's head. Some are decades-old originals. Others are modern reproductions he's sourced from artists, each costing upward of $500 to create. Young sells the caps they produce for $5 or $6 each.

Mechanical components receive just as much attention, including presses and punches to create the endless shapes and sizes of electronic switches required to ensure a machine accurately keeps score.

And then there's the coils. Pinball machines rely on small coils of wound copper wire, electromagnets that eject a plunger that pushes or pulls a mechanism to send the silver ball flying in a new direction. Young buys thousands of pounds of copper wire to wind custom coils in numerous sizes, even coming up with custom high-power models to make slow old games faster.

Sometimes, they're too fast. "I have a regular pop bumper coil, and I have a 'hot' pop bumper coil, and the hot one is too hot, okay? So, I'm trying to hone in on what a medium should be," Young said. "Everybody likes a medium, right? So I really want a little warmer pop bumper coil, but not a hot one. I don't want the lights to dim when the bumper pulls in."

Young also refines and improves upon original pinball parts known for failing early and often, subtly adding thickness or reinforcement to ensure that stressed components better survive the rigors of gameplay. "We try to make the part authentic to the original part, or better," he said. "You make the part, you might as well make the part right."

Improvements like these are thanks not only to Young's metallurgical background in the field but also thanks to the feedback he gets courtesy of the uniquely hands-on approach he takes to dealing with customers.

Check, please

The Pinball Resource's website has a delightfully retro 1990s feel about it. Click your way through, and you'll find an endless list of parts and accessories in simple tables. What you won't find, though, is a "Buy it Now" button anywhere.

How do you order anything then? Well, you send an email or pick up the phone. Either way, don't be surprised if you hear from Young himself.

"I almost always call in my orders and talk to Steve. It's always informative and interesting. I'll only email an order for mundane supplies," Dave Golden told me. He's a Massachusetts-based pinball enthusiast who not only keeps busy maintaining his own collection of about 30 games but volunteers his time fixing machines at the ElectroMagnetic Pinball Museum in Rhode Island.

Golden estimates he's spent a couple of thousand dollars at The Pinball Resource since his first order in 2018, but plenty of Young's customers spend a lot more.

People like Levi Nayman, who runs Crazy Levi's Pinball, which restores and sells pinball machines in the metro New York area. He's been a Pinball Resource customer for over 20 years and has lost track of how much he's spent there buying hard-to-find parts. "I really have no idea, probably over $10k but it's not anything I've kept track of," he said.

What keeps Levi coming back? Steve Young. "He's got the stuff, the knowledge, and the personality," he said. "I also get my stuff overnight since it's so close."

Young fields questions from customers like Nayman every day, often firing a question or two right back at them.

Questions like: "Wait, what are you trying to do?"

With a complex system like a pinball machine, sometimes a misfiring coil or a flickering bulb can have a cause that's only tangentially related to the symptom. And so, Young frequently finds himself talking people out of ordering parts they don't need.

"I can't be comfortable taking people's money from lack of knowledge," he said. "I've had to be careful how I can do that because people take offense. 'You won't sell me that? What's the matter?' You know? 'Well, you really don't need it. Do this first.'"

Regardless of which parts you order, you'll of course need to pay for them, and that leads to the final unusual aspect of The Pinball Resource's business model.

"I don't do credit cards. We don't do PayPal," Young said. Venmo, Zelle, and other digital forms of payment also rank on the no-fly list. Young takes checks, money orders, wire transfers, cash, and that's about it. These forms of payment can be slow, but orders don't wait: The Pinball Resource ships most orders before payment is received.

Young likens it to a sit-down restaurant, something that confuses a lot of new customers. "When you place your order, do you have to pay? Or, do you eat the meal first, and then they give you your check, and then you pay?" Young said. "People really appreciate the trust I place in them."

That attitude has earned The Pinball Resource a perfect five-star rating in online reviews from Google to Yelp, plus legions of loyal customers worldwide, each with a shared passion for keeping machines once considered disposable alive for the next generation to enjoy.

And that's what Young is dedicated to doing himself, though lately on a somewhat reduced scale. He's pared his personal collection of games down from over 200 to about 70. "I'm really focused on wood rails, so that kind of ends at 1960. And the more I work on them, the more my attention really narrows in on the span from maybe 1951 to '54 as being the creme de la creme in terms of play and artwork."

There's some interesting irony that a man who came into this hobby through a study of metallurgy prefers games known for their wooden construction, but in the intervening 50 years, Young has helped maintain countless machines of all generations. Given that, I asked him what advice he'd give anyone who's just bought their first machine, that one special game that somehow captured their imagination. I expected a suggestion about online user groups or specific tools worth investing in.

His response was a little different: "Don't turn your back on them," he said. "They multiply when you're not looking."

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Bacteria are in, around and all over us. They thrive in almost every corner of the planet, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to high up in the clouds, to the crevices of your ears, mouth, nose, and gut. But scientists have long assumed that bacteria can’t survive in the human brain. The powerful blood-brain barrier, the thinking goes, keeps the organ mostly free from outside invaders. But are we sure that a healthy human brain doesn’t have a microbiome of its own?

Over the past decade, initial studies have presented conflicting evidence. The idea has remained controversial, given the difficulty of obtaining healthy, uncontaminated human brain tissue that could be used to study possible microbial inhabitants.

Recently, a study published in Science Advances provided the strongest evidence yet that a brain microbiome can and does exist in healthy vertebrates—fish, specifically. Researchers at the University of New Mexico discovered communities of bacteria thriving in salmon and trout brains. Many of the microbial species have special adaptations that allow them to survive in brain tissue, as well as techniques to cross the protective blood-brain barrier.

Matthew Olm, a physiologist who studies the human microbiome at the University of Colorado, Boulder and was not involved with the study, is “inherently skeptical” of the idea that populations of microbes could live in the brain, he said. But he found the new research convincing. “This is concrete evidence that brain microbiomes do exist in vertebrates,” he said. “And so the idea that humans have a brain microbiome is not outlandish.”

While fish physiology is, in many ways, similar to humans’, there are some key differences. Still, “it certainly puts another weight on the scale to think about whether this is relevant to mammals and us,” said Christopher Link, who studies the molecular basis of neurodegenerative disease at the University of Colorado, Boulder and was also not involved in the work.

The human gut microbiome plays a critical role in the body, communicating with the brain and maintaining the immune system through the gut-brain axis. So it isn’t totally far-fetched to suggest that microbes could play an even larger role in our neurobiology.

Fishing for Microbes

For years, Irene Salinas has been fascinated by a simple physiological fact: The distance between the nose and the brain is quite small. The evolutionary immunologist, who works at the University of New Mexico, studies mucosal immune systems in fish to better understand how human versions of these systems, such as our intestinal lining and nasal cavity, work. The nose, she knows, is loaded with bacteria, and they’re “really, really close” to the brain—mere millimeters from the olfactory bulb, which processes smell. Salinas has always had a hunch that bacteria might be leaking from the nose into the olfactory bulb. After years of curiosity, she decided to confront her suspicion in her favorite model organisms: fish.

Salinas and her team started by extracting DNA from the olfactory bulbs of trout and salmon, some caught in the wild and some raised in her lab. (Important contributions to the research were made by Amir Mani, the lead author of the paper.) They planned to look up the DNA sequences in a database to identify any microbial species.

These kinds of samples, however, are easily contaminated—by bacteria in the lab or from other parts of a fish’s body—which is why scientists have struggled to study this subject effectively. If they did find bacterial DNA in the olfactory bulb, they would have to convince themselves and other researchers that it truly originated in the brain.

To cover their bases, Salinas’ team studied the fishes’ whole-body microbiomes, too. They sampled the rest of the fishes’ brains, guts, and blood; they even drained blood from the many capillaries of the brain to make sure that any bacteria they discovered resided in the brain tissue itself.

“We had to go back and redo [the experiments] many, many times just to be sure,” Salinas said. The project took five years—but even in the early days it was clear that the fish brains weren’t barren.

As Salinas expected, the olfactory bulb hosted some bacteria. But she was shocked to see that the rest of the brain had even more. “I thought the other parts of the brain wouldn’t have bacteria,” she said. “But it turned out that my hypothesis was wrong.” The fish brains hosted so much that it took only a few minutes to locate bacterial cells under a microscope. As an additional step, her team confirmed that the microbes were actively living in the brain; they weren’t dormant or dead.

Olm was impressed by their thorough approach. Salinas and her team circled “the same question, from all these different ways, using all these different methods—all of which produced convincing data that there actually are living microbes in the salmon brain,” he said.

But if there are, how did they get there?

Invading the Fortress

Researchers have long been skeptical that the brain could have a microbiome because all vertebrates, including fish, have a blood-brain barrier. These blood vessels and surrounding brain cells are fortified to serve as gatekeepers that allow only some molecules in and out of the brain and keep invaders, especially larger ones like bacteria, out. So Salinas naturally wondered how the brains in her study had been colonized.

By comparing microbial DNA from the brain to that collected from other organs, her lab found a subset of species that didn’t appear elsewhere in the body. Salinas hypothesized that these species may have colonized the fish brains early in their development, before their blood-brain barriers had fully formed. “Early on, anything can go in; it’s a free-for-all,” she said.

But many of the microbial species were also found throughout the body. She suspects that most bacteria in the fishes’ brain microbiomes originated in their blood and guts, and continuously leak into the brain.

“After that first wave of colonization,” she said, “you need to have specific features to go in and out.”

Salinas was able to identify features that let bacteria make the crossing. Some could produce molecules, known as polyamines, that can open and close junctions, which are like little doors in the barrier that allow molecules to pass through. Others could produce molecules that help them evade the body’s immune response or compete with other bacteria.

Salinas even caught a bacterium in the act. Looking under the microscope, she captured an image of a bacterium frozen in time within the blood-brain barrier. “We literally caught it right in the middle of crossing,” she said.

It is possible that the microbes don’t live freely in the brain tissue but are engulfed by immune cells. That would be the “most boring interpretation of this paper,” Olm said, and would suggest that the fish have adapted to bacterial inhabitants by containing them.

However, if the bacteria are free-living, they could be involved in the body’s processes beyond the brain. It’s possible that the microbes actively regulate aspects of the creatures’ physiology, Salinas suggested, the way human gut microbiomes help regulate the digestive and immune systems.

Fish, of course, are not humans, but they allow a fair comparison, Salinas said. And her work suggests that if fish have microbes living in their brains, it’s possible we have them, too.

Impenetrable or Not?

Bacteria have been found living in just about every human organ system, but to many scientists the brain is a step too far. The blood-brain barrier has traditionally been seen as “impenetrable,” said Janosch Heller, who studies the barrier at Dublin City University and was not involved in the new research. Plus, the brain has immune cells working overtime to zap any potentially harmful invaders. When microbes have been found in the human brain, they are are associated with active infections or typically linked to a breakdown in the barrier due to diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

This assumption was challenged in 2013, when scientists studying the neurological impacts of HIV/AIDS found genetic hints of bacteria in the brains of both sick and healthy people. The findings were the first to suggest that maybe humans could have a brain microbiome in the absence of disease.

“No one believed it 10 years ago,” Heller said. Follow-up studies—there haven’t been many—have been inconclusive. “It is very easy to trick yourself into thinking microbes are present because microbial DNA is essentially everywhere,” Olm said. “So it would take a lot of evidence to convince me that it does exist.”

The fish experiment did convince him, and other researchers, that a human brain microbiome is not impossible. What is nearly impossible, however, is confirming that without harming healthy people. To build a case, Link suggested repeating the fish experiment in rodents. “This protocol should be able to be adapted really easily to mouse brains,” Salinas said—and indeed her team has started looking into it. They have found early hints that microbes exist in the olfactory bulbs of healthy mice and, to a lesser extent, throughout the brain.

“There’s no reason, if fish have them, that you wouldn’t have them, or that mice wouldn’t have them,” Link said. If microbes have adapted to cross the fish blood-brain barrier and survive in the fish brain, they could do the same in our bodies. It’s unlikely they would be present at the same levels as they are in fish, he added, “but that doesn’t mean there’s none.”

Even in small numbers, Link said, resident microbes could influence our brain metabolism and immune systems. If they are truly present, this would suggest an extra layer of neurological regulation that we didn’t know existed. We already know that microbes influence our neurobiology: Right now, microbes in your gut are modulating your brain activity through the gut-brain axis by producing metabolites that are sensed by enteric neurons winding through your digestive system.

It’s a fascinating, though unproved, proposition that bacteria in the brain are directly impacting our physiology. However, thanks to research like Salinas’, more scientists are open to the idea that healthy human brains might also be home to microbes.

“Why not?” Heller said. “I’m not shocked anymore that they are there.” The more interesting question, he said, is: “Are they all there for a reason, or are they there by mistake?”

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, 6 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 16:44 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch one of its trust Falcon 9 rockets carrying 24 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. This batch of satellites has the designation Starlink Group 6-71; you can use this identifier to track them in space on apps like ISS Detector. Following the launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9 will perform a landing so that it can be reused.

Tuesday, 7 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 15:51–19:51 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: In this launch, SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to carry 21 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit, with the designation Starlink Group 12-11. Among these satellites are 13 direct-to-cell satellites, which are more modern. After the launch, the first stage of the rocket will perform a landing.

Wednesday, 8 January

• Who: Blue Origin
• What: New Glenn
• When: 06:00–09:45 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: This is the most notable mission this week, as it marks Blue Origin's first launch of the New Glenn rocket. The mission is called NG-1 and launches with two payloads. The first is called Blue Ring demonstrator, a satellite support system. The second is DS-1 flight system developed by Blue Origin.

The first stage of the rocket, which is reusable, contains seven BE-4 engines, while the second stage has two BE-3U engines. The first stage of the rocket will land on the Jacklyn LPV1 sea-based platform.

NASA's EscaPADE mission was supposed to be a payload on this mission, but it has been delayed for a later New Glenn launch.

Friday, 10 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Starship
• When: 22:00–23:37 UTC
• Where: Texas, US
• Why: This is the seventh test mission of the Starship rocket from SpaceX. Now that much progress has been made in the launches and landing, SpaceX thinks it's time to send 10 Starlink simulators to orbit on this rocket. These simulators will be a similar size and weight as real Starlink satellites. Interestingly, this mission will include a Raptor engine on the Super Heavy booster that was also used for the fifth test flight.

To read more about this mission, refer to Neowin's dedicated coverage.

Recap

• The first launch we got this week was from SpaceX. It used a Falcon 9 to launch Starlink Group 11-3 to orbit before the first stage of the rocket performed a landing.

• Next up was another launch with a SpaceX Falcon 9, but this time, it was carrying four satellites for Astranis, a mission that has been delayed a few times. The first stage of the rocket landed too.

• For the third mission of the week, India launched a PSLV rocket carrying the SpaDeX mission, which is a cost-effective docking test between two small spacecraft.

• On the last day of the year, SpaceX launched Starlink Group 12-6 on a Falcon 9 before landing the first stage of the rocket.

• In the final mission of the week, another SpaceX Falcon 9 was used to launch the Thuraya 4 mission. The Thuraya-4 NGS (Next Generation Satellite) was place into a geosynchronous transfer orbit.

That's all we have this week, be sure to check in next time!

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