Deshawn “DJ” Chow waited a year to receive a treatment that could change his life. The 19-year-old was born with sickle cell disease, which makes his red blood cells crescent-shaped and sticky. The misshapen cells build up and block blood vessels, cutting off oxygen to parts of the body and causing episodes of excruciating pain. The condition affects about 100,000 people in the United States, most of them Black.

The pain came more and more frequently for Chow in high school, landing him in the hospital often. He missed school, birthday parties, and sleepovers with friends. Sometimes, the pain lasted for days. “It’s like my body is on fire,” he says.

A year ago, he found out about a new treatment called Casgevy that could end his years-long battle with pain. It’s the first approved medicine to use the Nobel Prize–winning technology known as Crispr, a type of gene editing. Chow received Casgevy on December 5 at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles. He is among the first patients in the US to get the treatment since its approval in December 2023. It was also approved for beta thalassemia, a related blood disorder, this January.

Due to manufacturing complexities, insurance delays, and the extensive preparation involved for patients, few individuals in the US have been dosed with Casgevy since it became commercially available. The slow rollout underscores the complicated nature of commercializing cutting-edge medical treatments and getting them to patients. Another genetic treatment for sickle cell, Lyfgenia, won approval last December, and the first patient was treated in September. Made by Bluebird Bio, it uses an older technology that introduces a new gene to treat the disease.

Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Crispr Therapeutics, which developed Casgevy, have not publicly said how many patients have received the therapy so far. WIRED reached out to all 34 US hospitals approved to administer it as of December. Of the 26 that provided answers, only City of Hope and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, said they had administered Casgevy. (Three hospitals declined to comment, and five others did not respond to multiple inquiries.) Chow is City of Hope’s first sickle cell patient, while a beta thalassemia patient has been treated at Children’s National. Several authorized centers told WIRED they will begin infusions of Casgevy in early 2025.

“The process of getting this drug is very different from just taking a pill,” says Leo Wang, Chow’s hematologist-oncologist at City of Hope. It is a one-time therapy that involves collecting and editing a person’s stem cells. For the patient, it means a harsh round of chemotherapy before getting the cells, and a month in the hospital afterward.

It’s an arduous but transformative treatment. Among 42 patients who received Casgevy in clinical trials, all but three have been free of pain crises for at least a year, according to new data from Vertex. The average length of time without pain crises for those treated is more than two and a half years, with some participants going on five years.

“There’s a lot of interest and a lot of hope,” says Edward Donnell Ivy, chief medical officer of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. “We’re at the dawn of a new age for sickle cell disease.” But this hope and interest isn’t translating into a rush of demand yet.

Trusting the (Lengthy) Process

Chow and his parents had heard about Casgevy’s approval and reached out to City of Hope, which was among nine centers to initially offer the treatment. They learned about the risks and side effects and understood that getting the therapy would mean a lengthy hospital stay. Still, Chow was ready to move forward.

For other patients though, the decision isn’t as easy. There is wariness about new technology that involves manipulating genes, and many Black patients have had negative interactions with the health care system because of historical bias and discrimination. “The medical establishment has a long legacy of earned mistrust with minoritized populations,” Wang says.

Many patients also don’t realize that receiving Casgevy involves such a lengthy process. “They don’t necessarily know that it looks and feels like a stem cell transplant,” says Wang. “They can be taken aback.”

Bone marrow or stem cell transplants can cure sickle cell disease and have been available for decades. Like Casgevy, they require chemotherapy and several weeks of hospitalization, except the stem cells come from a donor. Patients need a close genetic match in order to get a transplant, and only a fraction of sickle cell patients have an eligible donor. Casgevy offers a future free of pain crises to far more patients.

Chow first met with doctors at City of Hope in March. Once his insurance approved Casgevy in May, his doctors could begin collecting his stem cells. Patients take a mobilization medicine that moves their blood stem cells from bone marrow into the blood stream. A machine then collects and separates the blood stem cells in a process called apheresis.

“The collections themselves are a very complex process,” says Julie-An Talano, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Children's Wisconsin, an authorized treatment center for Casgevy that will begin collecting cells from patients in 2025.

Apheresis can be dangerous for sickle cell patients because their blood can clot in the machine, causing a stroke. So patients first need to receive transfusions of donor blood to reduce their level of sickled cells. A single collection can take up to a week, and more than one may be needed to get enough cells to make Casgevy. Chow needed to endure four cell collections.

The cells are shipped to Vertex immediately to begin manufacturing. At that stage, a patient’s cells are edited with Crispr. Sickle cell disease arises from errors in a gene that makes hemoglobin, the substance that carries oxygen throughout the body and gives red blood cells their color. The edit used for Casgevy turns on the production of a healthy, alternative form of hemoglobin that the body naturally shuts off early on in life. Because the gene edit is permanent, researchers hope its effects will last for years or potentially even decades.

It can take up to six months from the time cells are collected to make Casgevy. Vertex must test the cells for purity and to make sure they contain the correct edit. (Off-target or unintended genetic edits are a possibility with Crispr). Vertex is ramping up manufacturing capacity for Casgevy in anticipation of growing demand. Once the cells are ready, they’re shipped back to the hospital.

Life on Hold

The next part of the process is what gives patients and families the most pause. Patients must undergo a high dose of chemotherapy in order to make space in the bone marrow for the edited stem cells. Chemotherapy can cause hair loss, mouth ulcers, fatigue, vomiting, and other unpleasant side effects.

“It’s a difficult treatment,” says David Jacobsohn, division chief of the blood and marrow transplantation program at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. “It’s pretty intense, and patients can get quite sick.” Children tend to tolerate chemotherapy better than adults because their bodies are more resilient and their organs are healthier.

Beyond the short-term side effects, chemotherapy can result in infertility. For those who want to have children later on, it means freezing their eggs or sperm. But patients who haven’t yet reached puberty don’t have that option. (Casgevy is approved for ages 12 and older.) Vertex has said it will help patients with commercial insurance access fertility preservation services, but federal law bars it from doing the same for individuals on Medicaid because it’s seen as a financial incentive to use Casgevy.

Chow took the chance with his fertility. Now, he’ll remain in the hospital until early to mid-January while the stem cells migrate to his bone marrow and start making new, healthy red blood cells. Until then, patients’ immune systems are weakened, so they’re at particularly high risk of infection and other complications.

The amount of time spent going to doctors appointments and being hospitalized is a major consideration for patients who are in school or working. Doctors say many patients are interested in the therapy, but it’s a matter of timing it to when they don’t have other big life events going on. “Essentially, it’s a year of your life on hold,” Talano says.

For Chow, the end is in sight. “It’s been a long journey,” he says. He plans to spend the next several weeks composing rap music from his hospital bed to pass the time.

Jacobsohn is optimistic that demand for Casgevy will pick up over time, especially as patients hear about more success stories. “I think more patients will come, but until we figure out a way to do this with lower intensity chemotherapy, I don’t think it will be an option for every patient,” he says, “Right now it’s not at the stage where you can imagine every two- or three-year-old with sickle cell getting this. That would be an amazing place to get to in five or 10 years—a cure for everyone.”

Delivering a $2.2 Million Drug

Behind the scenes, hospitals have been navigating their own issues in order to begin offering Casgevy.

“Only now do centers have all the infrastructure to provide this in a slicker way,” says James LaBelle, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago, who specializes in cancer and blood diseases. The University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital was among the original nine locations in the US to offer Casgevy.

A hospital first needs to first complete an assessment to make sure it can perform the cell collections. It then signs an agreement with Vertex that covers the collection and shipping of patient cells for manufacturing, as well as receiving and storing Casgevy before it can be infused. This generally takes a number of months.

Hospitals are also dealing with insurance hiccups. Casgevy is a $2.2 million drug, which is just the cost of the medicine. That doesn’t include a patient’s many medical appointments leading up to receiving it, or their hospital stay afterward. Hospitals often purchase drugs first, then get reimbursed by a patient’s insurance after giving the drug. With Casgevy and other pricey drugs, this means hospitals take on a significant up-front cost. “There’s a big question of, how does the health care system absorb these very high-cost drugs?” LaBelle says.

Stephan Grupp, section chief of cellular therapy and transplant at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says doctors will likely need to secure a single case agreement from insurers on behalf of their patients. This is a contract to make sure that the insurer will not only cover the cost of the drug itself but also the medical services the patient needs during the whole process.

Insurers have started covering Casgevy, although Grupp says extensive paperwork and documentation is needed to show that a patient is eligible, and insurance authorization can take months.

Navigating state Medicaid programs is another challenge. Not all states have an authorized treatment center yet. Some Medicaid programs allow patients to go out-of-state for care, but there can be authorization delays. A new payment program led by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is aimed at improving access. The voluntary program means Vertex will be paid by states depending on whether the drugs improve outcomes for people who get Casgevy.

Despite Casgevy’s slow start, Stuart Arbuckle, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Vertex, told WIRED in an emailed statement, “We are delighted with the strong first year of commercialization.” (The company declined an interview for this story.)

Chow doesn’t know if Casgevy will eliminate his pain completely, but he hopes it will at least keep him out of the hospital. He now sees a future in which he could try out snowboarding—something he could never do before because cold temperatures can bring on pain crises. For now, he wants to continue making music and see his friends more. As for what’s next, “It’s all in God’s hands.”

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In 2025 we will see AI and machine learning leveraged to make real progress in understanding animal communication, answering a question that has puzzled humans as long as we have existed: “What are animals saying to each other?” The recent Coller-Dolittle Prize, offering cash prizes up to half-a-million dollars for scientists who “crack the code” is an indication of a bullish confidence that recent technological developments in machine learning and large language models (LLMs) are placing this goal within our grasp.

Many research groups have been working for years on algorithms to make sense of animal sounds. Project Ceti, for example, has been decoding the click trains of sperm whales and the songs of humpbacks. These modern machine learning tools require extremely large amounts of data, and up until now, such quantities of high-quality and well-annotated data have been lacking.

Consider LLMs such as ChatGPT that have training data available to them that includes the entirety of text available on the internet. Such information on animal communication hasn't been accessible in the past. It’s not just that human data corpora are many orders of magnitude larger than the kind of data we have access to for animals in the wild: More than 500 GB of words were used to train GPT-3, compared to just more than 8,000 “codas” (or vocalizations) for Project Ceti’s recent analysis of sperm whale communication.

Additionally, when working with human language, we already know what is being said. We even know what constitutes a “word,” which is a huge advantage over interpreting animal communication, where scientists rarely know whether a particular wolf howl, for instance, means something different from another wolf howl, or even whether the wolves consider a howl as somehow analogous to a “word” in human language.

Nonetheless, 2025 will bring new advances, both in the quantity of animal communication data available to scientists, and in the types and power of AI algorithms that can be applied to those data. Automated recording of animal sounds has been placed in easy reach of every scientific research group, with low-cost recording devices such as AudioMoth exploding in popularity.

Massive datasets are now coming online, as recorders can be left in the field, listening to the calls of gibbons in the jungle or birds in the forest, 24/7, across long periods of time. There were occasions when such massive datasets were impossible to manage manually. Now, new automatic detection algorithms based on convolutional neural networks can race through thousands of hours of recordings, picking out the animal sounds and clustering them into different types, according to their natural acoustic characteristics.

Once those large animal datasets are available, new analytical algorithms become a possibility, such as using deep neural networks to find hidden structure in sequences of animal vocalizations, which may be analogous to the meaningful structure in human language.

However, the fundamental question that remains unclear is, what exactly are we hoping to do with these animal sounds? Some organizations, such as Interspecies.io, set its goal quite clearly as, “to transduce signals from one species into coherent signals for another.” In other words, to translate animal communication into human language. Yet most scientists agree that non-human animals do not have an actual language of their own—at least not in the way that we humans have language.

The Coller Dolittle Prize is a little more sophisticated, looking for a way “to communicate with or decipher an organism’s communication.” Deciphering is a slightly less ambitious goal than translating, considering the possibility that animals may not, in fact, have a language that can be translated. Today we don’t know just how much information, or how little, animals convey between themselves. In 2025, humanity will have the potential to leapfrog our understanding of not just how much animals say but also what exactly they are saying to each other.

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Sunday, 22 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 05:00 - 07:39 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch four Block 2 MicroGEO satellites into orbit for Astranis Space. Each satellite carries unique names, including UtilitySat, NuView A, NuView B, and Agila. Following the launch, SpaceX will very likely attempt to launch the first stage of the Falcon 9.

Monday, 23 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 05:00 - 09:00 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use one of its Falcon 9 rockets to launch 23 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. The group is designated as Starlink Group 12-2. Of this group, 13 of the satellites are direct-to-cell satellites. Following the launch, SpaceX will try to land the first stage of the Falcon 9.

Wednesday, 25 December

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz-2.1b
• When: 07:45 UTC
• Where: Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
• Why: On Christmas Day, Roscosmos will launch a Soyuz-2.1b rocket carrying the Resurs-P 5 Earth observation satellite. The satellite will be utilized by Russia’s Ministries of Agriculture and Fishing, Meteorology, Transportation, Emergencies, Natural Resources and Defence.

Friday, 27 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 05:00 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch the Thuraya-4 NGS communications satellite into a geosyncronous orbit. The satellite was built by Airbus Defense and Space for Yahsat, based in the UAE. Following the launch, SpaceX will try to land the first stage of the Falcon 9.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a Falcon 9 from SpaceX carrying the RRT-1 mission. RRT-1 is short for Rapid Response Trailblazer-1 and it was a US national security mission. Following the launch, the first stage of the rocket landed on a droneship.

• Next up, another SpaceX Falcon 9 was used to launch the NROL-149 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. It was a classified mission so it's not known for sure what was being launched. After the launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9 landed on a droneship.

• In its third mission of the week, SpaceX launched some satellites for the Luxembourgish company SES. The SES O3b mPOWER satellites will be used for to provide communications services. After the launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9 landed on a droneship.

• Finally, Space One's KAIROS rocket experienced an anomoly, making for an interesting watch.

That's it for this week! Check back next week for more launches!

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Microbes in our gut can have a profound impact on our health, but research is showing that those surrounding us in our environment—what’s known as the natural environmental microbiome—can have a big impact too. This suggests that we should all spend a lot more time interacting with nature, both outdoors and indoors.

I was first introduced to this emerging area of science by Professor Gretchen Daily from Stanford University. She mentioned a Finnish research project that showed how letting kindergarten-aged children play in a yard that contained “dirt” from the forest floor resulted in a significant positive impact on their gut microbiome. Seventy-nine young children took part, all living in urban environments and spending the majority of their days at different daycare centers around Finland. The only difference between them was that these daycare centers had three different types of outdoor spaces.

The first type was a fairly standard outdoor play area, comprised of concrete, gravel, and some plastic matting. The second was the type typically found in daycare environments that are already nature-orientated, with grass, soil, and planted areas for the children to play in. These two acted as a control against which to compare the third experimental space, where the concrete and gravel were covered with segments of forest floor and soil from the local coniferous forest.

The children were encouraged to play in only one of the three types of yard each day over the 28 days of the experiment (note that some kindergartens have multiple play areas). Before and after periods of play, the children’s skin and gut microbiota were measured using genetic sequencing of bacteria taken from skin swabs and stool samples, along with changes to T cells and cytokines in their blood. These cells and proteins play a critical role in preventing autoimmunity and autoimmune diseases; their levels are often used as an indication of how well the immune system is functioning.

Remarkable results emerged. The children who played in the experimental yard showed a large increase in the diversity of microbiota on their skin and in their gut in comparison to the children playing in the urban and nature-orientated areas. Importantly, these were the “good” types of microbiota—those associated with health benefits. There was also a significant increase in the children’s immunity markers, indicative of them having gained enhanced immunoregulatory pathways—which is indicative of a reduced risk of immune-mediated diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

The importance of this study cannot be overstated. It implies that even short-term exposure to nature’s microbial diversity has the potential to radically alter the diversity of microbiota on our skin and in our gut. In addition, it suggests that the altered gut microbiota can modulate the function of our immune system.

A Healthy Microbiome Is Made, Not Born

Everyone has a distinctive community of microbes in their gut—a person’s ethnicity, the food they consume, antibiotic use, body size, and the amount they exercise all leave a clear signature on their gut microbial diversity. The role of these microbiota communities is significant. Our organs can only synthesize 11 of the 20 essential amino acids that we need, so the rest, along with 13 essential vitamins, are retrieved and synthesized by our gut microbes.

And these microbial communities don’t just help our gut extract nutrients from food. Microbes also produce some of the most important compounds for our health, including immuno-suppressants, anti-cancer, and anti-inflammatory compounds. They appear to be associated with the functioning of our immune system, central nervous system, and associated health outcomes, so much so that clear correlations have been found between particular gut microbiota—so called “sick” microbiomes—and certain illnesses. Those with a distinctive gut microbial signature include irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and colorectal cancer as well as nonintestinal disorders such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Our environment—broadly meaning our diet, lifestyle, antibiotic use, and so on—appears to have a stronger influence on our gut microbiome than our genetic background. Less than 8 percent of our gut composition is thought to be due to genetic inheritance. The implications of this are profound: it suggests that by changing our environment we may be able to prevent and/or improve certain debilitating illnesses. But how do we go about changing our gut microbiota for the better?

There are at least nine different approaches proposed by the medical profession. Some are more medically intrusive than others—fecal transplants and phage therapy—while nonclinical interventions such as eating a Mediterranean region or fermented foods such as sauerkraut are easier and more palatable.

Yet still missing is the advice for us to interact more with nature and its associated microbiome—especially when some of this evidence now suggests that exposure to nature-derived microbiota could in fact be far more useful and effective than taking orally administered probiotics.

Let the Right Ones In

Like us, all terrestrial plants and soils are inhabited by a diverse, complex, and interactive community of microorganisms. These microbiomes play an essential role in nutrient uptake and growth in plants, improving resilience against pathogens and sustaining plant growth under stress. The microbiomes of plants and soil share very similar bacteria communities to our own, being composed of five major bacterial phyla that are also found in the human gut and skin.

When we spend time interacting with the environmental microbiome, new evidence suggests it passes onto our skin and into our gut through ingestion and greatly improves our own gut microbiota and associated health benefits. This hypothesis, called the “biodiversity hypothesis” was first proposed over two decades ago. Leena von Hertzen and Tari Haahtela, medical scientists at the Helsinki University Central Hospital, and Ilkka Hanski, a biodiversity scientist in the Helsinki Department of Biosciences, suggested that by spending time in and around naturally biodiverse environments, we increase the diversity of microbiota in our own bodies, gaining a larger and more diverse arsenal of microbiota better able to deal with day-to-day digestive functions, and protection from various health conditions, particularly autoimmune diseases.

Over the past 20 years, a series of studies have set out to test the biodiversity—or breaking it down into three sub-hypotheses. First, that there are significant differences between the microbial diversity of natural environments and urban environments. Second, that this microbial diversity transfers into our bodies when we are close to nature, altering our own microbiota. And third, that the presence of nature-derived microbial diversity in our bodies triggers changes in our immune and allergic pathways, which result in positive health outcomes.

The first assumption to be proved broadly correct was that there are significant differences in microbial diversity and abundance between natural and urban environments. Using genetic tools to identify the bacterial communities present, microbial diversity has been measured in the air, soil, and on the leaves of plants across an array of different landscapes, including natural environments such as forests, herbaceous borders, and grasslands, and compared to those typically found in urban areas such as lawns, building sites, parklands, revegetated open woodlands, and remnant open woodlands. These measurements have spanned sites in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Finland, and India. Without exception, they show that the more natural and biodiverse the environment, the more diverse and abundant the microbiota

Experiments have also taken place indoors to assess what happens if we bring nature into our homes. One of my favorites is a study that looked at what happened to the air in a cleaned room when a spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) was placed in it for six months. After this time the microbial diversity of the surrounding floor and walls had a significant increase in beneficial plant bacteria (abundance and diversity). This was despite the fact that diversity on the leaves remained the same, suggesting that the plant was actively contributing to the microbial diversity in the room.

The second assumption that needed to be tested was that these nature-derived microbial communities are transferred and ingested into our bodies. Ilkka Hanski, of the biodiversity hypothesis fame, took skin swabs from 118 teenagers living in a variety of different urban and semi-rural environments in Finland, to measure their skin microbial diversity. Clear results emerged: Those who lived in environments with higher levels of biodiversity—trees, shrubs, and flowering plants—had a far greater diversity and abundance of microbes on their skin.

Similarly, Anirudra Parajuli and colleagues, also from the University of Helsinki, found in a study involving 48 elderly Finnish participants that the stool samples of those that lived in urban apartment houses with little surrounding vegetation showed much lower abundance and diversity of “healthy” gut microbiota compared to those in accommodation with gardens within 200 meters.

But how do we know that it is not some other feature, such as diet or pets, that is responsible for this difference? Several more recent studies appear to fill this important knowledge gap. One involved participants interacting with organic soil, an important distinction because soils containing chemical fertilizers have very different and less “good” microbiota). After having their hand microbiota measured using skin swabs and genetic analysis, the participants rubbed their hands for 20 seconds in different soil and plant-based materials including composts, forest turfs, moss material, and material from peat bogs. They then washed their hands in water but without soap for five seconds and dried them on a paper towel. Skin swabs were then taken again for genetic analysis. Researchers found a significant difference in the participants’ skin microbiota after touching the soil materials. In effect, the environmental microbiome signature had transferred onto the participants’ skin.

It is not hard to extrapolate from here that the environmental microbiome could also easily be inhaled and ingested—and indeed this is what was found in two other experiments. Caitlin Selway and colleagues from the University of Adelaide measured the microbiota in participants’ nasal cavities before and after they had spent time in urban green spaces in Australia, the UK, and India, where researchers had already measured the microbial diversity in the soil, air, and leaves. What they showed was a clear increase in the diversity of microbiota in participants’ noses and on their skin after they spent time in these biodiverse urban green spaces. Even though such studies involve only small numbers of participants and must therefore be treated as preliminary, they certainly start to suggest that when we interact in naturally biodiverse landscapes, our bodies adopt the microbial signature of the surrounding environment.

A Natural Immunity Booster

But what about the third assumption—that this change to our microbiota triggers important changes that impact our health? Again, some tantalizing findings have emerged. In the Finnish study involving teenagers, Hanski and colleagues screened their blood for specific antibodies known to be indicative of levels of allergies, and a strong relationship emerged. Those who had the lowest levels of allergy markers in their blood lived in the more biodiverse areas. Similarly, the study involving elderly Finnish participants showed that those who lived in areas surrounded by more diverse vegetation had a reduced abundance in their gut of bacteria that are known to be pathogenic. They also had a reduced occurrence of certain gut microbiota often associated with inflammatory bowel disease.

Both these studies suggest that exposure to environmental microbiota may modulate our gut microbial ecology, and this may then influence our immune system. I say “may” because until very recently, these studies, and similar ones, show associations rather than a direct link. Many of them also lack blind controls where participants are placed in either a placebo or intervention group and the results are compared.

In the past two years, however, studies have started to address these issues.

One of the most important has been carried out by Maja Roslund and colleagues, again from the University of Helsinki. Building on the knowledge gained in the experiment outlined at the beginning, Roslund and her team ran a placebo-controlled double-blinded test of the biodiversity hypothesis of immune-mediated diseases—meaning not only was there a control placebo and intervention group, but that no one involved in the experiment or its day-to-day delivery of the experiment knew which group was which.

The participants were 3- to 5-year-old children in kindergarten who played over a 28-day period in one of two types of sandpits for up to two hours per day. One had been enriched with a microbially diverse soil mixture; the other was microbially poor with no soil. Bacterial communities in the sand, skin, and stools of the children were measured before the experiment and on day 14 and day 28. Blood samples were also taken from the children before and on day 14, and the number of types of T cell were measured. Depending on their type, these can play a critical role in either reducing or enhancing our auto-immune responses. Interleukin-10 (Il-10) is known to be a key player in bringing about an anti-inflammatory response—so we want as much of this in our blood as possible. On the other hand, interleukin-17 (Il-17) causes a pro-inflammatory response and is associated with diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.

Knowing the details about these T cells is important to appreciate the full significance of this experiment’s findings. Children who played in the sandpit containing soil had a significant shift in their skin microbial diversity to become much closer in composition to the soil. And importantly, their blood plasma showed a large increase in Il-10 levels and a decline in Il-17. In the placebo group there was no such change in either microbial diversity or T cell type.The children who played in the soil-enhanced sand also had higher skin microbial diversity through the duration of the experiment (day 28), suggesting that as long as the intervention is in place, the benefits will be obtained.

This is clearly a very new field of science, with gaps yet to be filled. Possibly one of the most important things to understand is whether interacting with nature-derived microbiota can help people who already have autoimmune and other serious diseases. All the experiments carried out to date have been on healthy participants.

We also need to understand how long we should interact with these nature-derived microbiota to gain and maintain their benefits. Clearly short-term interaction brings about changes. But do we need to do this each day to retain the benefits? A hint that we need to keep “topping up” our environmental microbiota can be seen in the study where the Finnish participants were handling soils. Thirty-five days after the experiment, changes to their microbiota were no longer observed. This suggests that when we stop interacting with nature-derived microbiota, our own not-so-healthy microbiota reestablishes itself.

Excerpt adapted from Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing, and Touching Plants is Good for Our Health by Kathy Willis. Published by Pegasus Books on December 3, 2024.

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This May 26, 2008 photo shows the Chaitén lava dome with lava spilling out the left side and a giant plume of

ash blasting into the sky. The eruption lasted several months and blanketed surrounding farmland in ash.

Credit: United States Geological Survey

On May 2, 2008, the Chaitén volcano in Chile awoke with unexpected fury after more than 9,000 years of dormancy. The eruption blasted rocks and ash a dozen miles into the air, and then heavy rainfall swept the fallen debris up in immense mudflows. A river of rubble carved a destructive path through the nearby town of Chaitén before surging into the sea. The town, practically split in two by the torrent that cut through its middle, was evacuated as ash blanketed over 200,000 square kilometers of surrounding land.

While the terrestrial aftermath was plain to see, captured by both the local media and satellites, the impact on the sea was unknown.

The eruption released over 750 billion liters of lava—enough to fill more than 300,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools—mainly in the form of rock fragments. The debris flowed through rivers into the Northern Patagonian Sea, just six miles away.

An international team of scientists set sail on the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Falkor (too) research vessel in September to trace the volcanic ash’s flow and assess its effects. Along the way, they found an underwater valley carved out by ancient glaciers. It’s hardly been altered in the 17,000 years or so since those glaciers retreated.

They wanted to explore how volcanoes impact the sea, its inhabitants, and underwater infrastructure.

“Our observations will allow us to explore how active volcanoes affect marine environments and infrastructure, ranging from fisheries to communication cables,” the expedition’s chief scientist, Sebastian Watt, an associate professor in Earth sciences at the University of Birmingham,  said in a press release. The town of Chaitén is very rural, and the area itself lacks submarine cables, but the team’s work could help assess whether volcanic activity might damage those cables at other locations across the globe.

Because of how they form, volcanoes are nearly always found in or near the ocean, yet scientists have hardly studied how eruptions affect marine ecosystems. “A range of hazards can impact communities in the aftermath of volcanic eruptions,” Watt said, “and the information we gather from studying the 2008 Chaitén eruption is relevant for coastal and island volcanoes globally.”

A remotely operated vehicle (ROV) called SuBastian served as the team’s underwater eyes. Fitted with a suite of lights, cameras, and sensors, the ROV explored the areas where volcanic debris had washed into the ocean.

“We used the ROV SuBastian to gather samples that would otherwise be impossible to obtain,” said Rodrigo Fernández, an assistant professor at the Universidad de Chile, who co-led the expedition. “And the ability to see the sampling sites with our own eyes and select the very best targets is a game changer. We usually sample the seafloor blind, selecting targets based on geophysics data acquired from the vessel and then deploying equipment hundreds or thousands of meters down.”

The team collected samples that contain both sediment and shells, which they’ll analyze to help determine the samples’ ages and to study microbial and geochemical changes. Comparing lower layers (from before the eruption) with higher ones will let them see how the eruption affected the marine ecosystem.

The ROV’s lights in the ocean shine like a candle in the night, casting an eerie glow on its immediate surroundings but unable to provide a big-picture view. For that, the team used sonar instruments on the ship to make a high-resolution 3D map of the seafloor.

That map revealed underwater giants—towering “mega-dunes” made of volcanic ash. The dunes are an imprint that hints at the forces that sculpt the seafloor, allowing scientists to trace the transport of volcanic material after it was swept into the sea. The team mapped over 1,000 square miles, collected data on what lies more than six stories beneath the seafloor, and found ash more than 15 miles from the volcano.

The ROV was equipped with a vibrating coring device, a straw-like instrument that gathered sediment samples by plunging into the seafloor. The layers of sediment collected in the core samples preserve evidence of the area’s past geological and biological activity.

Perhaps counterintuitively, sediment layers are more likely to remain intact on the seafloor than on land, so they can provide a better record of the region’s history. The seafloor is a more stable, oxygen-poor environment, reducing erosion and decomposition (two reasons scientists find far more fossils of marine creatures than land dwellers) and preserving finer details.

Samples from different areas vary dramatically in time coverage, going back only to 2008 for some and back potentially more than 15,000 years for others due to wildly different sedimentation rates. Scientists will use techniques like radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of sediment layers in the core samples.

Microscopic analysis of the sediment cores will also help the team analyze the way the eruption affected marine creatures and the chemistry of the seafloor.

“There’s a wide variety of life and sediment types found at the different sites we surveyed,” said Alastair Hodgetts, a physical volcanologist and geologist at the University of Edinburgh, who participated in the expedition. “The oldest place we visited—an area scarred by ancient glacier movement—is a fossilized seascape that was completely unexpected.”

This feature, too, tells scientists about the way the water moves. Currents flowing over an area that was eroded long ago by a glacier sweep sediment away, keeping the ancient terrain visible.

“I’m very interested in analyzing seismic data and correlating it with the layers of sediment in the core samples to create a timeline of geological events in the area,” said Giulia Matilde Ferrante, a geophysicist at Italy’s National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics, who co-led the expedition. “Reconstructing the past in this way will help us better understand the sediment history and landscape changes in the region.”

The team has already gathered measurements of the amount of sediment the eruption delivered to the sea. Now they’ll work to determine whether older layers of sediment record earlier, unknown events similar to the 2008 eruption.

“Better understanding past volcanic events, revealing things like how far away an eruption reached, and how common, severe, and predictable eruptions are, will help to plan for future events and reduce the impacts they have on local communities,” Watt said.

Ashley writes about space for a contractor for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center by day and freelances as an environmental writer. She holds master's degrees in space studies from The University of North Dakota and science writing from The Johns Hopkins University. She writes most of her articles with a baby on her lap.

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outbreaks of Oropouche virus have flared up in the Amazon for decades, but historically the pathogen has little troubled the rest of the world. But this seems to be changing. In 2024, the virus showed that it can travel.

Most of this year’s 11,000-plus cases occurred in Brazil and Peru, where the virus is an old acquaintance, but it has also been found in 2024 in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Panama, and Cuba—the latter reporting 603 cases as well as in-country transmission for the first time. Infected travelers also transported the virus to North America and Europe: This year it was found twice in Canada and 94 times in the United States—with 90 cases reported in Florida—while 30 imported cases were found across Spain, Italy, and Germany.

For those who study Oropouche and other arboviruses—the family of viruses transmitted by arthropods such as mosquitoes and ticks—the situation is worrying. Despite having clues about its transmission cycle, there’s insufficient information to accurately predict Oropouche’s future behavior. “We have some pieces of the puzzle, but there is no total certainty as to what role each one plays,” says Juan Carlos Navarro, director of research at SEK International University, where he heads the emerging diseases and epidemiology group.

The first symptoms of the disease appear suddenly between three and 12 days after being bitten, and usually last between four and six days. Symptoms include headaches, muscle and joint pain, chills, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light. Skin rashes and bleeding from the gums or nose may occur, and in severe cases, meningitis or encephalitis—inflammation of the brain and its membranes—may develop. An Oropouche infection is generally uncomplicated, if unpleasant, though for the first time this year Brazil recorded two deaths linked to the virus.

Where cases have occurred, researchers are increasingly detecting something that may explain why the virus is emerging and spreading: deforestation. Changing natural land to grow crops, drill for oil, or mine for resources “seems to be the main driver of outbreaks,” says Navarro. “It brings together three links: the virus, the vector, and humans.”

A Natural Cycle With Gaps

In 1955, a young charcoal burner fell ill after spending two weeks working and sleeping in the forest near the Oropouche River in Trinidad and Tobago. He had a fever for three days. That was the first documented case of Oropouche virus disease. Since then, dozens of outbreaks have been reported, most occurring in the Amazon basin.

Navarro has dedicated 30 years to studying arboviruses such as dengue, equine encephalitis, Mayaro, and, since 2016, Oropouche. It has two transmission cycles. In the jungle, the Oropouche virus’s reservoirs—the animals that keep the virus circulating, even if they themselves do not get sick—are believed to be nonhuman primates such as neotropical marmosets and capuchin monkeys, sloths, rodents, and birds. The virus has either been isolated from these creatures or antibodies have been found in their systems. In fact, the disease is also known as “sloth fever.” It is not understood what role sloths and nonhuman primates play in the transmission cycle, says Navarro. “They are probably amplifying hosts”—meaning they likely allow the virus to rapidly reproduce to high concentrations in their bodies.

When there is an epidemic among humans, there is a second transmission cycle. In this, people are the amplifying hosts, and the virus is transmitted between them by blood-eating insects. The main vector that transfers the pathogen between humans is the midge Culicoides paraensis, which is the size of the head of a pin and is found from Argentina up to the United States. Some studies suggest that Culex and Aedes mosquitoes can also transmit Oropouche. In fact, the first isolation of the virus in Trinidad and Tobago was from Coquillettidia venezuelensis, another type of mosquito.

But without a complete map of the virus’s reservoirs in the wild, the ecology of its vectors, and all their interactions, it is difficult to predict future scenarios. The midge Culicoides paraensis is associated with rural jungle areas, being found near bodies of water and banana crops, “but with new cases in urban areas, it is not known what role it plays,” says Navarro. Meanwhile, in Cuba, where transmission is now endemic, Culicoides paraensis has not been reported.

“If infected people are bitten by a competent mosquito, it could initiate a local cycle of transmission, as is happening with dengue in southern Europe,” Navarro says. “Before, this has happened with diseases that arrived in America: yellow fever, malaria, and Mayaro.”

A study by epidemiologist and ecologist Daniel Romero estimates that 5 million people could be at risk of Oropouche infection in the Americas, although the figure could be more, in light of the fact that several insects might be implicated in transmission. Travelers to Central and South America should identify sites with epidemic cycles. There are no vaccines for Oropouche and no specific antiviral treatments, but people can prevent bites with insect repellents and long-sleeved shirts.

Changing Landscape Is a Driver of Disease

Researchers are working to predict where the virus could spread by building what are known as “ecological niche models,” which contain data on cases, vectors, landscape, temperatures, and other factors to outline where the pathogen might be able to exist. “There are more cases in areas with recent deforestation,” says Navarro. Progress is being made every day in verifying the correlation between land-use change and greater transmission.

In outbreaks such as the current one, as well as one in Peru in 2016, researchers have found that badly affected areas lost more vegetation prior to the onset of the outbreak compared to regions without cases. In addition, 64 years ago, the first isolation of the virus in Brazil was in a sick sloth near the construction of the Belem-Brasilia highway. Navarro points out that human interference in nature seemingly driving disease outbreaks is not unique to Oropouche; years ago, the work of his colleague María Eugenia Grillet showed how the expansion of mining and deforestation reactivated malaria in Venezuela.

One possible explanation for this is the dilution effect, which suggests that the prevalence of a pathogen can increase at a site if species richness is reduced—with land-use change being an obvious cause of species loss. As an example, a study by the Borja Institute measured the transmission of arboviruses before, during, and after the construction of dams for the Panama Canal. It found that yellow fever decreased as monkeys disappeared due to the flooding of forested areas, but that equine encephalitis increased in areas near the dams due to the increase in waterfowl and mosquitoes.

Climate change could also be a contributing factor to the pathogen spreading. It is not known whether global warming affects the cycle of Culicoides paraensis, but it has been reported to accelerate the development of the mosquito Aedes aegypti—which is known to transmit other arboviruses—by reducing the time it takes for the mosquito to become an adult capable of biting. Inside the mosquito, viruses also replicate faster with heat (although excess heat damages them). Global warming also allows some vectors to thrive in regions where they could not before—which could lead to pathogens spreading to new habitats.

Destined to Change

The Oropouche virus genome is composed of three segments, unlike most insect-borne viruses, which have only one. This characteristic of the virus makes it prone to genetic reassortment, which occurs when two viruses infect a host at the same time. In the replication process inside the cell, they exchange segments of their genetic material, forming new, genetically unique combinations.

A reassortment containing Oropouche genetic material was found for the first time in Pará, Brazil, and was named Jatobal. A second was detected during an outbreak in Peru: 38 percent of the patients in that outbreak had respiratory problems, which is unusual for Oropouche, and so the virus may have picked up the capability to cause these through genetic material it gained from another virus. This reassortment was named Iquitos. Another reassorted strain, labeled Madre de Dios, has also been found in Peru. In 2012, yet another was isolated from a marmoset in Brazil, and named Perdões.

“That genetic process makes the virus more successful and diverse across other hosts. It is happening, and will happen more and more,” says Navarro. It appears that the current outbreak in the Brazilian Amazon coincides with the spread of a new reassorted lineage that emerged a decade ago in Brazil, which contains parts of viruses from the eastern Amazon, Peru, and Colombia. The worry with reassortment, Navarro explains, is that because of it you “can have variants with greater infection capacity or greater virulence.”

Next Strain, an international collaborative platform for real-time genomic surveillance, is available for monitoring such viral developments. It started out as a way of monitoring influenza viruses, before its use increased for tracking SARS-CoV-2. Genomic sequences of viruses are shared on this platform, and using genetic detective work, trees that trace the genetic characteristics and evolution of viruses are built. The Oropouche tree is currently under construction.

And there’s still much more to do besides this. Though outbreaks have been common, because they are usually quite small, studies into Oropouche have been limited. Navarro points out that countries also still need to work together to create rapid diagnostics, properly investigate the role of vectors in jungle, rural, and urban areas, as well as fully understand the transmission cycle. Research has also been slow because of a lack of funding—even though Oropouche is now the most common vector-borne disease after dengue in Brazil.

But now that the number of people at risk is increasing, and the World Health Organization is indicating a high risk to public health in the Americas, Navarro hopes that authorities will finally allocate more resources to study it. “A mistake in Latin America is that basic research is not given importance, because it is not seen as having an immediate application.”

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

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Welcome to Edition 7.24 of the Rocket Report! This is the last Rocket Report of the year, and what a year it's been. So far, there have been 244 rocket launches to successfully reach orbit this year, a record for annual launch activity. And there are still a couple of weeks to go before the calendar turns to 2025. Time is running out for Blue Origin to launch its first heavy-lift New Glenn rocket this year, but if it flies before January 1, it will certainly be one of the top space stories of 2024.

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.

Corkscrew in the sky. A Japanese space startup said its second attempt to launch a rocket carrying small satellites into orbit had been terminated minutes after liftoff Wednesday and destroyed itself again, nine months after the company’s first launch attempt in an explosion, the Associated Press reports. The startup that developed the rocket, named Space One, launched the Kairos rocket from a privately owned coastal spaceport in Japan's Kansai region. Company executive and space engineer Mamoru Endo said an abnormality in the first stage engine nozzle or its control system is likely to have caused an unstable flight of the rocket, which started spiraling in mid-flight and eventually destroyed itself about three minutes after liftoff, using its autonomous safety mechanism.

0-for-2 ... The launch failure this week followed the first attempt to launch the Kairos rocket in March, when the launcher exploded just five seconds after liftoff. An investigation into the failed launch in March concluded the rocket's autonomous destruct system activated after detecting its solid-fueled first stage wasn't generating as much thrust as expected. The Kairos rocket is Japan's first privately funded orbital-class rocket, capable of placing payloads up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Jay500001, Ken the Bin, and EllPeaTea)

A fit check for Themis. ArianeGroup has brought the main elements of the Themis reusable booster demonstrator together for the first time in France during a "full-fit check," European Spaceflight reports. This milestone paves the way for the demonstrator’s inaugural test, which is expected to take place in 2025. Themis, which is funded by the European Space Agency, is designed to test vertical launch and landing capabilities with a new methane-fueled rocket engine. According to ESA, the full-fit check is one of the final steps in the development phase of Themis.

Slow progress ... ESA signed the contract with ArianeGroup for the Themis program in 2020, and at that time, the program's schedule called for initial low-altitude hop tests in 2022. It's now taken more than double the time officials originally projected to get the Themis rocket airborne. The first up-and-down hops will be based at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden, and will use the vehicle ArianeGroup is assembling now in France. A second Themis rocket will be built for medium-altitude tests from Esrange, and finally, a three-engine version of Themis will fly on high-altitude tests from the Guiana Space Center in South America. At the rate this program is proceeding, it's fair to ask if Themis will complete a full-envelope launch and landing demonstration before the end of the decade, if it ever does. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Baguette One is going critical. French launch startup HyPrSpace has announced that it has completed preliminary design reviews for its Baguette One and Orbital Baguette One (OB-1) rockets, European Spaceflight reports. Baguette One will be a suborbital demonstrator for the OB-1 rocket, designed to use a hybrid propulsion system that combines liquid and solid propellants and doesn't require a turbopump. With the preliminary design complete, HyPrSpace said it is moving on to the critical design phase for both rockets, a stage of development where detailed engineering plans are finalized and components are prepared for manufacturing.

Heating the oven ... HyPrSpace has previously stated the Orbital Baguette One rocket will be capable of delivering a payload of up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit. Last year, the startup announced it raised 35 million euros in funding, primarily from the French government, to complete the critical design phase of the OB-1 rocket and launch the Baguette One on a suborbital test flight. HyPrSpace has not provided an updated schedule for the first flight of either rocket. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

A new player on the scene. RTX weapons arm Raytheon and defense startup Ursa Major Technologies have completed two successful test flights of a missile propelled by a new solid rocket motor, Breaking Defense reports. The two test flights, held at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California, involved a Raytheon-made missile propelled by an Ursa Major solid rocket motor measuring less than 10 inches in diameter, according to Dan Jablonsky, Ursa Major's CEO. Details about the missile are shrouded in mystery, and Raytheon officials referred questions on the matter to the Army.

Joining the club ... The US military is interested in fostering the development of a third supplier of solid rocket propulsion for weapons systems. Right now, only Northrop Grumman and L3Harris's Aerojet Rocketdyne are available as solid rocket vendors, and they have struggled to keep up with the demand for weapons systems, especially to support the war in Ukraine. Ursa Major is one of several US-based startups entering the solid rocket propulsion market. "There is a new player on the scene in the solid rocket motor industry," Jablonsky said. "This is an Army program that we’ve been working on with Raytheon. In this particular program, we went from concept and design to firing and flight on the range in just under four months, which is lightning fast." (submitted by Ken the Bin)

SpaceX's rapid response. In a mission veiled in secrecy, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, sending a military Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite to a medium orbit about 12,000 miles above Earth, Space News reports. Named Rapid Response Trailblazer-1 (RRT-1), this mission was a US national security space launch and was also intended to demonstrate military capabilities to condense a typical two-year mission planning cycle to less than six months. The payload, GPS III SV-07, is the seventh satellite of the GPS III constellation, built by Lockheed Martin. The spacecraft was in storage awaiting a launch on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket.

Tightening the timeline ... "We decided to pull SV-07 out of storage and try to get it to the launch pad as quickly as possible," Col. James Horne, senior material leader for launch execution at the US Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told Space News. "It’s our way of demonstrating that we can be responsive to operator needs." Rather than the typical mission cycle of two years, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and the Space Force worked together to prep this GPS satellite for launch in a handful of months. Military officials decided to launch SV-07 with SpaceX as ULA's Vulcan rocket faced delays in becoming certified to launch national security payloads. According to Space News, Horne emphasized that this move was less about Vulcan delays and more about testing the boundaries of the NSSL program’s flexibility. “This is a way for us to demonstrate to adversaries that we can be responsive,” he said. Because SV-07 was switched to SpaceX, ULA will get to launch GPS III SV-10, originally assigned to SpaceX. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

An update on Butch and Suni. NASA has announced that it is delaying the SpaceX Crew-10 launch, a move that will keep astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—who already had their stay aboard the International Space Station unexpectedly extended—in orbit even longer, CNN reports. Williams and Wilmore launched to space in June, piloting the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Their trip, expected to last about a week, ballooned into a months-long assignment after their vehicle experienced technical issues en route to the space station and NASA determined it would be too risky to bring them home aboard the Starliner.

Nearly 10 months in orbit ... The astronauts stayed aboard the space station as the Starliner spacecraft safely returned to Earth in September, and NASA shuffled the station's schedule of visiting vehicles to allow Wilmore and Williams to come home on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft with two crewmates to end the Crew-9 mission in February, soon after the arrival of Crew-10. Now, Crew-10 will get off the ground at least a month later than expected because NASA and SpaceX teams need "time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission," the space agency said. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Stoke Space names its engine. Stoke Space, the only other company besides SpaceX developing a fully reusable orbital rocket, has revealed the name of the methane-fueled engine that will power the vehicle's booster stage. "Say hello to Zenith, our full-flow staged-combustion booster engine, built to power Nova to orbit," Stoke Space wrote in a post on X. The naming announcement came a few days after Stoke Space said it hot-fired the "Block 2" or "flight layout" version of the main engine on a test stand in Moses Lake, Washington.

Stoked by the progress ... "As we build towards the future of space mobility, we’re building on top of the pinnacle–the zenith–of rocket engine cycles: full-flow staged combustion," Stoke Space said. Only a handful of rocket engines have been designed to use the full-flow staged combustion cycle, and only one has actually flown on a rocket: SpaceX's Raptor. Seven Zenith engines will power the first stage of the Nova rocket when it takes off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A hydrogen-fueled propulsion system will power the second stage of Nova, which is designed to launch up to 5 metric tons (11,000 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Upgrades coming for Vega. The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed 350 million euros in contracts with Avio to further evolve the Vega launcher family," Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The contracts cover the development of the Vega-E and upgrades to the current Vega-C’s ground infrastructure to increase the launch cadence. Vega-E, scheduled to debut in 2027, will replace the Vega-C rocket's third and fourth stages with a single methane-fueled upper stage under development by Avio. It will also offer a 30 percent increase in Vega's payload lift capability, and will launch from a new complex to be built on the former Ariane 5 launch pad at the European-run Guiana Space Center in South America.

Adaptations ... The fresh tranche of funding from ESA will also pay for Avio's work to "adapt" the former Ariane 5 integration building at the spaceport in French Guiana, according to ESA. "This will allow technicians to work on two rockets being assembled simultaneously–one on the launch pad and one in the new assembly building–and run two launch campaigns in parallel," ESA said. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

New Glenn coming alive. In a widely anticipated test, Blue Origin will soon ignite the seven main engines on its New Glenn rocket at Launch Complex-36 in Florida, Ars reports. Sources indicated this hot-fire test might occur as soon as Thursday, but it didn't happen. Instead, Blue Origin's launch team loaded cryogenic propellants into the New Glenn rocket on the launch pad, but stopped short of igniting the main engines.

Racing the clock … The hot-fire is the final test the company must complete before verifying the massive rocket is ready for its debut flight, and it is the most dynamic. This will be the first time Blue Origin has ever test-fired the BE-7 engines altogether. Theoretically, at least, it remains possible that Blue Origin could launch New Glenn this year—and the company's urgency certainly speaks to this. On social media this week, some Blue Origin employees noted that they were being asked to work on Christmas Day this year in Florida.

China begins building a new megaconstellation. The first batch of Internet satellites for China's Guowang megaconstellation launched Monday on the country's heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket, Ars reports. The satellites are the first of up to 13,000 spacecraft a consortium of Chinese companies plans to build and launch over the next decade. The Guowang fleet will beam low-latency high-speed Internet signals in an architecture similar to SpaceX's Starlink network, although Chinese officials haven't laid out any specifics, such as target markets, service specifications, or user terminals.

No falling debris, this time … China used its most powerful operational rocket, the Long March 5B, for the job of launching the first 10 Guowang satellites this week. The Long March 5B's large core stage, which entered orbit on the rocket's previous missions and triggered concerns about falling space debris, fell into a predetermined location in the sea downrange from the launch site. The difference for this mission was the addition of the Yuanzheng 2 upper stage, which gave the rocket's payloads the extra oomph they needed to reach their targeted low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Elon Musk's security clearance under review. A new investigation from The New York Times suggests that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has not been reporting his travel activities and other information to the Department of Defense as required by his top-secret clearance, Ars reports. According to the newspaper, concerns about Musk's reporting practices have led to reviews by three different bodies within the military: the Air Force, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and the Defense Department Office of Inspector General. However, none of the federal agencies cited in the Times article has accused Musk of disclosing classified material.

It won't matter … Since 2021, Musk has failed to self-report details of his life, including travel activities, people he has met, and drug use, according to the Times. The government is also concerned that SpaceX did not ensure Musk's compliance with the reporting rules. Musk's national security profile has risen following his deep-pocketed and full-throated support of Donald Trump, who won the US presidential campaign in November and will be sworn into office next month. After this inauguration, Trump will have the power to grant security clearance to whomever he wishes.

ULA's CEO has a pretty wild idea. Ars published a feature story last week examining the US Space Force's new embrace of offensive weapons in space. In the story, Ars discusses concepts for different types of space weapons, including placing roving "defender" satellites into orbit, with the sole purpose of guarding high-value US satellites against an attack. Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, wrote about the defender concept in a Medium post earlier this month. He added more detail in a recent conversation with reporters, describing the defender concept as "a lightning-fast, long-range, lethal, if necessary, vehicle to defend our assets on orbit." And guess what? The Centaur upper stage for ULA's own Vulcan rocket could do the job just fine, according to Bruno.

Death throes or a smart pivot? … A space tug or upper stage like the Centaur could be left in orbit after a launch to respond to threats against US or allied satellites, Bruno said. These wouldn't be able to effectively defend a spacecraft against a ground-based anti-satellite missile, which can launch without warning. But a space-based attack might involve an enemy satellite taking days or weeks to move close to a US satellite due to limitations in maneuverability and the tyranny of orbital mechanics. Several launch companies have recently pitched their rockets as solutions for weapons testing, including Rocket Lab and ABL. But the concept proposed by Bruno would take ULA far from its core business, where its efforts to compete with SpaceX have often fallen short. However, the competition is still alive, as shown by a comment from SpaceX's vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, Jon Edwards. In response to Ars's story, Edwards wrote on X: "The pivot to 'interceptor' or 'target vehicle' is a common final act of a launch vehicle in its death throes." (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Vulcan is months away from flying again. Speaking of ULA, here's an update on the next flight of the company's Vulcan rocket. The first national security mission on Vulcan might not launch until April 2025 at the earliest, Spaceflight Now reports. This will be the third flight of a Vulcan rocket, following two test flights this year to gather data for the US Space Force to certify the rocket for national security missions. On the second flight, the nozzle fell off one of Vulcan's solid rocket boosters shortly after liftoff, but the rocket successfully continued its climb into orbit. The anomaly prompted an investigation, and ULA says it is close to determining the root cause.

Stretching the timeline … The Space Force's certification review of Vulcan is taking longer than anticipated. "The government team has not completed its technical evaluation of the certification criteria and is working closely with ULA on additional data required to complete this evaluation," a Space Force spokesperson told Spaceflight Now. "The government anticipates completion of its evaluation and certification in the first quarter of calendar year 2025." The spokesperson said this means the launch of a US military navigation test satellite on the third Vulcan rocket is now slated for the second quarter of next year. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Dec. 21: Falcon 9 | "Astranis: From One to Many" | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 03:39 UTC

Dec. 21: Falcon 9 | Bandwagon 2 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 11:34 UTC

Dec. 21: Electron | "Owl The Way Up" | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 13:00 UTC

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Large language models represent text using tokens, each of which is a few characters. Short words are represented by a single token (like "the" or "it"), whereas larger words may be represented by several tokens (GPT-4o represents "indivisible" with "ind," "iv," and "isible").

When OpenAI released ChatGPT two years ago, it had a memory—known as a context window—of just 8,192 tokens. That works out to roughly 6,000 words of text. This meant that if you fed it more than about 15 pages of text, it would “forget” information from the beginning of its context. This limited the size and complexity of tasks ChatGPT could handle.

Today’s LLMs are far more capable:

• OpenAI’s GPT-4o can handle 128,000 tokens (about 200 pages of text).
• Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet can accept 200,000 tokens (about 300 pages of text).
• Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro allows 2 million tokens (about 2,000 pages of text).

Still, it’s going to take a lot more progress if we want AI systems with human-level cognitive abilities.

Many people envision a future where AI systems are able to do many—perhaps most—of the jobs performed by humans. Yet many human workers read and hear hundreds of millions of words during our working years—and we absorb even more information from sights, sounds, and smells in the world around us. To achieve human-level intelligence, AI systems will need the capacity to absorb similar quantities of information.

Right now the most popular way to build an LLM-based system to handle large amounts of information is called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). These systems try to find documents relevant to a user’s query and then insert the most relevant documents into an LLM’s context window.

This sometimes works better than a conventional search engine, but today’s RAG systems leave a lot to be desired. They only produce good results if the system puts the most relevant documents into the LLM’s context. But the mechanism used to find those documents—often, searching in a vector database—is not very sophisticated. If the user asks a complicated or confusing question, there’s a good chance the RAG system will retrieve the wrong documents and the chatbot will return the wrong answer.

And RAG doesn’t enable an LLM to reason in more sophisticated ways over large numbers of documents:

• A lawyer might want an AI system to review and summarize hundreds of thousands of emails.
• An engineer might want an AI system to analyze thousands of hours of camera footage from a factory floor.
• A medical researcher might want an AI system to identify trends in tens of thousands of patient records.

Each of these tasks could easily require more than 2 million tokens of context. Moreover, we’re not going to want our AI systems to start with a clean slate after doing one of these jobs. We will want them to gain experience over time, just like human workers do.

Superhuman memory and stamina have long been key selling points for computers. We’re not going to want to give them up in the AI age. Yet today’s LLMs are distinctly subhuman in their ability to absorb and understand large quantities of information.

It’s true, of course, that LLMs absorb superhuman quantities of information at training time. The latest AI models have been trained on trillions of tokens—far more than any human will read or hear. But a lot of valuable information is proprietary, time-sensitive, or otherwise not available for training.

So we’re going to want AI models to read and remember far more than 2 million tokens at inference time. And that won’t be easy.

The key innovation behind transformer-based LLMs is attention, a mathematical operation that allows a model to “think about” previous tokens. (Check out our LLM explainer if you want a detailed explanation of how this works.) Before an LLM generates a new token, it performs an attention operation that compares the latest token to every previous token. This means that conventional LLMs get less and less efficient as the context grows.

Lots of people are working on ways to solve this problem—I’ll discuss some of them later in this article. But first I should explain how we ended up with such an unwieldy architecture.

GPUs made deep learning possible

The “brains” of personal computers are central processing units (CPUs). Traditionally, chipmakers made CPUs faster by increasing the frequency of the clock that acts as its heartbeat. But in the early 2000s, overheating forced chipmakers to mostly abandon this technique.

Chipmakers started making CPUs that could execute more than one instruction at a time. But they were held back by a programming paradigm that requires instructions to mostly be executed in order.

A new architecture was needed to take full advantage of Moore’s Law. Enter Nvidia.

In 1999, Nvidia started selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to speed up the rendering of three-dimensional games like Quake III Arena. The job of these PC add-on cards was to rapidly draw thousands of triangles that made up walls, weapons, monsters, and other objects in a game.

This is not a sequential programming task: triangles in different areas of the screen can be drawn in any order. So rather than having a single processor that executed instructions one at a time, Nvidia’s first GPU had a dozen specialized cores—effectively tiny CPUs—that worked in parallel to paint a scene.

Over time, Moore’s Law enabled Nvidia to make GPUs with tens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of computing cores. People started to realize that the massive parallel computing power of GPUs could be used for applications unrelated to video games.

In 2012, three University of Toronto computer scientists—Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton—used a pair of Nvidia GTX 580 GPUs to train a neural network for recognizing images. The massive computing power of those GPUs, which had 512 cores each, allowed them to train a network with a then-impressive 60 million parameters. They entered ImageNet, an academic competition to classify images into one of 1,000 categories, and set a new record for accuracy in image recognition.

Before long, researchers were applying similar techniques to a wide variety of domains, including natural language.

Transformers removed a bottleneck for natural language

RNNs worked fairly well on short sentences, but they struggled with longer ones—to say nothing of paragraphs or longer passages. When reasoning about a long sentence, an RNN would sometimes “forget about” an important word early in the sentence. In 2014, computer scientists Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio discovered they could improve the performance of a recurrent neural network by adding an attention mechanism that allowed the network to “look back” at earlier words in a sentence.

In 2017, Google published “Attention Is All You Need,” one of the most important papers in the history of machine learning. Building on the work of Bahdanau and his colleagues, Google researchers dispensed with the RNN and its hidden states. Instead, Google’s model used an attention mechanism to scan previous words for relevant context.

This new architecture, which Google called the transformer, proved hugely consequential because it eliminated a serious bottleneck to scaling language models.

Here’s an animation illustrating why RNNs didn’t scale well:

This hypothetical RNN tries to predict the next word in a sentence, with the prediction shown in the top row of the diagram. This network has three layers, each represented by a rectangle. It is inherently linear: it has to complete its analysis of the first word, “How,” before passing the hidden state back to the bottom layer so the network can start to analyze the second word, “are.”

This constraint wasn’t a big deal when machine learning algorithms ran on CPUs. But when people started leveraging the parallel computing power of GPUs, the linear architecture of RNNs became a serious obstacle.

The transformer removed this bottleneck by allowing the network to “think about” all the words in its input at the same time:

The transformer-based model shown here does roughly as many computations as the RNN in the previous diagram. So it might not run any faster on a (single-core) CPU. But because the model doesn’t need to finish with “How” before starting on “are,” “you,” or “doing,” it can work on all of these words simultaneously. So it can run a lot faster on a GPU with many parallel execution units.

How much faster? The potential speed-up is proportional to the number of input words. My animations depict a four-word input that makes the transformer model about four times faster than the RNN. Real LLMs can have inputs thousands of words long. So, with a sufficiently beefy GPU, transformer-based models can be orders of magnitude faster than otherwise similar RNNs.

In short, the transformer unlocked the full processing power of GPUs and catalyzed rapid increases in the scale of language models. Leading LLMs grew from hundreds of millions of parameters in 2018 to hundreds of billions of parameters by 2020. Classic RNN-based models could not have grown that large because their linear architecture prevented them from being trained efficiently on a GPU.

Transformers have a scaling problem

See all those diagonal arrows between the layers? They represent the operation of the attention mechanism. Before a transformer-based language model generates a new token, it “thinks about” every previous token to find the ones that are most relevant.

Each of these comparisons is cheap, computationally speaking. For small contexts—10, 100, or even 1,000 tokens—they are not a big deal. But the computational cost of attention grows relentlessly with the number of preceding tokens. The longer the context gets, the more attention operations (and therefore computing power) are needed to generate the next token.

This means that the total computing power required for attention grows quadratically with the total number of tokens. Suppose a 10-token prompt requires 414,720 attention operations. Then:

• Processing a 100-token prompt will require 45.6 million attention operations.
• Processing a 1,000-token prompt will require 4.6 billion attention operations.
• Processing a 10,000-token prompt will require 460 billion attention operations.

This is probably why Google charges twice as much, per token, for Gemini 1.5 Pro once the context gets longer than 128,000 tokens. Generating token number 128,001 requires comparisons with all 128,000 previous tokens, making it significantly more expensive than producing the first or 10th or 100th token.

Making attention more efficient and scalable

A lot of effort has been put into optimizing attention. One line of research has tried to squeeze maximum efficiency out of individual GPUs.

As we saw earlier, a modern GPU contains thousands of execution units. Before a GPU can start doing math, it must move data from slow shared memory (called high-bandwidth memory) to much faster memory inside a particular execution unit (called SRAM). Sometimes GPUs spend more time moving data around than performing calculations.

In a series of papers, Princeton computer scientist Tri Dao and several collaborators have developed FlashAttention, which calculates attention in a way that minimizes the number of these slow memory operations. Work like Dao’s has dramatically improved the performance of transformers on modern GPUs.

Another line of research has focused on efficiently scaling attention across multiple GPUs. One widely cited paper describes ring attention, which divides input tokens into blocks and assigns each block to a different GPU. It’s called ring attention because GPUs are organized into a conceptual ring, with each GPU passing data to its neighbor.

I once attended a ballroom dancing class where couples stood in a ring around the edge of the room. After each dance, women would stay where they were while men would rotate to the next woman. Over time, every man got a chance to dance with every woman. Ring attention works on the same principle. The “women” are query vectors (describing what each token is “looking for”) and the “men” are key vectors (describing the characteristics each token has). As the key vectors rotate through a sequence of GPUs, they get multiplied by every query vector in turn.

In short, ring attention distributes attention calculations across multiple GPUs, making it possible for LLMs to have larger context windows. But it doesn’t make individual attention calculations any cheaper.

Could RNNs make a comeback?

The fixed-size hidden state of an RNN means that it doesn’t have the same scaling problems as a transformer. An RNN requires about the same amount of computing power to produce its first, hundredth and millionth token. That’s a big advantage over attention-based models.

Although RNNs have fallen out of favor since the invention of the transformer, people have continued trying to develop RNNs suitable for training on modern GPUs.

In April, Google announced a new model called Infini-attention. It’s kind of a hybrid between a transformer and an RNN. Infini-attention handles recent tokens like a normal transformer, remembering them and recalling them using an attention mechanism.

However, Infini-attention doesn’t try to remember every token in a model’s context. Instead, it stores older tokens in a “compressive memory” that works something like the hidden state of an RNN. This data structure can perfectly store and recall a few tokens, but as the number of tokens grows, its recall becomes lossier.

Machine learning YouTuber Yannic Kilcher wasn’t too impressed by Google’s approach.

“I’m super open to believing that this actually does work and this is the way to go for infinite attention, but I’m very skeptical,” Kilcher said. “It uses this compressive memory approach where you just store as you go along, you don’t really learn how to store, you just store in a deterministic fashion, which also means you have very little control over what you store and how you store it.”

Could Mamba be the future?

Perhaps the most notable effort to resurrect RNNs is Mamba, an architecture that was announced in a December 2023 paper. It was developed by computer scientists Dao (who also did the FlashAttention work I mentioned earlier) and Albert Gu.

Mamba does not use attention. Like other RNNs, it has a hidden state that acts as the model’s “memory.” Because the hidden state has a fixed size, longer prompts do not increase Mamba’s per-token cost.

When I started writing this article in March, my goal was to explain Mamba’s architecture in some detail. But then in May, the researchers released Mamba-2, which significantly changed the architecture from the original Mamba paper. I’ll be frank: I struggled to understand the original Mamba and have not figured out how Mamba-2 works.

But the key thing to understand is that Mamba has the potential to combine transformer-like performance with the efficiency of conventional RNNs.

In June, Dao and Gu co-authored a paper with Nvidia researchers that evaluated a Mamba model with 8 billion parameters. They found that models like Mamba were competitive with comparably sized transformers in a number of tasks, but they “lag behind Transformer models when it comes to in-context learning and recalling information from the context.”

Transformers are good at information recall because they “remember” every token of their context—this is also why they become less efficient as the context grows. In contrast, Mamba tries to compress the context into a fixed-size state, which necessarily means discarding some information from long contexts.

The Nvidia team found they got the best performance from a hybrid architecture that interleaved 24 Mamba layers with four attention layers. This worked better than either a pure transformer model or a pure Mamba model.

A model needs some attention layers so it can remember important details from early in its context. But a few attention layers seem to be sufficient; the rest of the attention layers can be replaced by cheaper Mamba layers with little impact on the model’s overall performance.

In August, an Israeli startup called AI21 announced its Jamba 1.5 family of models. The largest version had 398 billion parameters, making it comparable in size to Meta’s Llama 405B model. Jamba 1.5 Large has seven times more Mamba layers than attention layers. As a result, Jamba 1.5 Large requires far less memory than comparable models from Meta and others. For example, AI21 estimates that Llama 3.1 70B needs 80GB of memory to keep track of 256,000 tokens of context. Jamba 1.5 Large only needs 9GB, allowing the model to run on much less powerful hardware.

The Jamba 1.5 Large model gets an MMLU score of 80, significantly below the Llama 3.1 70B’s score of 86. So by this measure, Mamba doesn’t blow transformers out of the water. However, this may not be an apples-to-apples comparison. Frontier labs like Meta have invested heavily in training data and post-training infrastructure to squeeze a few more percentage points of performance out of benchmarks like MMLU. It’s possible that the same kind of intense optimization could close the gap between Jamba and frontier models.

So while the benefits of longer context windows is obvious, the best strategy to get there is not. In the short term, AI companies may continue using clever efficiency and scaling hacks (like FlashAttention and Ring Attention) to scale up vanilla LLMs. Longer term, we may see growing interest in Mamba and perhaps other attention-free architectures. Or maybe someone will come up with a totally new architecture that renders transformers obsolete.

But I am pretty confident that scaling up transformer-based frontier models isn’t going to be a solution on its own. If we want models that can handle billions of tokens—and many people do—we’re going to need to think outside the box.

Tim Lee was on staff at Ars from 2017 to 2021. Last year, he launched a newsletter, Understanding AI, that explores how AI works and how it's changing our world. You can subscribe here.

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The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones over parts of New Jersey yesterday and said "the United States government may use deadly force against" airborne aircraft "if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat."

The FAA issued 22 orders imposing "temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons" until January 17, 2025. "At the request of federal security partners, the FAA published 22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure," an FAA statement said.

Each NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) affects a specific area. "No UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] operations are authorized in the areas covered by this NOTAM" unless they have clearance for specific operations, the FAA said. Allowed operations include support for national defense, law enforcement, firefighting, and commercial operations "with a valid statement of work."

"Pilots who do not adhere to the following proc[edure] may be intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement/security personnel," the FAA said. Violating the order could result in "civil penalties and the suspension or revocation of airmen certificates," and criminal charges, the FAA said.

The New Jersey orders affect areas in Evesham, Hamilton, Bridgewater, Cedar Grove, Metuchen, North Brunswick Township, Camden, Gloucester City, Westampton, South Brunswick, Edison, Branchburg, Sewaren, Jersey City, Harrison, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Winslow, Burlington, Clifton, Hancocks Bridge, and Kearny.

5,000 tips to FBI, but nothing “anomalous”

The latest notices follow numerous sightings of objects that appeared to be drones, which worried New Jersey residents and prompted state and federal officials to investigate and issue several public statements. The FAA last month imposed temporary flight restrictions at the Picatinny Arsenal, an Army research and manufacturing facility, and a Bedminster golf course owned by President-elect Donald Trump.

On December 16, a joint statement was issued by the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and Department of Defense. The "FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated," but evidence so far suggests "the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones," the statement said. "We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast."

There was also a December 12 statement by the FBI and DHS on the New Jersey drone sightings, which said authorities had "no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus."

"Historically, we have experienced cases of mistaken identity, where reported drones are, in fact, manned aircraft or facilities... upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully. There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space," the statement said.

Don’t shoot the drones down yourself

Authorities warned residents not to shoot down drones themselves, saying it is illegal under federal law and could result in civil penalties and/or criminal charges. "A private citizen shooting at any aircraft—including unmanned aircraft—poses a significant safety hazard," the FAA said. "An unmanned aircraft hit by gunfire could crash, causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air."

The New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness recently released a "drone incidents FAQ" to answer residents' concerns. One question in the FAQ was, "Why can't authorities or the military shoot down or capture a drone midflight?" It answered that "state and local authorities do not have the legal ability to mitigate threatening drone activity at this time" and that "federal agencies and the US military have different legal abilities and technical capabilities."

The New Jersey FAQ pointed to a US Homeland Security publication that says when drones are operated illegally, Homeland Security can "seize or exercise control of the unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft," and "use reasonable force to disable, damage, or destroy the unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft."

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Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore.

Sure, the spacecraft got some attention when it launched.  It is, after all, the fastest moving object that humans have ever built. At its maximum speed, goosed by the gravitational pull of the Sun, the probe reaches a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent the speed of light. That kind of speed would get you from New York City to Tokyo in less than a minute.

And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. At the time of its launch, in August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years old.

But in the six years since the probe has been zipping through outer space and flying by the Sun? Not so much. Let's face it, the astrophysical properties of the Sun and its complicated structure are not something that most people think about on a daily basis.

However, the smallish probe—it masses less than a metric ton, and its scientific payload is only about 110 pounds (50 kg)—is about to make its star turn. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun. It will come within just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the solar surface, flying into the solar atmosphere for the first time.

Yeah, it's going to get pretty hot. Scientists estimate that the probe's heat shield will endure temperatures in excess of 2,500° Fahrenheit (1,371° C) on Christmas Eve, which is pretty much the polar opposite of the North Pole.

Going straight to the source

I spoke with the chief of science at NASA, Nicky Fox, to understand why the probe is being tortured so. Before moving to NASA headquarters, Fox was the project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, and she explained that scientists really want to understand the origins of the solar wind.

This is the stream of charged particles that emanate from the Sun's outermost layer, the corona. Scientists have been wondering about this particular mystery for longer than half a century, Fox explained.

"Quite simply, we want to find the birthplace of the solar wind," she said.

Way back in the 1950s, before we had satellites or spacecraft to measure the Sun's properties, Parker predicted the existence of this solar wind. The scientific community was pretty skeptical about this idea—many ridiculed Parker, in fact—until the Mariner 2 mission started measuring the solar wind in 1962.

As the scientific community began to embrace Parker's theory, they wanted to know more about the solar wind, which is such a fundamental constituent of the entire Solar System. Although the solar wind is invisible to the naked eye, when you see an aurora on Earth, that's the solar wind interacting with Earth's magnetosphere in a particularly violent way.

Only it is expensive to build a spacecraft that can get to the Sun. And really difficult, too.

Now, you might naively think that it's the easiest thing in the world to send a spacecraft to the Sun. After all, it's this big and massive object in the sky, and it's got a huge gravitational field. Things should want to go there because of this attraction, and you ought to be able to toss any old thing into the sky, and it will go toward the Sun. The problem is that you don't actually want your spacecraft to fly into the Sun or be going so fast that it passes the Sun and keeps moving. So you've got to have a pretty powerful rocket to get your spacecraft in just the right orbit.

That’s a dynamic spacecraft

And then you've got to have a pretty sophisticated spacecraft that can survive flying into the atmosphere of a star. Because it's super hot and there's this hellish radiation all around, not to mention plasma.

But you can't get around the fact that to observe the origin of the solar wind, you've got to get inside the corona. Fox explained that it's like trying to understand a forest by looking in from the outside. One actually needs to go into the forest and find a clearing. However, we can't really stay inside the forest very long—because it's on fire.

So, the Parker Solar Probe had to be robust enough to get near the Sun and then back into the coldness of space. Therein lies another challenge. The spacecraft is going from this incredibly hot environment into a cold one and then back again multiple times.

"If you think about just heating and cooling any kind of material, they either go brittle and crumble, or they may go like elastic with a continual change of property," Fox said. "Obviously, with a spacecraft like this, you can't have it making a major property change. You also need something that's lightweight, and you need something that's durable."

The science instruments had to be hardened as well. As the probe flies into the Sun there's an instrument known as a Faraday cup that hangs out to measure ion and electron fluxes from the solar wind. Unique technologies were needed. The cup itself is made from sheets of Titanium-Zirconium-Molybdenum, with a melting point of about 4,260° Fahrenheit (2,349° C). Another challenge came from the electronic wiring, as normal cables would melt. So, the team at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA grew sapphire crystal tubes to suspend the wiring and made the wires from niobium.

Anyway, all that is to say, it took a lot of time, money, and technological breakthroughs in exotic materials to get a spacecraft that was up to the task. And on Christmas Eve, we're finally going to see what the Parker Solar Probe has got.

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In a widely anticipated test, Blue Origin may ignite the seven main engines on its New Glenn rocket as soon as Thursday at Launch Complex-36 in Florida.

This is the final test the company must complete before verifying the massive rocket is ready for its debut flight, and it is the most dynamic. This will be the first time Blue Origin has ever test-fired the BE-7 engines altogether, in a final rehearsal before launch.

The company did not respond immediately to a request for comment, but the imminent nature of the test was confirmed by a NASA official.

"New Glenn, you know, obviously, you know that they're vertical on LC-36, so they're going through all their ground processing, getting ready for their hot fire," Lisa Watson-Morgan, the program manager for the Human Landing System, said Thursday morning in an interview with Ars. "Maybe, maybe, maybe today, maybe soon. I think it's very soon. And so to that, we are really looking forward to that Blue Ring flight that is coming up for Blue Origin. So we get insight into their processing, their hot fires, into their early commercial launches. And that gives us confidence that as we're moving forward, that the launch vehicle system is making progress."

Watson-Morgan said the agency is watching the development of New Glenn closely, as the rocket is expected to play a role in the Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon. The super heavy lift rocket will be used to launch a lunar lander, as well as elements to fuel it in space for missions to the Moon.

Moving forward with some urgency

Blue Origin has been making steady progress toward a debut launch this fall. At the end of October, the company rolled the rocket's first stage from its production facility in Florida out to Launch Complex-36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, and about three weeks later, just before the US Thanksgiving holiday, the company moved the integrated first and second stage out to the launch pad for testing.

In the nearly month since then the company has performed various tests on the vehicle and its ample ground systems, working up to the hot firing.

Theoretically, at least, it remains possible that Blue Origin could launch New Glenn this year—and the company's urgency certainly speaks to this. On social media this week, some Blue Origin employees noted that they were being asked to work on Christmas Day this year in Florida.

About 10 days ago, the company said its rocket would be ready for a launch this year. New Glenn will be carrying a prototype of the "Blue Ring" space vehicle, which provides power and propulsion to payloads for deployment beyond where they are dropped off by the rocket. However, as of Thursday, it's unclear whether Blue Origin has obtained final regulatory approval for a launch from the Federal Aviation Administration.

After years of delays for the rocket, originally due to debut in 2020, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos hired a new chief executive to run the company a little more than a year ago. Dave Limp, an executive from Amazon, was given the mandate to change Blue Origin's slower-moving culture to be more nimble and urgent and was told to launch New Glenn by the end of 2024. He appears to be delivering on that promise.

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When the Sun is blazing and the wind is blowing, Germany’s solar and wind power plants swing into high gear. For nine days in July 2023, renewables produced more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the country; there are times when wind turbines even need to be turned off to avoid overloading the grid.

But on other days, clouds mute solar energy down to a flicker and wind turbines languish. For nearly a week in January 2023, renewable energy generation fell to less than 30 percent of the nation’s total, and gas-, oil- and coal-powered plants revved up to pick up the slack.

Germans call these periods Dunkelflauten, meaning “dark doldrums,” and they can last for a week or longer. They’re a major concern for doldrum-afflicted places like Germany and parts of the United States as nations increasingly push renewable-energy development. Solar and wind combined contribute 40 percent of overall energy generation in Germany and 15 percent in the US and, as of December 2024, both countries have goals of becoming 100 percent clean-energy-powered by 2035.

The challenge: how to avoid blackouts without turning to dependable but planet-warming fossil fuels.

Solving the variability problem of solar and wind energy requires reimagining how to power our world, moving from a grid where fossil fuel plants are turned on and off in step with energy needs to one that converts fluctuating energy sources into a continuous power supply. The solution lies, of course, in storing energy when it’s abundant so it’s available for use during lean times.

But the increasingly popular electricity-storage devices today—lithium-ion batteries—are only cost-effective in bridging daily fluctuations in sun and wind, not multiday doldrums. And a decades-old method that stores electricity by pumping water uphill and recouping the energy when it flows back down through a turbine generator typically works only in mountainous terrain. The more solar and wind plants the world installs to wean grids off fossil fuels, the more urgently it needs mature, cost-effective technologies that can cover many locations and store energy for at least eight hours and up to weeks at a time.

Engineers around the world are busy developing those technologies—from newer kinds of batteries to systems that harness air pressure, spinning wheels, heat or chemicals like hydrogen. It’s unclear what will end up sticking.

“The creative part … is happening now,” says Eric Hittinger, an expert on energy policy and markets at Rochester Institute of Technology who coauthored a 2020 deep dive in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources on the benefits and costs of energy storage systems. “A lot of it is going to get winnowed down as front-runners start to show themselves.”

Finding viable storage solutions will help to shape the overall course of the energy transition in the many countries striving to cut carbon emissions in the coming decades, as well as determine the costs of going renewable—a much-debated issue among experts. Some predictions imply that weaning the grid off fossil fuels will invariably save money, thanks to declining costs of solar panels and wind turbines, but those projections don’t include energy storage costs.

Other experts stress the need to do more than build out new storage, like tweaking humanity’s electricity demand. In general, “we have to be very thoughtful about how we design the grid of the future,” says materials scientist and engineer Shirley Meng of the University of Chicago.

Reinventing the battery

The fastest-growing electricity storage devices today—for grids as well as electric vehicles, phones and laptops—are lithium-ion batteries. Recent years have seen massive installations of these around the globe to help balance electricity supply and demand and, more recently, to offset daily fluctuations in solar and wind. One of the world’s largest battery grid storage facilities, in California’s Monterey County, reached its full capacity in 2023 at a site with a natural-gas-powered plant. It can now store 3,000 megawatt-hours and is capable of providing 750 megawatts—enough to power more than 600,000 homes every hour for up to four hours.

Lithium-ion batteries convert electrical energy into chemical energy by using electricity to fuel chemical reactions at two lithium-containing electrode surfaces, storing and releasing energy. Lithium became the material of choice because it stores a lot of energy relative to its weight. But the batteries have shortcomings, including their fire risk, their need for air-conditioning in hot climates, and a finite global supply of lithium.

Importantly, lithium-ion batteries aren’t suitable for long-duration storage, explains Meng. Despite monumental price declines in recent years, they remain costly due to their design and the price of mining and extracting lithium and other metals. The battery cost is above $100 per kilowatt-hour—meaning that a battery container supplying one megawatt (enough for about 800 homes) every hour for five hours would cost at least $500,000. Providing electricity for longer would quickly become economically unfeasible, Meng says. “I think four to eight hours is really a sweet spot for balancing cost and performance,” she says.

For longer durations, “we want energy storage that costs one tenth of what it does today—or maybe, if we could, one hundredth,” Hittinger says. “If you can’t make it extremely cheap, then you don’t have a product.”

One way of cutting costs is to switch to cheaper ingredients. Several companies in the US, Europe and Asia are working to commercialize sodium-ion batteries that replace lithium with sodium, which is more abundant and cheaper to extract and purify. Different battery architectures are also being developed—such as “redox flow” batteries, in which chemical reactions take place not at electrode surfaces but in two fluid-filled tanks that act as electrodes. With this kind of design, capacity can be enlarged by increasing tank size and electrolyte amount, which is much cheaper than increasing the expensive electrode material of lithium-ion batteries. Redox-flow batteries could supply electricity over days or weeks, Meng says.

US-based company Form Energy, meanwhile, just opened a factory in West Virginia to make “iron-air” batteries. These harness the energy released when iron reacts with air and water to form iron hydroxide—rust, in other words. “Recharging the battery is taking rust and unrusting it,” says William Woodford, Form’s chief technical officer.

Because iron and air are cheap, the batteries are inexpensive. The downside with both iron-air and redox-flow batteries is that they give back up to 60 percent less energy than is put into them, partly because they gradually discharge with no current applied. Meng thinks both battery types have yet to resolve these issues and prove their reliability and cost-effectiveness. But the efficiency loss of iron-air batteries could be dealt with by making them larger. And since long-duration batteries supply energy at times when solar and wind power is scarce and more costly, “there’s more tolerance for a little bit of loss,” Woodford says.

Spinning wheels and squished air

Other engineers are exploring mechanical storage methods. One device is the flywheel, which employs the same principle that causes a bike wheel to keep spinning once set into motion. Flywheel technology uses electricity to spin large steel discs, and magnetic bearing systems to reduce the friction that causes slowdowns, explains electrical engineering expert Seth Sanders of the University of California, Berkeley. “The energy can be stored for actually a very substantial amount of time,” he says.

Sanders’ company, Amber Kinetics, produces flywheels that can spin for weeks but are most cost-effective when used at least daily. When power is needed, a motor generator turns the movement energy back into electricity. As the wheels can switch quickly from charging to discharging, they’re ideal for covering rapid swings in energy availability, like at sunset or during cloudy periods.

Each flywheel can store 32 kilowatt-hours of energy, close to the daily electricity demand of an average American household. That’s small for grid applications, but the flywheels are already deployed in many communities, often to balance fluctuations in renewable energy. A municipal utility in Massachusetts, for instance, has installed 16 flywheels next to a solar plant; they supply energy for more than four hours, absorbing electricity during low-demand times and discharging during peak demand, Sanders says.

A different kind of mechanical facility stores electricity by using it to compress air, then stashes the air in caverns. “When the grid needs it, you release that air into an air turbine and it generates electricity again,” explains Jon Norman, president of the Canada-based company Hydrostor, which specializes in compressed-air storage. “It’s just a giant air battery underground.”

Such systems usually require natural caverns, but Hydrostor carves out cavities in hard rock. Compared to batteries or flywheels, these are large infrastructure projects with lengthy permitting and construction processes. But once those hurdles are passed, their capacity can be slowly scaled up by carving the caverns more deeply, at pretty low additional cost, Norman says.

In 2019, Hydrostor launched the first commercial compressed-air storage facility, in Goderich, Ontario, storing around 10 megawatt hours—enough to power some 2,100 homes for more than 5 hours. The company plans several much larger facilities in California and is building a 200-megawatt facility in the Australian town Broken Hill that can supply energy for up to eight hours to bridge shortfalls in solar and wind energy.

Storing energy as heat and gas

Around the world, there are efforts afoot to make use of excess renewable electricity by using it to heat up water or other heat-storing materials. This can then provide climate-friendly warmth for buildings or industrial processes, says Katja Esche of the German Energy Storage Association.

Heat can also be used to store energy, though that technology is still being developed. Energy storage and systems expert Zhiwei Ma of Durham University in the United Kingdom recently tested a pumped thermal energy storage system. Here, the main energy-storing process occurs when electricity is used to compress a gas, like argon, to a high pressure, heating it up; electricity is generated when the gas is allowed to expand through a turbine generator. Some experts are skeptical of such thermal storage systems, as they supply up to 60 percent less electricity than they store—but Ma is optimistic that with more research, such systems could help with daily storage needs.

For even longer-duration storage—over weeks—many experts put their bets on hydrogen gas. Hydrogen exists naturally in the atmosphere but can also be produced using electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is stored in pressurized tanks and when it reacts with oxygen in a fuel cell or turbine, this generates electricity.

Hydrogen and its derivatives are already being explored as fuel for ships, planes and industrial processes. For long-duration storage, “it looks plausible that that would be the technology of choice,” says energy expert Wolf-Peter Schill of the German Institute for Economic Research who coauthored a 2021 review on the economics of energy storage in the Annual Review of Resource Economics.

The German energy company Enertrag is building a facility that uses hydrogen in both ways. Surplus energy from the company’s 700-megawatt solar and wind plant near Berlin is used to make hydrogen gas, which is sold to various industries. In the future, about 10 percent of that hydrogen will be stashed away “as an emergency backup measure” for use during weeks without sun or wind, says mechanical engineer Tobias Bischof-Niemz, who is on Enertrag’s board.

The idea of using hydrogen for electricity storage has many critics. Similar to heat, up to two-thirds of the energy is lost during reconversion into electricity. And storing massive quantities of hydrogen over weeks isn’t cheap, although Enertrag is planning on reducing costs by storing it in natural caverns instead of the customary pressurized steel cylinders.

But Bischof-Niemz argues that these expenses don’t matter much if hydrogen is produced from cheap energy that would otherwise be wasted. And, he adds, hydrogen storage would be used only for Dunkelflauten periods. “Because you only have two or three weeks in the year that are that expensive, it works economically,” he says.

A question of cost

There are many other efforts to develop longer-duration storage methods. Cost is key for all, regardless of how much is paid for by governments or utility companies (the latter typically push such costs onto consumers). All new systems will need to prove that they’re significantly cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, says energy expert Dirk Uwe Sauer of Germany’s RWTH Aachen University. He says he has seen many technologies stall at the demonstration stage because there’s no business case for them.

Developers, for their part, argue that some systems are approaching that of lithium-ion batteries when used to store energy for eight hours or more, and that costs will come down substantially for others when they are manufactured in large volumes. Maybe many technologies could, ultimately, compete with lithium-ion batteries, but getting there, Sauer says, “is extremely difficult.”

The challenge for developers is that the market for long-duration technologies is only beginning to take shape. Many nations, such as the US, are early in their energy transition journey and still lean heavily on fossil fuels. Most regions still have fossil-fuel-powered plants to cover multiday doldrums.

Indeed, Hittinger estimates that the real economic need for long-duration storage will only emerge once solar and wind account for 80 percent of total power generation. Right now, it can often be cheaper for utilities to build gas plants—fossil fuels, still—to ensure grid reliability.

One important way to make storage technologies more economical is a carbon tax on fossil fuels, says energy systems researcher Anne Liu of Aurora Energy Research. In European countries like Switzerland, utilities are charged up to about $130 per metric ton of carbon emitted. California grid operators, meanwhile, have spurred storage development by requiring utility companies to ensure adequate energy coverage, and helping to cover the cost.

Market incentives can also help. In the Texas energy market, where electricity prices fluctuate a lot, electricity customers are saving hundreds of millions of dollars from the build-out of lithium-ion batteries, despite their costs, as they can store energy when it’s cheap and sell it for a profit when it’s scarce. “Once those power markets have incentive, then the longer-duration batteries will be more viable,” Liu says.

But even when incentives are there, the question remains of who will foot the bill for energy storage, which isn’t considered in many cost projections for transitioning the grid off fossil fuels. “I don’t think there’s been enough time spent studying how much these decarbonization pathways are going to cost,” says Gabe Murtaugh, director of markets and technology at the nonprofit Long Duration Energy Storage Council.

Without interventions, Murtaugh estimates, California customers, for instance, could eventually see a threefold increase in utility bills. “Thinking about how states and federal governments might help pay for some of this,” Murtaugh says, “is going to be really important.”

Saving costs and resources

Cost considerations are prompting experts to also think of ways to reduce the need for storage. One way to strengthen the grid is building more consistently available forms of renewable energy, such as geothermal technologies that draw energy from the Earth’s heat. Another is to connect the grid over larger regions—such as across the US or Europe—to balance local fluctuations in solar and wind. Ensuring that storage technologies are as long-lived as possible can help to save costs and resources.

So can being smarter about when we draw electricity from the grid, says Seth Mullendore, president of the Vermont-based nonprofit Clean Energy Group. What if, rather than charging electric cars when getting home from work, we charged them at midday when the Sun is blazing? What if we adjusted building heating and cooling so the bulk would happen during windy periods?

Mullendore’s nonprofit recently helped to design a program in Massachusetts where electricity customers could sign up to get paid if they responded to signals from their utilities to use less energy—for instance, by turning their air-conditioning down or delaying electric car charging. In a smart grid of the future, such tweaks could be more widespread and fully automatic, while allowing consumers to override them if needed. Governments could encourage programs by rewarding utility companies for designing grids more efficiently, Mullendore says. “It’s much less expensive to have people not use energy than it is to build more infrastructure to deliver more energy.”

It will take careful thought and a worldwide push by engineers, companies and policymakers to adapt the global grid to a solar- and wind-powered future. Tomorrow’s grids may be studded with lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries for short-term energy needs and newer varieties for longer-term storage. There may be many more flywheels, while underground caverns may be stuffed with compressed air or hydrogen to survive the dreaded Dunkelflauten. Grids may have smart, built-in ways of adjusting demand and making the very most of excess energy, rather than wasting it.

“The grid,” Meng says, “is probably the most complicated machine ever being built.”

Knowable Magazine, 2024 DOI: 10.1146/knowable-121824-2 (About DOIs.)

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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Some large, newly released studies underscore the point, although forming a clear image of workers’ sentiments is somewhat challenging.

BambooHR surveyed 1,500 full-time, salaried employees. To be sure, 72% of them said they feel positive emotions when describing their compensation. That was down from 83% in a similar 2022 survey, but still a strong indication of satisfaction.

On the other hand, the average-sized salary increase, at 3.6%, was down sharply for a second year and hovering not far above the 2.4% inflation rate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 73% of the employees said they feel they deserve an increase in pay for their current job responsibilities.

But for the second year in a row, according to BambooHR, two in five salaried workers haven’t received a pay increase in the past 12 months. Among those who did, 32% were dissatisfied with the raise, up from 23% in last year’s survey.

Half of those polled said they’re currently struggling to make ends meet because of rising costs, while 43% said they’re working more hours than ever. Three in five are paying off debt, costing them an average of 30% of their paycheck. (Interestingly, though, 27% said they wouldn’t want a raise if it meant more work.)

More than a third (37%) said there is no benefit they could receive that would make them willing to take a pay cut.

BambooHR said the survey “reveals a critical juncture in the relationship between compensation and employee satisfaction. In short, for a majority of employees, it’s all about money, money, money.”

Another study, by Checkr, a provider of background-check solutions, polled 3,000 employed Americans, 750 from each of four generational groups — baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z).

Collectively, a third of the employees said compensation was the biggest driver of workplace unhappiness in 2024. These workers were even less satisfied than the ones surveyed by BambooHR, with just 46% saying they were fairly compensated this year for the value they brought to their employer.

Among Gen Z and millennial workers, 51% and 47%, respectively, said they would find a new job if they weren’t given a raise for 2025. Sixty percent said compensation is the clear-cut, the top motivating factor today when accepting a new job. Millennials (68%) felt most strongly about that.

Indeed, more than half (55%) of the survey respondents said the thing they want most from their managers in 2025 is higher compensation, with better work-life balance next but trailing far behind at 15%.

Baby boomers and Gen X workers were the most satisfied with their compensation, with 50% and 47%, respectively, reporting satisfaction. In contrast, only 24% of Gen Z employees and 25% of millennials were satisfied.

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In 2025, AI and climate change, two of the biggest societal disruptors we're facing, will collide.

The summer of 2024 broke the record for Earth’s hottest day since data collection began, sparking widespread media coverage and public debate. This also happens to be the year that both Microsoft and Google, two of the leading big tech companies investing heavily in AI research and development, missed their climate targets. While this also made headlines and spurred indignation, AI’s environmental impacts are still far from being common knowledge.

In reality, AI’s current “bigger is better” paradigm—epitomized by tech companies’ pursuit of ever bigger, more powerful large language models that are presented as the solution to every problem—comes with very significant costs to the environment. These range from generating colossal amounts of energy to power the data centers that run tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney to the millions of gallons of freshwater that are pumped through these data centers to make sure they don’t overheat and the tons of rare earth metals needed to build the hardware they contain.

Data centers already use 2 percent of electricity globally. In countries like Ireland, that figure goes up to one-fifth of the electricity generated, which prompted the Irish government to declare an effective moratorium on new data centers until 2028. While a lot of the energy used for powering data centers is officially “carbon-neutral,” this relies on mechanisms such as renewable energy credits, which do technically offset the emissions incurred by generating this electricity, but don’t change the way in which it’s generated.

Places like Data Center Alley' in Virginia are mostly powered by nonrenewable energy sources such as natural gas, and energy providers are delaying the retirement of coal power plants to keep up with the increased demands of technologies like AI. Data centers are slurping up huge amounts of freshwater from scarce aquifers, pitting local communities against data center providers in places ranging from Arizona to Spain. In Taiwan, the government chose to allocate precious water resources to chip manufacturing facilities to stay ahead of the rising demands instead of letting local farmers use it for watering their crops amid the worst drought the country has seen in more than a century.

My latest research shows that switching from older standard AI models—trained to do a single task such as question-answering—to the new generative models can use up to 30 times more energy just for answering the exact same set of questions. The tech companies that are increasingly adding generative AI models to everything from search engines to text-processing software are also not disclosing the carbon cost of these changes—we still don't know how much energy is used during a conversation with ChatGPT or when generating an image with Google’s Gemini.

Much of the discourse from Big Tech around AI’s environmental impacts has followed two trajectories: Either it’s not really an issue (according to Bill Gates), or an energy breakthrough will come along and magically fix things (according to Sam Altman). What we really need is more transparency around AI’s environmental impacts, by way of voluntary initiatives like the AI Energy Star project that I’m leading, which would help users compare the energy efficiency of AI models to make informed decisions. I predict that in 2025, voluntary initiatives like these will start being enforced via legislation, from national governments to intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations. In 2025, with more research, public awareness, and regulation, we will finally start to grasp AI’s environmental footprint and take the necessary actions to reduce it.

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Editors of the environmental chemistry journal Chemosphere have posted an eye-catching correction to a study reporting toxic flame retardants from electronics wind up in some household products made of black plastic, including kitchen utensils. The study sparked a flurry of media reports a few weeks ago that urgently implored people to ditch their kitchen spatulas and spoons. Wirecutter even offered a buying guide for what to replace them with.

The correction, posted Sunday, will likely take some heat off the beleaguered utensils. The authors made a math error that put the estimated risk from kitchen utensils off by an order of magnitude.

Specifically, the authors estimated that if a kitchen utensil contained middling levels of a key toxic flame retardant (BDE-209), the utensil would transfer 34,700 nanograms of the contaminant a day based on regular use while cooking and serving hot food. The authors then compared that estimate to a reference level of BDE-209 considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA's safe level is 7,000 ng—per kilogram of body weight—per day, and the authors used 60 kg as the adult weight (about 132 pounds) for their estimate. So, the safe EPA limit would be 7,000 multiplied by 60, yielding 420,000 ng per day. That's 12 times more than the estimated exposure of 34,700 ng per day.

However, the authors missed a zero and reported the EPA's safe limit as 42,000 ng per day for a 60 kg adult. The error made it seem like the estimated exposure was nearly at the safe limit, even though it was actually less than a tenth of the limit.

"[W]e miscalculated the reference dose for a 60 kg adult, initially estimating it at 42,000 ng/day instead of the correct value of 420,000 ng/day," the correction reads. "As a result, we revised our statement from 'the calculated daily intake would approach the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose' to 'the calculated daily intake remains an order of magnitude lower than the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose.' We regret this error and have updated it in our manuscript."

Unchanged Conclusion

While being off by an order of magnitude seems like a significant error, the authors don't seem to think it changes anything. "This calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper," the correction reads. The corrected study still ends by saying that the flame retardants "significantly contaminate" the plastic products, which have "high exposure potential."

Ars has reached out to the lead author, Megan Liu, but has not received a response. Liu works for the environmental health advocacy group Toxic-Free Future, which led the study.

The study highlighted that flame retardants used in plastic electronics may, in some instances, be recycled into household items.

"Companies continue to use toxic flame retardants in plastic electronics, and that's resulting in unexpected and unnecessary toxic exposures,” Liu said in a press release from October. "These cancer-causing chemicals shouldn't be used to begin with, but with recycling, they are entering our environment and our homes in more ways than one. The high levels we found are concerning."

BDE-209, aka decabromodiphenyl ether or deca-BDE, was a dominant component of TV and computer housings before it was banned by the European Union in 2006 and some US states in 2007. China only began restricting BDE-209 in 2023. The flame retardant is linked to carcinogenicity, endocrine disruption, neurotoxicity, and reproductive harm.

Uncommon Contaminant

The presence of such toxic compounds in household items is important for noting the potential hazards in the plastic waste stream. However, in addition to finding levels that were an order of magnitude below safe limits, the study also suggested that the contamination is not very common.

The study examined 203 black plastic household products, including 109 kitchen utensils, 36 toys, 30 hair accessories, and 28 food serviceware products. Of those 203 products, only 20 (10 percent) had any bromine-containing compounds at levels that might indicate contamination from bromine-based flame retardants, like BDE-209. Of the 109 kitchen utensils tested, only nine (8 percent) contained concerning bromine levels.

"[A] minority of black plastic products are contaminated at levels >50 ppm [bromine]," the study states.

But that's just bromine compounds. Overall, only 14 of the 203 products contained BDE-209 specifically.

The product that contained the highest level of bromine compounds was a disposable sushi tray at 18,600 ppm. Given that heating is a significant contributor to chemical leaching, it's unclear what exposure risk the sushi tray poses. Of the 28 food serviceware products assessed in the study, the sushi tray was only one of two found to contain bromine compounds. The other was a fast food tray that was at the threshold of contamination with 51 ppm.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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The Justice Department will defer prosecution and eventually drop the case entirely if McKinsey upholds its side of the settlement. In addition to paying $650 million over five years, the firm must “improve its compliance practices to detect illegal activity and submit to oversight from the DOJ and US Department of Health and Human Services inspector general’s office,” CNN reported. McKinsey will also “enter into a ‘corporate integrity’ agreement with the [Health and Human Services] inspector general’s office,” according to CNN.

Martin Elling, a former senior partner at McKinsey, will “plead guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting documents from his laptop after he became aware of investigations into Purdue Pharma,” the AP reported.

McKinsey’s role. Court records showed how McKinsey helped drugmakers maximize sales, including by “advis[ing] Purdue’s sales team to pursue healthcare providers it knew wrote high volumes of OxyContin prescriptions and spend less time on doctors who prescribed the opioid medication the least,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The company told Purdue and Endo International, another opioid maker, “how to target the US Department of Veterans Affairs for sales of their products.” McKinsey hasn’t advised “opioid-specific businesses” since 2019, the Journal reported.

“We should have appreciated the harm opioids were causing in our society and we should not have undertaken sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma,” the firm said in a statement. “This terrible public health crisis and our past work for opioid manufacturers will always be a source of profound regret for our firm.”

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This has thereby halted efforts to increase the representation of women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ individuals in corporate governance

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the SEC should not have approved Nasdaq's policy, which was set to be the first of its kind for a U.S. securities exchange

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana: A U.S. appeals court has struck down Nasdaq's proposal to mandate diversity on the boards of companies listed on its exchange, thereby halting efforts to increase the representation of women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ individuals in corporate governance.

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should not have approved Nasdaq's policy, which was set to be the first of its kind for a U.S. securities exchange.

The policy, approved by the SEC over three years ago, required nearly 3,000 companies listed on the Nasdaq to have at least one woman on their board of directors and one individual from a racial minority or who identifies as LGBTQ. It also called for companies to disclose board demographic data.

In its decision, the court stated that Nasdaq's requirements were not legally enforceable.

"It is not unethical for a company to decline to disclose information about the racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ characteristics of its directors," the ruling said. "We are not aware of any established rule or custom of the securities trade that saddles companies with an obligation to explain why their boards do not meet Nasdaq's preferred diversity criteria."

Nasdaq expressed disappointment with the ruling but indicated it would not pursue further legal action.

"We maintain that the rule simplified and standardized disclosure requirements to the benefit of both corporates and investors," Nasdaq said in a statement.

"That said, we respect the Court's decision and do not intend to seek further review."

The SEC, which initially approved the policy, said it was reviewing the ruling and would determine its next steps accordingly.

The decision comes as companies across the U.S. reassess their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives amid growing political and legal challenges. In recent months, several major corporations have scaled back DEI programs following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions and increased scrutiny from conservative groups.

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Normally, antibodies are protective proteins produced by our immune systems to fight bacteria or viruses. Their strength comes from their specificity—when you get ill, B cells in your immune system undergo an exquisitely precise process of accelerated evolution, rapidly optimizing antibodies that bind precisely to whatever is making you unwell, without sticking to any of your body’s own cells. The antibodies can gum up the workings of a marauding germ or mark it for destruction by other parts of the immune system, making antibodies a critical defense against disease in our immune arsenal.

This precise targeting ability also means they’re an attractive tool for use in biology or medicine: You could use them to target anything from an infection to cancer. Having identified a particular protein or process that goes wrong in a disease, much of the time and work spent developing a drug is actually finding medicines that hit the process you identified, while affecting as little else as possible. This should provide for the maximum treatment effect, with the minimum of side-effects. So, since our immune systems have already worked out how to do this, scientists have speculated about putting antibodies to use in clinical applications.

The first antibody approved for medical use was muromonab-CD3 in 1986, designed (ironically) to suppress the immune system and prevent organ rejection in transplant patients. There are now hundreds of antibodies in use for everything from cancer treatment to the surprisingly everyday—pregnancy tests and rapid Covid tests, for instance, rely on antibodies.

Today the latest wave of antibody applications are going after a bigger prize: the aging process itself. That’s because the biology of aging makes us susceptible to a whole range of different problems, from diseases such as cancer and dementia, to frailty, incontinence, and gray hair. Slowing down this process could keep us all healthier for longer—and parts of it are in the antibodies’ sights.

In 2021, a research group used antibodies to guide a deadly drug to aged, “senescent” cells, whose removal has been shown to make mice live longer and healthier lives. Another paper in 2023 used subtly different drug-bearing antibodies to rejuvenate the skin of old mice. An antibody targeting a type of age-related protein modification for cleanup made genetically modified mice live longer. And, in March 2024, another group reported that antibodies targeting defective bone marrow cells improved response to a vaccine against the (very poorly named) Friend virus in late-middle-aged mice. It will be a beautiful symmetry that the very molecules our bodies use to fight disease could be repurposed to improve this ability in old age. We also know that these elderly bone marrow cells can increase the risk of blood cancers and heart disease, so further testing could unearth wider-ranging benefits.

These are all fascinating proofs of principle, and better skin and immunity with age would be well worth having, but can antibodies slow aging and make mice, or humans, actually live longer? In July 2024, scientists showed that antibodies targeting a protein called IL-11 could reduce inflammation in mice and extend their lifespans by 25 percent—up there with the best anti-aging drugs we know of, such as rapamycin. Even better, anti-IL-11 antibodies are already in human trials, with (very) preliminary results indicating that they’re safe.

Greg Winter, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2018 for work on isolating and mass-producing specific antibodies, told a conference in 2020: “I’m old now, and I have to take various blood pressure pills. I wish I could just have an injection once every month or once every six months and just forget about all those combinations of different pills.” The year his dream comes true could be 2025.

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An Alabama woman has become the third person to receive a kidney transplant from a genetically engineered pig, her doctors announced Tuesday.

Towana Looney, 53, is off of kidney dialysis after undergoing the procedure at NYU Langone Health on November 25. She was discharged from the hospital on December 6, and her doctors say she is in good health. Her surgery is the latest in a series of similar procedures known as xenotransplantation, the practice of transplanting organs from one species to another.

More than 103,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for a transplant, with the vast majority of those needing a kidney. With human donor organs in short supply, some researchers are exploring the use of pigs as a potential source.

“I am overjoyed,” Looney said at a press conference Tuesday morning. “I’m blessed to have received this gift, a second chance at life.”

Earlier this year, surgeons carried out pig kidney transplants in living people for the first time. In March, 62-year-old Richard Slayman made history when he received a kidney from a genetically engineered pig at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was discharged from the hospital and was initially doing well, but he died nearly two months after the transplant. In a statement released by the hospital, his medical team said there was no indication that his death was the result of his transplant. In November, Slayman’s surgeon said his death was caused by an “unexpected cardiac event,” and there was no sign that his body had rejected the organ.

In the second attempt, this April, 54-year-old Lisa Pisano received both a kidney and thymus gland from a genetically engineered pig after getting a mechanical heart pump implanted days prior. The addition of the thymus, a small organ in the upper chest that’s part of the immune system, was meant to help prevent rejection. That surgery was also performed at NYU Langone. But 47 days after the transplant, her doctors elected to remove the pig kidney following several episodes of the heart pump not being able to pass enough blood through her new kidney. The kidney needs steady blood flow so that it can produce urine and filter waste. Without it, Pisano’s kidney was failing. She died in July.

Two individuals previously received heart transplants from genetically engineered pigs, the first in January 2022 and a second in September 2023, both at the University of Maryland. Those patients died less than two months after their surgeries and were too sick to leave the hospital.

The latest pig organ recipient, Looney, donated a kidney to her mother in 1999 but developed kidney failure several years later after a pregnancy complication caused damaging high blood pressure. Kidney failure in living donors is extremely rare, with less than 1 percent of people developing it. Those who do end up needing a transplant are given higher priority on the waiting list.

By December 2016, Looney needed dialysis treatment, in which a patient’s blood vessels are hooked up to a machine that does the job of the kidneys—removing excess fluid and waste from the bloodstream. She was placed on the national waiting list for a kidney transplant in early 2017 but couldn’t find a suitable match. Because of exposure to other people’s tissue, through pregnancies and blood transfusions, she became sensitized to nearly every tissue type in the population. High levels of harmful antibodies in her blood meant rejection was likely. She remained on the transplant waiting list for nearly eight years while her blood vessels became weak and damaged from the dialysis.

Slayman, the first pig kidney recipient, was eligible for a human kidney but would have likely waited six to seven years to get one because of his rare blood type. Pisano and the two pig heart patients didn’t qualify for a human organ because of other medical issues.

Looney was running out of options. Her health was declining, and there was little chance of finding a matched human kidney after years of searching. Her doctor, Jayme Locke, then an abdominal transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, had previously led short-term pig kidney transplants in brain-dead recipients and suggested the experimental procedure as a last resort. Looney’s transplant was approved through the US Food and Drug Administration’s compassionate use program, when an unapproved medical treatment is the only option for a patient with a serious or life-threatening condition.

Locke partnered with Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, to carry out Looney’s seven-hour surgery. Locke is now director of the Division of Transplantation at the US Health Resources and Services Administration, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Locke said Tuesday that Looney will be spending the next three months in New York City so that she can be monitored closely before returning to her home in Alabama.

Looney received a kidney from a pig with 10 genetic edits developed by Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics. Three pig genes known to spark an immune response, as well as a porcine growth hormone receptor, were removed. Six human genes were added to reduce the likelihood of rejection.

Because of the genetic differences between pigs and people, researchers have turned to gene editing to make pig organs more compatible with the human body. But there’s debate in the xenotransplantation field over how many genetic edits are necessary for a pig organ to work long term in a person. For Pisano’s procedure earlier this year, the NYU team used a donor pig with a single genetic edit—a gene knockout to eliminate alpha-gal sugar on the surface of the pigs’ cells. This sugar triggers rapid rejection of pig organs in humans. That donor pig also came from Revivicor.

The Massachusetts team took a different approach with Slayman’s surgery, opting for a pig with 69 genetic edits from biotech company eGenesis. “These distinctions highlight the ongoing evolution of xenotransplantation strategies and underscore the potential benefits of increasing compatibility through more extensive genetic modifications,” says Leonardo Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Mass General.

Pig organ recipients still need to take immunosuppressant drugs so that the new organs are not rejected by their immune systems.

While researchers hope pigs will one day provide a source of readily available organs for people who need them, they will first have to demonstrate that they are safe and can function in the human body for longer than a few months. With this latest transplant, scientists are a step closer to carrying out formal clinical trials involving more patients in hopes of answering those questions.

Montgomery is optimistic that Looney will fare better than Pisano because she is in “much better shape physically” and was not at high risk of dying from her kidney disease when she underwent the procedure.

“Our challenge is to learn how to support these kidneys for longer periods of time so that they become a reasonable alternative for this scarce, highly rationed supply of human organs,” Montgomery said.

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The first batch of internet satellites for China's Guowang megaconstellation launched Monday on the country's heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket.

The satellites are the first of up to 13,000 spacecraft a consortium of Chinese companies plans to build and launch over the next decade. The Guowang fleet will beam low-latency, high-speed internet signals in an architecture similar to SpaceX's Starlink network, although Chinese officials haven't laid out any specifics, such as target markets, service specifications, or user terminals.

The Long March 5B rocket took off from Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, at 5:00 am EST (10:00 UTC) Monday. Ten liquid-fueled engines powered the rocket off the ground with 2.4 million pounds of thrust, steering the Long March 5B on a course south from Wenchang into a polar orbit.

After shedding four strap-on boosters and the core stage, the rocket's Yuanzheng 2 upper stage ignited to maneuver into the targeted orbit for payload separation. The mission delivered 10 Guowang satellites into an orbit roughly 680 miles (1,100 kilometers) above the Earth, with an inclination of 86.5 degrees to the equator, according to publicly-available US military tracking data.

The Long March 5B's large core stage, which entered orbit on the rocket's previous missions and triggered concerns about falling space debris, fell into a predetermined location in the sea downrange from the launch site. The difference for this mission was the addition of the Yuanzheng 2 upper stage, which gave the rocket's payloads the extra oomph they needed to reach orbit.

What we (don't) know

China has published scant details about the design of the Guowang satellites, other than their intended use as broadband internet relay stations. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said in a statement that the Guowang satellites were developed by its subsidiary, the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). Both organizations are owned by China's central government.

The existence of plans for the Guowang megaconstellation have been publicly known since 2020, when China submitted spectrum allocation filings to the International Telecommunication Union. In these filings, China outlined a fleet of 12,992 satellites in low-Earth orbit, operating at a range of altitudes and orbital inclinations.

Guowang, or "national network," is managed by a secretive company called China SatNet, established by the Chinese government in 2021. SatNet has released little information since its formation, and the group doesn't have a website.

Marc Julienne, director of the Center for Asian Studies at the French Institute of International Relations, wrote last year that SatNet's inconspicuous presence in the public sphere "seems rather inconsistent with the ambition of the project" if it is to offer an alternative to Starlink in consumer markets, particularly in countries where Starlink is banned—like China and Russia.

"The discretion surrounding China SatNet's activities could be explained by the company’s lack of maturity and organization, and perhaps by certain uncertainties regarding its technical, technological and strategic directions," Julienne wrote.

There is, perhaps, another explanation. Earlier this year, China launched the first group of satellites for another megaconstellation—called Qianfan or Thousand Sails—to provide internet connectivity from space. The Qianfan constellation is managed by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), a company backed by Shanghai's municipal government.

Unlike Guowang, Chinese officials have released some basic information about the Qianfan network, which will initially consist of around 1,300 satellites, but could eventually grow to some 14,000 satellites. For example, organizations involved in the Qianfan program have publicly stated how many satellites they plan to build per year, and they revealed the spacecraft have a flat-panel design, allowing them to stack on top of one another for launch, just like SpaceX's Starlink satellites.

With Starlink, SpaceX is not only serving the consumer broadband market, but the service is proving useful in military operations in Ukraine. Starlink connectivity has aided Ukrainian military forces following the Russian invasion in 2022, and Chinese officials recognize the military utility of SpaceX's network.

The US military has tested Starlink services in austere conditions to evaluate the network's ability to support military operations, and the National Reconnaissance Office is using the mass-produced Starlink spacecraft platform to create its own fleet of low-altitude spy satellites.

"Any nation equipped with these systems will thus have a decisive advantage over others that are not," Julienne wrote.

While there are open questions about how China will use its satellite megaconstellations, their deployment will require a significant increase in the country's launch capacity, driving the development of new commercial rockets, including reusable boosters, to lower costs and increase their flight rate.

The Long March 5B rocket, developed by China's incumbent state-owned launch company, is not the most cost-effective of these options. But the Long March 5B has the lift capacity to haul more Guowang satellites to orbit than any other operational Chinese rocket. It's likely future satellites for Chinese megaconstellations will fly on multiple types of rockets as more launchers come online.

China has until 2032 to launch half of the Guowang constellation—6,496 satellites—according to radio spectrum regulations promulgated by the International Telecommunication Union.

A watchful eye

The military implications for Chinese networks like Guowang and Qianfan aren't lost on US Space Force leaders. Large megaconstellations like Starlink, or the future Amazon Kuiper and Guowang systems, have the advantage of being difficult to disable or destroy, compared to a single large communications satellite providing wide-area coverage.

"This just is a continuation of what China's been doing now for about 20 years," said Gen. Stephen Whiting, the top general at US Space Command. "In addition to all the counter-space weapons they've built, they are building capability to enable their army, their navy, their air force, their marines, to be more lethal, more precise, and more far-ranging."

"We've seen hundreds of (surveillance) satellites, and now it seems like they're launching this proliferated, low-Earth orbit constellation to give them global communications to enable their operations on a broader scale," Whiting said. "Certainly, it's something we'll be watching to see how that develops. But it's just a continuation of the breathtaking speed at which they've been they've been moving in space."

Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of US Space Forces in the Indo-Pacific region, said he is most interested in seeing how China integrates constellations like Guowang into their military operations. China is conducting increasingly "elaborate and complex" military exercises, Mastalir said, and US commanders will assess if, and how, China incorporates the global communications capabilities of Guowang into future exercises.

"Seeing how they integrate space across that exercise regime is something that we'll be watching very closely in terms of assessing the relative success of their megaconstellation," Mastalir said.

In response to questions from Ars at last week's Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida, Whiting said Space Command will track the deployment of the Chinese satellite constellations, just as they do other fleets, like Starlink. The difference is SpaceX, with more than 6,800 Starlink satellites currently in orbit, sends information on its launch schedules and spacecraft positions to Space Command, essentially giving the military a heads-up to know where to look as they track orbital traffic. China does not do the same for its satellites.

Space Command currently monitors around 47,000 objects in orbit, and screens them for risks of collisions. If there's going to be a close encounter between two active satellites, Space Command informs their operators.

"When we see that there's going to be what we call aconjunction, we send that information off, and we continue to do that with China," Whiting said. "We do not get regular communications back. There have been a couple times over the last year where they reached out through various ways to give us heads-up about some things going on in space, like a satellite re-entering, but that is not a routine, standardized way of communication."

Whiting said he's not worried about the safety of so many megaconstellations coexisting in low-Earth orbit, provided their operators "follow tenants of responsible behavior."

"We want to make sure that folks are doing all the right things with prediction, predictive conjunctions, and then not leaving debris in orbit, and all those kind of things," Whiting said.

But, still, Whiting said it would be helpful for Space Command to have a regular dialogue with China.

"We think there should be a way to have space safety discussions," he said.

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On the southern tip of Malaysia lies the state of Johor, renowned for its beaches and mountainous jungle. But Johor has a new boom industry: data centers to power generative AI, with Microsoft committing more than $2 billion on just such a data center. For the tech giants, electricity has become the new oil. A state-of-the-art AI data center might need 90 MW, enough to power tens of thousands of American homes. With AI applications proliferating, from chatbots to AI agents, needs are growing. One industry consortium is planning for data centers requiring 10 GW (more than a hundred times the demand of today’s largest). Securing cheap, reliable power is now as crucial to tech firms as silicon chips.

In 2025, the big tech firms will scour the globe for kilowatts, megawatts and gigawatts. In board meetings, discussions about server capacity are increasingly overshadowed by discussions on grid capacity and energy futures. Nations blessed with abundant low-cost energy are leveraging this newfound advantage and crafting policies to attract AI investments with the zeal once reserved for manufacturing.

Regions that have historically won the data center ark, such as Ireland and Singapore, have found their capacity strained to bursting before the GenAI boom. This has created opportunities for unlikely competitors, not just Malaysia but Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Chile. Latency is less important than keeping the electrons flowing.

Low-cost energy has long been a priority for firms: Just as companies in the past co-located their refineries near ports, their factories near coal mines, AI firms are trying to position themselves near where they can get electricity consistently—and at great prices.

Location ultimately does matter. Half of the energy costs in a data center typically comes from running cooling systems and air conditioning to keep the servers from overheating. Cooler climates or coastal areas will start to become more in demand as potential sites.

This draw to deliver AI is so powerful that big tech firms are buying dirty power to meet it, putting their own and local economies' decarbonization targets at risk.

Countries hotly compete for the business of data centers. Tax breaks are popular: more than half of US states—including Arizona, New York, and Texas—offer operators some form of tax break, and even preferential rates for buying land and committing to access to power. In Malaysia, Green Lane Pathway initiatives expedite construction approvals, cutting through red tape to fast-track construction—and power lines—for data centers. Concessions of data regulations to allow information to flow freely.

This interplay between watts and algorithms is redrawing the map of global influence. It's a shift as profound as the oil boom of the 20th century, but far less visible. No pipelines are being built, no tankers are changing course. Instead, nondescript warehouses humming with servers are becoming the new geopolitical hotspots.

The extent to which this shifts global influence is unclear. The real research on AI—where the breakthroughs happen—will remain in the research hubs of San Francisco, London, Beijing, and Paris. The data centers that take these algorithms to market, however, will be a low-margin, pile-it-high and sell-it-cheap business.

This electro-diplomacy will be a key pillar for the next couple of years. Scaling AI is less about algorithms and more about electronics.

However, nations capitalizing on this moment should be wary; their advantage may prove fleeting as dominant economies figure out how to bring cheap, clean power online in sufficient quantities to incentivize domestic hosting.

For today's energy-rich providers of AI data centers, the challenge lies in transforming this fleeting advantage into a sustainable edge. They will need to go beyond attracting data centers to building their own enduring innovation ecosystems that can thrive long after the “electricity rush” subsides.

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Medical accounts of red wine headaches go back to Roman times, but the experience is likely as old as winemaking—something like 10,000 years. As chemists specializing in winemaking, we wanted to try to figure out the source of these headaches.

Many components of red wine have been accused of causing this misery—sulfites, biogenic amines, and tannins are the most popular. Our research suggests the most likely culprit is one you may not have considered.

The common suspects

Sulfites have been a popular scapegoat for all sorts of ailments since it became mandatory in the 1990s to label them on wines in the US. However, not much evidence links sulfites directly to headaches, and other foods contain comparable levels to wine without the same effects. White wines also contain the same amount of sulfites as red wines.

Your body also produces about 700 milligrams of sulfites daily as you metabolize the protein in your food and excrete it as sulfate. To do so, it has compounds called sulfite oxidases that create sulfate from sulfite—the 20 milligrams in a glass of wine are unlikely to overwhelm your sulfite oxidases.

Some people point the finger for red wine headaches at biogenic amines. These are nitrogenous substances found in many fermented or spoiled foods, and can cause headaches, but the amount in wine is far too low to be a problem.

Tannin is a good guess, since white wines contain only tiny amounts, while red wines contain substantial amounts. Tannin is a type of phenolic compound—it’s found in all plants and usually plays a role in preventing disease, resisting predation, or encouraging seed dispersal by animals.

But there are many other phenolic compounds in grapes’ skin and seeds besides tannin that make it into red wines from the winemaking process, and are not present in white, so any of them could be a candidate culprit.

Tannin is also found in many other common products, such as tea and chocolate, which generally don’t cause headaches. And phenolics are good antioxidants—they’re unlikely to trigger the inflammation that would cause a headache.

A red wine flush

Some people get red, flushed skin when drinking alcohol, and the flushing is accompanied by a headache. This headache is caused by a lagging metabolic step as the body breaks down the booze.

The metabolism of alcohol happens in two steps. First, ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde. Then, the enzyme ALDH converts the acetaldehyde to acetate, a common and innocuous substance. This second step is slower for people who get flushed skin, since their ALDH is not very efficient. They accumulate acetaldehyde, which is a somewhat toxic compound also linked to hangovers.

Leftover acetaldehyde not converted into acetate can cause hangover symptoms.

Credit: Compound Chemistry (CC BY-NC-ND)

So, if something unique in red wine could inhibit ALDH, slowing down that second metabolic step, would that lead to higher levels of acetaldehyde and a headache? To try to answer this question, we scanned the list of phenolics abundant in red wine.

We spied a paper showing that quercetin is a good inhibitor of ALDH. Quercetin is a phenolic compound found in the skins of grapes, so it’s much more abundant in red than white wines because red grape skins are left in longer during the fermentation process than white grape skins.

Putting enzymes to the test

Testing ALDH was the next step. We set up an inhibition assay in test tubes. In the assay, we measured how fast the enzyme ALDH breaks down acetaldehyde. Then, we added the suspected inhibitors—quercetin, as well as some other phenolics we wanted to test—to see whether they slowed the process.

The chemical structure of quercetin, which may cause red wine headaches.

Credit: Johannes Botne (CC BY-SA)

These tests confirmed that quercetin was a good inhibitor. Some other phenolics had varying effects, but quercetin glucuronide was the winner. When your body absorbs quercetin from food or wine, most is converted to glucuronide by the liver in order to quickly eliminate it from the body.

Our enzyme tests suggest that quercetin glucuronide disrupts your body’s metabolism of alcohol. This disruption means extra acetaldehyde circulates, causing inflammation and headaches. This discovery points to what’s known as a secondary, or synergistic, effect.

These secondary effects are much harder to identify because two factors must both be in play for the outcome to arise. In this case, other foods that contain quercetin are not associated with headaches, so you might not initially consider quercetin as the cause of the red wine problem.

The next step could be to give human subjects two red wines that are low and high in quercetin and ask whether either wine causes a headache. If the high-quercetin wine induces more headaches, we’d know we’re on the right track.

So, if quercetin causes headaches, are there red wines without it? Unfortunately, the data available on specific wines is far too limited to provide any helpful advice. However, grapes exposed to the Sun do produce more quercetin, and many inexpensive red wines are made from grapes that see less sunlight.

If you’re willing to take a chance, look for an inexpensive, lighter red wine.

Andrew Waterhouse is professor of enology, University of California, Davis, and Apramita Devi is a postdoctoral researcher in food science and technology, University of California, Davis.

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

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience. This rule acted like the key to a lock. If you had the key, you could unscramble the message; otherwise, you’d need to pick the lock. Some locks are so effective they can never be picked, even with infinite time and resources. But even those schemes suffer from the same Achilles’ heel that plagues all such encryption systems: How do you get that key into the right hands while keeping it out of the wrong ones?

The counterintuitive solution, known as public key cryptography, relies not on keeping a key secret but rather on making it widely available. The trick is to also use a second key that you never share with anyone, even the person you’re communicating with. It’s only by using this combination of two keys—one public, one private—that someone can both scramble and unscramble a message.

To understand how this works, it’s easier to think of the “keys” not as objects that fit into a lock, but as two complementary ingredients in an invisible ink. The first ingredient makes messages disappear, and the second makes them reappear. If a spy named Boris wants to send his counterpart Natasha a secret message, he writes a message and then uses the first ingredient to render it invisible on the page. (This is easy for him to do: Natasha has published an easy and well-known formula for disappearing ink.) When Natasha receives the paper in the mail, she applies the second ingredient that makes Boris’ message reappear.

In this scheme, anyone can make messages invisible, but only Natasha can make them visible again. And because she never shares the formula for the second ingredient with anyone—not even Boris—she can be sure the message hasn’t been deciphered along the way. When Boris wants to receive secret messages, he simply adopts the same procedure: He publishes an easy recipe for making messages disappear (that Natasha or anyone else can use), while keeping another one just for himself that makes them reappear.

In public key cryptography, the “public” and “private” keys work just like the first and second ingredients in this special invisible ink: One encrypts messages, the other decrypts them. But instead of using chemicals, public key cryptography uses mathematical puzzles called trapdoor functions. These functions are easy to compute in one direction and extremely difficult to reverse. But they also contain “trapdoors,” pieces of information that, if known, make the functions trivially easy to compute in both directions.

One common trapdoor function involves multiplying two large prime numbers, an easy operation to perform. But reversing it—that is, starting with the product and finding each prime factor—is computationally impractical. To make a public key, start with two large prime numbers. These are your trapdoors. Multiply the two numbers together, then perform some additional mathematical operations. This public key can now encrypt messages. To decrypt them, you’ll need the corresponding private key, which contains the prime factors—the necessary trapdoors. With those numbers, it’s easy to decrypt the message. Keep those two prime factors secret, and the message will stay secret.

The foundations for public key cryptography were first discovered between 1970 and 1974 by British mathematicians working for the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters, the same government agency that cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. Their work (which remained classified until 1997) was shared with the US National Security Agency, but due to limited and expensive computing capacity, neither government implemented the system. In 1976, the American researchers Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman discovered the first publicly known public key cryptography scheme, influenced by the cryptographer Ralph Merkle. Just a year later, the RSA algorithm, named after its inventors Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, established a practical way to use public key cryptography. It’s still in wide use today, a fundamental building block of the modern internet, enabling everything from shopping to web-based email.

This two-key system also makes possible “digital signatures”—mathematical proof that a message was generated by the holder of a private key. This works because private keys can be used to encrypt messages too, not just decrypt them. Of course, this is useless for keeping messages secret: If you used your private key to scramble a message, anyone could just use the corresponding public key to unscramble it. But it does prove that you, and only you, created the message, since as the holder of the private key, only you could have encrypted the message. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin couldn’t exist without this idea.

If two cryptographic keys instead of one is so effective, why did it take millennia to discover? According to Russell Impagliazzo, a computer scientist and cryptography theorist at the University of California, San Diego, the concept of a trapdoor function just wasn’t useful enough before the invention of computers.

“It’s a matter of technology,” he said. “A person in the 19th century thought of encryption as being between individual agents with military intelligence in the field—literally, in a field with guns firing. So if your first step is ‘pick two 100-digit prime numbers to multiply together,’ the battle is going to be over before you do that.” If you reduce the problem to something a human can do quickly, it’s not going to be terribly secure.

But while computers helped make public key cryptography possible, they’ve also created cracks in its armor. In 1994, the mathematician Peter Shor discovered a way for quantum computers to efficiently reverse the trapdoor functions that underlie most current public key cryptography systems, including prime factorization. This algorithm, if implemented, would act like an all-purpose “reappearing ink,” capable of making any invisible message reappear. Goodbye, internet security.

Luckily, quantum computers themselves are “still in the ENIAC phase,” Impagliazzo said, referring to the room-size machine built for the US Army in 1945. By the time quantum computers become sophisticated enough to pose a real threat to public key cryptography, its original trapdoor functions could be replaced by “quantum-safe” versions called lattice problems. Of course, this new computational “ink” may also become susceptible to attack in the future. But that’s the great thing about public key cryptography: As long as we can find new functions to use, we can just keep reinventing the wheel. Or in this case, the key.

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

The number of people who read for fun appears to be steadily dropping. Fifty percent of UK adults say they don’t read regularly (up from 42 percent in 2015) and almost one in four young people aged 16 to 24 say they’ve never been readers, according to research by The Reading Agency.

But what are the implications? Will people’s preference for video over text affect our brains or our evolution as a species? What kind of brain structure do good readers actually have? My new study, published in NeuroImage, has found out.

I analyzed open source data from more than 1,000 participants to discover that readers of varying abilities had distinct traits in brain anatomy.

The structure of two regions in the left hemisphere, which are crucial for language, were different in people who were good at reading.

One was the anterior part of the temporal lobe. The left temporal pole helps associate and categorize different types of meaningful information. To assemble the meaning of a word such as leg, this brain region associates the visual, sensory and motor information conveying how legs look, feel and move.

The other was Heschl’s gyrus, a fold on the upper temporal lobe which hosts the auditory cortex (the cortex is the outermost layer of the brain). Better reading ability was linked to a larger anterior part of the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere compared to the right. It makes sense that having a larger brain area dedicated to meaning makes it easier to understand words and, therefore, to read.

What might seem less intuitive is that the auditory cortex would be related to reading. Isn’t reading mainly a visual skill? Not only. To pair letters with speech sounds, we first need to be aware of the sounds of the language. This phonological awareness is a well-established precursor to children’s reading development.

A thinner left Heschl’s gyrus has previously been related to dyslexia, which involves severe reading difficulties. My research shows that this variation in cortical thickness does not draw a simple dividing line between people with or without dyslexia. Instead, it spans the larger population, in which a thicker auditory cortex correlates with more adept reading.

Why Size Matters

Is thicker always better? When it comes to cortical structure, no, not necessarily. We know the auditory cortex has more myelin in the left hemisphere of most people. Myelin is a fatty substance that acts as an insulator for nerve fibers. It increases neural communication speed and can also insulate columns of brain cells from each other. Neural columns are believed to function as small processing units.

Their increased isolation and rapid communication in the left hemisphere can be thought to enable the fast, categorical processing necessary for language. We need to know if a speaker uses the category d or t when saying dear or tear rather than detecting the exact point where the vocal folds start vibrating.

According to the “balloon model” of cortical growth, the larger amount of myelin squeezes out left-hemispheric cortical areas, making them flatter but more extended. So while the left auditory cortex may be thicker in good readers, it is still thinner (but much more extended) than the corresponding right cortex.

This hypothesis was corroborated in the recent research. The left hemisphere had generally larger but thinner cortical areas with a higher degree of myelin.

So is thinner better, then? Again, the answer is no, not necessarily. Complex abilities that require integrating information tend to benefit from a thicker cortex. The anterior temporal lobe with its complex way of integrating information is indeed the thickest structure of all cortical areas. An underlying mechanism might be the existence of more overlapping, interacting neurons which process information more holistically.

Phonology is a highly complex skill, where different sound and motor features are integrated into speech sounds. It appears to correlate with a thicker cortex in an area near the left Heschl’s gyrus. While it is unclear to what extent phonology is processed in Heschl’s gyrus, the fact that phoneticians often have multiple left Heschl’s gyri suggests it is linked to speech sounds.

Clearly, brain structure can tell us a lot about reading skills. Importantly, though, the brain is malleable—it changes when we learn a new skill or practice an already acquired one.

For instance, young adults who studied language intensively increased their cortical thickness in language areas. Similarly, reading is likely to shape the structure of the left Heschl’s gyrus and temporal pole. So, if you want to keep your Heschl’s thick and thriving, pick up a good book and start reading.

Finally, it’s worth considering what might happen to us as a species if skills like reading become less prioritized. Our capacity to interpret the world around us and understand the minds of others would surely diminish. In other words, that cozy moment with a book in your armchair isn’t just personal—it’s a service to humanity.

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