If you look at a Neanderthal skull and a Homo sapiens skull, they’re visibly different: Neanderthal skulls are lower and longer, whereas ours tend to be rounder. However, those differences probably don’t say much about the brains within them, according to a recent study, which compared MRI scans of modern people’s brains with casts of the inside of Neanderthal skulls.

The results suggest that there’s more variation in brain size among modern people than between Neanderthals and Pleistocene Homo sapiens. And because brain size is actually a terrible way to predict cognitive capability, Neanderthals could have been a lot more like us than some previous studies have claimed, which definitely fits what the archaeological record tells us about how they lived. It would also mean that our species probably didn’t out-compete the Neanderthals by being smarter or more adaptable.

Neanderthal brains fit within the modern human range

Years after you die, the inner vault of your skull will hold the shape of your brain; if future archaeologists make a cast of that inner space, they’ll get a neat resin model of the outer contours of your brain, called an endocast. (Sediment that filled the skull of an Australopithecus africanus child who died 2.8 million years ago did this naturally, creating an endocast that’s half rocky brain-sculpture and half sparkling crystal.) For years, researchers have studied endocasts of Neanderthal skulls, trying to piece together how their brains were different or similar to ours. And that has been a matter of some debate.

A 2018 study compared endocasts from four Neanderthals and four early members of our species, measuring the volumes of 13 major brain regions. That study’s authors suggested that, despite having larger total cranial capacity (more room in their skulls), Neanderthals, on average, had smaller cerebellums than Homo sapiens. (A small structure at the back of the brain, the cerebellum plays a role in motor control, emotional regulation, and attention, among other things.) And while that’s technically true—based on, admittedly, a very small sample size—it wasn’t the whole story.

“The inferred differences were not put into the context of modern human populational variation in brain anatomy,” wrote Indiana University cognitive scientist P. Thomas Schoenemann and his colleagues. In that same paper, they decided to take a stab at doing so. Schoenemann and his colleagues performed the same size comparison using MRI scans of 400 modern people’s brains: 200 US residents of European descent and 200 ethnic Han Chinese people who had volunteered to be scanned as part of the Human Connectome project.

It turns out that, when it comes to brain size, the differences between our species and Neanderthals are on par with the differences within our species. For nine of the 13 regions measured, Schoenemann and his colleagues found bigger differences in volume between some modern people than the earlier study found between Neanderthals and Pleistocene Homo sapiens. “Our analysis shows that Neanderthal differences in brain and cognition would fit comfortably within the range of differences seen among modern humans,” wrote Schoenemann and his colleagues.

In other words, we’re a diverse species, and the size and shape of Neanderthal brains fit into the range of that diversity (which arguably lends some support to the paleoanthropologist who argues that maybe we shouldn’t think of Neanderthals and Denisovans as separate species at all). And all of those size differences are too small to have any effect on cognitive ability, so Neanderthals could easily be on par with our species there, too.

When does size matter?

Conventional wisdom gives the credit for humans’ evolutionary success to our intelligence and our “big brains,” but what does that even mean?

Decades’ worth of research have found that brain volume—whether we’re talking about the whole brain or the size of a particular region—has little to no connection to how well a person performs on cognitive tests compared to other people. Or as Schoenemann and his colleagues put it, “cognitive implications of neuroanatomical size differences are very weak in modern humans, when found at all.” In other words, when it comes to intelligence, brain size doesn’t matter.

(When we talk about “intelligence,” we’re describing something complex and, frankly, sort of nebulous; it’s impossible to really quantify, but that hasn’t stopped generations of scientists from trying. Researchers who study cognition break it down into specific areas: attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, speech production and speech comprehension, working memory, and episodic memory. Some of those abilities are associated with particular sections of the brain, but those relationships are often complicated.)

So, when looking at brain size and intelligence, the differences among human brains are relatively small compared to the differences between a human brain and any other great ape brain. For example, our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have brains that average just 400 cubic centimeters; the average adult human brain takes up about 1,350 cubic centimeters. (And there’s a wide range, from about 1,100 to 1,500 cubic centimeters.)

So total brain volume is “empirically the best predictor of behavioral and cognitive abilities among primates,” but only if you’re comparing different primate species. Within species, the differences aren’t pronounced enough to matter.

If you’re comparing, say, crows to dolphins, you’ve got to factor in the size of the brain relative to the size of the whole animal, which scientists call the encephalization quotient; according to Schoenemann and his colleagues, that’s less relevant for primates, where it’s all about size.

With that in mind, a group of early hominins called Australopithecus afarensis, who lived about 3.2 million years ago, had about 500-cubic-centimeter brains. That’s a big enough difference that we can make some guesses that they were cognitively more like chimpanzees than like us. On the other hand, the average group of Neanderthals had a brain capacity that’s consistent with them scoring about the same on cognitive tests as their Homo sapiens neighbors.

What about the difference in shape, with Neanderthals having longer, lower skulls and Homo sapiens having higher, more rounded ones? An earlier study suggested that it has more to do with the shape of our faces than the structure of our brains.

What we already knew

Schoenemann and his colleagues’ conclusion isn’t terribly surprising given our other source of information about Neanderthals’ brains: the objects they made and left behind. We know that Neanderthals were good at working memory and attention because they made complex tools that required planning, focus, and a set of skills that had to be taught and then practiced. We know they were capable of symbolic, abstract thought because they made art. We know they must have been decent at language and social skills because they met and organized themselves in large groups to hunt big game.

To some extent, we don’t really need to measure Neanderthal brain endocasts to know that they were our cognitive equals; they’ve already shown us. Today, we’re overcoming more than a century of bias against them and beginning to fully see our extinct cousins and better understand our relationship with them.

PNAS, 2026. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2426638126

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Posted Wednesday 29 April 2026 at 7:26 am AEST (my time).

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told lawmakers on Monday that SpaceX and Blue Origin, the agency’s two lunar lander contractors, say they could have their spacecraft ready for the next Artemis mission in Earth orbit in late 2027, somewhat later than NASA’s previous schedule.

This mission, Artemis III, will not fly to the Moon. Instead, NASA will launch an Orion capsule with a team of astronauts to rendezvous and potentially dock with one or both landers in Earth orbit. The details of the Artemis III flight plan remain under review, with key questions about the orbit’s altitude and the configuration of the Space Launch System rocket still unanswered.

A mission to low-Earth orbit, just a few hundred miles in altitude, may not require NASA to use up an SLS upper stage that is already built and in storage, saving the unit for the following Artemis mission to attempt a landing on the Moon. A launch into a higher orbit would require the upper stage, but it would allow NASA to perform tests in an environment more similar to the Moon. NASA is buying a new commercial upper stage, the Centaur V from United Launch Alliance, to pair with the SLS rocket after flying the last of the rocket’s existing upper stages.

Also in question is which of the landers—SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon—Artemis III will attempt to link to in space, or if NASA will try to incorporate both landers into the flight plan, assuming they are ready. Two months ago, Isaacman announced Artemis III would no longer land at the Moon’s south pole. The original Artemis III mission profile would have tried to accomplish too much. With that plan, the first time humans docked with and boarded a Starship or Blue Moon spacecraft would have been near the Moon, a quarter-million miles and several days away from Earth.

Instead, Artemis III will be a mission akin to Apollo 9, which tested the Apollo lunar lander in Earth orbit four months before Apollo 11’s historic landing at the Sea of Tranquility with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. If something goes wrong in Earth orbit, the Artemis III astronauts will be minutes or hours from home, not days.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman testifies during a House budget hearing at the Rayburn House Office

Building on April 27, 2026, in Washington, DC.

Credit: Heather Diehl/Getty Images

18 months away?

All of the ambition wrapped up in NASA’s original plan for Artemis III also meant a long multiyear gap before the next launch of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft after the nearly flawless flight of the Artemis II mission earlier this month. The agency wants to fly Artemis missions at least once per year. When NASA revealed the revised Artemis III flight plan in February, officials suggested it might launch as soon as mid-2027, followed by up to two Artemis missions to the lunar surface in 2028, before China puts a crew on the Moon and before the end of President Donald Trump’s term in office.

Now, it’s looking more like late 2027, at the earliest, for Artemis III.

“I’ve received responses from both vendors, both SpaceX and Blue Origin, to meet our needs for a late 2027 rendezvous, docking, and test of the interoperability of both landers in advance of a landing attempt in 2028,” Isaacman said Monday.

Both companies have multibillion-dollar contracts to develop and deliver human-rated landers to NASA for use on Artemis missions. Both vehicles need to be refueled in space in order to fly to the Moon. This added complexity is not required for an Earth orbit mission.

“The taxpayers are making a very big investment to both SpaceX and Blue Origin’s Human Landing System (HLS) capability,” Isaacman said in a hearing before the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee responsible for NASA’s budget. “I would also appreciate that both those companies are investing well in excess of that, as well.”

Starship and Blue Moon are each significantly larger than the Apollo lunar lander, and could eventually be refueled at the Moon for multiple trips between the lunar surface and crew and cargo freighters in orbit.

“It’s that capability that allows us not just to get back to the Moon, but really build the Moon base, put lots of mass, sufficiently and affordably, on the surface, not to mention every other application that comes from a rocket that you don’t have to throw away,” Isaacman said. “So we’re very grateful for that.”

There are steep challenges in getting Starship and Blue Moon ready for a human spaceflight mission. On Apollo 9, two astronauts took the lunar module for a test run, separating from the command module with the mission’s third crew member for more than six hours before reconnecting in low-Earth orbit. For a similar test on Artemis III, Starship or Blue Moon would require an advanced, independent life support system, human-rated engines, a cockpit and flight controls, and a docking mechanism. SpaceX and Blue Origin have released few details of where those systems are in development and production.

This artist’s rendering shows NASA’s Orion spacecraft docked with SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander near the Moon.

Credit: NASA/SpaceX

It’s possible NASA could go for a less ambitious Artemis III mission, with a rendezvous and docking but no independent crewed flight of the lunar lander. NASA’s leaders must decide on these options in the coming months, and their thinking will be informed by how quickly and successfully SpaceX moves forward with flying the next-generation Starship Version 3 rocket and Blue Origin’s planned uncrewed landing near the Moon’s south pole with the Blue Moon cargo lander.

NASA would also like to fly at least one of Axiom’s commercial spacesuits on Artemis III to give astronauts a chance to try it out in space before they need it for walking on the Moon. The suits are undergoing tests on the ground and in NASA’s spacewalk training pool in Houston. Isaacman said Monday that NASA could also send an Axiom suit to the International Space Station for testing by the end of next year.

And then there’s SLS and Orion, the two pieces of the Artemis architecture that performed so well on Artemis II.

Technicians at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will soon install the heat shield onto the Orion spacecraft for Artemis III. This heat shield has a modified design after engineers discovered unexpected erosion of the Artemis I heat shield on a test flight in 2022. Then, sometime this summer, ground teams at Kennedy will connect the Orion crew module to the ship’s service module before preparing the spacecraft for fueling. NASA and its contractors will also study and resolve a handful of issues encountered on Artemis II, including a helium leak in the service module propulsion system and problems dumping urine overboard.

The core stage for the Artemis III mission’s SLS rocket arrived at Kennedy on Monday, pulling up to dock just a couple of hours before Isaacman’s testimony before Congress. It sailed aboard a NASA barge from the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana, where teams manufactured and integrated the core stage’s propellant tanks. Once inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy, the stage will be prepared to receive its engine section with four RS-25 main engines.

That will set the stage for NASA’s go-ahead to begin stacking the SLS rocket from Artemis III.

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Posted Tuesday 28 April 2026 at 12:47 pm AEST (my time).

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NASA has assigned its first crew to launch on a mission “13” since Apollo 13 “had a problem” on the way to the Moon 56 years ago.

Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney with NASA, Joshua Kutryk with the Canadian Space Agency, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov will lift off for the International Space Station as Crew-13 on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in mid-September. The four will serve as members of the station’s Expedition 75 and 76 crews, before returning to Earth about five months later.

“This flight is the 13th crew rotation with SpaceX,” NASA’s announcement read. “The crew will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future exploration missions to the moon and Mars, and benefit people on Earth.”

Rather than give in to triskaidekaphobia (the fear or avoidance of 13), the crew is embracing it, or at least their connection to the last US launch to be similarly numbered. The Crew-13 mission patch includes visual nods to the insignia worn by Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert in April 1970.

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 members Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov.

Credit: NASA/CSA/Roscosmos

Imitation is an option

“NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 patch looks ardently toward the future of space exploration while honoring the legacy of those who came before,” reads the official description of the emblem.

At the center of the Crew-13 patch is a golden dragon, which is both a reference to the name of SpaceX’s capsule and the golden horses depicted on the Apollo 13 insignia. (Lovell and his crewmates worked with NASA contract artist Norman Tiller and muralist and sculptor Lumen Winter, who proposed the equestrian design, to create their flight badge.)

The dragon’s tail on the Crew-13 patch wraps around Earth in a manner reminiscent of the blue contrail that connects Earth with the horses on the Apollo 13 insignia. In the 1970 artwork, it was a nod to the Roman and Greek god Apollo; today, it is a “bridge between Earth, the International Space Station, the moon and Mars,” per NASA’s caption.

The use of Roman numerals for “XIII” (13) and the lack of crew names on the Crew-13 patch also mimic elements of the design from almost six decades ago, wherein the golden stars are symbolic of the Crew-13 families, and the overall capsule shape (as opposed to a circle) references the “possibilities born out of human collaboration toward a common goal,” according to the space agency.

It comes after 12

The STS-13 crew, redesignated STS-41-C, created this patch that highlights superstitions and triskaidekaphobia.

Credit: collectSPACE.com

Prior to Crew-13, NASA managers leaned into the superstition and devised a less intuitive but more data-driven designation that went into effect after the ninth space shuttle mission. Hence, what would have been STS-13 became STS-41-C, where the 4 was the fiscal year (1984), the 1 was the launch site (Kennedy Space Center in Florida), and C was the order of launch (C was the third planned flight of the year).

“I mentioned it was 41-C that originally was STS-13, and my friend Jim Beggs, who was the administrator of NASA, had triskaidekaphobia, and he said, ‘There’s not going to be [another] Apollo 13 or a Shuttle 13, so come up with a new numbering system.’ So we did come up with this complex system for numbering the shuttles during that period of time,” said Bob Crippen, STS-41C commander, in a NASA oral history interview.

NASA later reverted to a straightforward numerical designation after the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and the STS-51L crew in January 1986. As such, there was an STS-113, which launched aboard space shuttle Endeavour in 2002, but not before having to make late crew changes due to medical issues. The last time that NASA faced the same decision was on Apollo 13.

“We were joking a lot about being number 113,” commander Ken Bowersox told the press at the time. He added that to play it safe, the mission patch used Roman numerals (CXIII).

On board the International Space Station, the 13th crewed expedition began on April 1, 2006, 10 days before the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 13 launch.

The Russian space program launched six crewed missions designated as number 13. At least one of those times, the head of the country’s space agency suggested it be skipped.

“Many people have superstitious beliefs,” said Roscosmos director Anatoly Perminov, according to his press secretary, in 2008. “That’s why I think that it is a good idea to change the number of the next spaceship.”

Despite the concern, Soyuz TMA-13 went forward as planned. As did Soyuz 13, Soyuz T-13, and Soyuz TM-13 before it.

Soyuz TMA-13M launched Reid Wiseman, and Soyuz MS-13 landed with Christina Koch. Both US astronauts went on to fly aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission earlier this month, a crewed fly-by of the Moon that broke the distance record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts.

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Posted Tuesday 28 April 2026 at 7:30 am AEST (my time).

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A blow-up chair? Ikea has been here before. It attempted to make inflatable furniture in the mid-1990s, when designer Jan Dranger came to the Swedish company with a revolutionary idea to solve one of its biggest challenges: how to squish sofas into its preferred flat-pack format, simplifying transport and cutting costs.

It sounded like the perfect solution. Made from durable and recyclable polyolefin plastic, the chair and sofa designs could be inflated at home using only a hair dryer. Transport volumes would be cut by as much as 90 percent. Sadly, only after the “a.i.r" collection launched in the 2000 catalogue did Ikea's ambitions become deflated.

Staff in stores said that the easy chairs and sofas looked like groups of "swollen hippos” in the furniture displays. Customers forgot to set their hair dryers to cold before inflating. Hot air takes up more space than cold air, so inevitably the sofas deflated as the air inside cooled. Even worse, the valves leaked, so after sitting down, an unglamorous farting noise issued from your general direction. By 2013, Ikea killed the a.i.r collection, but it had crucially learned many lessons.

Fast-forward to the present day and now Mikael Axelsson is the intrepid Ikea designer who has decided to give blow-up furniture another try for the brand's latest PS collection launching on May 13. However, his $200 inflatable armchair, called (somewhat uninspiringly) the “PS 2026 Easy Chair,” has had a stranger birth than any other of the 2,000 products Ikea releases each year. To start, he's been sitting on this particular idea for 12 long years after he initially fashioned a Barbie-sized mock-up from foam and wire in 2014—just one year after the original a.i.r collection burst.

Axelsson's first model of the PS 2026 Easy Chair.

Courtesy of IKEA

 

The tubular chrome frame prototyping.

Courtesy of IKEA

 

At the time, the trouble was not merely that Axelsson struggled to figure out how to make an inflatable cushion feel more like foam and less like a beach ball; Ikea was also wary of returning so soon to the flatulent debacle that was its inflatable furniture failure. So his model was shelved, literally, in his office. Then, in 2023, Axelsson and the rest of the in-house team were summoned to drum up innovative designs for an upcoming PS collection, and he saw a chance to breathe life back into his inflatable easy chair concept.

Deciding to stick with his original tubular chrome frame idea, Axelsson hand-welded 20 prototypes himself, a skill acquired from growing up around his father's metal workshop, but the beach ball problem remained.

“I remember when Mikael met with this guy who repairs tractor tires, and he came with the inner tube of a tractor,” Johan Ejdemo, Ikea's global design manager, tells me. They put that in a concept chair. Better, but not perfect. Eventually, they struck upon the idea of a dual-chamber seat. “It's one outer air section, and then one central air section,” Ejdemo says. “And you can regulate the comfort yourself, depending on how much you pump it up.”

The hair dryer solution has wisely been ditched in favor of a simple foot pump that comes with each PS Easy Chair, which will supposedly make such home self-adjustment a breeze. Another lesson learned from the early 2000s was that just putting a sheet cover over plastic can lead to—there's no other way to put this—unwanted sweatiness. So now a fiber layer sits on top of the inflatable seat, which not only adds to the comfort but, along with the deep emerald green fabric cover, mercifully stops any uncomfortable moistness.

I've sat in this chair, and it's a marvel. Axelsson and Ikea have achieved a level of comfort you don't expect from something you inflate with a foot pump. “Many have been sitting on this chair, and they haven't really reflected on that it's an inflatable product. So I think we have succeeded,” Ejdemo says. Then he shows me the chair's party trick: In one move, he lifts it above his head effortlessly using just one hand. Thanks to the tubular frame and air interior, the Easy Chair astonishingly weighs just 8 kilograms (around 18 pounds). By comparison, Ikea's Rocksjön chair weighs close to 20 kilograms (44 pounds). What's more, the box it comes in is just 6 inches thick, and you can carry it under your arm.

However, all of you cat owners out there know exactly what happens when felines are left alone with a good chair or sofa. Furniture miraculously morphs into scratching post nirvana. Considering Ikea has made a surprisingly comfortable armchair out of what is effectively a balloon, have cats tested the inflatable Easy Chair?

“Yes,” laughs Ejdemo. “Cats are going to scratch it, but Mikael tested it with cats.” He did indeed. Ikea even sent us a video of Axelsson's family moggy enjoying its owner's creation. Evidently, the chair passed. Ejdemo also tells me that, along with the usual rigorous Ikea testing, Axelsson's four daughters were drafted in to jump up and down on the seat.

Ejdemo is clearly proud of this chair and how it rights a historical design failure for the company. “I'm super happy we made it," he says. “To get all this to come together to make one good product takes a lot of work. You need to be determined. Passion has made this possible.”

He says he has 100 freelance designers on contract working with Ikea, but the actual in-house team consists of only 15 designers who work on the majority of the 1,500 to 2,000 products the company produces per year. “Mikael is one of these 15 with around 20 years of experience designing products for Ikea, which is something,” Ejdemo says. "It is tough to design products for Ikea.”

Thanks to Axelsson's (pictured) lightweight design …

Courtesy of IKEA

 

… the PS 2026 Easy Chair amazingly weighs just 8 kilograms (around 18 pounds).

Courtesy of IKEA

 

Experiencing how good the inflatable Easy Chair is leads me to ask if Ikea will take this success further. Now that the company has nailed cat-proof blow-up furniture, a whole new world of air-filled products is possible. Mattresses? Camping gear?

For now, the obvious extension is a sofa. I ask Ejdemo if Ikea is making one. He smiles broadly and pauses. “Now we know a lot more about working with air," he says. "I don't think we've scratched the surface on this. There's so much more to do.”

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Posted Monday 27 April 2026 at 7:33 am AEST (my time).

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Switching from one smartphone to another is mostly a smooth procedure. You log into your accounts and your apps, preferences, and contacts should sync to the new hardware. But in the world of robotics, swapping an old robotic arm for a newer model has meant setting everything up from scratch.

To fix that, a team of researchers at the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has developed what they call Kinematic Intelligence, a framework that makes switching robots work more like switching smartphones. They describe their system in a recent Science Robotics paper.

Demonstrating skills

For years, roboticists have been working on getting robots to learn from demonstration—teaching them new skills by showing them what to do, rather than writing lines of code. The idea is to remotely control or physically guide the robot’s arm to teach it a task like wiping a table, stacking boxes, or welding a car component. The problem is that most of these taught skills end up tied to the specific robot the training was done with.

But robotics is advancing quickly. “The robots have different designs, and nowadays there are new designs being proposed—that brings its own set of challenges,” said Sthithpragya Gupta, a roboticist at EPFL and lead author of the study. If a new robot has slightly longer links, a different joint orientation, or a more complex configuration, that learned behavior instantly breaks and the new robot will likely flail, freeze, or crash if attempting it.

“With new designs come different capabilities and constraints,” said Durgesh Haribhau Salunkhe, an EPFL roboticist and co-author of the study. “The problem is to adapt to these constraints and capabilities—to faithfully replicate the actions demonstrated by a human.” Today, making the leap from one robot body to another usually means starting from scratch and retraining the whole system.

The danger zone

When a robot moves through space to complete a task, it must constantly calculate how to bend its joints to keep its end-effector (a robotic equivalent of a hand) on the right path. The robot has to avoid hitting a physical limit, or worse, a singularity, which in robotics is a mathematical danger zone: a physical configuration where the robot’s joints align in such a way that it temporarily loses a degree of freedom. “In such positions, the robot’s motion may become unstable or [you] may lose control of the robot,” Gupta said.

In human terms, it works roughly like locking the elbows as they get fully straightened when pushing something heavy, which makes the arms unable to perform side-to-side movements for a moment.

Transferring skills from one robot to another is hard because differently structured robots usually have a different topology of singularities. When a robot’s algorithm blindly follows a path and hits a singularity, the math controlling its joints will fail. The robot might try to spin a joint at infinite speed, for instance, resulting in a sudden, unsafe movement. Gupta’s team solved this by giving the robots a deep, innate mathematical awareness of their own physical limitations. This Kinematic Intelligence, as they call it, lets a user demonstrate a skill just once, and have it executed safely by an entirely different type of robot.

And (surprisingly, these days) Kinematic Intelligence was built in an AI-free manner.

Seeking certainty

Traditionally, engineers have dealt with singularities through software fixes. They built inverse models, complex mathematical formulas that work backward from the target position of the robot’s end-effector to map all the joint positions required to get it there. Then, they just slapped on safety filters or corrections to prevent the robot from getting itself into trouble.

Some of the newer, data-driven AI approaches take less effort and expertise but require access to every robot that the control software will be used on during the training phase. “Also, there is this probabilistic or black box nature of AI wherein it can do something incoherent, which can be potentially catastrophic,” Gupta said. His team wanted certainty, not probabilities, so they took a different approach.

Instead of trying to correct for a robot’s mechanical constraints after the training, they embedded these constraints directly into the control policy from the beginning. They focused on three-revolute robots—basically robotic arms with three joints—which act as the foundational building blocks for many of the commercial robots we see today. Through an algebraic analysis of the robots’ parameters, such as the lengths of their links and the offsets of their joints, the team mapped out exactly where the singularities lie within their joint space. These singularities, combined with the hard limits of the joints, slice the robot’s possible movement space into feasible regions the researchers call aspects.

By looking at the topology of these aspects, the researchers classified three-revolute robots (those with three joints) into six categories. This way, once they knew which of these six categories a specific robot falls into, they instantly knew the exact structure of its physical limitations—a complete map of its danger zones.

Armed with this map, the Kinematic Intelligence framework enables robots to go around their singularities using a strategy the team calls a track cycle. Based on its category classification, the robot knows its physical limits, which prevents it from crashing and dynamically redirects the movement to safely slide or traverse along the edge of the singularity boundary. The robot carefully follows this boundary until it finds a safe configuration where it can re-enter the nominal path to finish the task.

When the team made sure the math behind their idea was correct, they put their framework to the test on various machines. And it worked.

Robotic teamwork

The experimental setup included a compact 6-DoF Duatic DynaArm with tight joint limits, a 7-DoF KUKA LWR IIWA 7 with moderate limits, and a 7-DoF Neura Robotics Maira M with much more relaxed boundaries. With these machines, the researchers built a mock multi-robot assembly line where three different robotic arms cooperated to complete a sequence of tasks. At the beginning, a human performed a single demonstration of three skills in sequence. “We demonstrated a task where you push something off a conveyor belt, pick it up and put it on a workbench, and then pick it up again and throw it into a basket,” Gupta said. All these actions were then distributed among the robots so that each robot performed one of them: the DynaArm did the pushing, the KUKA did the picking and placing, and the Neura did the picking and throwing.

Even though the pushing and throwing motions forced the robots into excursions near the boundaries of their physical workspaces, and the pick-and-place maneuver demanded complex internal mathematical checks, all three machines were able to learn a functional policy via a single human demonstration. “And then we said, you know what, let’s shuffle these robots around,” Gupta said.

Without any retraining, the team swapped the robots’ locations and tasks. It turned out their Kinematic Intelligence made it possible to complete the sequence when KUKA was responsible for pushing, the DynaArm for throwing, the Neura for picking and placing, and in all other possible configurations. “The key challenge for now is to take this technology to the industrial assembly floor,” Gupta said. He admitted, though, that there are several details the team still has to figure out.

Plug-and-play robotics

While the Kinematic Intelligence framework guarantees mechanically safe motion, it currently lacks the advanced sensing and context-sensitive decision-making required for unpredictable environments. While the researchers acknowledge that the system flawlessly handles a robot’s internal physical constraints like singularities and joint limits, it is not yet equipped to inherently understand the nuances of the objects it interacts with. For example, the system cannot currently distinguish between moving a full container, which requires slow, careful handling, and an empty one, which can be moved quickly. What’s more, it requires the integration of high-level cognitive safety checks to integrate human commands with common sense, such as knowing not to grab a knife when asked to prepare coffee.

Another hurdle to overcome before Kinematic Intelligence can transition from controlled laboratory experiments to factory floors is the integration of advanced environmental sensing, which would enable robots to safely navigate dynamic spaces where humans are constantly and unpredictably moving around. Additionally, while the software framework has already been validated on current industrial robots, its deployment in more sensitive fields like medicine is currently bottlenecked by hardware limitations.

“If we talk deploying this technology in medical scenarios, I believe in the next five years we will see mechanically safer robots that should make this possible,” Salunkhe said. “Our framework can be immediately translated to such new designs, so we’re waiting for these robots now.”

Gupta’s and Salunkhe’s work on robots’ skill sharing is published in Science Robotics: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aea1995

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Posted Monday 27 April 2026 at 7:32 am AEST (my time).

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With the circumlunar flight of Artemis II, and the prospect of landing astronauts on the lunar surface within a few years, humanity is preempting an era where the imprint of visiting the Moon would be erased from living memory.

There are five men still alive who flew to the Moon on NASA’s Apollo missions. All are now in their 90s. Between 1968 and 1972, 24 astronauts visited the Moon, and 12 of them walked on its surface. We’ll have to wait a little longer to add to the roster of Moonwalkers, but there are four new names to etch on the list of lunar explorers.

The Artemis II astronauts, all in their 40s or 50s, flew a little more than 4,000 miles from the Moon, higher above the surface than the Apollo lunar missions. The four-person crew on Artemis II set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth: 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometers).

Artemis II broke the record set on the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970, when astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise soared to a maximum distance from Earth of 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers). Ars recently visited with Haise to discuss his perspective on the record and the Artemis II mission, and we include the interview later in this story.

The Apollo 13 record stood for almost exactly 56 years. NASA officials, astronauts, and space enthusiasts alike hope the Artemis II record won’t last quite as long.

Parsing the numbers

When might Artemis II’s record actually be broken? Missions heading to the lunar surface won’t have to venture so far beyond the far side of the Moon. Artemis II followed a free-return trajectory, using the Moon’s gravity to slingshot the Orion capsule back toward the Earth for reentry.

But there are other factors that make calculating the distance of future Artemis missions a little complicated. These considerations center on orbital dynamics. The Moon’s 27-day orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle. On average, the distance between the centers of the Earth and the Moon ranges between about 225,800 and 252,000 miles (363,400 to 405,500 km).

The Sun’s gravitational influence throws the Moon’s orbit into a constant state of change. Sometimes the Moon’s perigee, or nearest point to Earth, is closer than average. Similarly, the Moon’s apogee stretches farther from Earth on some orbits. The Moon’s apogee can reach as far as 252,727 miles (406,725 km). The Moon’s orbit only touches this distance about once every 5,000 years, but it routinely gets close (within 100 km, or 62 miles, three times between now and 2040). A NASA website explains all of this in extensive detail.

Suffice it to say, it is impossible to predict when humans might break the Artemis II distance record. NASA planned to place the Gateway mini-space station into a so-called near-rectilinear halo orbit looping as close as 1,900 miles (3,000 km) and as far as 43,500 miles (70,000 km) from the Moon, opening up opportunities for astronauts to reach greater distances from Earth than Artemis II.

This is where NASA planned to send future Artemis crews to meet up with lunar landers to carry them to the Moon’s south pole. The space agency has now canceled Gateway to focus on building a base on the lunar surface, where astronauts can learn to harvest resources like water, live in partial gravity, and prove out technologies for future expeditions to Mars.

The Artemis II astronauts captured this view of the Moon, showing the rugged lunar terrain, on April 6, 2026.

Credit: NASA

NASA hasn’t yet selected a new orbit for Artemis crews and their Orion spacecraft to rendezvous with human-rated landers, but the meetup point will certainly be closer to the Moon. The Orion spacecraft’s service module lacks the ability to reach a low-lunar orbit—Apollo missions circled the Moon at altitudes of below 70 miles (110 km)—and then safely return to Earth. Ars recently reported on the factors in NASA’s decision on a new orbit for Orion at the Moon, including the capabilities of Orion itself, a higher-performing upper stage on the Space Launch System rocket, and the ability of NASA’s Human Landing System vehicles—provided by SpaceX or Blue Origin—to shuttle between that orbit and the lunar surface.

The bottom line: Astronauts likely won’t exceed Artemis II’s distance from Earth on most lunar landing missions, but it’s conceivable that on some occasions, circumstances will align to propel a crew a little beyond the 252,756-mile mark. The sure bet will come when someone finally takes aim at Mars.

“Big disappointment”

Haise, the only Apollo 13 astronaut still living, didn’t care much for the record he and his crewmates set in 1970. It was a consolation prize, of sorts, for Haise. You probably know the story of Apollo 13’s aborted lunar landing and the around-the-clock, high-stakes effort to bring the crew home.

Still, among the more than 100 billion people who have walked the Earth in human history, the Artemis II astronauts have ventured farther from the cradle than anyone else. Sure, it’s not walking on the Moon, but it’s something more than a piece of trivia.

Haise, 92, spoke with Ars as Artemis II made its way back to Earth earlier this month. We present our conversation below, lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: How closely have you followed the Artemis II mission?

Fred Haise: Not real close. Today, I have not seen anything. I just got home from my great-grandson’s baseball game. I noticed, from their projected flight plan, they’re past the Moon, sort of on their cruise back toward Earth for the reentry. I’ve seen the pictures they’ve shot, which are excellent. They have better cameras and better equipment than we had on Apollo, because it really looks like they got much higher-resolution pictures than we were able to from that altitude.

Ars: I presume this all brings back some memories for you.

Haise: Vaguely. When they splash down Friday, if you go to the next day, Saturday, the 11th, that’s when I launched, 56 years ago. So, yes, I’ve lived several lifetimes, the Shuttle program, then in the business world. It was a long time ago.

Ars: Was the distance record ever a big deal to you?

Haise: Somebody figured out how to get it in Guinness to make us feel better because we didn’t land. That was the big disappointment. I hoped to walk on the Moon, and that went away. If you look at the so-called distance record, all the orbits around the Moon, all the missions that went, were 60 miles or so [from the Moon]. If you take our flight, it just so happened that the Moon was a little farther away. The Moon doesn’t go in a circle. It’s an ellipse, so it was kind of at its farthest point from Earth, and we were only a little above the normal orbit. It wasn’t a big deal. It just coincided with the fact that the Moon was farther away from the Earth.

Ars: Are you surprised your record stood for as long as it did?

Haise: It’s a surprise, mainly because our US government hasn’t supported programs to get us back. The average citizen I know and talk to a lot, they somehow think NASA has a big pot of gold somewhere that they can just use to do whatever they want. They don’t realize that to get monies to do things, be it unmanned research, satellite programs or whatever, including any manned program, it requires getting money from Congress and through the annual budgeting cycle.

NASA spent [nearly] 25 or 30 years making this [Orion] capsule. They finally got it made. The Artemis I mission, when did they fly? It was two-and-a-half years ago, without people, right? And here it is, the first time it’s ever flown with people. That’s the nature of the business in space. Apollo was, uniquely, I would say, the only program that was fully funded, supported from the president through Congress from the start to achieving the goal, which was to land by the end of the decade. Even then, the funding started getting cut. That’s the nature of the business. But the average person I talk to, a lot of them are children, of course. I don’t expect them to know that. But a lot of the citizens I talk to, they have absolutely no idea of how a program is spawned and how it’s budgeted to keep it alive and make it happen.

Ars: It’s remarkable looking back at Apollo, when you guys were typically landing on the Moon every four to six months.

Haise: Actually, from the Apollo 7 launch through Apollo 11, we launched every two months. Every two months. Then we started slipping. After Apollo 11, when they made the landing in July of that year, they slipped. Apollo 12 was normally to be flown in September, but even then, they slipped it to November, so it waited four months to launch. Then they stretched us even further. On 13, we went all the way to the next April, because of budget cuts.

Ars: It’s been two-and-a-half years since Artemis I, and it will be another year or longer until Artemis III, an Earth orbit mission.

Haise: You could accomplish it faster if you had the program laid out and funded it. I mean, it’s that simple. It ain’t simple to plan it and everything. But if you had the program planned and laid out and done the technology trades and everything, and a preliminary design for where you’re headed with what you’re doing, if you fund it, you can go accomplish it. There’s no magic to it. It’s just you need to apply the money and the resources, the right people, the right engineering, and you can do it.

NASA astronaut Fred Haise, center, moments after exiting the Apollo 13 command module following splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean on April 17, 1970.

Credit: NASA

Ars: What do you remember about being on the far side of the Moon?

Haise: We had done a maneuver earlier, approaching the Moon, because where our explosion happened, we were not on a path to get home. We were not on a free return, which they were on this [Artemis II] flight … When our capsule had the explosion and we had to shut it down, the very first thing to work on after getting the LM (Lunar Module) powered up was to use its rocket engine to change our path to get us sort of in a rough direction of heading home. And that first burn we did looped us around the Moon. Then we did a second maneuver, the biggest one, using the decent landing engine after we passed the Moon. That shaved 10 to 12 hours off our return time, which was helpful, because the LM didn’t have enough power if we kept it powered up, so we had to critically power it down and only had battery power.

Going around the Moon, after we finished that burn, and Jack [Swigert] and I were tourists. We got out our cameras and put color and black and white film packs in it, and shot a lot of pictures. We got pictures with a little better resolution, but still didn’t get anywhere near like they’ve taken on Artemis II. Hopefully, some of their pictures are near the South Pole, which is where it’s hoped that we’ll land someday and actually have a lunar base, close to the water ice in some of the craters near the South Pole.

Ars: Did you have an opportunity to take in the view at the Moon?

Haise: Jim (Lovell) wasn’t as interested as I was. He was too disappointed about not landing, and he had been already once. So he had seen the Moon quite a bit on Apollo 8, when they went around a number of orbits.

Ars: Did you have a chance to meet with any of the Artemis II astronauts before they flew?

Haise: I had lunch with Victor Glover one time after he had flown the Dragon capsule, the second flight in the Dragon. I wanted to know a little bit about Dragon. I met the commander [Reid Wiseman] at an event one time in Houston, and that was quite a while ago. It was before his wife passed away. In fact, she was at the luncheon also.

I met Christina Koch, the youngest member of the crew, a couple of times. She very nicely came to speak at the Memorial Tree ceremony for [Apollo 15 astronaut] Al Worden [at Johnson Space Center in Houston]. Al was head of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. He was the chairman when she was given an award that helped her with education funding. So she appreciated that, and came and spoke at Al’s event, and then I met her again at Jim Lovell’s son’s house. Jeffrey [Lovell], he lives in Houston here, and he hosted an event at his house, again, trying to draw in some people he had invited to help fund the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which gives out over 30 scholarships a year.

Ars: What else stands out to you about the Artemis II mission?

Haise: My commander, as you know, recorded a message for the crew with his son, Jeffrey, and his daughter, Susan. Unfortunately, Jim passed away, but the message was read up to them. I was FaceTiming with Jim at least once a week over the years, and he unfortunately passed away last year.

Ars: That was very poignant. There have been a lot of touching moments on this mission.

Haise: One of the biggest values, I feel, is the photography. Hopefully, they got good photography of the proposed eventual landing places. But the biggest value of all, and this is underplayed in the media, is this was a test flight. Who rode the rocket before? Nobody. How many humans have ridden in that capsule? Nobody. So they tested the capsule … to make sure it’s OK, testing all its variety of systems and making sure everything is working. To me, it was a great test pilot mission. Everybody’s got so excited about some pictures, which is good, but to me, I was a test pilot, so that’s the way I look at the mission. This was a great test pilot mission.

Ars: This mission seems to have captured a lot of public interest. I’m sure you can understand that after everything that’s been written about Apollo 13.

Haise: Apollo 13, to young people, when they hear a little bit about the story in school, it’s like a folktale, a survival folktale, much like many you may read about, like Shackleton’s sailing ship that got trapped in the ice. Apollo 13 has gotten to be in the same class as that. That makes it interesting.

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Posted Sunday 26 April 2026 at 7:53 am AEST (my time).

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At CES 2022, BMW debuted its BMW iX Flow concept car that could dynamically change its appearance using the same grayscale E Ink panels found in e-readers like the Kindle. It was followed by the BMW i Vision Dee concept and the BMW i5 Flow Nostokana that were both upgraded with color E Ink panels. Its latest concept, the BMW iX3 Flow Edition announced at the 2026 Beijing Auto Show, might look slightly less ambitious but it takes a new approach, pushing color-changing cars closer to actual production.

BMW’s previous concepts wrapped the entire vehicle in a patchwork of E Ink panels that were all custom-sized and shaped to match its contours. It was an approach that wasn’t practical for mass production, and one that wasn’t very durable. The new BMW iX3 Flow Edition is potentially the most exciting of all of BMW’s concepts as it embeds the E Ink Prism technology directly into the structure of the vehicle’s hood panel, instead of just slapping it on top. The new approach has “undergone BMW’s stringent quality testing” so that it meets the “requirements of automotive engineering and everyday use,” according to a release from E Ink.

The BMW iX3 Flow Edition’s hood has an embedded E Ink panel that’s more durable and easier to manufacture than a custom vehicle wrap.

Image: BMW

 

The BMW iX3 Flow Edition’s color-changing capabilities are limited to its hood with eight different animations (which appear restricted to a grayscale palette) that can be changed by the driver at the push of a button. It’s not exactly the color-changing car that BMW has been teasing for years and you still can’t buy one, but by focusing on making this technology more practical and functional these vehicles are one step closer to moving past the concept phase.

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Posted Saturday 25 April 2026 at 7:48 am AEST (my time).

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Some 80 million years ago, the late Cretaceous oceans were patrolled by 17-meter mosasaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs, and massive, predatory sharks. For decades, the paleontological consensus was that this was the age of vertebrates; anything without a backbone was lunch.

However, a new Science paper argues there was another apex predator lurking in the depths, and it didn’t have a single bone in its body. Researchers have uncovered the fossilized remains of ancient, finned octopuses that likely reached lengths of up to 19 meters. They were armed with powerful, hardened beaks and likely had high intelligence.

Reverse 3D printing

“Before this study, Cretaceous marine ecosystems were generally understood as worlds in which large vertebrate predators occupied the top of the food web,” said Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University and co-author of the study. Invertebrates, on the other hand, were seen as prey that evolved protective structures such as hard shells in response to predation. Octopuses were especially difficult to evaluate because they rarely fossilize. “Our study changes that picture,” Iba said.

The reason it has taken so long to place a giant octopus at the top of the Mesozoic food chain is that octopuses are essentially highly organized bags of water and muscle. When they die, their soft tissues decay rapidly, leaving almost nothing behind for the fossil record. The only octopus body parts that do fossilize are their chitinous jaws, which look a bit like parrot beaks. These beaks, though, are also extremely hard to spot when they are embedded in dense marine rock formations. To find them, Iba’s team deployed a technique they called Digital Fossil Mining.

Instead of relying on traditional imaging techniques based on X-rays, Iba and his colleagues used high-resolution grinding tomography to physically shave away microscopic layers of the rock. It worked like a destructive 3D printer working in reverse. Rocks that could potentially be hiding the beaks were first embedded in resin to hold them together and then ground layer by layer with every individual slice photographed along the way. Then, thousands of resulting images were compiled into full-color, 3D digital datasets of the rock’s interior. “We then used an AI model to analyze these large datasets and detect fossils embedded inside,” Iba said. “Once detected, the fossils were digitally extracted as 3D models.”

When Iba and his colleagues examined these digitally reconstructed beaks, it became apparent that the creatures they belonged to must have been terrifying.

Sizing a kraken

“We were very surprised,” Iba said. “We already knew that the jaws were large, but the body size estimates were striking.” The largest fossilized lower jaws Iba’s team has recovered surpassed the size of the modern giant squid by a factor of 1.5—and giant squids can grow up to 12 meters. According to the study, Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, the species this jaw belonged to, may have reached between 6.6 and 18.6 meters in total length. “It was comparable in size to some of the largest marine predators of the Cretaceous,” Iba said. But because we’ve never recovered a complete Nanaimoteuthis haggarti’s body, these size estimates come with a caveat.

The team evaluated the size of the ancient octopuses using allometric calculation—a method that used the proportional growth rates of modern, long-bodied finned octopuses to extrapolate the size of their extinct relatives. “The main limitation is that body size estimates have a range,” Iba acknowledges. “Different modern species have different allometric relationships between jaw size and body size.” But even assuming the smallest possible size, Nanaimoteuthis haggarti was still huge for an octopus.

The Digital Fossil Mining, besides discovering the beaks in the first place, enabled Iba’s team to observe very fine details of their structure. “This was essential for reconstructing feeding behavior,” Iba said. That reconstruction suggests that Nanaimoteuthis haggarti was a brutal hunter.

Reading the beaks

The outer surfaces of the fossilized beaks were heavily polished, their sharp edges rounded off, and their surfaces marred by deep scratches and millimeter-scale chips. According to the team, this wasn’t post-mortem damage from tumbling in the current, as the geological context of the find indicated transport abrasion was unlikely. Additionally, the researchers found that this wear was present only in adult specimens, was completely absent in juveniles, and was missing from the jaws of squids.

“This strongly suggests that the wear was produced during life by feeding, not by fossilization or later damage,” Iba said. “In other words, these animals were repeatedly using their jaws to crush hard structures such as shells and possibly bones.” The wear, the researchers demonstrate in their study, was more severe than what is typically seen in modern cephalopods that feed on hard prey.

On top of that, when analyzing the beaks, the team noticed a distinct pattern. The wear wasn’t uniform. The right edge of the jaw was consistently more worn down, chipped, and scratched than the left. The team concluded this asymmetry wasn’t an accident but a proof of lateralized behavior. It’s a tendency we observe in modern octopuses, which often favor a specific side of their body or a particular eye when performing complex tasks.

In biology, lateralized behavior is usually linked to a highly sophisticated, specialized nervous system. “Of course, we cannot directly measure intelligence from a fossil,” Iba said. “But the asymmetric wear suggests that these animals may also have had advanced and individualized hunting behavior, similar in some ways to modern octopuses.”

They were not just huge and powerful. They were probably smart.

The evolutionary arms race

A highly intelligent, 19-meter-long cephalopod actively hunting and crushing prey suggests that the Cretaceous evolutionary arms race wasn’t entirely dominated by vertebrates. By shedding heavy shells like those seen in early nautiloids and ammonites, the ancestors of modern octopuses traded passive defense for active offense. They gained explosive swimming speed, vast improvements in eyesight, and the neurological capacity required for advanced cognition.

“Our study highlights convergent evolution. Vertebrates and cephalopods have very different evolutionary origins, but both evolved toward becoming large, intelligent marine predators with powerful jaws, flexible bodies, high mobility, and advanced behavior,” Iba said. He notes that Cretaceous marine ecosystems were most likely way more complex than we thought.

Iba also hopes the Digital Fossil Mining technique can be used to learn more about this complexity. “One major direction is to apply Digital Fossil Mining to many more fossil-bearing rocks,” he told Ars. “This approach allows us to uncover organisms and structures that were previously almost invisible in the fossil record.” The technique, he thinks, is especially important for animals like octopuses and squids, which rarely fossilize.

The team ultimately wants to reconstruct a more complete history of cephalopods. “More broadly, our goal is to reveal the hidden components of ancient ecosystems and build a much more complete picture of how past ecosystems really worked,” Iba said.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aea6285

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Posted Saturday 25 April 2026 at 7:48 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.38 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week concerned the third launch of the New Glenn rocket. The first 15 minutes of the flight were exhilarating for Blue Origin, seeing a previously flown rocket take flight and then triumphantly land on a barge at sea. But then the highest of highs was followed by the company’s first loss of an orbital payload, the AST SpaceMobile satellite being injected into a low orbit due to an upper stage failure. We’ve heard it was due to a valve problem, but that would be no scoop as it seems like it’s always the valves that fail in this industry.

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

Canada’s spaceport plans are not without critics. About a month ago, the Canadian National Defense Minister, David McGuinty, announced an “historic investment” of $200 million over 10 years to Maritime Launch Services for the lease of a dedicated “space launch pad” in Nova Scotia. But some local residents, including Marie Lumsden, are pushing back. Writing in the Halifax Examiner, Lumsden shares a photo of a small concrete pad at the end of a gravel road (the entirety of the spaceport). The residents have formed a group, Action Against the Canso Spaceport, because they have “genuine concerns about this project and the people behind it.”

A litany of concerns … The article outlines some of the organization’s concerns about the spaceport, Maritime Launch Services, and a “revolving door” of team members. There are also questions about an environmental assessment by the Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change regarding the environmental risks of launching a Ukrainian rocket with a mix of UDMH/LOX/kerosene fuels. “This project was approved by an utterly inappropriate and broken environmental assessment process whose outcome, despite the outcry of NSECC staff, is determined by lobbyists, unscrupulous proponents, and their friends in high political places,” Lumsden. (submitted by Adapheon)

Rocket Lab launches “origami” satellite. An Electron rocket on Thursday launched the Japanese space agency’s Innovative Satellite Technology Demonstration-4 mission, which aims to test advanced space tech developed by startups and universities, The Independent reports. Among the payloads was a small 10 cm cube that unfolds to a 2.5-meter array.

A lot of unfolding … Rocket Lab’s name for the mission, its second for JAXA, was “Kakushin Rising.” JAXA describes the 10cm cube as “an unprecedentedly lightweight and highly packable deployable array antenna for space, with antenna elements attached to a two-layer deployable membrane that can be folded using origami techniques.” It sounds pretty cool.

Astrobotic tests rotating detonation engine. Astrobotic on Thursday announced the successful hot fire testing of its Chakram rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Two Chakram engine prototypes completed eight successful hot-fire tests, accumulating more than 470 seconds of total run time without any discernible damage to the engine hardware, the company said.  The campaign included a 300-second continuous burn, which is believed to have set the record for the longest duration hot firing of an RDRE engine to date.

Plans to incorporate over time … During testing, each engine produced more than 4,000 pounds of thrust, making Chakram one of the most powerful such engines ever demonstrated. This successful test campaign represents an important milestone in Astrobotic’s development of rotating detonation rocket engines to improve the performance and payload capacity of its spacecraft. Astrobotic plans to incorporate this state-of-the-art propulsion technology into future vehicles, including Griffin-class lunar landers, Xodiac- and Xogdor-class reusable rockets, and an orbital transfer vehicle currently in development.

SpaceX eyes financial future as an AI company. Reuters reviewed the forthcoming S-1 regulatory filing for SpaceX, in which companies disclose their financials and key risks before going public, and there were some eye-opening details. SpaceX estimates that its total addressable market—the maximum revenue a company could generate if it captured every customer in a particular market—could be as much as $28.5 trillion.

But where money does that come from? … SpaceX expects more than 90 percent of that market, or $26.5 trillion, to stem from the AI sector. The vast majority of that, $22.7 trillion, could come from AI for businesses. The company is moving ahead with an IPO expected this summer targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion and seeking ⁠to raise about $75 billion, which would make it the largest initial public offering in history. “We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history,” according to the filing.

Falcon boosters have now landed 600 times. SpaceX completed its 600th Falcon booster landing during a Starlink mission Sunday, Spaceflight Now reports. The Starlink 17-22 mission added another 25 broadband Internet satellites into the company’s low Earth orbit constellation that consists of more than 10,200 spacecraft.

Don’t forget the hard-working ships … SpaceX used Falcon 9 first stage booster B1097, which was flying for the seventh time. It previously launched Sentinel-6B, Twilight, and five previous batches of Starlink satellites. A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1097 landed on the SpaceX drone ship, “Of Course I Still Love You.” It was the 191st landing on this vessel. Another droneship, “Just Read the Instructions,” will now be dedicated to supporting Starship operations.

Two steps forward, one step back for New Glenn. The third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company’s first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos’ flagship rocket, Ars reports. After the launch, the booster settled onto the ship for a smoky but on-target touchdown less than 10 minutes after liftoff. The landing marked the end of the second flight for this booster, a stunning success for the company.

Second-stage issues … But Blue Origin could not celebrate the achievement for long. Within a couple of hours, it became clear that something went wrong with the mission’s remaining milestones. Blue Origin confirmed New Glenn’s upper stage missed its aim and released its payload, a cellular broadband communications satellite for AST SpaceMobile, into an inaccurate orbit. The satellite later reentered Earth’s atmosphere. The second stage issue will force Blue Origin to stand down New Glenn at a time when NASA needs the vehicle to ramp up operations to support the Artemis Program.

Vulcan issue proves costly to Northrop. Northrop Grumman said Tuesday it had taken a $71 million charge due to an anomaly with a solid rocket booster that grounded the Vulcan Centaur rocket, Space News reports. The problem occurred on a February 12 launch, when one of four GEM 63XL boosters attached to the rocket shed debris about 65 seconds after liftoff.

Payloads waiting to go to space … After the mission, which concluded successfully, United Launch Alliance called the incident a “significant performance anomaly” that would need to be investigated prior to Vulcan’s next flight. This was the second time in four Vulcan missions that a solid rocket booster suffered an issue. The problems have delayed the launch of several payloads for the US Space Force. For more on this, read on.

Space Force may use Vulcan for lower-risk missions. Amid an ongoing investigation into a solid rocket motor anomaly that grounded United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket for US national security missions, the Space Force is exploring options to use the heavy-lift launch vehicle for less complex missions, Aviation Week reports. Since the issue is restricted to the Northrop Grumman-built solid rocket motor, the service is considering flying Vulcan without those boosters, Col. Eric Zarybnisky, acting program acquisition executive for space access, said.

No solids, no problem … The Space Force could launch certain missions without solid rocket boosters that carry lower mass or are bound for lower orbits. For example, the service could launch an upcoming Space Development Agency mission on Vulcan, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, Space Systems Command chief, told reporters in a separate briefing. “Essentially, if it doesn’t rely on a solid, there’s no reason why we can’t launch, and I’m committed to supporting that and keeping that mission going,” he said. The Space Force has switched four GPS III missions from a Vulcan rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle since December 2024

NASA rolls out Artemis III core stage. NASA said this week it has rolled out the core stage of the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will launch the crewed Artemis III mission in 2027. The stage departed from the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on Monday for shipment to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Using highly specialized transporters, engineers maneuvered the top four-fifths of the SLS core stage, the section containing the liquid hydrogen tank, liquid oxygen tank, intertank, and forward skirt, from inside NASA Michoud to the agency’s Pegasus barge.

Launching sometime in 2027 … After the core stage arrives at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, teams will complete the stage outfitting and vertical integration, and the agency’s Exploration Ground Systems Program will stack the rocket’s components in preparation for launch. Next year’s Artemis III mission will launch astronauts to Earth’s orbit aboard the Orion spacecraft on top of SLS to test rendezvous and docking capabilities between Orion and commercial spacecraft needed to land Artemis IV astronauts on the Moon in 2028.

Next three launches

April 25: Long March 6 | Unknown payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 12:15 UTC

April 25: Soyuz 2.1a | Progress MS-34 | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan | 22:21 UTC

April 26: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17=16 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 14:00 UTC

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Posted Saturday 25 April 2026 at 7:47 am AEST (my time).

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A multi-walled carbon nanotube. In this work, the tubes only had two layers.

Credit: theasis

Shortly after their discovery, carbon nanotubes seemed to be a material wonder. There were metallic and semiconducting forms; they were tiny and incredibly light; and they could only be broken by tearing apart chemical bonds. The ideas for using them seemed endless.

But then the reality of working with them set in. It was hard to get a pure population of metallic or semiconducting forms. Synthesis techniques tended to produce a tangle of mostly short nanotubes; those that extended for more than a couple of centimeters remain rare. And while the metallic version offered little resistance to carrying electric current, it was hard to send many electrons down the nanotube.

Materials scientists, however, are a stubborn bunch, and they’re still trying to get them to work. Today’s issue of Science includes a paper describing the addition of a chemical to carbon nanotube bundles to boost their ability to carry current to levels closer to those of copper. While the more conductive nanotubes weren’t stable, the discovery may point the way toward something with a longer shelf life.

Doped nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes come in various forms. In the case of single-walled nanotubes, you can think of them as taking a sheet of graphene, rolling it up into a circle, and linking together the two opposite ends you just brought together. These can also be different diameters. There are also multi-walled carbon nanotubes, where a second nanotube (and maybe third, and maybe more beyond that) is wrapped around the first.

When metallic, these offer little resistance to electron flow along the nanotube. But, because most of their electrons are tied up in the chemical bonding needed to form the nanotube, there’s not a lot of them available to carry current. So, a lot of people have tried developing dopants—chemicals that can be mixed in small quantities that change the behavior of the bulk material. In this case, the goal was to find chemicals that would act as electron donors, adding to the amount of current that could potentially be sent down the nanotube.

Obviously, isolated nanotubes can’t really have dopants, since they’re pretty self-contained. But the team behind the new work, based in Spain, was working with bulk nanotube fibers, which are a mixture of nanotubes of various lengths bundled into a larger fiber, with most individual nanotubes oriented along the fiber’s long axis. In this case, the fiber was made from double-walled nanotubes, given its interior a pretty consistent structure.

You can think of the interior space of these fibers as a bit like what you’d get if you were packing spherical objects into a box. Even under the most efficient packing arrangement, there will be gaps between neighboring spheres. In the same way, these fibers have internal spaces that can allow additional chemicals to be incorporated inside the fiber.

The nanotube fibers themselves came from a commercial supplier. To dope these fibers, the researchers decided to use tetrachloroaluminate, or AlCl₄^–, a charged molecule that has electrons to spare. To get it into the spaces between the nanotubes, they used a vapor composed of aluminum trichloride plus a source of additional chlorine. This seeped into the fibers themselves and formed the charged tetrachloroaluminate in place.

Current carrying

A large chunk of the paper simply consists of imaging and spectroscopy that confirms the expected chemical is present in the spaces between the nanotubes. There was also a fair bit of modeling using Density functional theory to confirm that the resulting doping would be expected to make additional electrons available to carry current. Overall, they estimate that the resulting material has a chemical formula of C₃₉AlCl₄ and that the chemical changes occur without altering the fiber’s physical size.

The interesting results come when the researchers start looking into the material’s current-carrying capacity. Doping with the aluminum stuff boosted the mean conductivity by a factor of 10. That is about as high as any previously tested dopant achieved. The highest individual fiber they tested saw this rise to an over 15x improvement and is about 70 percent as conductive as aluminum (which makes it a bit less than half as good as copper).

However, a key feature of this is that the doping doesn’t add much mass to what’s a very light material to start with. So, normalized by density, the doped carbon nanotube fibers actually outperformed copper.

This may sound like an artificial standard, but it could actually matter in applications where space isn’t a concern, and/or where weight is. So, if you could tolerate the wiring being a bit over twice the thickness, then it should be an option to just use a nanotube fiber that’s thicker than the copper wire you’d otherwise need. Another application might be high-capacity transmission lines, where getting the same performance with a lower weight could save money on the support towers needed.

Relevant to this last application, the doping doesn’t alter the durability of the (very tough) carbon nanotube fibers. They have higher tensile strength than either copper or aluminum, and they are closer to steel.

Before you rush out to invest in carbon nanotube futures, however, there is a major issue: The tetrachloroaluminate isn’t stable under normal environmental conditions, as it will react with water molecules in the air. The researchers could extend its useful life by sealing the fibers in a polymer coating, but it still had a lifetime measured in weeks rather than the decades we would want to see.

That doesn’t mean this research is useless. It clearly demonstrates the potential of these materials if the price of carbon nanotube fibers could be brought down. It has identified the structural and chemical features of a highly effective dopant that boosts conductivity, which may ultimately allow us to identify a similar yet more stable chemical to replace it.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb0673 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 24 April 2026 at 4:09 pm AEST (my time).

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The gravitational constant, affectionally known as “Big G,” is one of the most fundamental constants of our universe. Its value describes the strength of the gravitational force acting on two masses separated by a given distance—or if you want to be relativistic about it, the amount a given mass curves space-time. Physicists have a solid ballpark figure for the value of Big G, but they’ve been trying to measure it ever more precisely for more than two centuries, each effort yielding slightly different values. And we do mean slight: The values vary by roughly one part in 10,000.

Still, other fundamental constants are known much more precisely. So Big G is the black sheep of the family and a point of frustration for physicists keen on precision metrology. The problem is that gravity is so weak, by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces, so there is significant background noise from the gravitational field of the Earth (aka “little g”). That weakness is even more pronounced in a laboratory.

In the latest effort to resolve the issue, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) spent the last decade replicating one of the most divergent recent experimental results. The group just announced their results in a paper published in the journal Metrologia. It does not resolve the discrepancy, but it gives physicists one more data point in their ongoing quest to nail down a more precise value for Big G.

Isaac Newton introduced the concept of a gravitational constant when he published his law of universal gravitation in the late 17th century, although it didn’t get its Big G notation until the 1890s. Newton thought it might be possible to measure the strength of gravity by swinging a pendulum near a large hill and measuring the deflection, but he never attempted the experiment, reasoning that the effect would be too small to measure. By 1774, the Royal Society had established a committee to determine the density of the Earth as an indirect measurement of Big G, using a variation of Newton’s pendulum concept.

It was Henry Cavendish in 1798 who achieved the first direct laboratory measurement of the gravitational attraction between two bodies using a torsion balance, although his target was the Earth’s density. This consisted of a large dumbbell with two-inch lead spheres on either end of a six-foot wooden rod suspended by a wire at its center so it could rotate. There was also a second dumbbell with two 12-inch lead spheres, each weighing 350 pounds, that would attract the smaller spheres when brought close, causing the suspended rod to twist.

Cavendish painstakingly recorded those oscillations to measure the gravitational force of the larger spheres on the smaller ones, and from that he could infer Earth’s density. His torsion balance has since become something of a workhorse for physicists keen on refining the value for Big G.

Updating the Cavendish experiment

Traditional Cavendish experiment for measuring the strength of gravity.

S. Kelley/NIST

 

Setup at NIST for measuring the strength of gravity.

S. Kelley/NIST

 

Developing ever-more precise experiments has long been the dominant strategy for resolving the discrepancies. The authors of this latest paper realized that simply adding more measurements to the dataset would not be sufficient, since earlier inconsistent results would still dominate. So they came up with the idea of taking a closer look at one of the largest outliers—specifically a 2007 experiment by physicists at France’s International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) that employed a much more sophisticated version of Cavendish’s torsion balance apparatus.

The NIST team replicated the original BIPM experiment, building a torsion balance with eight metal cylinders: four on a rotating carousel and four smaller masses inside the carousel, sitting on a suspended disk held by a thin ribbon of copper-beryllium. The torsion balance and ribbon would twist when the outer masses attracted the inner ones, and physicists measured Big G by tracking the cylinder’s rotation and the resulting gravitational torque. They also performed a second set of measurements by applying a voltage to electrodes beside the inner masses. This twisted the wire in the opposite direction to the gravitational torque, and the voltage magnitude provided another estimate of Big G.

The NIST scientists also added an extra twist: They ran two versions of the experiment, one with copper masses and one with sapphire masses, achieving nearly identical values for both. This ruled out the possibility that the specific materials used were affecting the measurements. After all that, they came up with a value of 6.67387×10^-11 meters³/kilogram/second². That’s 0.0235 percent lower than the original BIPM result.

Some might question why physicists continue to try to measure the value of G with more precision. One benefit is that it leads to ever-better instruments for measuring small forces, torques, and other subtle effects, advances that benefit science in general. But also, “Every measurement is important, because the truth matters,” said co-author Stephan Schlamminger, a physicist at NIST. “For me, making an accurate measurement is a way of bringing order to the universe, whether or not the number agrees with the expected value.”

Metrology, 2026. DOI: 10.1088/1681-7575/ae570f (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 24 April 2026 at 4:08 pm AEST (my time).

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GREENBELT, Md.—On Tuesday, NASA invited the press to look at the fully assembled Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is now ready to join the ranks of the great observatories in orbit, ahead of its September launch. The Roman Space Telescope (NGRST), named after a key figure in the planning of the Hubble Space Telescope, is notably distinct from hardware like the Hubble and Webb, as it’s designed around a wide-field view and massive imaging system that will allow it to send back 1.4 terabytes of data to Earth every day.

It also has an unusual history that began when NASA’s planning intersected with surplus spy hardware.

In from the cold

Many of the gases in our atmosphere absorb infrared wavelengths, contributing to the greenhouse effect that has helped keep the planet habitable for us. But that effect also makes infrared astronomy from Earth extremely difficult. That’s unfortunate, as a number of important phenomena, from the earliest galaxies to the features of exoplanet atmospheres, are only detectable at infrared wavelengths. There have been a number of infrared-specific telescopes put into space, notably the Spitzer, one of the original suite of Great Observatories.

But those telescopes were largely designed to provide high-resolution imaging of a tiny slice of the sky. There was also a call for a survey telescope capable of imaging large swaths of the sky simultaneously. In the infrared, this could do everything from revealing the large-scale structure of the early Universe to cataloging far more of the asteroids orbiting in Earth’s vicinity. NASA eventually adopted the idea as a priority in the form of WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

Around the same time, the National Reconnaissance Office decided that two of its spy satellites were surplus to requirements and offered the hardware to NASA. By the time the news broke, NASA had already recognized that the hardware could work for WFIRST. NASA’s Mark Melton told Ars that WFIRST designs at the time used a 1.5-meter telescope; the NRO hardware was almost twice that size. This required scaling up a lot of the hardware—the present NGRST easily extended past the second story of the building it was housed in—but it also provided higher-resolution imaging and more space for some of the imaging hardware.

Since the rethink, things have gone incredibly smoothly. At the time of the hardware gift in 2012, estimates suggested that the earliest we could see a launch was earlier this decade. It’s only a bit beyond that highly optimistic estimate, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the press that the September launch would be “eight months ahead of schedule and under budget.” There was a lot of discussion about how the lessons learned here might inform future NASA projects.

What’s going to space?

The NGRST will carry just two instruments. The first is its Wide Field Instrument, meant to capture a huge portion of the sky at once. NASA compares the size of its field of view to that of a full Moon; it’s roughly 100 times wider than the largest images Hubble can capture. That will be paired with an array of 18 individual detectors, each capable of capturing 4096 x 4096 pixels.

The result is that a complete NGRST survey image will be enormous. NASA astronomer Julie McEnery said that using 4K displays to display it at single-pixel resolution would require enough TVs to cover the surface of El Capitan in Yosemite—hence the enormous bandwidth needed to get those images back to Earth.

Sitting between the mirrors and the imaging device will be a carousel of filters that limit which wavelengths get through. The carousel also includes both a prism and grism (a planar prism) that will allow the telescope to do spectroscopy, giving us a picture of what wavelengths of light are arriving from certain sources or how severely redshifted the light of distant objects has become.

The second instrument is a Coronagraph, which blocks out a star in the center of the field of view, allowing nearby orbits to be directly imaged, even if they are far dimmer than the star. The effectiveness of the coronagraph will determine just how close to the star an object can be imaged. The one flying on the NGRST will be the first time a coronagraph with active elements—components that can progressively adjust to decrease the light coming from the star—will be used on a space-based observatory.

Scientifically, it will be used to image exoplanets in distant orbits from their stars. But it also serves an engineering purpose: starting the development of a coronagraph for the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory that will need to be 100 times more effective at blocking out stars.

Compared to something like the Webb Telescope, Roman is also delightfully simple. It has relatively few moving parts that need to be deployed once in space, and those that exist, like the solar arrays and high-gain antenna, are simple spring-loaded devices. Once latches are released, they’ll simply open into place, a process that NASA’s Melton said will start as soon as 20 minutes after the NGRST separates from the launch vehicle. Commissioning is planned to take only 90 days, and Melton told Ars that it could be doing science before it completes the final burn to put it into orbit around the L2 Lagrange point.

He said the fuel needed to keep it in orbit will be the primary factor limiting the observatory’s life. Using very conservative estimates of its rate of use, NGRST will be sent to space with 10 years of fuel, so barring a major hardware failure, it’s likely to be operational for quite a bit longer.

What will we be looking for?

One of the key targets of the NGRST surveys is what are called baryon acoustic oscillations. In the extremely early Universe, matter was dense enough that sound waves could create interference patterns in the material, with areas forming that had higher or lower densities than average. As the Universe expanded, these patterns were frozen into place and ultimately formed regions with a higher or lower density of galaxies.

Identifying these patterns at large scales can tell us about the composition of the Universe, including the factors that shape most of its structure: dark matter and dark energy. Tracking how they evolve over time could also help us determine whether dark energy is changing with time rather than being in constant acceleration. There have been hints that some details of our understanding of these factors are wrong, and the NGRST will provide an independent measure of them.

In addition to directly imaging exoplanets, the NGRST will conduct a microlensing survey to detect them. This effort will focus on the galactic bulge, where star density is much higher, and will take advantage of the fact that a planet can act as a small gravitational lens, briefly brightening any background stars that pass between it and Earth.

These events are very brief, often only a few hours, and NGRST will repeatedly observe the same locations at a 15-minute cadence, providing the opportunity to capture much of the curve of the brightening and dimming. That will often be accompanied by the lensing event produced by the planet’s host star, but we’re also expecting to capture some “rogue planets” that have been ejected from extrasolar systems and are floating freely through space. In any case, the expectation is that we’ll identify tens of thousands of planets in this survey, most of them further from the host star than the ones spotted by Kepler.

Those are the planned targets for now. There will also be time set aside for individual research proposals that may find additional uses for the hardware. But there was a clear sense that we were likely to either find something entirely new with the RST or be able to use it to help tackle future problems. McEnery summed everything up by saying, “I very much hope and in fact expect that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn’t expect that we couldn’t predict, but that will set the new, deep questions [for] future missions to address.”

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Posted Friday 24 April 2026 at 7:15 am AEST (my time).

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New gas projects linked to just 11 data center campuses around the US have the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024. Emissions estimates from air permit documents examined by WIRED show that these natural gas projects—which are being built to power data centers to serve some of the US’s most powerful AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI—have the potential to emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.

As tech companies race to secure massive power deals to build out hundreds of data centers across the country, these projects represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential climate cost of the AI boom.

The infrastructure on this list of large natural gas projects reviewed by WIRED is being developed to largely bypass the grid and provide power solely for data centers, a trend known as behind-the-meter power. As data center developers face long waits for connections to traditional utilities, and amid mounting public resistance to the possibility of higher energy bills, making their own power is becoming an increasingly popular option. These projects have either been announced or are under construction, with companies already submitting air permit application materials with state agencies.

Michael Thomas, the founder of clean energy research firm Cleanview, has been tracking gas permits for data centers across the country. He calls behind-the-meter power “a crazy acceleration of emissions.”

“It’s almost like we thought we were on the downside of the Industrial Revolution, retiring coal and gas, and now we have a new hump where we’re going to rise,” he says. “That terrifies me in a lot of ways.”

One of the first—and most notorious—examples on this list is in Memphis, Tennessee. xAI made national headlines in 2024 after it began to set up gas turbines at its first data center campus in the city, Colossus 1, to quickly develop Grok, its AI. Community members living in the low-income Black community around the campus, concerned about air pollution, rallied to protest the turbines. (The EPA ultimately approved the use of turbines for the xAI campus last year; last month, regulators granted a permit for an xAI affiliate for the company’s second campus in Southaven, Mississippi, despite widespread community opposition. The NAACP filed suit against xAI last week, claiming the company was illegally operating the turbines.)

xAI’s gas turbines also represent what could be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Air permit applications for both the Colossus campus in Memphis and the nearby Colossus 2 campus in Southaven show that the turbines on each campus could generate more than 6.4 million tons of CO2equivalents at each site per year. Combined, that’s roughly equivalent to the emissions from more than 30 average-size natural gas plants, or enough energy to power 1.5 million homes. (xAI did not respond to a request for comment.)

Microsoft, meanwhile, is reportedly looking into purchasing power from a Chevron-backed natural gas project in West Texas. That single project, according to its permit, could emit more than 11.5 million tons of greenhouse gases each year—more than the yearly emissions of the entire country of Jamaica.

“Microsoft takes a portfolio approach to energy, leveraging a range of solutions to meet reliability needs while continuing to invest in carbon-free electricity,” Melanie Nakagawa, the chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, told WIRED in a statement. “In certain regions, dedicated onsite energy infrastructure may be part of that portfolio, particularly where grid constraints limit the pace of deployment.”

The emissions projections for the xAI and Microsoft projects, and all the others on WIRED’s list, were pulled directly from publicly available air permit documents in state databases as well as public air permit materials collected by both Cleanview and Oil and Gas Watch, a database maintained by the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental enforcement nonprofit. Actual greenhouse gas emissions from power plants are usually lower than what’s on their air permits. Air permit modeling is based on the scenario of a power plant constantly running at full capacity. That’s rarely the reality for grid-connected power plants, as turbines go offline for maintenance or adjust to the ebbs and flows of customer demand.

“Permitted emission numbers represent a theoretical, conservative scenario, not the actual projected emissions,” Alex Schott, the director of communications at Williams Companies, an oil and gas company that is building out three behind-the-meter power plants in Ohio for Meta, told WIRED in an email. Internal modeling done by the company, Schott added, shows that actual emissions could be “potentially two-thirds less than what’s on paper.”

The projections involved, however, are still substantial. Even if the actual emissions from these power plants end up being half of the emissions numbers on the permits, they still could create more greenhouse gas emissions than the country of Norway emitted in 2024. This number is, according to the EPA, equivalent to the emissions from more than 153 average-size natural gas plants. (WIRED’s analysis does not include emissions from backup generators and turbines on the data center campuses themselves, which create smaller amounts of emissions.)

Energy researcher Jon Koomey estimates that while emissions from efficient grid-connected gas plants could be 40 to 50 percent of the permitted numbers, data center emissions could be much closer to what is modeled on the permit, given that they don’t have to respond to customer demand. This idea is reflected on a November permit application for a data center being built by AI company Crusoe, a player in three of the projects WIRED reported on. The permit application describes the facility as “unlike a traditional power plant” that has to “respond to the demands of a constantly varying grid. At the data center, the power requirements do not vary significantly.” (“We view gas as a critical bridge—not the destination—as we work to build AI infrastructure that meets the scale of demand while expanding access to innovative forms of energy over time,” Andrew Schmitt, Crusoe’s senior director of communications, told WIRED in a statement.)

Koomey points out that a global shortage of the most efficient types of gas turbines—thanks in part to the data center race—is prompting some developers to consider choosing less efficient turbine models, forcing them to run them for longer and create more emissions.

“[Data center operators’] belief is that the value being delivered by the servers is much, much more than the cost of running these inefficient power plants all the time,” Koomey says.

Gas projects developed as part of the Stargate Project, a massive, multicompany AI effort originally started to build out infrastructure for OpenAI, also represent a potential emissions bombshell on WIRED’s list. Stargate campuses are being built across multiple states, including Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Permit documents for just three Stargate-affiliated natural gas projects—one to power a data center campus near the project’s headquarters in Abilene, Texas, and two to power Project Jupiter, a campus in New Mexico—show that they have a combined potential to emit more than 24 million tons of greenhouse gases each year.

“We are committed to protecting ratepayers while building the infrastructure needed for U.S. AI leadership,” OpenAI spokesperson Aaron McLear said in a statement. “Where near term natural gas is required to ensure reliable power, we work with partners to use modern, efficient generation while helping accelerate clean power and grid modernization.”

Oracle spokesperson Julia Allyn Fishel told WIRED that there is a “modification” to the Project Jupiter application currently in progress, “which is expected to materially lower emissions.” The company did not provide the new emissions estimates, which the New Mexico Environment Department have not yet made public.

“Oracle is committed to paying our own way on energy costs while implementing the best energy solution for each community so that ratepayers’ bills and electric grid reliability are not impacted by our AI data centers,” Fishel said in a statement.

A fourth gas plant on the main Stargate campus in Abilene has, according to application documents, the potential to permit more than 7.8 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents each year. This power plant is being built by Crusoe for use by Microsoft. The companies announced in late March that Crusoe would be building new buildings on the Abilene campus, including a power plant, to support Microsoft’s AI infrastructure. (Microsoft declined to comment.)

There are projects with an even bigger potential carbon footprint than Stargate. Outside of Amarillo, Texas, White House darling Fermi is building what it calls the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus, a data center campus with a target of 17 gigawatts. Fermi continuously emphasizes its use of what it calls “clean” natural gas. But documents show that the maximum emissions for the two gas projects combined could be more than 40.3 million tons of CO2 equivalents each year, more than the yearly emissions of all the power sources in the state of Connecticut.

About five hours south of Amarillo, near the city of Fort Stockton, Pacifico Energy is developing what it claims is the largest single energy project in the country: a 7.2 gigawatt data center campus, powered by a gas project that is permitted to emit more than 33 million tons of greenhouse gases each year. (Pacifico did not respond to a request for comment.)

Major tech companies that have made carbon reduction pledges in recent years have acknowledged that the AI infrastructure build-out is hampering their goals. The sheer scale of the gas projects shows how easy it is for even just a few fossil fuel plants to tip the scale.

Meta, for example, is linked with three behind-the-meter gas projects in Ohio: two to power a data center in New Albany, and one to power a separate facility in Wood County. Together, permit documents for these facilities show they could emit a maximum of 5.5 million tons of CO2 equivalents each year.

Meta claims in its 2025 sustainability report that it has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 23.8 million metric tons since 2021. But even if the three projects in Ohio emit just half of what’s on their permits, that would still equal more than 10 percent of the company’s stated emissions reductions over the past four years. (Meta declined to comment on the record.)

The Ohio projects aren’t the only fossil fuel projects in Meta’s pipeline. Most major AI companies building behind-the-meter power are also pursuing arrangements with utilities to pay for power plants that would be connected to the grid. Meta has an agreement with utility Entergy to help power a massive data center, Hyperion, in Richland Parish, Louisiana. A gas plant being built by Entergy in Richland Parish to meet power needs from the Meta campus could, according to its application, emit nearly 5.2 million tons of greenhouse gases each year. Earlier this month, Meta announced that it would pay for seven new natural gas plants, totaling more than five gigawatts, to serve both its data centers and Entergy customers. (These facilities, the announcement states, are being built with future carbon capture capabilities, which could drive down some emissions from the plants.)

Data center developers have quickly jumped over the past year to pursue behind-the-meter options. Research released in January from Global Energy Monitor, a nonprofit that tracks oil and gas, showed that nearly 100 gigawatts of behind-the-meter natural gas power for data centers were in the US development pipeline at the start of 2026—up from just 4 gigawatts of data center-specific power in the pipeline in early 2024. Several massive, multi-gigawatt data center gas projects have been announced in the weeks since the research was released, illustrating just how quick the race to build out data center power has become. In March, several companies linked to projects on this list signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a nonbinding agreement sponsored by the Trump administration, which asks AI companies to “build, bring, or buy” power generation for data centers. (Experts told WIRED that the pledge was largely symbolic, and that neither the White House nor tech companies have much control over policies that can actually bring down consumer electric bills.)

Last month, three Senate Democrats sent questions about emissions from data centers to several leading tech companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Fermi. In response to a series of questions from WIRED about the carbon emissions on its air permit, Fermi sent a copy of its response to those lawmakers, where it urged the lawmakers to support nuclear energy and the campus’s inclusion in foreign nuclear investment deals. The company also claimed that its behind-the-meter power was not subject to regulations requiring them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since its power would not be connected to the electric grid.

“Clean natural gas is fundamental to the energy transition and is the logical bridge to nuclear for a nation that cannot afford to wait,” the letter states. The company did not answer questions about whether it would retire the natural gas turbines it was building once its planned nuclear capability is brought online.

It is unlikely that all of the gas facilities WIRED examined will get built; an air permit is not a guarantee of construction. Neither Fermi nor the GW Ranch facility, the two largest emitters on this list, have a client yet. (On Friday, Fermi announced that its CEO would be stepping down immediately; while he remains on the board, he has called for the company to be sold. Stocks plunged more than 20 percent, and the company’s CFO also departed.) The Stargate project has created high-profile headlines as OpenAI reshuffles its strategy; the company paused a planned data center expansion in the UK this week. Turbine shortages, labor and construction costs, and energy shocks in the Middle East are just a few factors that could cause bumps in the road for AI companies building their own power. And most of these companies are also racing to build out renewable energy and nuclear as they seek to power their data centers with anything and everything they can get.

But Thomas sees behind-the-meter gas power as a potentially lasting trend for data centers—with worrisome implications for the climate.

“The thing that has kept me up at night and is starting to really worry me,” he says, “is what happens if this gets 10 times bigger?”

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Posted Friday 24 April 2026 at 7:14 am AEST (my time).

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During most of the Artemis II mission, the crew of four astronauts beamed back low-definition video, both from inside the spacecraft and from exterior views of the Moon. It was exhilarating stuff, but in a world in which we’re all watching HDTVs, it also felt a little flat.

This is because Orion largely communicated with Earth via radio waves, picked up by large dishes sprinkled around the world. This is pretty much the same way the Apollo spacecraft talked to Earth more than half a century ago.

However, unlike Apollo, the astronauts on Orion would periodically send batches of much higher-resolution data, including the stunning photographs of the far side of the Moon and the Solar eclipse observed from there. This was made possible by optical laser communications, and not just those built by NASA. The mission included a commercial component that could pave the way for vastly more data returning to Earth from space than ever before.

Laser comms works

Apollo returned data to Earth at about 50KB per second using radio frequencies. Similarly, Orion used S-band for a slightly higher communication rate most of the time, at 3MB to 5MB per second. But when the spacecraft turned on its optical communications terminal and connected to ground stations, the data rate increased to 260 Mbps. At those speeds, the crew could have transmitted a full high-definition movie to Earth in seconds.

But that did not happen for a couple of reasons. The first is that the optical communications system was experimental, and the second is that NASA had only three ground stations capable of receiving and processing these laser signals back on Earth: two in the United States and one in Australia.

NASA has previously experimented with laser communications from the Moon with the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer mission a little more than a decade ago, and later a demonstration from the International Space Station as well as the Psyche spacecraft from deep space.

Yet these were tentative efforts. Bolting an optical communications system onto Orion represented an important final test for the technology, which is now likely to become a bedrock for future Artemis missions to the Moon. Its successful use should allow NASA’s Artemis IV landing on the lunar surface and future missions to be broadcast live in high definition and possibly even 4K.

There’s always a catch

There is one major drawback with optical laser communications. The photons in the laser, at 1550 nm, are easily scattered by clouds. A single ground station must have clear skies to receive a steady signal,

That’s a major reason why, although SpaceX’s Starlink constellation has implemented space-to-space laser links, space-to-ground laser links have remained experimental to date.

But laser communications are clearly the future as the amount of data generated and stored in space grows exponentially. Not only is the bandwidth about 100 times greater, but the transmitters required are also smaller and need less power. For example, on Orion, the S-band transmitter required 5 to 20 watts of power, compared to the laser communications transmitter, which used just a single watt.

How do you address the cloudy skies problem? For always-on laser communications with future Artemis missions, to protect against clouded-in locations, it’s estimated that there would need to be about 40 ground stations around the world. Fortunately, there was an experiment-within-the-experiment on Artemis II that could help solve this issue.

Low-cost optical terminals

NASA’s primary ground stations for optical communications on Artemis II were telescopes at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and the Table Mountain Facility in California. However, the space agency also decided to test whether it would be feasible to deploy a lower-cost optical terminal on the ground to receive lasers from space.

Engineers from NASA field centers in Ohio and Maryland purchased an off-the-shelf 70 cm telescope from Observable Space and a backend to process the lasers from Quantum Opus. Within months, the telescope and detector were deployed at Mount Stromlo in southeastern Australia, near Canberra.

During Artemis II, the off-the-shelf optical terminal reached the system-designed maximum rate of 260MB per second, downloading much of the data NASA received during the mission.

“Advancing US leadership in space- and ground-based optics is core to our mission, and turn-key laser communication ground stations are a critical component of that future,” Dan Roelker, co-founder and CEO of Observable Space, said in a statement.

The technology for receiving and processing laser signals from the Moon, Mars, or beyond is not simple. The “Opus One” detection system, for example, uses superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors. That’s why reducing the cost of building and deploying these systems is critical for widespread adoption of space-to-ground laser communications.

Quantum Opus was co-founded by physicist Josh Cassada, who became a NASA astronaut in 2013 and then retired more than a decade later to rejoin Quantum Opus. He led the fabrication of the company’s photon-detection products.

In an interview, Cassada said the technology is important not just for getting massive amounts of data down from space, but also for applications such as quantum computing. “If you want to detect photons at the single photon level, and you don’t know anything about cryogenics, that’s fine,” he said. “You just push this button, and in three hours, you’re counting photons.”

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 7:31 am AEST (my time).

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Humans have been building ping-pong playing robots for decades, such as Omron’s FORPHEUS that challenged amateur competitors at CES 2017. What sets Ace apart from the rest is that the robot, which was developed by Sony’s AI division, is the first that can hold its own against top-ranked human players and occasionally even beat them in matches that follow the official rules of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF).

AI is already capable of besting humans at games like Chess and Go, but physical games pose a much greater challenge as robots have to be engineered to match the speed and responsiveness of the human mind and body. To be competitive at table tennis, a particularly difficult game with a ball moving at a high speed and spin that can alter its trajectory, Sony’s researchers developed a robotic system with eight joints. Two joints control the paddle’s position, two adjust its overall orientation, and the other three enable the robot to deliver powerful shots.

Ace’s moving parts are assisted by a complicated vision system made up of nine traditional cameras surrounding the court that can locate the position of the ball in 3D space, and three “gaze control systems” that measure the ball’s angular velocity and spin so its trajectory can be accurately calculated.

In a study outlining Ace’s capabilities and achievements published in the journal, Nature, today, Sony says that during test matches in April 2025, the robot won three out of five matches against elite players (athletes with more than 10 years of training) and lost two matches to professional players who regularly compete in professional leagues. Sony says Ace went on to defeat professional players in December 2025 and last month, according to Reuters.

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 7:30 am AEST (my time).

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Physicists have spent the last 20 years pondering an apparent discrepancy between experimental results and theoretical predictions for the magnetic properties of the muon, the electron’s heavier cousin—a mismatch that hinted at a possible fifth force. But according to a new paper published in the journal Nature, the discrepancy is due to a calculation fluke, not exciting new physics, so the Standard Model of particle physics is still holding strong.

“There were many calculations in the last 60 years or so, and as they got more and more precise, they all pointed toward a discrepancy and a new interaction that would upend known laws of physics,” said co-author Zoltan Fodor, a physicist at Penn State University. “We applied a new method to calculate this discrepancy quantity, and we showed that it’s not there. This new interaction we hoped for simply is not there. The old interactions can explain the value completely.”

As previously reported, the muon (a member of the lepton classification) is the heavier second-generation cousin of the electron—the tau is the third-generation cousin—and that makes muons particularly sensitive to virtual particles popping into and out of existence in the quantum vacuum, since they can briefly interact with those virtual particles. Muons are special to physicists because they are light enough to be plentiful yet heavy enough to be used experimentally to probe the accuracy of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The muon has an internal magnet and an angular momentum (spin); “g” (the “proportionality constant”) refers to the ratio between the internal magnet’s strength and the rate of gyration. The muon’s magnet would typically rotate to align along the axis of the magnetic field, much like a compass does in Earth’s magnetic field. But because of the muon’s angular momentum, this doesn’t happen; instead, the field exerts a torque on the muon’s spinning magnetic moment, causing it to precess around the axis of the field. Because the muon can interact with virtual particles, the value for g differs from the classical value of 2 by about 0.1 percent—so it’s technically known as the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.

Intriguing hints

The Muon g-2 experiment (pronounced “gee minus two”) is designed to look for tantalizing hints of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. It does this by making precise measurements of the wobble that occurs when a muon is placed in a magnetic field, in response to virtual particles popping in and out of existence. If the value of the wobble disagrees with the exacting prediction of the Standard Model, that’s a strong hint that some new physics might be involved. The final result, announced in 2006, found an intriguing discrepancy with the predicted value of the Standard Model: The muon’s measured magnet moment came in at a smaller value.

Even more intriguing, that result was deemed a 3.7-sigma effect. (A signal’s strength is determined by the number of standard statistical deviations, or sigmas, from the expected background in the data, producing a telltale “bump.” This metric is often compared to a coin landing on heads several times in a row. A three-sigma result is a strong hint. The gold standard for claiming discovery is a five-sigma result, comparable to tossing 21 heads in a row, for example.)

That said, three-sigma results, while tantalizing, pop up all the time in particle physics, and more often than not, they disappear once more data is added to the mix. So Fermilab revived the Muon g-2 experiment in hopes of either confirming or refuting the discrepancy. The Fermilab physicists completed their initial analysis of data from the updated Muon g-2 experiment, showing “excellent agreement” with the discrepancy Brookhaven recorded. Taken together, they boosted the statistical significance to 4.2 sigma—teetering just on the verge of the threshold required for discovery. The experiments recently received a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

A new approach

Supercomputer simulations reveal the effect of the strong nuclear force on the muon’s magnetism.

Credit: University of Wuppertal

This latest measurement focuses on strong force effects, specifically the “hadronic vacuum polarization,” which arises as quarks and gluons interact within the framework of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory. The authors adopted a hybrid approach, combining powerful large-scale computer simulations with experimental data.

“The old methodology involved collecting thousands of experimental results and reinterpreting them to get the single number, the magnetic moment of the muon,” Fodor said. “Our approach was completely different. We divided space-time into very small cells, a lattice, then we solved the equations of the Standard Model on that. There was an awful lot of theory, mathematics, programming, computational knowledge and computer architecture behind this calculation.”

It took 10 years to make those complicated calculations, but when they were done. Fodor et al. found their results agreed with the Standard Model to within half a standard deviation and down to 11 decimal places. It’s the most precise calculation yet achieved, accurate to parts per billion. While the results do not completely rule out possible new physics like a fifth force, they do further constrain the areas where new physics might be lurking.

“People ask me how it feels to make this discovery and, to be honest, I feel somewhat sad,” said Fodor. “When we started to calculate this quantity, we thought we were going to have a good and trustworthy calculation for a new fifth force. Instead, we found there is no fifth force. We did find a very precise proof of not just the Standard Model but also of quantum field theory, which is the foundation on which the Standard Model was built.”

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10449-z (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 7:29 am AEST (my time).

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If charging speed is one of the major stumbling blocks preventing people from considering an electric vehicle, then ChargePoint’s new Express Solo DC fast charger is a step in the right direction. It has been designed to be compact and work with DC power, making it easy to install in tight spaces. Oh, and it maxes out at a hefty 600 kW.

As we saw with yesterday’s news from CATL, EV batteries are getting more and more capable by the day. Increasing power can reduce charge times, as long as the battery can take it—BYD’s new Blade battery can charge at up to 1.5 MW, and megawatt chargers are already common across China.

Once again, you can see how badly the US is lagging in EVs. Most Tesla Superchargers max out at 250 kW, Electrify America stops at 350 kW, and even the new IONNA stations top out at 400 kW per plug. So the Express Solo’s 600 kW—as powerful as a Formula E pit stop—sets a new benchmark, particularly for a standalone charger that could live in an urban gas station or convenience store parking lot.

The Express Solo can charge two EVs simultaneously, splitting up to 600 kW of power between them or sending all 600 kW to a single plug; ChargePort’s “Omni Port,” which has both CCS1 and NACS sockets for maximum compatibility. It takes direct DC inputs, such as from an energy storage battery on site, obviating the need for a costly inverter. And it’s modular and scales—it can be expanded to four plugs with support for eight coming soon, ChargePoint says.

“The Express DC fast charging architecture delivers differentiation,” said ChargePoint CEO Rick Wilmer. “Not just by higher output but by how economically, efficiently, and flexibly that power is delivered. ExpressSolo combines unmatched power density, direct DC inputs for energy storage integration, and a modular architecture that scales with minimal cost and complexity. Collectively, this redefines DC fast charging from a fixed asset into a future-ready energy platform. For those with plans for expansion, Express Solo enables scalable configurations for any charging scenario, futureproofing a station owner’s investment by giving drivers an ideal fast charging experience today while offering flexibility for the EVs of tomorrow. ”

The charging company has some other interesting stuff in the works for the Express Solo—its DC inputs mean it is capable of bidirectional power, so it could use an EV to top up the energy storage battery. The charger’s design and direct DC inputs make the Express Solo about 30 percent cheaper to buy and operate compared to existing high-power chargers, according to the company.

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 7:29 am AEST (my time).

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As prophesied by more than a few analysts along the years, China’s full-hearted embrace of electric vehicles has paid dividends. Starting with also-rans that required joint ventures with Western automakers, Chinese OEMs now make world-leading EVs crammed full of smartphone-like features that we’re told are the best thing since sliced bread. I remain skeptical about that for now, but I don’t need to be convinced about the advanced state of Chinese EV powertrain technology.

For instance, earlier today, the battery giant CATL unveiled an impressive new lithium-iron phosphate battery at a tech event in China. The third-generation Shenxing battery is CATL’s answer to BYD’s recently announced Blade Battery 2.0, and like BYD, CATL has focused on improving a couple of big pain points.

One is charging speed. Humans have long been conditioned to expect pumping an energy-dense liquid fuel into a vehicle to be quick. Batteries, meanwhile, can have non-linear charge curves depending on cell chemistry, and they behave differently at different temperatures and starting states of charge. OEMs like Hyundai and Porsche have 800 V nickel manganese cobalt battery packs that can charge from 10 to 80 percent in as little as 18 minutes. But according to a report in CarNewsChina, CATL’s Shenxing 3.0 is nearly five times faster.

LFP batteries have more linear charging curves than NCM batteries, and unlike the latter, they don’t mind being fully recharged by a DC fast charger. Charging from 10 to 98 percent took just six minutes and 27 seconds. The more standard 10–80 percent time takes just three minutes, 44 seconds. Only have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge.

Another issue is cold-weather performance, and even electromobility evangelists must concede that EVs suffer more when temperatures drop. An internal combustion engine’s efficiency also degrades below freezing, but the waste heat offsets this a little and also lets you stay nice and warm in the cabin for free. But even at -22 F (-30 C), the Shenxing battery charged from 10 to 98 percent in 9 minutes.

That’s as long as BYD’s Blade 2.0 takes to charge to 98 percent at room temperature; at -22° F, the Blade requires 12 minutes to charge from 20 to 98 percent, according to its maker. CATL credits its battery’s cold-weather performance to very precise temperature control of the individual cells and an ability to heat itself in pulses. An extremely low internal resistance of just 0.25 milliohms also plays an important role.

CATL demoed fast-charging booths and a battery-swap system, though with charging speeds this fast, there seems little point in swapping packs in and out. After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said.

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Posted Wednesday 22 April 2026 at 7:12 am AEST (my time).

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After the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission earlier this month, focus turned to what comes next in NASA’s roadmap to return humans to the Moon.

The biggest question concerned the readiness of lunar landers, the complex and essential machines needed to take astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up to orbit. And as Ars reported at the time, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have a significant amount of developmental and testing work left to do before even a prototype lander is ready.

But a secondary question has been the development of spacesuits, which are necessary for astronauts to exit their landers and explore the lunar surface. Less is publicly known about their development.

However, the release of a report by NASA’s Inspector General on Monday sheds some light on this progress. And for those interested in NASA’s aggressive 2028 timeline to land humans on the Moon, it’s worth noting what the report did and did not say.

The report

Broadly speaking, the new report examines the process by which NASA has gone about acquiring lunar spacesuits. For those not paying attention to spacesuit procurement—which is basically everyone with a life or without a financial interest in the matter—it has been a long and tortured process. NASA has been working internally for decades to develop a next-generation spacesuit.

It has been a messy, bloated process, so the space agency decided to try something different in 2022. Following a more commercial procurement process, NASA awarded two Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contracts—firm-fixed-price, service-based contracts worth up to $3.1 billion—to teams led by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace. Axiom was a new space company with no experience in spacesuits, and Collins was a more traditional provider with a lot of experience.

However, two years later, Collins dropped out of the competition. The company had apparently not managed the contract particularly well and determined it could not continue working on spacesuits profitably.

“Collins’ descope from xEVAS negated the competition and redundancy sought by the Agency, leaving NASA with only one xEVAS spacesuit provider,” the inspector general’s report finds. “If Axiom cannot satisfy its contractual requirements in a timely or cost-effective manner, then NASA could be forced to continue using the problematic EMUs throughout the life of the ISS and significantly adjust its lunar plans.”

The report also provides some basic comparisons to other spaceflight programs and finds that, based on historical averages, the Axiom spacesuit may not be ready for an Artemis demonstration before 2031—five years from now.

So, are lunar astronauts out of luck?

This all sounds pretty dire, so we did a little digging. In reality, the situation does not appear as grim as what’s outlined in the new report. Yes, it does seem like NASA made some mistakes in procuring the spacesuits “as a service,” especially when there are likely to be no non-NASA customers for these suits for a long time.

However, the space agency has evidently found a good partner in Axiom Space, a Houston-based company also working to develop a commercial space station. Axiom has no guarantees that it will ultimately make money from this project, but it has nevertheless poured resources into the program and hired appropriately to meet its needs. Unlike the traditional space company Collins, Axiom and its investors have been willing to make a long-term bet that its suits will one day be in great demand. If NASA does succeed in building a Moon Base, this bet could pay off big time.

Despite the 2031 date bandied about in the spacesuit report, it appears this is too pessimistic. After the report’s release on Monday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman replied, “I am confident that when NASA is ready to land on the Moon in 2028, our astronauts will be wearing Axiom suits.”

This is consistent with what two sources have told Ars: that internally the spacesuit program is making good progress and that both Axiom and NASA are putting in the time and resources to push it toward success. Axiom Space chief executive Jonathan Cirtain said Tuesday that Axiom’s suit has logged more than 950 hours of crewed pressurized testing and should complete critical design review this year. Problems can always occur during hardware development programs, of course, but things appear to be on track.

NASA presently plans to fly Artemis III in 2027, during which Orion will dock with one or both lunar lander prototypes in Earth orbit. That mission is likely to carry an Axiom suit for demonstration in microgravity. This would be a precursor mission to a lunar landing in 2028.

At this point, the new report notwithstanding, the Artemis schedule is unlikely to be delayed by spacesuit readiness.

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Posted Wednesday 22 April 2026 at 7:11 am AEST (my time).

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On Monday, the International Energy Agency released its analysis of the energy trends of 2025, covering the entire globe. It confirms and extends the primary conclusion of a more limited analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency: 2025 was the first year of solar’s dominance. Increased solar production was a key reason the growth of carbon-free energy sources outpaced rising demand.

Coupled with a massive growth in battery storage and relatively stagnant fossil fuel use, the year has led the IEA to declare that “the world has entered the Age of Electricity.”

Electrons for everyone

The IEA report covers energy use, including the electrical grid, transportation, home heating, and other forms of consumption. As such, it can track how some of those uses are shifting, as electric vehicles displace some gasoline use and heat pumps replace gas and oil heating. It also saw a more global trend: The demand for electricity grew at twice the rate of overall energy demand. All of these went into the conclusion that we’re starting the Age of Electricity.

In terms of specifics, the IEA saw electric vehicle demand rise by nearly 40 percent, with electric car sales being a quarter of the total of cars sold last year. While that’s having a measurable effect on electricity demand, it remains relatively small at the moment. It’s almost certain to be contributing to the size of the rise in oil use last year: 0.7 percent. In absolute terms, that’s less than half the average rise of the previous decade.

The share of each source that was used to meet changes in energy demand vs. 2024. Nearly every source of

energy grew, but renewables accounted for over half, with solar dominating.

Credit: IEA

Heat pump sales were largely flat last year, but in a number of countries, past growth has meant that heat pumps now account for a majority of new heating units sold. But relatively cold weather in populated regions of the world made the building sector the primary driver of demand for natural gas. Even so, its use rose only 1 percent in 2025 compared to 2024.

Trends like these are likely to accelerate in 2026 due to the conflicts in the Middle East. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz will severely affect the flow of oil globally, and a number of countries are dependent on liquefied natural gas from Persian Gulf states. Even if non-fossil alternatives were unavailable, we’d see lower consumption due to a combination of reduced availability and higher prices. Instead, we’re more likely to see an accelerated shift away from fossil fuels due to increased interest in electrified alternatives and government efforts to limit the impact of future fuel shocks.

Moving to a solar-dominated grid

When it comes to supplying electrons for those alternatives, the central story is solar power. “The absolute increase of solar PV generation in 2025 is the largest ever observed for any source,” the IEA says, “excluding years marked by rebounds from global economic shocks such as COVID-19.” In other words, with nothing in particular driving the energy markets in 2025, Solar’s growth was unprecedented. On its own, its growth covered a quarter of the rising demand for all forms of energy. If you limit it to electricity, increased solar production covered over two-thirds of the increased demand.

Overall, solar generated over 2,700 terawatt-hours last year, more than double its output from three years earlier. It now accounts for over 8 percent of the world’s total electricity production. Thirty individual countries installed at least a gigawatt of solar last year, and it is now the single largest grid source by capacity (though other sources still outproduce it at the moment).

Change in the production of different electricity sources. Most have barely budged in the past two years, with solar being a big exception.

Credit: IEA

The solar boom is the primary reason that carbon-free generating sources—hydro, nuclear, solar, wind, and other renewables—were able to grow faster than demand in 2025. In other words, as electrification increases, we’re at the point where we are capable of meeting the additional demand without boosting carbon emissions. These sources covered nearly 60 percent of the overall growth in demand for energy of all types.

Solar’s growth is being accompanied by a key enabling technology: batteries. Batteries were the fastest-growing power technology, with capacity additions rising 40 percent between 2024 and 2025, reaching 110 GW of new capacity last year. That is apparently more than the highest one-year addition of natural gas capacity and leaves our total installed capacity at over 10 times what it was just five years ago. Batteries, when combined with cheap solar, can limit the need for fossil fuel-powered backups.

As noted above, natural gas use increased (by about 1 percent), but that was primarily due to weather-driven heating demand. Coal was largely flat, with use rising by just 0.4 percent. While the US saw a small increase in coal use, coal use in the EU dropped below 10 percent of electricity production last year for the first time since statistics were kept. While China commissioned a lot of coal plants in 2025, those were largely started during a prior energy shock. China actually saw its coal use for electricity drop last year due to its massive investment in renewables (China was responsible for 60 percent of renewable global growth last year).

Last year, nuclear remained stable, with about 3 GW of newly commissioned plants offsetting the retirement of 3 GW elsewhere. China is the major player here, too, with enough plants under construction that it will eventually surpass the US in installed nuclear capacity if all of them are commissioned. Twelve GW of new plants started construction last year, with nine of the 10 total plants being located in China.

Impact on carbon

In keeping with all of the trends above, energy-related carbon emissions grew last year, but only by about 0.4 percent. While that’s still enough to create a record high, it is well below some of the growth of the past and represents the third straight year that the growth of emissions has slowed. One potentially critical aspect of this is that China’s emissions actually declined in 2025, which the IEA ascribes to a mixture of industrial changes and the explosive expansion of renewable energy.

2025 saw relatively low growth in carbon emissions compared to most other years, with many of the exceptions

representing periods of economic turmoil.

IEA

All the green tech we’ve installed over the last six years have cut significantly into the rise in emissions we’d have expected without their deployment.

IEA

 

The IEA also estimates that the green tech we’ve installed since 2019—renewables, EVs, heat pumps, etc.—along with nuclear power, has displaced about 7 percent of total fossil fuel use in 2025 and reduced carbon emissions by 8 percent compared to where they might be. In terms of coal use alone, it estimates that these systems have displaced the equivalent of India’s 2025 coal use.

And, as noted above, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where the supply interruptions caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz don’t interfere with global fossil fuel use in 2026. But the world has seen shocks cause one-time drops in emissions in the past. The key question now is whether this event will accelerate many countries’ efforts to move away from fossil fuels.

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Posted Wednesday 22 April 2026 at 7:10 am AEST (my time).

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After spending the last couple of weeks discussing the problem, Formula 1’s stakeholders have arrived at a number of solutions to the sport’s hybrid energy problem. F1 started this year with all-new powertrains with much more powerful electric motors than ever before, but with batteries that can only send full power to those motors for a few seconds a lap. Once exhausted, the power halves until there’s more charge in the battery. In qualifying this ruins the show, as the fastest lap is no longer a flat-out one; in the race it can create dangerous speed differentials with other cars that still have charge in their battery.

The new rules, which go into effect from the Miami Grand Prix (May 1–3), reduce the maximum energy you can recharge per lap. The battery holds 4 MJ, and in the past few races, each driver has been allowed to recharge and then use up to 8 MJ per lap to power the electric motor that supplements the turbocharged V6 engine.

Recharging is done through a mixture of regenerative braking and what the sport calls “super clipping,” using the engine to power the electric motor as a generator to charge the battery. The problem is that every kW that gets super-clipped from the engine is a kW that isn’t going to the rear wheels, creating speed differentials of up to 70 km/h (43 mph). And without an electric motor at the front axle, the cars can only harvest a few MJ via regenerative braking each lap.

What’s changing?

From Miami, the new limit is 7 MJ per lap in qualifying, instead of 8 MJ, so there’s less overall need to harvest during the lap, meaning the drivers should be flat-out more often. And the cars can harvest more energy while super clipping—the full 350 kW rather than the 250 kW allowed in the first three race weekends this year. The FIA (the sport’s organizers) says that should mean just 2–4 seconds of super clipping per lap.

The greater harvesting limit also applies during the races, and there are new rules on how much power the electric motor (better known in the sport as an MGU-K, or motor-generator unit-kinetic) can send to the rear wheels.

In “key acceleration zones (from corner exit to braking point, including overtaking zones)” the MGU-K will be able to deploy its full 350 kW (469 hp) to complement the V6’s 400 kW (536 hp). Outside of those zones, the MGU-K is limited to just 250 kW (335 hp) around the lap, which means smaller speed differentials. And the boost—which drivers can engage if they’re within a second of a car in front—is capped at an extra 150 kW (201 hp) now.

Those changes should also mean F1 drivers spend a little less of their time worrying about energy management, although their hybrid powertrains remain governed by algorithms that have shown the potential to be unpredictable. Lap times will be slower than they otherwise might, but the powers that be hope these tweaks are enough to quell criticism that has been growing since preseason testing in February. They’ll also be hoping the changes don’t ruin the action we’ve seen during the last three races—lest people forget, the pre-hybrid era had loud and dynamic cars but precious little overtaking (and so, so many mechanical breakdowns).

There are also changes that will be tested at the start of the Miami race to ameliorate the problem of a car failing to get off the line (and therefore being dangerously slow) because of a problem on the formation lap. If the “low power start detection” system detects a car making too little power off the line, the system will make that car’s warning lights flash and also trigger full MGU-K deployment; in normal conditions, the MGU-K only joins the fun above 50 km/h (31 mph), so it isn’t used in the first phase of a race start.

The FIA will see whether that works before making the change permanent for the rest of the 2026 season. Additionally, there are some tweaks for racing in the rain, including hotter tire blankets for wet tires, a lower deployment limit for the MGU-K if it’s wet, and simpler visual cues from the cars’ rain lights.

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Posted Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 7:45 am AEST (my time).

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Bruce the kea—a species of alpine parrot native to New Zealand—lost his upper beak in an accident as a young bird. But that hasn’t stopped him from becoming the dominant male in his kea community (known as a “circus”) at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, Bruce achieved his alpha status via a unique fighting method, essentially “jousting” with what remains of his beak.

Researchers already knew Bruce was special. In 2021, scientists at the Kea Animal Minds Lab at the University of Auckland studied Bruce and other non-disabled kea and found that Bruce exhibited unusual preening behavior to compensate for his missing upper beak. He figured out how to use small pebbles for that purpose, wedging them between his lower jaw and tongue and then rubbing them along his feathers. Other non-disabled keas occasionally played with pebbles, too, but they chose larger ones and never used them for preening.

So Bruce didn’t learn this behavior by watching other birds; he figured it out on his own. The authors concluded this was evidence of keas’ high problem-solving abilities and possibly an example of deliberate tool use. It’s also why Bruce’s caretakers at the reserve have never fitted him with prosthetics, believing it would only cause him stress and force him to re-adapt his behavior all over again.

No contest

Now Bruce is challenging a fundamental assumption of so-called “contest theory”: that the larger, better-armed opponent in a conflict will usually win the fight. Bruce’s circus consists of nine males and three females, and the researchers observed 162 male-versus-male interactions over four weeks. Bruce was involved in 36 interactions and won them all, thereby cementing his alpha status. Bruce also had the lowest levels of stress hormone metabolites, was given priority access to the four central feeding stations on account of his rank, and even had a non-mate remove debris from his lower beak, the only individual in the circus to be so honored.

Bruce lost his upper beak in an accident when he was very young.

Ximena Nelson

 

Bruce “jousting” with another male.

Alex Grabham

 

Bruce runs and jumps to “joust” with opponents from a distance.

Ximena Nelson

 

The key to Bruce’s success and overall chill mood? His unique beak-jousting technique, which enabled him to quickly displace his rivals. At close range, Bruce would extend his neck to thrust at opponents, adding a run or jump to the motion when attacking from farther away. Other non-disabled males mostly bit downward onto an opponent’s neck, while Bruce mostly engaged in forward thrusts and targeted the back, head, wings, and legs of his opponents. He kicked at the same rate as other kea but used his half-beak much more frequently.

According to the authors, there are only two other cases in the scientific literature that are comparable to Bruce’s ingenious adaptation. In one case, the late Jane Goodall observed an alpha male chimpanzee named Fabian who lost the use of his arm due to polio; his brother became the new alpha male. Fabian managed to achieve “beta” status via association, and also by developing unusual charging displays. The other case concerned an old Japanese macaque whose ability to walk gradually deteriorated; the macaque maintained his alpha status by allying with the alpha female. But Bruce achieved his alpha status on his own through dominance, not via a useful alliance.

“Bruce shows us that behavioral innovation can help bypass physical disability, at least in species with the cognitive flexibility to develop new solutions,” said co-author Alexander Grabham of Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “Previous research has shown links between large brains, behavioral flexibility, and survival at the species level. Bruce demonstrates how those links play out in a single individual across traits that matter day-to-day, such as social dominance. Our findings also raise an important welfare question: if a disabled animal can innovate its way to success, well-intentioned interventions like prosthetics might not always improve their quality of life. Sometimes the animal can do better without help.”

Current Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.03.004 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 7:43 am AEST (my time).

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If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won’t see is what’s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States.

I was the lead laser scientist on the Texas Petawatt, or TPW as we called it, from 2020 to 2024. Texas Petawatt, which is currently closed due to funding cuts, was a government-funded research center where scientists from across the country applied for time to use specialized equipment. It was part of LaserNetUS, a Department of Energy network of high-power laser labs.

This type of laser takes a tiny pulse of light, stretches it out so it doesn’t blast optics to pieces, and amplifies it until, for a brief instant, it carries more power than the entire US electrical grid. Then it compresses the pulse back to a trillionth of a second to create a star in a vacuum chamber.

On a typical shot day, the target might be a piece of metal foil thinner than a human hair, a jet of gas or a tiny plastic pellet—each designed to answer a different scientific question.

Scientists from across the country applied for time on TPW to study everything from the physics of stellar interiors and fusion energy to new approaches for cancer treatment.

Most people hear about petawatt lasers and picture something out of a movie. A “shot day” is actually hours of quiet, repetitive work followed by about 10 seconds where nobody breathes.

I now work as a research scientist at the University of Texas-Austin, studying the interaction of lasers with different materials, but a typical shot day during my time running TPW would look like this:

7 am

I arrive two hours before the first scheduled shot. I put on my gown, boots, and hairnet and step into the cold clean room. The laser doesn’t just turn on. You coax it awake.

I start with the oscillator, a small box that generates the first seed of light. I write down the parameters that define how the laser will behave during the shot: energy, center frequency, vacuum pressure in the tubes, cooling water level and flow. At this stage, they are fixed regardless of the experiment. The laser must perform the same way every time before the science can begin. Then I fire up the pump laser that will amplify this tiny pulse from nanojoules to about half a joule.

The system needs at least 30 minutes to stabilize. During that time, I check alignment through every pinhole and every camera along the beam path. A slight misalignment at this stage isn’t just a problem; it can be catastrophic—a mispointed beam at full power can burn through optics that take months to source and replace, setting the entire laser back.

Building the beam

Once the system is warmed up, I send the beam into the first amplifier: a glass rod surrounded by bright flash lamps that pump light into the glass—like charging a battery. With each pass, the beam absorbs energy from the glass and grows stronger. Then the beam travels into a larger rod, where it makes four passes, picking up more energy each time until it reaches about 12 joules, roughly the energy of a ball thrown hard across a room.

This process alone takes the better part of an hour, most of it spent checking and confirming alignment and energy at each stage.

I expand the beam and send it through the final stage: the disk amplifiers. Two amplifiers, each consisting of two massive 30-centimeter glass disks, are pumped by a huge bank of flash lamps powered by capacitor banks—essentially giant batteries that store electrical energy and release it in a sudden burst. They are so large that they have their own room on a separate floor. Fast optical shutters between each stage act as gates, controlling exactly when and where the beam travels.

The shot

When the experimental team confirms that the target is in position, it asks me to prepare for a system shot. I run through the long checklist. We test the shutters and switch to system shot mode. Every monitor in the facility changes to display the same message—“System Shot Mode”—and flashes red.

I lean into the microphone at the control desk, a vintage piece that looks like it belongs in a World War II radio room, and announce that we’re going into a system shot. Then I open the compressor beam dump: a heavy glass plate that normally blocks the beam from reaching the target. It takes about two minutes to move.

“Sweeping, sweeping for a system shot.”

The announcement goes out over speakers across the facility. I grab a small interlock key, put on my laser safety goggles and head downstairs. I walk a specific pattern through every room, checking that nobody is still inside. As I go, I lock each door with the key. If anyone opens one of those doors after I’ve locked them, the entire shot sequence aborts.

Back in the control room, I sit down and start charging the capacitor banks. At this point, there’s no going back except for an emergency shutdown, and that means losing the shot and waiting for everything to cool down.

“Charging.”

The room goes silent. Everyone’s eyes are on the monitors. Nobody talks.

I typically will share a glance with the researcher whose project the shot is for – today it’s Joe, a visiting scientist from Los Alamos National Lab, who designed the target we’re about to vaporize. He’s gripping his coffee cup like it owes him money. I turn back to the console.

“Charge complete. Firing system shot in three, two, one. Fire.”

I press the button. A loud thud rolls through the building as all that stored energy dumps into the beam. The monitors freeze, capturing everything at the moment of the shot: beam profiles, spectra, diagnostics—these metrics provide a full picture of exactly how the laser performed and whether the shot was clean. Downstairs, in the vacuum chamber, a spot smaller than a human hair just reached temperatures measured in millions of degrees.

I lean back in my chair and start recording laser parameters as everyone exhales. A radiation safety officer heads down first to check readings around the target chamber before anyone else can enter. The experimental team follows to collect data.

Sometimes it all works perfectly. Sometimes a shutter fails to open and you lose the shot.

For example, one afternoon in 2023, we’d spent three hours preparing for a high-priority shot. Target aligned. Capacitors charged. I pressed the button and heard nothing. A shutter had failed somewhere in the chain. The monitors stayed frozen, showing black. Nobody said anything. I wrote SHOT FAILED in the logbook and started the hourlong cooldown sequence. That’s the part they don’t show in movies: sitting in silence, waiting to try again. We got the shot four hours later.

This anticipation is all part of the job: hours of patience for 10 seconds you never quite get used to. Everything happens underneath a campus where thousands of people walk above, unaware that for a fraction of a second, a tiny point of matter hotter than the surface of the Sun just existed below their feet.

Ahmed Helal, research scientist, The University of Texas at Austin. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Posted Monday 20 April 2026 at 6:43 am AEST (my time).

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The evolutionary edge that fueled great white shark dominance for millions of years could soon become its greatest downfall.

The ocean’s most iconic predators maintain warmer body temperatures than the surrounding seawater and are paying an increasingly steep price for it. As the oceans warm due to climate change, they now face the risk of potentially fatal overheating, according to a new report in Science.

Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.

“If you’re a shark, you can’t just pop down to the supermarket and buy more food,” said Nick Payne, lead author and associate professor at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. “We’re seeing animals move with climate change in every biome on land and in the sea; this is just another example of that mechanism.”

From South Africa’s powerful great whites to Ireland’s filter-feeding basking sharks, these mesotherms burn nearly four times as much energy as their cold-blooded counterparts, whose body temperatures match the surrounding water. As oceans warm, these species must slow down, alter their blood flow or dive to cooler temperatures, all while hunting for an ever-dwindling food supply.

A rare group comprising fewer than 0.1 percent of all marine life, mesothermic fishes—also including thresher and porbeagle sharks—trap metabolic heat to keep their bodies warmer than surrounding seawater. This has been evolutionarily key to enabling higher swimming speeds, enhanced predation and their long-distance migrations.

However, as fish grow larger, their bodies generate heat faster than they can shed it. This mismatch—driven by the physics of surface area and heat retention—triggers the overheating dilemma in warmer waters.

While some species like Atlantic bluefin tuna can temporarily boost their heat loss or dive to colder waters, the suitable habitats for mesotherm species will shrink as larger swaths of oceans become inhospitably hot. This will be especially the case during summer months when sharks will experience increased competition for prey.

This will disrupt ecosystems as mesotherms are typically apex predators that exert disproportionate control on species below them in the food chain, said Edward Snelling, co-author and physiologist at the University of Pretoria.

“These species are being pushed closer to their physiological limits, which could have consequences for where they can live and how they survive,” said Snelling in a press release. “These animals are already operating on a tight energy budget, and climate change is narrowing their options even further.”

Using tiny sensors on a range of fish, including basking sharks weighing over three tons, researchers calculated how much heat fish produce and lose in real time. From this, they calculated that a one-ton warm-bodied shark may struggle to remain in waters above 62.6° Fahrenheit  (17° Celsius) without taking countermeasures. Discovering these “hidden heat budgets” could prove critical to any hope of conserving them or mapping protection areas, researchers said.

In South Africa, the stakes are both ecological and cultural. Here, great whites have emerged as a “sentinel species”: When their patterns change, it signals a deeper shift in the marine ecosystem.

While long sensationalized as feared predators, they’ve increasingly become icons of marine conservation and eco-tourism, said Stephanie Nicolaides, a marine conservation researcher at the University of the Western Cape. “Many local and international conservation narratives now position the great white not as a villain, but as a keystone species essential to maintaining ocean health,” Nicolaides said.

Declines of great white sightings in False Bay, Mossel Bay, and Gansbaai, however, are multifaceted. Though thermal relocation may be a contributor, their population decline is also linked to a history of overfishing, shark netting, and habitat destruction.

Indeed, though warming waters heighten mesotherms’ vulnerability worldwide, other manmade harms exert the most danger. “If we had to say what is the one thing that we need to urgently address for these animals, it’s the fishing problem,” said Payne. “The most acute, urgent crisis these animals face is from overfishing, and particularly now from bycatch.”

Bycatch refers to fish and other marine animals caught unintentionally by fishermen using huge nets or long lines baited with thousands of hooks.

History, however, offers a grim precedent for physiological vulnerability itself. Fossils of extinct warm-bodied species—like the infamous Megalodon shark, which reached almost 60 feet long—suggest they suffered disproportionately during past ocean temperature increases as they likely struggled to secure food to fuel their large, warm bodies.

“Today’s oceans are changing at unprecedented speeds,” Payne said. “The alarm bells are ringing loudly at this point.”

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Posted Sunday 19 April 2026 at 7:42 am AEST (my time).

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The crew of Artemis II spoke with the media on Thursday, six days after returning to Earth following their mission around the Moon. After a news conference, the astronauts gave a handful of interviews, and Ars was able to speak with Orion’s pilot, Victor Glover.

Glover and Ars first connected nearly a decade ago as part of our homage to Apollo, The Greatest Leap. Glover now stands at the vanguard of our modern Apollo program, named Artemis, which aims to return humans to the Moon and establish a semi-permanent base there.

Glover, an accomplished naval aviator, first went to space in November 2020 as the pilot on the first operational Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. Two years after he landed back on Earth, Glover was assigned to the Artemis II mission and tasked with a majority of the test piloting of the Orion spacecraft during the outbound and return journey from the Moon.

We spoke mostly about that experience at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Thursday afternoon. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: You flew Dragon with touchscreens and Orion with more traditional, hands-on controls. I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but which did you prefer?

Victor Glover: You know me. We talked about Dragon a lot before, and it’s a fantastic ship to get humans to the space station. But I was really thrilled to have a translational hand controller, a THC, on Orion.

Ars: How did Orion handle compared to the simulations you did on Earth?

Glover: The real vehicle had better springs. There was less pre-play, less wobble in the stick, so when I would move something, the thruster sounds we had in the sim? Totally wrong. It was more of a rumble like driving a pickup on a dirt road.

The SM (Service Module) was nice—we could tell it was pressurizing and thrusting. It felt responsive. I could feel the push, but also I could see it in the camera instantly that there was motion. The integrated system flew so much better than the sim. That team should be very proud.

The modelers, the flight controllers, they came up with something. And even though there were pleasant surprises, overall, the real thing is better than we simulated. And that’s part of what being a test pilot is: to verify and validate manufacturing processes, software development processes, and sometimes teams. And all three of those, in this case, crushed it.

Ars: What do you think the implications are for Artemis III and Artemis IV when there will be some pretty complex rendezvous and docking operations with a lander?

Glover: The Lunar Science team won’t like it when I say this, but it’s the truth. If we had launched, done the rendezvous and proximity operations demo, and then had to emergency de-orbit, I would have considered us a massive success. Because that may be the only chance we get to test this really important capability.

We don’t plan to manually dock. It’s a crew interrupt. Boeing CFT (the Starliner Crew Flight Test in 2024, during which Butch Wilmore had to take control of the spacecraft during an emergency) has shown us when these things might need to be done. And Butch held position manually. He had to use his eyeballs to correlate where he was and just hold position. That was a critical moment for them to breathe, and for the team to collect themselves, because if they had tried to retreat or tried to continue docking with ISS, both of those would have been catastrophic.

So this capability, to me, was a huge milestone—now Artemis II gets to pass the baton to III and IV, whatever they are, docking, proximity ops again, landing. Those crews will have the peace of mind that the Artemis II test pilot said it was good to go. An engineer said it was good to go, and an F-18 pilot said it was good to go. That, to me, is unreal. We got so much juice for the squeeze on that.

Ars: But you had some fun?

Glover: It was also a ton of fun, truly a test pilot’s dream. I mean, I feel bad. I got to fly Dragon as well. I got to manually pilot Dragon. We got to do a fly-around for the port relocation. It was the first time that software got used in space, and I did that. So I got to do a few touchscreen commands and listen, I prefer a stick-and-throttle over a touchscreen any day.

But Dragon also flew like a dream. It worked. It does what they say it’s going to do. It’s really about the mission. They both are great tools. If I’m doing something where I’m so busy that I cannot stop and look down at my hands to fly, this is the biggest difference. I have to touch the screen, which means I have to look, because if I touch right next to that arrow, it doesn’t work. In Orion, I have a feel. I don’t have to look. I can focus on precision because I can look out the window the whole time. That’s the difference. So stick-and-throttle, or hand controllers, are vital depending on the type of tasks.

Ars: Did you guys ever do any flying off the books? I’m thinking of Apollo 12, during the ascent from the Moon. They’re in the shadow of the Moon, and Pete Conrad tells Alan Bean to take the Lunar Module controls for a spin when they were out of contact with Mission Control. Bean later recalled it as an unforgettable experience.

Glover: [laughs] OK, that’s good. Listen, we wanted everybody to have a meaningful role. I think you saw that everybody did critical things. Jeremy and Christina got us to the Moon and back. We [Reid and Glover] did ascent, prox-ops, and entry. But they monitored all the burns. The team really wrote the original plan for Reid and I to do all the flying, but we knew that it’s important to get this data because on future missions, you might have a doctor in that seat, and it’s important to know the vehicle from varying perspectives. We didn’t have to be sneaky because the team built a plan that capitalized on the strengths of the whole crew. Everyone got to fly it per the plan. And so Jeremy flew the vehicle, and Christina flew the vehicle.

Ars: You’ve talked about reentry, 13 minutes and 36 seconds. You called it “very intense.” You and I have talked about the heat shield concerns before. Walk me through the experience you just lived.

Glover: We got assigned on April 3, 2023. It was almost three years exactly ago. I’ve been thinking about reentry for three straight years, maybe too much. Maybe I focused on that too much, but I knew if anybody has to be on that day, I have to be a part of it. It’s not just me, but to back up Reid, or Reid backing me up. We’ve got to be in flow that day.

Having gone through something similar in Dragon was helpful. But that window on Orion was right in front of me, that view was so different. When the flames started, I was like, “That’s big. Is it supposed to be that big?” And then my brain just locked onto “OK, it all looks the same.” That’s a good sign. If I start to see changes, that’s something. And then there was a point—there’s something that I feel that I am not ready to say to the public yet.

Ars: OK.

Glover: But you know, I know what happened to Columbia, and that this is a system with no backup. But I was not worried. I wasn’t focused on that because we had already said we’re go for launch—and go for launch is go for entry. And I just said, “Hey, they need me to be on.” Reid needs me to be on. I need him to be on. What I’m saying is kind of what folks are expecting. So I need to do it like we’ve trained to do it.

And I was able to focus on that because whether or not the heat shield worked, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go outside and hold my hands over the spot. So the best I could do is if a parachute didn’t go out, to assess “do I need to do anything?” Or if the risers didn’t cut after we hit the water, to not get flipped over, I would have had to flip a switch, and I need to flip the right switch. So I just wanted to be present.

The Artemis II crew takes time out for a group hug before returning to Earth.

Credit: NASA

Ars: What did you hear?

Glover: The sounds were something we didn’t simulate. There’s so much we didn’t model correctly on entry. But I still had to be present. Even when there was a new bump-bump-bump. Then there was the moment after the drogue parachutes released. [There was a break between the pull of the drogues and deployment of the main parachutes, when Orion started falling rapidly again.]

We were in free fall again. It wasn’t scary. I was just amazed because Dragon didn’t do that. I think the drogues on Dragon actually helped pull out the mains, so we stayed under tension. In Orion, we had a few seconds of free fall after the drogues. I just was—wow. That sensation was very vivid. And when those parachutes came out, when the mains came out, it was like God himself led us down to the water. And I had a big old grin on my face. It was intense. It went from intense to pure elation.

Ars: Where I was watching, there was silence during those final minutes, the parachutes, and the splashdown, just holding our collective breath. It was amazing. I think Artemis managed to break through.

Glover: I know we’re on to something. I know the 10 days we were up there are a big part of it, but I’m gonna say this to you as a person because, you know, I consider you a friend. A part of this is how we frame what we’re doing now, what we do next, the stories we choose to tell. There’s a lot of this we haven’t talked to you about, but now we have the challenge of keeping it going.

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Posted Saturday 18 April 2026 at 7:27 am AEST (my time).

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