Sunday, 15 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 20:58 - 22:58 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying two O3b mPOWER broadband internet satellites to a Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) for SES, a Luxembourgish company. As this is a Falcon 9 rocket, the first stage will likely attempt a landing so that it can be reused.

Monday, 16 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 09:33 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch the National Reconnaissance Office's classified NROL-149 mission. It's believed that SpaceX will launch a few NRO imaging satellites that will make up part of the Proliferated Architecture constellation. Some Starlink satellites are also expected to be aboard.

Tuesday, 17 December

• Who: Rocket Lab
• What: Electron
• When: 14:00 UTC
• Where: Mahia, New Zealand
• Why: In this mission, Rocket Lab will use an Electron rocket to launch the sixth StriX satellite for Synspective. This satellite is a synthetic aperture radar satellite (SAR) and will be part of a 25-satellite constellation. This constellation will be able to take ground images with a one to three-meter resolution with a swath width of ten to thirty kilometers.

Wednesday, 18 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 03:38 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch four MicroGEO satellites for Astranis. Each satellite carries unique names, including UtilitySat, NuView A, NuView B, and Agila.

Saturday, 21 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 01:26 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying the Thuraya 4-NGS comms satellite. The satellite will be placed in a geosynchronous orbit. It was built by Airbus Defense and Space for Yahsat, based in the UAE.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying 23 Starlink satellites to orbit. They are designated Starlink Group 12-5. The first stage of the Falcon 9 landed successfully.

Next up, China used a Long March 2D to launch the High-speed Laser Diamond Constellation Test System mission consisting of five satellites that reached their intended orbits.

Finally, SpaceX launched Starlink Group 11-2, consisting of 22 satellites. The first stage of the rocket also performed a successful landing.

That's it for this week; check back next time!

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This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A handful of dairy farms sprawl across the valley floor, ringed by the spikey, copper-colored San Jacinto mountains. This is the very edge of California’s dairy country—and so far, the cows here are safe.

But everyone worries that the potentially lethal bird flu is on the way. “I hope not,” says Clemente Jimenez, as he fixes a hose at Pastime Lakes, a 1,500-head dairy farm. “It’s a lot of trouble.”

Further north and west, in the San Joaquin Valley—the heart of the state’s dairy industry—the H5N1 virus, commonly known as bird flu, has rippled through the massive herds that provide most of the country’s milk. Farmworkers have piled carcasses into black and white heaps. This week the state reported 19 new confirmed cases in cows and more than 240,000 in chickens. Another 50,000 cases were confirmed at a chicken breeding facility in Oklahoma.

Most worrying, though, is the spillover from livestock to humans. So far, 58 people in the United States have tested positive for bird flu. Fifty-six of them worked either on dairy or poultry farms where millions of birds had to be culled.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that four of the cases in humans had no known connection to livestock, raising fears that the virus eventually could jump from one human to another, though that hasn’t happened yet. On December 5, a study published in Science by researchers at The Scripps Research Institute said it would take only a single mutation in the H5N1 virus for it to attach itself to human receptor cells.

Large livestock facilities in states across the country, and especially in California, have become the epicenters of these cases, and some researchers say that’s no surprise: Putting thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of animals together in confined, cramped barns or corrals creates a petri dish for viruses to spread, especially between genetically similar and often stressed animals.

More drought and higher temperatures, fueled by climate change, supercharge those conditions.

“Animal production acts like a connectivity for the virus,” said Paula Ribeiro Prist, a conservation scientist with the EcoHealth Alliance, a not-for-profit group that focuses on research into pandemics. “If you have a lot of cattle being produced in more places, you have a higher chance of the virus spreading. When you have heat stress, they’re more vulnerable.”

So far, this bird flu outbreak has affected more than 112 million chickens, turkeys, and other poultry across the US since it was first detected at a turkey-producing facility in Indiana in February 2022. In March of this year, officials confirmed a case of the virus in a Texas dairy cow—the first evidence that the virus had jumped from one livestock species to another. Since then, 720 cows have been affected, most of them in California, where there have been nearly 500 recorded cases.

In the United States, a trend of consolidation in agriculture, particularly dairies, has seen more animals housed together on ever-larger farms as the number of small farms has rapidly shrunk. In 1987, half of the country’s dairy cows were in herds of 80 or more, and half in herds of 80 or fewer. Twenty years later, half the country’s cows were raised in herds of 1,300 or more. Today, 5,000-head dairies are common, especially in the arid West.

California had just over 21,000 dairy farms in 1950, producing 5.6 billion pounds of milk. Today, it has 1,100 producing around 41 billion pounds. Total US milk production has soared from about 116 billion pounds in 1950 to about 226 billion today.

“The pace of consolidation in dairy far exceeds the pace of consolidation seen in most of US agriculture,” a recent report by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said.

Initially, researchers thought the virus was spreading through cows’ respiration, but recent research suggests it’s being transmitted through milking equipment and milk itself.

“It’s been the same strain in dairy cows … We don’t necessarily have multiple events of spillover,” said Meghan Davis, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Now it’s transmission from one cow to the next, often through milking equipment.”

“When we introduce the virus to poultry operations where birds live in unsanitary and highly confined conditions, the virus is … able to spread through them like wildfire.”

 

— Ben Rankin, Center for Biological Diversity

It’s still unclear what caused that initial jump from wild birds, which are the natural reservoirs of the virus, to commercial poultry flocks and then to cows, but some research suggests that changing migration patterns caused by warmer weather are creating conditions conducive to the spreading of viruses. Some wild birds are migrating earlier than usual, hatching juvenile birds in new or different habitats.

“This is leading to a higher number of young that are naive to the virus,” Prist explained. “This makes the young birds more infectious—they have a higher chance of transmitting the virus because they don’t have antibodies protecting them.

“They’re going to different areas and they’re staying longer,” Prist added, “so they have higher contact with other animals, to the other native populations, that they have never had contact [with] before.”

That, researchers believe, could have initiated the spillover from wild birds to poultry, where it has become especially virulent. In wild birds, the virus tends to be a low pathogenic strain that occurs naturally, causing only minor symptoms in some birds.

“But when we introduce the virus to poultry operations where birds live in unsanitary and highly confined conditions, the virus is … able to spread through them like wildfire,” said Ben Rankin, a legal expert with the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group. “There are so many more opportunities for the virus to mutate, to adapt to new kinds of hosts and eventually, the virus spills back into the wild and this creates this cycle, or this loop, of intensification and increasing pathogenicity.”

Rankin pointed to an analysis that looked at 39 different viral outbreaks in birds from 1959 to 2015, where a low pathogenic avian influenza became a highly pathogenic one. Out of those, 37 were associated with commercial poultry operations. “So it’s a very clear relationship between the increasing pathogenicity of this virus and its relationship with industrial animal raising,” Rankin said.

Some researchers worry that large farms with multiple species are providing the optimal conditions for more species-to-species transfer. In North Carolina, the second-largest hog-producing state after Iowa, some farmers have started raising both chicken and hogs under contracts that require huge numbers of animals.

“So you’ve got co-location at a pretty substantial scale of herd size, on a single property,” said Chris Heaney, an associate professor of environmental health, engineering, epidemiology, and international health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Another concern is seeing it jump into swine. That host, in particular, is uniquely well suited for those influenza viruses to reassort and acquire properties that are very beneficial for taking up residence in humans.”

In late October, the USDA reported the first case of bird flu in a pig that lived on a small poultry and hog farm in Oregon.

Farmworker advocates say the number of cases in humans is likely underreported, largely because the immigrant and non-English speaking workforce on farms could be reluctant to seek help or may not be informed about taking precautions.

“What we’re dealing with is the lack of information from the top to the workers,” said Ana Schultz, a director with Project Protect Food Systems Workers.

In northern Colorado, home to dozens of large dairies, Schultz started to ask dairy workers in May if they were getting protective gear and whether anyone was falling ill. Many workers told her they were feeling fluish, but didn’t go to the doctor for fear of losing a day of work or getting fired.

“I feel like there’s a lot more avian flu incidents, but no one knows about it because they don’t go to the doctor and they don’t get tested,” Schultz said. “In all the months that we’ve been doing outreach and taking protective gear and flyers, we haven’t had one single person tell us they’ve been to the doctor.”

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A person in Louisiana is hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu after having contact with sick and dying birds suspected of carrying the virus, state health officials announced Friday.

It is the first human H5N1 case detected in Louisiana. For now, the case is considered a "presumptive" positive until testing is confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials say that the risk to the public is low but caution people to stay away from any sick or dead birds. A spokesperson for Louisiana's health department told Ars that the hospitalized patient had contact with both backyard and wild birds.

Although the person has been hospitalized, their condition was not reported.  The spokesperson said the department would not comment on the patient's condition due to patient confidentiality and an ongoing public health investigation.

The case is just the latest amid H5N1's global and domestic rampage. The virus has been ravaging wild, backyard, and commercial birds in the US since early 2022 and spilling over to a surprisingly wide range of mammals. In March this year, officials detected an unprecedented leap to dairy cows, which has since caused a nationwide outbreak. The virus is currently sweeping through California, the country's largest dairy producer.

To date, at least 845 herds across 16 states have contracted the virus since March, including 630 in California, which detected its first dairy infections in late August.

Human cases

At least 60 people in the US have been infected amid the viral spread this year. But the new case in Louisiana stands out. To date, nearly all of the human cases have been among poultry and dairy workers—unlike the new case in Louisiana— and almost all have been mild—also unlike the new case. Most of the cases have involved conjunctivitis—pink eye—and/or mild respiratory and flu-like symptoms.

There was a case in a patient in Missouri who was hospitalized. However, that person had underlying health conditions, and it's unclear if H5N1 was the cause of their hospitalization or merely an incidental finding. It remains unknown how the person contracted the virus. An extensive investigation found no animal or other exposure that could explain the infection.

No human-to-human spread of H5N1 has been found in the US.

Last month, an otherwise healthy teen in Canada was found to have H5N1 and was hospitalized in critical condition from the infection. It was the first H5N1 human case reported in Canada. Like the case in Missouri, investigators were not able to find an explanation of how the teen contracted the virus. The investigation has since been closed, with no additional cases having been found. Public health officials have stopped providing health updates on the case, citing the closed investigation and patient privacy.

Evolving threat

Infectious disease experts have recently warned that H5N1 may only need to acquire a small number of mutations to become a greater threat to humans. For example, last week, researchers published a study in Science finding that a single mutation in the H5N1 dairy strain would make it better at latching onto human cells. The more the virus circulates around us, the more opportunities it has to accumulate such mutations and adapt to infect our respiratory tracts and spread from person to person.

Influenza viruses are also able to swap genetic segments with each other in a process called reassortment. As flu season begins in the US, a nightmare scenario that experts have raised is if H5N1 swaps segments with the seasonal flu, creating a new, potentially deadly virus with pandemic potential.  For this to happen, a person would have to be infected with the two types of influenza viruses at the same time—something health officials have feared could happen in dairy or poultry workers as the outbreaks continue.

While the human cases of H5N1 detected this year have mostly been mild, the virus has a history of more severity. Globally, H5N1 has had a case fatality rate of 49 percent, according to data collected between 2003 and November 2024 by the World Health Organization. Why the US cases have so far been almost entirely mild is an open question.

12/13/2024, 9:10pm: This post has been updated to include responses from a spokesperson for Louisiana's health department.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expects AGI, or artificial general intelligence—AI that outperforms humans at most tasks—around 2027 or 2028. Elon Musk’s prediction is either 2025 or 2026, and he has claimed that he was "losing sleep over the threat of AI danger." Such predictions are wrong. As the limitations of current AI become increasingly clear, most AI researchers have come to the view that simply building bigger and more powerful chatbots won’t lead to AGI.

However, in 2025, AI will still pose a massive risk: not from artificial superintelligence, but from human misuse.

These might be unintentional misuses, such as lawyers over-relying on AI. After the release of ChatGPT, for instance, a number of lawyers have been sanctioned for using AI to generate erroneous court briefings, apparently unaware of chatbots’ tendency to make stuff up. In British Columbia, lawyer Chong Ke was ordered to pay costs for opposing counsel after she included fictitious AI-generated cases in a legal filing. In New York, Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca were fined $5,000 for providing false citations. In Colorado, Zachariah Crabill was suspended for a year for using fictitious court cases generated using ChatGPT and blaming a "legal intern" for the mistakes. The list is growing quickly.

Other misuses are intentional. In January 2024, sexually explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift flooded social media platforms. These images were created using Microsoft’s “Designer” AI tool. While the company had guardrails to avoid generating images of real people, misspelling Swift's name was enough to bypass them. Microsoft has since fixed this error. But Taylor Swift is the tip of the iceberg, and non-consensual deepfakes are proliferating widely—in part because open-source tools to create deepfakes are available publicly. Ongoing legislation across the world seeks to combat deepfakes in hope of curbing the damage. Whether it is effective remains to be seen.

In 2025, it will get even harder to distinguish what’s real from what’s made up. The fidelity of AI-generated audio, text, and images is remarkable, and video will be next. This could lead to the "liar's dividend": those in positions of power repudiating evidence of their misbehavior by claiming that it is fake. In 2023, Tesla argued that a 2016 video of Elon Musk could have been a deepfake in response to allegations that the CEO had exaggerated the safety of Tesla autopilot leading to an accident. An Indian politician claimed that audio clips of him acknowledging corruption in his political party were doctored (the audio in at least one of his clips was verified as real by a press outlet). And two defendants in the January 6 riots claimed that videos they appeared in were deepfakes. Both were found guilty.

Meanwhile, companies are exploiting public confusion to sell fundamentally dubious products by labeling them “AI.” This can go badly wrong when such tools are used to classify people and make consequential decisions about them. Hiring company Retorio, for instance, claims that its AI predicts candidates' job suitability based on video interviews, but a study found that the system can be tricked simply by the presence of glasses or by replacing a plain background with a bookshelf, showing that it relies on superficial correlations.

There are also dozens of applications in health care, education, finance, criminal justice, and insurance where AI is currently being used to deny people important life opportunities. In the Netherlands, the Dutch tax authority used an AI algorithm to identify people who committed child welfare fraud. It wrongly accused thousands of parents, often demanding to pay back tens of thousands of euros. In the fallout, the Prime Minister and his entire cabinet resigned.

In 2025, we expect AI risks to arise not from AI acting on its own, but because of what people do with it. That includes cases where it seems to work well and is over-relied upon (lawyers using ChatGPT); when it works well and is misused (non-consensual deepfakes and the liar's dividend); and when it is simply not fit for purpose (denying people their rights). Mitigating these risks is a mammoth task for companies, governments, and society. It will be hard enough without getting distracted by sci-fi worries.

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Welcome to Edition 7.23 of the Rocket Report! We're closing in on the end of the year, with a little less than three weeks remaining in 2024. Can you believe it? I hardly can. The biggest question left in launch is whether Blue Origin will make its deadline for launching New Glenn by the end of this year. It's been a long-time goal of founder Jeff Bezos, but the clock is ticking. We wish them luck!

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.

Virgin Galactic studies Italian spaceport. The US-based suborbital space tourism company said Thursday it has signed an "agreement of cooperation" with Italy's civil aviation authority to study the feasibility of Virgin Galactic conducting spaceflight operations from Grottaglie Spaceport in the Puglia region of Southern Italy. Phase one of the study, anticipated to be completed in 2025, will examine Grottaglie’s airspace compatibility with Virgin Galactic’s requirements and unique flight profile.

Follows earlier flight ... The announcement comes 18 months after members of the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council of Italy conducted research aboard Virgin Galactic’s June 2023 ‘Galactic 01’ mission from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The flight marked the company’s first commercial spaceflight. It's all well and good to be making such strategic announcements, but this is all dependent upon the company delivering on its new generation of Delta-class spaceships.

For some reason, Avio and MaiaSpace may partner. MaiaSpace CEO Johann Leroy has suggested that a partnership with Italian rocket-builder Avio could benefit both companies and bolster Europe’s independent access to space, European Spaceflight reports. "The goal of MaiaSpace is to design, produce, and operate the mini-launcher, as well as to market the related launch services, and to stay focused and responsive to market developments," said Leroy. "However, I am convinced that a collaboration between Avio and MaiaSpace could be established. It would be an advantage for both companies and for Europe."

But it's not clear why ... Founded in early 2022 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ArianeGroup, MaiaSpace is developing a 50-meter tall, two-stage, partially reusable rocket designed to deliver small satellites to orbit. Avio builds solid rocket motors and is best known for its Vega rockets. It's not clear why a reusable launch company would want to partner with a company that builds solids, which are not reusable. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Australian space center shuts down. A spaceport in the Northern Territory of Australia will cease operations immediately, the Australian Broadcast Corporation reports. The company running the spaceport, Equatorial Launch Australia, said it was now in conversations with the Queensland government to relocate its operations to Cape York. The space center's claim to fame was the 2022 launch of three NASA sounding rockets from the facility.

Disagreements over territory ... The company, Equatorial Launch Australia, had been planning a major expansion of the Arnhem Space Centre at its East Arnhem Land location. However that process apparently got bogged down, and the spaceport company blamed the delays on the Northern Land Council. This council pushed back and described those claims as a "falsehood." The wait for a renewal of orbital launches from Down Under continues. (submitted by Marzipan)

Ukrainian launch company finds refuge in Maine. Promin Aerospace, a small launch company from Dnipro, Ukraine, opened its doors in Maine this month with a goal of hiring US engineers to complete development of its first rocket in time for a test launch in mid-2026, Payload reports. Promin’s goal of launching Ukraine’s first rocket from the coast of the Black Sea was put on hold after Russia invaded the country in February 2022.

Lobsters and launches ... For the past two and a half years, Promin has been developing its unique rocket technology amid power outages, Internet connectivity problems, and sporadic attacks on Dnipro from Russian forces. The search started in Europe but quickly moved across the pond to take advantage of the speed and resources that US industry provides. "[Europe moves] very slow, so a lot of things that we expected would be done by our partners in 2022, they’re only going to be done in 2025," said Misha Rudominski, Promin’s co-founder and CEO. The Maine Space Corporation was more welcoming. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Long March-8A rocket set for debut. After successfully completing a wet dress rehearsal and other pre-launch tests, the first Long March-8A rocket is set for its debut launch in January 2025, China's state-run news service, Xinhua, reports. The news service adds that the rocket is "designed to serve as China's future primary launch vehicle for medium- and low-Earth orbit missions." The rocket is capable of lofting up to 7 metric tons to a 700-km Sun-synchronous orbit.

Satellite workhorse ... The newer rocket offers increased performance over the Long March 8 rocket and a larger 5.2-meter payload fairing. As such, it is being counted on to help deploy one or more of China's planned satellite Internet megaconstellations. "The Long March-8A is an upgraded version of the Long March-8 rocket, specifically developed to meet the launch requirements of large-scale constellation networks in medium- and low-Earth orbits," said Song Zhengyu, chief designer of the Long March-8 rocket. (submitted by gizmo23)

Chinese national arrested after flying drone near SpaceX pad. Federal police arrested Yinpiao Zhou on Monday after he was allegedly caught flying a drone over the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, The Telegraph reports. In a criminal complaint, the US Attorney’s Office said Zhou flew a drone over the base and took photographs on November 30, the same day a Falcon 9 rocket launched a payload on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office. He has been accused of violating national defense air space and of failing to register an aircraft as required under US law.

Is that a drone in your pocket? ... The complaint against Zhou, filed in California, says he admitted to installing software on his drone to evade limits on the height the device could fly at, and over a virtual fence around the Vandenberg base. The drone was allegedly in the air for 59 minutes and took photographs of SpaceX rocket pads and other sensitive areas. The flight was picked up by the base’s security team, who traced Zhou to nearby Ocean Park, where he was standing with another man. After initially hiding the drone in his coat, Zhou admitted he had flown it over the base.

Blue Origin says New Glenn is ready. Blue Origin said Tuesday that the test payload for the first launch of its new rocket, New Glenn, is ready for liftoff, Ars reports. The company published an image of the "Blue Ring" pathfinder nestled up against one half of the rocket's payload fairing. This week's announcement—historically Blue Origin has been tight-lipped about new products but is opening up more as it nears the debut of its flagship New Glenn rocket—appears to serve a couple of purposes.

Still targeting 2024 for liftoff ... First of all, the relatively small payload contrasted with the size of the payload fairing highlights the greater volume the rocket offers over most conventional boosters. Additionally, the company appears to be publicly signaling the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulatory agencies that it believes New Glenn is ready to fly, pending approval to conduct a hot-fire test at Launch Complex-36, and then for a liftoff from Florida. This is a not-so-subtle message to regulators to please hurry up and complete the paperwork necessary for launch activities. A company official said the plan remains to launch New Glenn before the end of 2024.

SpaceX static-fires booster for next Starship flight. Only three weeks after Flight 6, SpaceX has static-fired Booster 14 and rolled Ship 33 to Masseys to complete its own engine testing, NASASpaceflight.com reports. Once both vehicles are tested, SpaceX will begin the final drive to Flight 7, potentially launching in January. Booster 14 is more or less identical to Booster 13 on the outside except for the ship engine chill pipe extensions on previous boosters. These are no longer needed, as Block 2 of the ship has its engine chill pipes running through the aft flap fairing with a flare outward at the bottom. This simplifies the connection between the ship and the booster and reduces mass.

Block 2 upgrades ... Ship 33 has many changes compared to past ships, as it is the first Block 2 ship. First and foremost for Block 2 are the extended propellant tanks. SpaceX added a ring on the ship, making it 21 rings tall, and moved around the common and forward domes to be able to load 300 more tons of propellant into the ship. This addition will allow SpaceX to increase its payload to orbit with Block 2. The sacrifice was a smaller payload bay section, which went from five rings to three rings. However, SpaceX retained most of its usable payload space, as the nose cone on Block 2 was completely redesigned. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ULA expects to be certified for national security launch soon. United Launch Alliance expects to gain Space Force certification for national security payloads within a few months, company chief executive Tory Bruno told Breaking Defense. He added that no further testing of the Vulcan Centaur will be needed to meet certification, saying the company has met all the requirements from the Pentagon. Two successful launches are requisite to achieve certification for carrying payloads under the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program.

Seeking a higher cadence ... A January launch was deemed a success, but there was an anomaly during the second flight in October with one of Vulcan’s solid rocket boosters that currently is under investigation. Overall, he said, the company has 20 launches manifested for 2025, with 16 Vulcan rockets stored away for use and no worries that production won’t be able to keep up with demand. Looking forward, Bruno said he hopes to have 20-30 Vulcan launches a year, about “half” of which would be for national security. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Super heavy lift is 'essential' to Europe. This week the European Space Agency has published a third iteration of a proposed pathfinder study for the development of a European reusable super heavy-lift rocket capable of delivering 60 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, European Spaceflight reports. Twice before, in November and early December, the space agency published and then deleted a call for a study. While the first and second iterations made no mention of Ariane 6, currently Europe’s only heavy-lift rocket, the third iteration highlights the limitations of the ArianeGroup-built rocket.

A final decision may come next year ... The text states that the development of a “European very-heavy launch system” is essential for Europe’s future ambitions in space and represents a necessary step to ensure the continent remains competitive in the global launch market. Once the study is complete, ESA hopes to have a detailed end-to-end development roadmap with a well-defined business case that could be used to move forward with the project quickly. A decision on whether to adopt the program will likely be made at the ESA ministerial meeting in late 2025. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

Dec. 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-2 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 19:28 UTC

Dec. 14: Electron | Stonehenge | Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia | 00:45 UT

Dec. 14: Falcon 9 | GPS-3 10 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 01:04 UTC

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Until recently, Skype users could purchase so-called Skype Credits to make calls to mobile phones and landlines (Skype-to-Skype calls have always been free). Now, however, calls to non-Skype numbers require purchasing a monthly calling subscription. Alternatively, as Microsoft says, you can just make a Skype-to-Skype call.

Microsoft has not made any announcements or published any detailed support documents describing the change. All we have is a small banner on the official website stating, "Skype Credit is no longer available. For new purchases, check out the monthly subscriptions or make a free Skype call to anyone anytime."

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Techcrunch that Skype Credits are now discontinued. However, the good news is that you can still use the remaining Skype Credit on your account as long as it remains active during a 180-day period.

It is hard to tell how many people will be affected by this sneaky move. In February 2023, Microsoft revealed that Skype had over 36 million monthly active users, but what portion of those pay for landline and mobile numbers remains unknown.

Skype to Phone subscription has a flexible rate that depends on where you want to call. For example, calls in the United States, Guam and Puerto Rico cost $2.99 per month and 0.15 cents per minute when you go over 2000 min per month. Paying Microsoft $6.99 per month (0.35 cents per minute above 2000 minutes) will let you make calls anywhere in North America. For reference, the old Skype Credit system allowed roughly 434 minutes of calls for $10 in the United States.

Do you use Skype to call landline and mobile numbers? If so, let us know what you think about the latest change.

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The No. 1 nuisance with smartphones and smartwatches is that we need to charge them every day. As warm-blooded creatures, however, we generate heat all the time, and that heat can be converted into electricity for some of the electronic gadgetry we carry.

Flexible thermoelectric devices, or F-TEDs, can convert thermal energy into electric power. The problem is that F-TEDs weren’t actually flexible enough to comfortably wear or efficient enough to power even a smartwatch. They were also very expensive to make.

But now, a team of Australian researchers thinks they finally achieved a breakthrough that might take F-TEDs off the ground.

“The power generated by the flexible thermoelectric film we have created would not be enough to charge a smartphone but should be enough to keep a smartwatch going,” said Zhi-Gang Chen, a professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Does that mean we have reached a point where it would be possible to make a thermoelectric Apple Watch band that could keep the watch charged all the time? “It would take some industrial engineering and optimization, but we can definitely achieve a smartwatch band like that,” Chen said.

Manufacturing heaven

Thermoelectric generators producing enough power to run something like an Apple Watch were, so far, made with rigid bulk materials. The obvious problem with them was that nobody would want to wear a metal slab on their wrist or run a power cable from anywhere else to their watch. Flexible thermoelectric devices, on the other hand, were perfectly wearable but offered efficiencies that made them good for low-power health-monitoring electronics rather than more power-hungry hardware like smartwatches.

Back in 2021, generating 35 microwatts per square centimeter in a wristband worn during a typical walk outside was impressive enough to land your research paper in Nature. Today, Chen and his colleagues made a flexible thermoelectric device that performed over 34 times better at room temperature. “To the best of our knowledge, we hold a current record in this field,” Chen says.

What’s more, their thermoelectric film was made using bismuth telluride, a semiconductor with a fairly simple manufacturing process. “We wanted to go for the most cost-effective method, so each step did not require too much time or energy,” says Xiao-Lei Shi, a Queensland Technical University researcher and co-author of the study. To make the film, the team used a technique called screen printing, which is widely used in manufacturing printed circuit boards. The process began with synthesizing bismuth telluride nanoplatelets and tellurium nanorods in an autoclave under high temperature and pressure. Then, the two compounds were mixed to produce an ink.

Next, the ink was used to soak a screen that was then pressed onto a very thin polyamide substrate. Finally, the substrates with the deposited ink were fused together by applying high pulsed current and pressure at the same time in a process called spark plasma sintering. “The process is easy to perform and easy to scale up,” Chen claims. The resulting flexible thermoelectric film was only one micron thick, and yet it worked like a charm.

Bending over

To test what the film could do, the team manually cut a small sample out of an A4 size sheet of the material and fitted it with silver paste electrodes connected to measuring equipment. The generator achieved a power output of 1.2 milliwatts per square centimeter using a temperature difference between the skin and air-facing sides measured at 20 Kelvin. This means a performance like that should be more or less achievable on a walk when it’s around 16° Celsius outside—so neither too hot nor too chilly.

While bismuth telluride was used to produce flexible thermoelectric films before, the key to record-breaking performance of Chen’s film was the addition of tellurium nanorods. It turned out that having 7.5 percent by weight of those rods in the ink allowed them to fill in the pores in the bismuth telluride layer, making it denser, and connecting tellurium nanorods.

What’s more, the ink had very little effect on flexibility. Chen’s team bent the film a thousand times and found that the strain was reduced only by 2 percent compared to polyamide substrate without any ink deposited on it. Repeated bending also had a limited impact on performance, which went down by 2 percent during these tests.

But serving as a potential material for power-generating smartwatch bands is just one side of the thermoelectric coin. The other is thermoelectric cooling, which is basically the energy-harvesting process running in reverse—electric current is used to decrease temperature. And Chen’s team has that in their sights, too.

Staying cool

“We demonstrated our device could achieve up to 11.7 Kelvin temperature drop off without any heat sink [and] with a very tiny input current,” Chen says. For cooling tests, the team used the same device it used for generating power. It took just 84.2 milliamps to produce that 11.7 Kelvin difference between the two sides of the material. “Because the film’s thickness is just one micrometer, it is possible to integrate it with silicon chips in the future. For us this would be a new research direction,” Chen claims.

He suggests that thermoelectric cooling films are going to be particularly useful in processors with small feature sizes, like the three nanometer architectures used in the Apple M3 family of chips. The team argues in their study that ultra-thin thermoelectric films could be applied directly onto the chips to provide cooling and harvest power at the same time. This, the researchers claim, should not require radical alterations in the chip manufacturing because screen-printing is used during the manufacturing of processors anyway.

There are some improvements to work on before that could happen, though. Chen would like to improve the material’s flexibility—his goal is for the film to bend 10,000 or even 1,000,000 times before taking a performance hit. “The third challenge is integration. How do we integrate flexible thermoelectric devices with silicon chips,” Chen says. Integrating thermoelectric films with silicon chips would require redesigning thermal and power management of those chips to work with thermoelectric cooling and establishing processes to manufacture those films at a truly massive scale. “This would take scientists and engineers from multiple disciplines working together to achieve this,” Chen adds. And what his team believes should bring all those scientists and engineers together is the simplicity of their design.

“Other research on flexible thermoelectric films is complicated—the mechanisms involved are very hard to reproduce,” Shi claims. “Our work is unique in that it is very easy to reproduce and use for practical applications.”
Science, 2024.  DOI:  10.1126/science.ads5868

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Two recent studies suggest that the gene flow (as the young people call it these days) between Neanderthals and our species happened during a short period sometime between 50,000 and 43,500 years ago. The studies, which share several co-authors, suggest that our torrid history with Neanderthals may have been shorter than we thought.

Pinpointing exactly when Neanderthals met H. sapiens  

Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology scientist Leonardo Iasi and his colleagues examined the genomes of 59 people who lived in Europe between 45,000 and 2,200 years ago, plus those of 275 modern people whose ancestors hailed from all over the world. The researchers cataloged the segments of Neanderthal DNA in each person’s genome, then compared them to see where those segments appeared and how that changed over time and distance. This revealed how Neanderthal ancestry got passed around as people spread around the world and provided an estimate of when it all started.

“We tried to compare where in the genomes these [Neanderthal segments] occur and if the positions are shared among individuals or if there are many unique segments that you find [in people from different places],” said University of California Berkeley geneticist Priya Moorjani in a recent press conference. “We find the majority of the segments are shared, and that would be consistent with the fact that there was a single gene flow event.”

That event wasn’t quite a one-night stand; in this case, a “gene flow event” is a period of centuries or millennia when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens must have been in close contact (obviously very close, in some cases). Iasi and his colleagues’ results suggest that happened between 50,500 and 43,000 years ago. But it's quite different from our history with another closely related hominin species, the now-extinct Denisovans, with whom different Homo sapiens groups met and mingled at least twice on our way to taking over the world.

In a second study, Arev Sümer (also of the Max Planck Institute) and her colleagues found something very similar in the genomes of people who lived 49,500 to 41,000 years ago in what’s now the area around Ranis, Germany. The Ranis population, based on how their genomes compare to other ancient and modern people, seem to have been part of one of the first groups to split off from the wave of humans who migrated out of Africa, through the Levant, and into Eurasia sometime around 50,000 years ago. They carried with them traces of what their ancestors had gotten up to during that journey: about 2.9 percent of their genomes were made up of segments of Neanderthal ancestry.

Based on how long the Ranis people’s segments of Neanderthal DNA were (longer chunks of Neanderthal ancestry tend to point to more recent mixing), the interspecies mingling happened about 80 generations, or about 2,300 years, before the Ranis people lived and died. That’s about 49,000 to 45,000 years ago. The dates from both studies line up well with each other and with archaeological evidence that points to when Neanderthal and Homo sapiens cultures overlapped in parts of Europe and Asia.

What’s still not clear is whether that period of contact lasted the full 5,000 to 7,000 years, or if, as Johannes Krause (also of the Max Planck Institute) suggests, it was only a few centuries—1,500 years at the most—that fell somewhere within that range of dates.

Natural selection worked fast on our borrowed Neanderthal DNA

Once those first Homo sapiens in Eurasia had acquired their souvenir Neanderthal genes (forget stealing a partner’s hoodie; just take some useful segments of their genome), natural selection got to work on them very quickly, discarding some and passing along others, so that by about 100 generations after the “event,” the pattern of Neanderthal DNA segments in people’s genomes looked a lot like it does today.

Iasi and his colleagues looked through their catalog of genomes for sections that contained more (or less) Neanderthal ancestry than you’d expect to find by random chance—a pattern that suggests that natural selection has been at work on those segments. Some of the segments that tended to include more Neanderthal gene variants included areas related to skin pigmentation, the immune response, and metabolism. And that makes perfect sense, according to Iasi.

“Neanderthals had lived in Europe, or outside of Africa, for thousands of years already, so they were probably adapted to their environment, climate, and pathogens,” said Iasi during the press conference. Homo sapiens were facing selective pressure to adapt to the same challenges, so genes that gave them an advantage would have been more likely to get passed along, while unhelpful ones would have been quick to get weeded out.

The most interesting questions remain unanswered

The Neanderthal DNA that many people carry today, the researchers argue, is a legacy from just 100 or 200 Neanderthals.

“The effective population size of modern humans outside Africa was about 5,000,” said Krause in the press conference. “And we have a ratio of about 50 to 1 in terms of admixture [meaning that Neanderthal segments account for about 2 percent of modern genomes in people who aren’t of African ancestry], so we have to say it was about 100 to maybe 200 Neanderthals roughly that mixed into the population.” Assuming Krause is right about that and about how long the two species stayed in contact, a Homo sapiens/Neanderthal pairing would have happened every few years.

So we know that Neanderthals and members of our species lived in close proximity and occasionally produced children for at least several centuries, but no artifacts, bones, or ancient DNA have yet revealed much of what that time, or that relationship, was actually like for either group of people.

The snippets of Neanderthal ancestry left in many modern genomes, and those of people who lived tens of thousands of years ago, don’t offer any hints about whether that handful of Neanderthal ancestors were mostly male or mostly female, which is something that could shed light on the cultural rules around such pairings. And nothing archaeologists have unearthed so far can tell us whether those pairings were consensual, whether they were long-term relationships or hasty flings, or whether they involved social relationships recognized by one (or both) groups. We may never have answers to those questions.

And where did it all happen? Archaeologists haven’t yet found a cave wall inscribed with “Og heart Grag,” but based on the timing, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens probably met and lived alongside each other for at least a few centuries, somewhere in “the Near East,” which includes parts of North Africa, the Levant, what’s now Turkey, and what was once Mesopotamia. That’s one of the key routes that people would have followed as they migrated from Africa into Europe and Asia, and the timing lines up with when we know that both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were in the area.

“This [same] genetic admixture also appears in East Asia and Australia and the Americas and Europe,” said Krause. “If it would have happened in Europe or somewhere else, then the distribution would probably look different than what we see.”

Science, 2023 DOI: 10.1126/science.adq3010;

Nature, 2023 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08420-x;

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Nearly half of US teens are “almost constantly” online, though the platforms they spend their time on vary significantly, according to a new Pew survey.

 

Despite some variety in their overall online habits, virtually all teenagers use YouTube. Of the 1,391 teenagers polled by the Pew Research Center, 90 percent said they use the site, a slight decrease from 95 percent in 2022. And 73 percent of them go on YouTube every day, making it by far the most popular platform for teenage users. The second-most popular app is TikTok, which 63 percent of teens say they use.

 

Almost all teenagers polled by Pew use YouTube, but very few are on Threads.

Pew Research Center

 

But there’s a gender divide, especially among teenagers who say they “almost constantly” use either app: 19 percent of girls say they use TikTok that often, while the same share of boys are constantly on YouTube.

 

And even this extremely online demographic isn’t using all websites equally. Just 6 percent of teenagers polled said they use Threads, Meta’s microblogging app, and only 32 percent use Facebook — down from 71 percent a decade ago. The only Meta product a majority of teenagers use is Instagram, whose popularity has increased since 2014.

 

There seems to be a preference for image- and video-based platforms among the teenagers polled: X and Reddit were also much less popular, with 17 percent and 14 percent of teens saying they use them, respectively. And teens’ X usage has declined significantly over the past decade: a decade ago, when it was still called Twitter, 33 percent of US teens used it. But teens’ use of some image-based apps — including Snapchat — is on the decline as well. In fact, the only app that has experienced a rise in popularity is WhatsApp, which is now used by 23 percent of teenagers.

 

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One of Dr. Mo Sarhan’s patients was experiencing intense cravings for opioids and alcohol when the Florida-based doctor offered him a striking solution: the Eli Lilly weight-loss drug Mounjaro.

“Within days, all of his cravings were gone and he was much more effective in his engagement and treatment. He’s done great since,” Sarhan says.

Sarhan and his colleague Steven Klein at the Caron Treatment Centers in Florida and Pennsylvania have prescribed a range of so-called glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s) to treat addictions, using them alongside traditional therapies, to around 75 patients.

The results, which Sarhan describes as “compelling,” are the latest sign that drugs such as Mounjaro, Ozempic and Wegovy could be effective treatments for a startlingly wide range of conditions well beyond their original focus on obesity and diabetes.

On Tuesday, Dave Ricks, Eli Lilly’s chief executive, said the company would begin large studies of GLP-1s in alcohol, nicotine and drug abuse—the first pharmaceutical group to do so.

“These medicines, we think and we’ve aimed to prove, can be useful for other things we don’t think about connected to weight,” he told the Economic Club of Washington DC.

While GLP-1s are not clinically approved for addiction treatment, preliminary studies suggest they reduce cravings by acting on pleasure pathways in the brain—similar to the mechanism that dampens appetite.

In recent years, GLP-1s have helped transform the waistlines of patients and the top lines of pharmaceutical groups Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. Worldwide, more than 1 billion people are defined as obese, according to research published this year in The Lancet, with rates doubling for adults and quadrupling for children and adolescents between 1990 and 2022. Conditions linked to obesity, such as chronic kidney disease and diabetes, are increasingly prevalent too.

According to data provider Airfinity, there are 66 ongoing, late-stage trials of GLP-1 drugs for obesity, diabetes and a range of other conditions linked to excess weight. The prospect of broader uses for the drugs is one reason that Goldman Sachs analysts anticipate a $130 billion market for them by 2030.

But there are also ongoing studies in treatment areas with few apparent links to excess weight. Novo Nordisk is running three late-stage trials of semaglutide, the active ingredient in its Ozempic and Wegovy drugs, for Alzheimer’s disease. Another of the class of drugs, lixisenatide, has shown some early promise in slowing the worsening of motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease patients.

Widespread uptake of the drugs could help tackle the rising tide of chronic diseases across the world and lower the costs associated with them for health systems.

In one example, Airfinity estimates that Wegovy could prevent up to 3.8 million cases of obstructive sleep apnoea, a breathing disorder, in the US by 2030. That could cut expenditure on the CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines used to help patients manage symptoms in the US by up to $3 billion.

Sarhan’s patients, most of whom pay for the drug themselves and are all informed beforehand of its regulatory status, have taken the treatments for addiction to nicotine, inhalants and alcohol. But the therapeutic mechanisms of the drugs are not yet fully understood and many of the benefits have not been verified in late-stage trials.

Production of GLP-1s is currently dominated by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which have much more incentive to maximise the revenue potential of the obesity market than to spend on experimental clinical trials in unproven treatment areas.

And the hefty price tags and unpleasant side effects associated with current weight-loss treatments mean they are not yet a panacea for the growing body of chronic health conditions across the world.

Lower-priced, more widely available drugs that could be taken orally are “the direction of travel,” says Naveed Sattar, professor at the University of Glasgow and chair of the UK government’s obesity mission. “But we are not there yet—because the drugs are too expensive.”

GLP-1 receptor agonists have surprised scientists before. The gut hormone was originally discovered in the 1980s, but found to break down quickly in the body. It was not until researchers discovered a similar but more stable compound in the venom of the Gila monster, a lizard native to North America, that they were able to produce long-lasting drugs mimicking GLP-1’s effects. The first GLP-1 based drug was approved in 2005.

Early GLP-1s were developed as diabetes treatments owing to their ability to stimulate insulin production, with weight loss initially a useful side effect. Previous treatments for obesity itself came with dangerous side effects. The “fen-phen” cocktail of an appetite suppressant and amphetamine was withdrawn in 1997 after its use was linked to heart valve defects.

Novo Nordisk is running late-stage trials of semaglutide, the active ingredient in its Ozempic and Wegovy drugs, for Alzheimer’s disease.

Credit: Steve Christo/Corbis/Getty Images

Rather than increasing cardiovascular risk, GLP-1s have shown impressive benefits. Last year, Novo Nordisk unveiled data that suggested semaglutide cut the risk of heart attacks by 28 percent in its so-called Step trial of 17,604 patients, and reduced the risk of death by 18 percent.

The results of the trial have helped expand the drugs’ usage. In March, Novo Nordisk secured US approval for Wegovy to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes in overweight or obese adults with cardiovascular disease.

“It’s a complete turnaround from what we’ve had before,” says Vlado Perkovic, a renal specialist at UNSW Sydney, who has done research on the impact of GLP-1s on kidney conditions. Trials show the drugs are effective in treating both chronic kidney disease and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis or Mash, a liver disease.

Meanwhile, Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro has slashed the severity of sleep apnoea, a breathing disorder, by nearly two-thirds and cut heart failure outcomes in a separate trial.

Sattar, the University of Glasgow professor, says weight loss alone is a major driver of improvements across each of these disease areas.

“The weight loss attributes of the drugs are responsible for most of the benefits in multiple diseases, or are the predominant reason why these drugs affect multiple diseases,” he says.

As new and stronger drugs emerge, these effects are likely to increase. Novo Nordisk’s chief executive Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen said last month he was “very excited” about the potential of the company’s new CagriSema drug on diseases linked to obesity. Upcoming data is expected to show the drug delivers 25 percent weight loss on average, an increase from the 22 percent attributed to Mounjaro.

Danish professor Jens Juul Holst was among the first to identify the GLP-1 hormone in 1986, and sees the new crop of GLP-1s as similar in impact to bariatric surgery, a procedure to shrink stomach volume.

“The effects are becoming more and more clear, and now there’s no doubt that with the rate of weight loss you have, you also will have a real solution for steatosis [excess liver fat] in many individuals,” says Holst.

But weight loss alone does not explain the drugs’ benefits. Both Holst and Sattar pointed to a discontinued GLP-1 drug once marketed by GSK, albiglutide, that did not provide any weight loss in clinical trials, but led to cardiovascular benefits for patients.

There are GLP-1 receptors throughout the body and researchers believe the drugs could also have direct effects on organs and lead to health improvements other than through weight loss.

Recent trials exploring the effects of semaglutide in diabetics with chronic kidney disease showed a 24 percent reduction in outcomes such as kidney failure for patients taking the drug.

“Weight loss may well be a contributor, but it would appear unlikely to be the whole explanation,” says Perkovic.

The drugs also lower inflammation in the body, which has been linked to better cardiovascular outcomes, while they could also be having “direct effects” on the kidneys, such as improving blood flow and reducing pressure in the kidney blood vessels, he adds.

Knowledge about the exact reasons for improved health outcomes is likely to increase as the drugs are more widely prescribed and drugmakers conduct larger studies.

“There will be a continuous flow of new results . . . which may or may not provide better explanations for exactly what goes on,” says Holst.

The wide-ranging action of GLP-1s has also triggered a search for still broader therapeutic frontiers.

One of the most intriguing is a late-stage trial of semaglutide in Alzheimer’s patients, with initial results expected in 2025. It follows early findings that patients with type 2 diabetes were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease if they were receiving GLP-1 medications.

Success would be “freaking nuts,” says one biotech investor, while noting that neurological disorders have for decades defied treatment. One pharmaceutical executive said scientists at his company were “sceptical” that the trial would bring positive results, partly because the drugs are not yet proven to cross the blood-brain barrier, a semi-permeable membrane that protects the brain.

Holst says “the most logical” way of explaining the potential benefits is through the lowering of inflammation and improvements in circulation. But it is still too soon to say whether GLP-1s offer a pioneering way to treat disorders afflicting growing numbers of people as societies age.

Studies exploring the drugs’ effects in combating Parkinson’s disease have also had mixed results. French scientists unveiled a study in April suggesting that lixisenatide—a GLP-1 diabetes drug—could slow the impact of the brain disorder, which causes balance and movement problems and other symptoms. Patients who took the medicine exhibited no further worsening of their motor symptoms after a one-year trial.

But exenatide, which had shown potential in an earlier trial of Parkinson’s patients, flopped in a new one reported in October. Olivier Rascol, co-author of the French study of lixisenatide, says the drug is quite similar in structure to exenatide, making it hard to explain why a trio of trials yielded such contrasting results.

“Nobody really has a clear explanation for [the] negative outcomes,” says Rascol, a Toulouse University Hospital professor and co-ordinator of the French NS-Park network for Parkinson’s research.

The Parkinson’s conundrum highlights wider gaps in knowledge about how GLP-1s work against brain disorders. Evidence for their effectiveness in treating addiction, for instance, has largely come from looking back at health records and observing that patients with addictions were less likely to overdose if they were using GLP-1s.

Sue Grigson, a scientist at Penn State University Hospital who has worked on small studies in opioid-use disorder, is among those exploring the links. She has observed a lower dopamine response when patients were using GLP-1s, indicating that the effect of the “feel-good” hormone is damped by the drugs.

Grigson said the drugs appear to have an effect on the circumventricular organs—the parts of the brain not protected by the blood-brain barrier—and this may influence brain function. But much remains unknown about the drugs’ impact on neurological conditions.

“This is still very much in infancy,” Rascol says, of the understanding of how GLP-1s affect the brain. “There will be more . . . experiments to better explore the real effects of these compounds.”

While scientists continue to explore their potential, pharmaceutical companies are already cashing in on GLP-1s’ broader health benefits.

Eli Lilly is seeking US regulatory approval for Mounjaro as a treatment for sleep apnoea, while Novo Nordisk has filed an application for Wegovy in chronic kidney disease.

“There’s a reason why companies have gone for these diseases where they think the weight loss plus or minus the direct effect may have a benefit,” says Sattar. “Guess what? The reality proves that to be the case.”

But large-scale trials are expensive and securing extra approvals could entrench the early movers’ grip on the GLP-1 market. “Novo and Lilly are going to cement their lead here,” says one investment banker.

Adam Steensberg, the chief executive of Danish biotech Zealand Pharma, which is developing an alternative weight loss product based on a different hormone, says “there is a duopoly already” in the GLP-1 market.

Combining different drugs could be a way of expanding the effects of GLP-1s further still. Doctors such as Perkovic envisage a possible future treatment regime for chronic kidney disease patients that combines existing drugs with GLP-1s to drastically reduce the risks of organ failure.

But the upfront costs of GLP-1s are likely to hold back the wide-ranging access needed if the treatments are to tackle cardiometabolic diseases across the world.

The US list price of Wegovy is $1,349 for a one-month course. The cost of preventing one major adverse cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke, is likely to be almost $1.3 million, Airfinity predicts. This estimate assumes such an outcome would on average require 67 people to be treated for over three years, with the drugs available at a large discount to the list price.

Side-effects including nausea, diarrhoea and fatigue also remain a problem for some users, a challenge drugmakers and physicians are attempting to address. BlueHealth Intelligence, a health insurer in the US, found that 30 percent of GLP-1 users in the US were discontinuing their usage within a month, with poorer patients more likely to stop taking their drugs.

Glasgow University’s Sattar sees a “distant future” where lower-priced GLP-1s can be given to patients orally at the onset of conditions such as diabetes, tackling both obesity and other negative consequences in a way that doesn’t “bankrupt the health system.”

While progress is being made on cardiometabolic conditions, Ricks’ comments are the first sign that pharmaceutical companies will undertake clinical trials in areas such as addiction. Even if scientists establish a link, the road to an approval for use here is long.

The head of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, points out that treating addiction may not be a commercial priority for pharmaceutical groups. GLP-1s are already generating big sales for Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, but many obese patients are yet to receive them—so there is still a huge target market.

“It may be hard, if the pharmaceutical industry says ‘why should I care? I make much more money prescribing these things for obesity’,” Volkow says.

Additional reporting by Oliver Barnes in New York

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Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said that under the new scheme, tech companies such as Google and Meta will be fined hefty penalties for refusing to negotiate a deal with local Australian news publishers. The decision builds on a law introduced in 2021, which made Australia one of the first countries to require digital platforms to negotiate a deal and pay local media outlets.

The new scheme described as the "news bargaining initiative" aims at balancing the power between big tech companies and local news media outlets, who have argued that the tech platforms were profiting from their content without fair compensation. Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones said, "The News Bargaining Initiative will create a financial incentive for agreement-making between digital platforms and news media businesses in Australia."

Under the law in 2021, tech platforms and local publishers reached agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars. On one hand, while Google has voluntarily renewed the agreement, Meta, who earlier struck a deal with Australian media firms such as News Corp., and Australian Broadcasting Corp, said that it would not renew the agreements beyond 2024.

The parliamentary joint select committee on social media and Australian society focused mainly on Meta and criticized its decision to not renew deals. A Meta spokesperson said that the report "ignores the realities of how our platforms work, the preferences of the people who use them, and the value we provide news publishers who choose to post their content on our platforms." The updated laws are set to be introduced soon, with hopes of securing long-term benefits for Australia's media landscape.

Source: Reuters

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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, right, stands near the apex of a sand ripple in an image taken by Perseverance

on Feb. 24, 2024, about five weeks after the rotorcraft’s final flight.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS

Eleven months after the Ingenuity helicopter made its final flight on Mars, engineers and scientists at NASA and a private company that helped build the flying vehicle said they have identified what probably caused it to crash on the surface of Mars.

In short, the helicopter's on-board navigation sensors were unable to discern enough features in the relatively smooth surface of Mars to determine its position, so when it touched down, it did so moving horizontally. This caused the vehicle to tumble, snapping off all four of the helicopter's blades.

Delving into the root cause

It is not easy to conduct a forensic analysis like this on Mars, which is typically about 100 million miles from Earth. Ingenuity carried no black box on board, so investigators have had to piece together their findings from limited data and imagery.

"While multiple scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one we believe is most likely: Lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with," said Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a news release.

A team from NASA and a company that specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles, AeroVironment, started by looking at the terrain where Ingenuity was operating over during its 72nd flight, on January 18 of this year. The helicopter’s navigation system tracked visual features on the surface using a downward-looking camera. During its initial flights, Ingenuity was able to discern pebbles and other features to determine its position. But nearly three years later, Ingenuity was flying in a region of Jezero Crater filled with steep, relatively featureless sand ripples.

The navigation system uses these visual cues to help determine the vehicle's velocity and ensure that it returns to the surface with almost no lateral or vertical motion, to make a soft touchdown. About 20 seconds into the final flight, according to data from the vehicle, the navigation system was unable to lock on to features for sufficient positioning and velocity data.

Still talking, for now

As a result, when Ingenuity touched down, it had a horizontal velocity that caused it to make a hard impact and pitch and roll. One of the blades was ripped wholly off—instead of being sheared part way up the blade—draining the vehicle's power and leading to a loss of communications.

Amazingly, the vehicle was able to recharge somewhat with its solar panels and is continuing to communicate about once a week with the Perseverance rover that brought it to Mars in February 2021. This will last a little while longer before the rover and helicopter lose line-of-sight communications.

The remarkable success of Ingenuity has prompted NASA engineers to already begin planning for possible follow-on missions, including a larger "Mars Chopper" that could carry scientific instruments to study areas inaccessible to rovers.

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Matt Berkey was becoming suspicious.

Berkey, a 42-year-old poker pro known for his presence in some of the highest-stakes cash games in Las Vegas, was playing in a well-known casino poker room over the summer. One player in the game who wasn’t particularly familiar to Berkey and other regulars at the table, but who was believed to be an amateur based on his play style, was displaying some strange behavior.

For one, the player was wearing earbuds—typically a no-no in these kinds of semi-private games where many players have existing friendships.

“Nobody has headphones on during our games,” Berkey says. “The player in question had headphones in, so that’s already a bit off.”

The player’s style of play also raised some alarms.

Texas Hold’em, the game being played, features two individual cards dealt to each player, plus five community cards dealt in stages to the center of the table. Players combine their own cards with the community cards to make the best possible five-card poker hand. There are four rounds of betting: One before any communal cards are dealt, one after the first three communal cards are spread at once (the part of the game known as “the flop”), one after the fourth communal card (“the turn”), and one more after the fifth and final communal card (“the river”).

Berkey noticed that, despite presenting as an amateur who was clearly the least skilled player at the table, the suspicious player never seemed to lose on the river. When he was in a hand that reached that point, he always either folded or showed the winning hand—one of the first red flags seasoned poker players have come to recognize in suspected cheating situations. As the thinking goes, cheaters with knowledge of their opponents’ cards prefer to wait until all communal cards are dealt before making large bets, allowing them to do so with perfect information about who holds the best hand, which often isn’t certain until that final card.

“Playing all rivers perfectly over an eight-hour sample—that’s an anomaly that isn’t really statistically possible, especially from a recreational player,” Berkey says. “When you start to see things that don’t add up, like the least skilled player in the game never showing down a losing hand, that kind of begins to trigger your suspicions.”

The player also had his phone and earbuds case arranged around him, with the case on the felt and his phone on the rail that runs along the table’s edge. While occasional phone usage at poker tables is normal, that kind of arrangement is unusual and is even something many casinos have guarded against for years. Berkey began to wonder if this game was falling victim to a new cheating scheme that word had been spreading about in high-stakes circles for months: Hidden cameras placed at felt level, capturing the faces of cards as they’re dealt and transmitting that intel to an accomplice, who then relays it back to the player at the table through an earpiece.

Berkey also noticed that the player always seemed to sit in the seats directly to the left of the casino’s dealer, even across multiple days and playing sessions. That furthered suspicions, as the rumored cheating method required a player to be in these seats to maximize camera visibility.

Berkey says he quietly alerted other regulars of his suspicions, and the game eventually broke down, but not before the player had made enormous profits. “Not just for his skill level but for the stakes he was playing,” Berkey says. “He was up hundreds of thousands of dollars playing a $10,000 buy-in game.”

Berkey says he and the other regulars in the game flagged the incident to casino staff, but they are unsure what, if any, action was taken. Security for the casino declined to comment on this incident.

Several other such incidents involving the same suspected cheating method have been rumored in various locations over the past 18 months, including one other instance WIRED verified independently. (Specific casinos where these incidents are alleged are not being named in this story to protect the safety of players who confirmed the incidents occurred.) This form of cheating is now a known concern to high-stakes poker players everywhere.

But each of these rumored incidents has lacked a “smoking gun”—proof of the measures, methods, and equipment the cheaters were using to see the cards being dealt. That is, until recently. A breaking case in France has provided revealing new evidence, fueling concerns that this cheating method is rampant around the globe and may be more advanced than anyone had assumed.

What kinds of modern technology can facilitate such a scheme? Should poker players at all levels, not just high-stakes pros, be worried about scofflaws attempting it in games they play, and what can be done to prevent it?

The recent scandal sounds like a rejected Ocean’s movie script.

Following tips of suspicious behavior at a major casino in Enghien-les-Bains, French police with the Central Racing and Gaming Service (SCCJ) launched an elaborate in-person and video surveillance operation around two suspected players at both blackjack and Ultimate Texas Hold’em poker (a type of poker played against the casino rather than against fellow players). Though they were initially in the dark about the method being used, investigators soon noticed a pattern.

“They were putting [something] beside the [dealing] shoe,” Stéphane Piallat, commissioner of SCCJ, alleges to WIRED, referring to the tabletop container a dealer pulls from to draw new cards. “But it was quite difficult to understand why.”

Both players were arrested inside the French casino in late July after weeks of surveillance, with police recovering a variety of items from both their person and their hotel rooms (including ID cards from casinos around Europe that suggested a prolonged scheme). The technology seized by law enforcement amazed even a seasoned gambling fraud officer like Piallat, both for its ingenuity and its relative simplicity.

The players had allegedly modified existing smartphone cameras with simple mirrors, allowing them to capture footage on a phone’s camera sensor laterally, while the phone was in a flat position. Sitting in the seat nearest to the dealer’s shoe, they placed these devices either on the felt (concealed in some situations by a hat or another piece of clothing) or within pockets of their own clothing (with tiny holes cut out to afford the camera a view of the cards). Police say they used these devices to capture card faces as they were dealt from the shoe—a stunning realization given that casino shoes are quite literally designed to prevent card exposure by allowing the dealer to slide new cards directly onto the felt. Clearly, some exposure was still being captured.

“It’s quite incredible,” Piallat says. “They didn’t need to mark cards … Those cards were normal cards.”

Police also recovered basic communication devices that transmitted these feeds to an outside accomplice, believed to be sitting in the casino parking lot. (As of WIRED’s interview with French police, this accomplice remains at large.) The accomplice is thought to have relayed information about which cards the dealer was holding back to their partner at the table, but not through a standard earbud.

“This device is so small that you can’t take it off with your fingers,” Piallat says of the hearing device recovered by police. “You need a magnet to pull it off, otherwise you can’t do it. It looks like a typical James Bond movie device.”

Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, police declined to provide any pictures or further details about the specific items used to facilitate this scheme. A simple look at available technology, though, offers a number of cheap, simple candidates, including several that don’t require pairing with a phone or any other large device.

“The same kind of modules that are used in your iPhone or your DSLR, you can just buy them,” says John Coles, the director of technology for the VR company Rezzil, who has also spent years working in camera and broadcast technology.

The alleged cheaters in France used simple techniques to conceal their cameras, like hiding the devices in their clothing, but much more robust options exist on the open market. A device that looks like a battery charger may not cause alarm if it was spotted sitting on a poker or blackjack table, at least in casinos where devices are generally allowed (some have stopped allowing any devices on tables); one can find a 4K, Wi-Fi capable “hidden camera powerbank” on Amazon. (It’s marketed as a “nanny camera” for surveilling your child’s babysitter, naturally.) Even smaller options exist, like a “spy camera pen” or a pinhole camera that could easily be inserted into various items. And that’s just a fraction of the true marketplace, says Coles: “If that’s what you know about publicly, the stuff that exists behind closed doors is like 10 times what you’re aware of.”

“You could probably build that into a lighter,” Coles says of a typical tiny camera rig. “There are lighters and pens that have modules integrated that still work as those items so they’re less conspicuous.”

For bad actors at traditional poker tables that feature “pitch”-style dealing instead of a more secure casino shoe, the video quality demands are even lower. Card faces are visible for exponentially longer when pitched from a dealer’s hand situated a foot or so above the card table.

The transmission element of the scheme is similarly attainable using today’s technology. You can buy a “mini spy earpiece” from Amazon that receives signals from an inductive coil for just $18. An entire industry of earpieces appears to exist for exam cheating purposes, from tiny Bluetooth earpieces that connect to a phone to setups contained within glasses and pens. It’s easy to imagine these methods converted for use in cheating at the card table, especially when aided by basic video-calling technology and access to the Wi-Fi networks offered at most casinos. In fact, while police say the suspects in France allegedly used separate devices for capture and transmission, Coles believes it would be simple enough to handle the entire operation with a single device.

“I think it’s kind of surprising that a lot of these things don’t happen sooner, to be perfectly honest,” Coles says, noting that many of these cameras, earpieces, and transmitters have existed for a decade or more.

“You could do it with a very cheap investment,” Piallat says. “You won’t need a lot of money.”

Clearly, these schemes are out there and available. So should poker players everywhere be concerned?

Mini-camera cheating is now an open secret in the poker community, from its references in forums to an entire August episode from Berkey’s Only Friends podcast that covered the alleged methods in detail. And if casinos and law enforcement weren’t aware of it much earlier, they certainly are now; Piallat confirmed to WIRED that his unit dispersed information about the case around the globe through Interpol networks.

What can casinos, players, and law enforcement do about it, though?

The first step is simple vigilance, something all these parties are well-versed in. Policing of suspicious players happens at casino level. WIRED independently confirmed a separate alleged incident at a different casino in June that included an individual reportedly earning seven-figure profits before disappearing. The alleged cheater in this case hasn’t been seen since, and Berkey wonders if he was banned from this and possibly other casinos.

“It would seem as though the Vegas casinos have acted,” Berkey says.

Those are retroactive measures, though; what about stopping this cheating as or before it happens?

Some Vegas casinos, per multiple sources, have begun banning phones from being set down at felt level on tables. Many casinos have long had policies prohibiting phone use during hands, and some have even banned phones entirely in prior years, and now these efforts are growing more widespread. However, with the knowledge that today’s miniature cameras can be built into lighters, pens, and other non-phone devices, is that enough of a safety measure? A true “no items on the table whatsoever” rule feels more prudent, but will casinos view that as too invasive toward their clientele? Then there’s a whole separate conversation about placing devices on the rail, which is where players rest their elbows and which sits slightly higher than the felt itself.

“There will be guys who want to watch the game at the table and have their phone propped up,” Berkey says. “That should just be fine. It’s a fine line; it’s a gray line.”

Berkey even suggested some sort of hybrid arrangement where phones or other devices are allowed so long as they sit behind chips or some other item that blocks their view of the felt. These solutions, though, also fail to account for rings or other jewelry that may contain a concealed camera.

The device removal tactic would have run into another big snag when the arrests in France took place: One of the suspects had nothing on the table at all. He allegedly concealed a camera in his clothing. If that scheme worked to capture card faces out of a dealer’s shoe, it would definitely work for the traditional dealer-pitch style used in Vegas.

The better long-term solution, one Berkey and others in the poker world support, involves retraining the dealers—a process that’s already begun.

The European Poker Tour has introduced a new form of dealer pitch known as slide dealing, where the deck remains on the table and the dealer slides each top card off individually to greatly minimize or eliminate any exposure. EPT tournament director Toby Stone directly cited issues of camera cheating as the impetus behind this change, which took effect within the past couple of months.

Casinos could take it even further; some have been cracking down for years. The Star casinos in Australia, for instance, have long used a modified version of a blackjack shoe meant for a single poker deck, which sits at the center of the table and allows cards to slide out from within it. This ostensibly makes it much harder to capture cards than from the traditional blackjack shoe placed at the very side of the table, closer to potential cameras. Anecdotally, these contraptions also seem to limit or eliminate other common risks like bottom-dealing or cards flipping over while being dealt.

While it might take time to retrain the world’s legion of poker dealers to mitigate these schemes, that could be the eventual outcome here.

“I’ve spoken to a few of the [casino] higher-ups, and it seems they’re all open to the idea of retraining dealers,” Berkey says.

Maybe even that eventual move wouldn’t completely eliminate mini camera cheating. As the suspects in France allegedly showed us, today’s video technology is truly amazing. Would you ever have guessed a mini camera could accurately capture which cards are being dealt during the split second they’re exposed as they’re pulled from a blackjack shoe?

Anyone putting their money down at a casino, particularly higher up the stakes spectrum, should at least be aware of the risk of bad actors—particularly in a game like poker, where your opponents are other patrons rather than the casino itself. Whether to combat this or any other potential scheme, a dose of diligence goes a long way.

“As long as there’s a fair game to be offered, there will be people who will try to corrupt it,” Berkey says. “The best we can do is continually work hard to keep the game as fair as possible.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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There is, of course, no quantitative way to rank amazing things that happen in space. We cannot measure their absolute magnitude nor assign them a numerical value, and trying to do so is something of a fool’s errand. Are we fools? Maybe. But we're fools who like to have a little fun.

Understandably, then, this list is completely subjective. How else could one rank events that span the cosmos, from gravitational wave detection to the launch of humans into suborbital space? What follows is a list of the most incredible, surprising, impressive, and demanding achievements and developments in space and spaceflight during the first 25 years of the 2000s—as selected by the editors of Ars Technica.

You will probably disagree with some choices and their ranking, and that’s totally fine. That’s what the comments section is for. But the point here is simply to bring some of these incredible moments back onto the front burner so we can all bask in their glory once again. Each of these achievements deserves our celebration and appreciation.

Without further ado, here's our list counting down the most incredible space achievements in the 2000s so far.

25. Artemis I

When I asked readers on social media for suggestions about the coolest things they’ve seen in spaceflight during the last 25 years, I received hundreds of suggestions. To the best of my knowledge, not a single person mentioned the Artemis I mission, in which an uncrewed Orion spacecraft flew around the Moon in late 2022.

This is somewhat surprising, as NASA invested more money into the Artemis Program than anything else on this list. And it strikes me as notable that with the Artemis I mission, NASA set down a marker for the program that will finally return humans to deep space after more than half a century. It deserves a place on this list for that reason, even if it did not excite the passions of my followers.

The Space Launch System rocket lifts off on the Artemis I mission.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

24. Parker Solar Probe

This NASA flagship mission, more than five decades in the making, was literally built to touch the Sun. It is the fastest spacecraft ever built and required a breakthrough in hypersonic materials to become feasible. After launching in 2018, the spacecraft built by the Applied Physics Laboratory will make its closest approach to the Sun on December 24, coming to within less than 10 solar radii of the star's surface.

At its closest approach, the spacecraft will be traveling at something like 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph), or 0.06 percent the speed of light. The primary goal of the mission is to understand the flow of energy through the Sun and better discern the nature of the Solar wind, as well as study other properties of our star. For all of that, the mission was delivered on time and on budget, a rarity for a lot of the projects on this list.

23. ʻOumuamua

What is this object, and where did it come from? The mystery of ʻOumuamua is fascinating to think about. Discovered in 2017 by Robert Weryk using a telescope at Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii, ʻOumuamua is the first interstellar object humans have discovered moving through our Solar System. At the time of its detection, ʻOumuamua was already moving away from the Sun.

ʻOumuamua is a small object, likely shaped in the manner of a cigar, and is perhaps up to 1 km (3,000 feet) long. It has a reddish hue, similar to objects in the outer Solar System. Unlike most objects from the outer Solar System, however, ʻOumuamua had no coma, or tail, as it passed near the Sun. It is most likely an interstellar comet of some sort, but astronomers can only speculate about its nature, age, and where it may have originated.

An artist’s impression of the oddly shaped interstellar asteroid `Oumuamua.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

22. Falcon 9 and Starlink cadence

How has the Falcon 9 rocket revolutionized the launch industry? Since its origin in 2010, the Falcon 9 has flown 400 times. In 2024 alone, the rocket will launch more times than its would-be competitors—including Russia, Arianespace, and United Launch Alliance—have each flown in the last decade. Next year, the Falcon 9 rocket will likely launch more times than NASA’s space shuttle did in 30 years. All of this is made possible by reusing the rocket’s first stage and payload fairing and through SpaceX’s relentless push to control costs and streamline operations.

The high flight rate of the Falcon 9 rocket has enabled SpaceX to deploy its Starlink constellation at a rapid pace over the last five years, putting more than 7,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit. Starlink has raised serious concerns from astronomers about its impact on their observations, and it has also increased the risk of collisions and debris near Earth. However, there is no arguing with the amazing feeling of plugging in a Starlink dish and pulling down high-speed, low-latency Internet from the heavens moments later.

21. Dark matter and dark energy

These are arguably the greatest astronomical mysteries of the day. Dark matter has not been observed directly, but its existence is suggested by the need for large amounts of hidden mass to explain observations in the cosmos. Dark energy’s existence is implied by an unknown force behind the expansion of the Universe, which is accelerating rather than slowing down after the Big Bang. The observations that hint at the existence of dark matter (1980s and 1990s) and dark energy (1998) were made prior to this century. However, scientists have been working feverishly to understand the nature of both since then.

Remarkably, astronomers estimate that the mass–energy content of the Universe is just 5 percent ordinary matter (such as stars and planets), 26.8 percent dark matter, and 68.2 percent dark energy. So what are dark matter and dark energy made of? We don’t know. Theoretical physicists have all sorts of wonderful ideas for both, but none have ever been directly observed in space or in laboratories. Nobel prizes await these fundamental discoveries.

20. Genesis and Stardust

In the 1960s and 1970s, Apollo astronauts returned rocks from the Moon, and some robotic Soviet missions did likewise. Sample return missions then stopped for a quarter of a century until the launch of two NASA missions, Stardust in 1999 and Genesis in 2001. Stardust flew through the coma of comet Wild 2, collecting samples there as well as those of cosmic dust. Genesis sought to collect and return samples of the Solar wind.

Genesis was first to return to Earth in 2004, but its parachute deployment system failed, and it crashed into the Utah desert traveling at a speed of 310 km/h (190 mph). Miraculously, scientists were still able to recover some of Genesis’ samples and complete the mission’s science objectives. Stardust had a happier return in 2006. Both spacecraft set the stage for more complex sample return missions this century.

An artist's concept of Cassini flying through a plume on Enceladus in 2015.

Credit: NASA

19. Cassini finds plumes on Enceladus

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. There, it made many fascinating observations, including of the intriguing moon Titan (more on this later). However, the highlight for many planetary scientists and space enthusiasts came during some of Cassini’s flybys of Saturn’s tiny, ice-encrusted moon Enceladus.

In 2005, Cassini observed water ice geysers erupting from the south pole of Enceladus, and three years later, the spacecraft made an even closer flyby, within 50 km (31 miles) of the moon’s surface. This time, Cassini passed through the plumes extending from these geysers and detected water, carbon dioxide, and various hydrocarbons with its mass spectrometer. NASA later confirmed that there is a subsurface ocean below the ice, making Enceladus a candidate for extant life beyond Earth. Hopefully, we will return soon.

18. The Moon makes a comeback

After NASA and the Soviets visited the Moon frequently during the Cold War, humans—and even robotic spacecraft—stopped visiting our celestial neighbor. It was thought to be a cold, dead world, and scientists were more interested in Mars, Venus, and some of the outer planets. This began to change around the turn of the century with the discovery of (probably) large deposits of ice at the lunar poles.

As a result, in the last decade, interest in the lunar surface has risen dramatically. China has flown a successful series of robotic landers to various locations on the Moon and has flown two sample return missions. NASA has sparked a nascent industry of private companies developing lunar landers, with Intuitive Machines making its first, largely successful landing earlier this year. And NASA and China are engaged in a competition to put humans back on the Moon, this time with the aim of permanence and establishing habitats at the South Pole. The Moon is back, baby!

17. Demo-2

The retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 marked a painful moment for NASA. The space agency had to spend several years convincing Americans that the space program was not shutting down. NASA leaders also had to go, hat in hand, to Russia’s space corporation and barter for seats to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. And in 2020, along came SpaceX and its Dragon spacecraft.

The vehicle’s first mission, carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, came during a summer of unrest when America needed a win. The country was still largely shut down by COVID-19, and its politics were fractured by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. America’s return to human spaceflight marked a significant technical achievement by SpaceX, which became the first private company to launch humans into orbit, and it allowed NASA to fly more astronauts to the space station and take full advantage of that facility's research capabilities. Dragon has flown more than a dozen times since.

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley inside Crew Dragon. With their mission in 2020, NASA

broke its dependence on Russia for access to space.

Credit: SpaceX

16. Detection of gravitational waves

Although he theorized about their existence a century ago, eminent physicist Albert Einstein was not sure humans could ever detect the faint echoes of gravitational waves traveling across the vastness of space. Nevertheless, experimental physicists strived to do that for decades. Then, in February 2016, two LIGO observatories announced that they had detected gravitational waves coming from two merging black holes.

This marked a triumphant moment for experimental physics and confirmed a key tenet of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Now, these observatories have given physicists a powerful new tool to observe violent astrophysics from afar. Since the initial discovery nearly a decade ago, physicists have detected eight additional gravitational waves from a variety of astrophysical phenomena.

15. Rise of space tourism

In April 2001, an engineer and businessman named Dennis Tito launched into orbit on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He was the first private space tourist. A little more than three years later, the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan and flown by Mike Melvill, reached an altitude of 100.1 km. This was the first privately funded human spaceflight.

Then, for nearly two decades, private space tourism floundered. There were a handful of commercial flights on Soyuz. But it wasn't until the summer of 2021 that things took off, first with Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spacecraft and then Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle flying private citizens to suborbital space. Shortly afterward, in September 2021, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman commanded the first private orbital mission, Inspiration4, on Crew Dragon. In December of that year, the daughter of the first American in space, Laura Shepard-Churchley, followed in her father's footsteps by flying a similar trajectory on board a spacecraft carrying his name. Private space travel is not yet ubiquitous, but the era is finally opening.

14. Continuous presence on Mars

In early 2004, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers touched down on opposite sides of Mars. Initially designed for 90 days of operations, Spirit functioned until it got stuck in 2009, and it halted communications in 2010. Opportunity proved more tenacious, operating 57 times longer than its planned lifetime. By the time of its final contact with NASA in June 2018, Opportunity had traversed 45 km (28 miles).

Because of Opportunity’s longevity and the ongoing operations of Curiosity (as well as the more recently landed Perseverance), humanity has had eyes on the surface of Mars for more than two decades. This has given NASA an incredible ability to study the planet’s weather and climate continuously for long enough to understand patterns and develop an average climate state. This type of knowledge is essential if humans want to live on the red planet one day.

The Opportunity rover leaves its landing site in Eagle Crater on Mars back in 2004.

Credit: NASA

13. Exploring and moving asteroids

For 4.5 billion years, the surface of the Earth has been vulnerable to killer asteroids, and its inhabitants have been unable to identify threatening objects. That has finally begun to change as humans have become asteroid hunters. In 2003, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa became the first mission to land on an asteroid and collect samples. A few years later, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spent several years orbiting and studying the largest asteroids in the Solar System, Ceres and Vesta. In the mid-2010s, Japan and the United States sent the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx missions to asteroids to collect larger samples and return them to Earth successfully.

Then, in 2022, the NASA-built Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART mission, successfully collided with the small asteroid Dimorphos, about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth. The collision shortened Dimorphos' orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos by 32 minutes. This successfully demonstrated the capability to redirect an asteroid. In October of this year, a European spacecraft, Hera, was launched to study the aftermath of this collision. These efforts, combined with better monitoring of the heavens, have increased the ability of humanity to prevent killer asteroids from striking the planet.

12. Rise of China’s lunar program

One of the major stories of this century is the rise of China’s space program and its efforts to challenge the United States for preeminence. This has been most apparent in the country’s efforts to study and land on the Moon with its Chang’e project. In 2007, China flew its first orbiter to the Moon, and in 2013, the Chang’e 3 spacecraft successfully landed on the Moon and deployed the small Yutu rover.

These early successes set the stage for even more ambitious missions. In 2019, the Chang'e 4 mission landed on the far side of the Moon, the first time this had been accomplished by anyone. The country’s space program subsequently flew robotic sample return missions, including the Chang’e 6 mission at the South Pole of the Moon this year. China aims to land humans on the Moon by 2030, setting up a competition with NASA and the United States.

11. Starship tower catch

On October 13 of this year, SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket for the fifth time, but this flight profile was different in that the company sought to recover the Super Heavy first stage. Remarkably, the rocket returned to the launch site, hovered adjacent to the launch tower, and was plucked from the air by a pair of “chopsticks” and subsequently set down back on the launch mount.

This technical achievement demonstrates a number of important things, including verifying the radical approach to catching a rocket (obviating the need for landing legs and reducing launch turnaround times). It also allows SpaceX to accelerate the development and testing of Starship. The visually arresting tower grab also captured the public’s attention and brought wider recognition of Starship’s potential to change spaceflight forever.

The sixth flight of Starship lifts off from SpaceX's Starbase launch site at Boca Chica Beach, Texas.

Credit: SpaceX.

10. Voyagers are alive and kicking

Nearly 50 years have passed since NASA launched the iconic Voyager spacecraft into deep space, and for those of us alive in 1990, the “pale blue dot” image may have felt like a coda for the program. However, the Voyagers have continued to return important science this century as they have explored the outer Solar System and beyond. In 2012, data from Voyager 1 indicated that it had entered interstellar space, followed seven years later by Voyager 2.

They still weren't done, though, and have continued to fly in the interstellar medium between stars to collect data, including the recent discovery of an unexpected increase in the density of space. Voyager 1 has now reached a distance of more than 160 astronomical units from the Sun (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun), and Voyager 2 is more than 135 AU away. Thanks to careful management by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Center, the Voyagers continue to periodically phone home, our silent sentinels in the great void.

9. Kepler and exoplanets everywhere

Prior to this century, astronomers had identified a handful of planets around other stars, but we really had no idea whether planets were rare or common and if Earth-size worlds existed beyond our own star. That all changed in 2009 with the launch of the Kepler space telescope into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. It operated for nearly a decade and transformed our understanding of exoplanets.

Kepler monitored the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in our neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy, looking for periodic dimmings to identify transiting planets. To date, Kepler has detected more than 2,700 exoplanets and found that far from being rare, there are probably at least as many planets in our galaxy as stars, if not many more. The telescope and subsequent observations have confirmed that Earth-size worlds are also common, providing some promising targets in our search for life.

8. James Webb Space Telescope

The effort to design, build, test, and deploy the Webb telescope was a saga that spanned the entire 21st century. Initial concept studies were completed in the late 1990s, and a major redesign of the space-based infrared observatory was undertaken in 2005. Construction was finally completed in 2016, setting the stage for a lengthy series of tests to verify the observatory’s instruments and its capability to deploy in space.

Along the way, the price tag ballooned from $1 billion to $10 billion by the time the telescope finally reached the launch pad. After lifting off on an Ariane 5 rocket on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope spent half a year unfolding and deploying in space before finally beginning operations. But the astronomical results have been worth it. The saga of Webb has been a story of persistence and perseverance by NASA, Northrop Grumman, and other partners who strived to bring this magnificent instrument online. A happy ending was far from certain, but we got one anyway.

On Jan. 4, 2022, engineers successfully completed the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope’s

sunshield, seen here during its final deployment test on Earth in December 2020 at Northrop Grumman in

Redondo Beach, California.

Credit: NASA

7. Huygens probe lands on Titan

The Huygens probe flew to Saturn as a passenger aboard the Cassini mission, which launched in 1997. Built by the European Space Agency, Huygens was deployed to the moon Titan in 2005. This large moon is one of the most intriguing bodies in the Solar System, with a surface pressure not dissimilar to that on Earth but with temperatures cold enough to support lakes of methane. What's amazing is that a probe built during the 1990s made it all the way down to the surface.

Huygens touched down on land, although the mission designers planned for the possibility that it would touch down in a methane lake. Intended to gather data for a few hours during its descent through Titan’s thick atmosphere and possibly briefly while on the surface, Huygens continued to communicate for about 90 minutes from the moon’s surface. More than two decades later, no other human-made object has ever landed on a body in the outer Solar System. That will hopefully change with NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan within the next decade.

6. Human habitation in space becomes routine

The International Space Station is remarkable for a number of reasons, but perhaps no more so than for its longevity across a quarter of a century. Although the first element of the International Space Station was launched in 1998, the first long-term inhabitants, Expedition 1, did not arrive until November 2000. Since then, humans have lived continually in space. More than 280 people have visited the station, including a handful for longer than a year.

During that time, astronauts and cosmonauts conducted countless science experiments and provided human health researchers with a trove of data about the perils of living in microgravity. The space station has also been a beacon for peace and human cooperation at a time of geopolitical turmoil. Finally, the station has nurtured the growing US commercial space industry, and it's likely that companies such as SpaceX would not exist today without the station.

A Falcon 9 rocket lands for the first time after delivering the Orbcomm-2 mission to space.

Credit: SpaceX

5. Orbcomm-2, the first Falcon 9 landing

If left to myself, I would have put this mission at the top of the list. In writing the book Reentry, I came to understand all of the toil and turmoil behind the scenes of SpaceX’s first successful attempt to land a rocket vertically back on Earth. The mission happened just days before Christmas, on the night of December 21, 2015, at Cape Canaveral in Florida. It felt otherworldly to see a rocket that had just launched minutes before return and land near the launch site.

So much was on the line. The company’s previous launch, a cargo mission to the space station, had blown up on the way to orbit. For Orbcomm-2, SpaceX was debuting a brand-new and much-changed version of the Falcon 9 rocket known as “full thrust.” Its engineers and technicians had to learn how to produce copious amounts of densified liquid oxygen and load it onto the rocket just minutes before launch. SpaceX also had to convince the Air Force to let a rocket land near sensitive facilities. In the end, the company pulled it off, inaugurating the era of modern reusability. Launch will never be the same.

4. New Horizons flies by Pluto

Launched in 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft made a stunning flyby of the Pluto and Charon system in 2015. For the first time since the Voyagers, a spacecraft revealed an unknown planet in great detail, and it was thrilling to see new images and data from Pluto and its largest moon in almost real time as they came in from New Horizons. The excitement was so genuine because we simply had no idea what to expect.

After nearly a decade of travel across more than 5 billion km (3 billion miles), New Horizons managed to fly within 12,500 km (7,800 mi) of Pluto’s surface. During this brief passage, New Horizons revealed vibrant colors and incredible features such as ice volcanoes. After passing by Pluto, New Horizons also became the first spacecraft to visit a Kuiper Belt object, 486958 Arrokoth. New Horizons is now more than 60 AU from Earth, bound for the interstellar medium.

Four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color

data from the spacecraft's Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view of Pluto.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University/SWRI

3. Philae touches down on a comet

Built by the European Space Agency, Philae was a small robotic lander that traveled to a distant comet, 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, aboard the Rosetta spacecraft. After a journey of about a decade, Rosetta reached orbit around the comet and released Philae. In November 2014, Philae touched down on the comet, but harpoons designed to anchor the spacecraft failed to deploy. Accordingly, Philae bounced a few times before coming to a soft landing on the nucleus.

This marked the first time a spacecraft had ever landed on a comet. Although lying on its side in the shadow of a steep cliff, Philae still returned rich data about the comet’s nucleus over the next half year or so. Why does Philae rank so highly? Because the spacecraft was so plucky and lovable, and along with Rosetta, it returned images and video from a comet that were at once familiar but also entirely alien. This was truly an inspirational mission.

2. Ingenuity flies on Mars

Almost everyone reading this article remembers the seven minutes of terror associated with the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012. A similar thing happened nine years later when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars (this time, with some amazing video of the dynamic experience). Yet as cool as these landings were, and as impressive as the capabilities of Curiosity and Perseverance are, a tiny payload named Ingenuity carried by Perseverance stole the show on Mars.

The small helicopter had a mass of just 1.8 kg (4 pounds), and to a large extent, it was built from off-the-shelf parts. Expectations were low for the vehicle, which was developed by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They would have been happy with a simple hover flight, with the vehicle flying up several feet and back to the Martian surface. Instead, Ingenuity survived long winter nights and dust storms, amazing us all by flying 72 missions over the course of nearly three years. During its lifetime, Ingenuity spent a total of 2 hours and 9 minutes soaring through the thin Martian air. It was an incredible little machine, the Wright Flyer of this century.

The Falcon Heavy rocket made its debut launch at 3:45 pm ET Tuesday, February 6, 2018, with all 27 engines firing.

Credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars Technica

1. Falcon Heavy launch, dual rocket landing

By popular demand, this mission in February 2018 ranks in the top spot. The visuals were irresistible. The rocket launch itself was impressive, with the combination of 27 Merlin rocket engines generating a brightness that one almost had to look away from. Then the twin boosters separated and returned to Earth, landing like a pair of synchronized swimmers. Finally, there was the arresting view of a cherry red Tesla (and Starman) flying away from Earth in the general direction of Mars.

It was a spectacle that understandably captured the public’s attention. But the new rocket was more than a spectacle. By designing, building, and launching the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX demonstrated that a private company could independently fund and fly the largest and most powerful rocket in the world. This showed that commercial, heavy-lift rockets were possible. By providing competition to the Delta IV Heavy, the Falcon Heavy saved the US government billions. It's likely that the US government will never design and develop a rocket ever again.

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Optimism among owners of small businesses soared last month to the highest level in more than three years, fueled by expectations that President-elect Donald Trump will push through pro-growth regulatory and tax policies, the National Federation of Independent Business said Tuesday.

The portion of small business owners anticipating an improvement in the economy rose to the highest level since June 2020, while the share believing that now is a good time to invest in their business hit the highest reading since June 2021, the NFIB said, describing results of a monthly survey.

“The election results signal a major shift in economic policy, leading to a surge in optimism among small business owners,” NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg said in a statement. “Owners are particularly hopeful for tax and regulation policies that favor strong economic growth as well as relief from inflationary pressures,” he said, noting that “small business owners are eager to expand their operations.”

Dive Insight:

Trump’s win at the ballot box last month coincided with several signs of vitality and optimism, including above-trend economic growth, solid consumer spending and record-high stock prices.

Gross domestic product — defying predictions of a slowdown this year — grew at annual rates of 1.4% in the first quarter, 3% in Q2 and 2.8% in Q3, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

During the current quarter, the economy will likely expand 3.3%, according to a forecast by the Atlanta Fed released Monday.

Like their counterparts at small businesses, leaders of the largest U.S. companies see good times ahead, the Business Roundtable said Tuesday, reporting on its CEO Economic Outlook Survey for Q4.

The Business Roundtable’s composite index measuring CEO plans for capital spending, employment and expectations for sales during the next six months hit the highest level in more than two years, the organization said, reporting on its quarterly CEO Economic Outlook Survey.

“With Washington poised to consider measures that can protect and strengthen tax reform, enable a sensible regulatory environment and drive investment and job creation, business leaders are energized by the opportunity to engage the incoming administration and Congress on policies that can further fuel our economy,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement. He also serves as chair of the Business Roundtable.

Among small business owners, their one-month increase in optimism from October until November is the biggest jump since the start of the NFIB index in 1986, and more than double the monthly gain after Trump’s first presidential election win in 2016, Pantheon Macroeconomics Chief U.S. Economist Samuel Tombs said.

“Right now, small businesses surely are cheering Mr. Trump’s plans to reduce the corporate tax rate for American-based businesses without foreign ties to 15% from 21%, and to lessen the burden of regulations,” he said Tuesday.

Yet the outlook is not without risks, Tombs said in an e-mail to clients.

“Tariffs and deportations threaten to lift small businesses’ costs and weigh on overseas sales, if other countries retaliate,” Tombs said. “The risk that the mood among small businesses quickly sours is high.”

Moreover, high borrowing costs thwart expansion plans for many small businesses, he said, noting that the 8.8% average interest rate on short-term loans last month far exceeded nominal sales growth.

“External finance remains so expensive to obtain that few small businesses will seek to expand soon,” Tombs said.

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Nearly 400 Boeing employees were laid off in Washington state and more than 500 in California, news outlets reported Monday.

The aerospace giant announced previously it would reduce its workforce by 10% in the coming months as it tries to recover from financial and regulatory troubles and a strike by its machinists that lasted almost two months.

CEO Kelly Ortberg has said the strike did not cause the layoffs, which he said was the result of overstaffing.

In November, the company started notifying workers who would be laid off. Notices filed with state employment agencies showed the first round of cuts impacted about 3,500 people around the country, The Seattle Times reported.

Those cuts touched people in roles from engineers to recruiters to analysts and impacted Boeing’s commercial, defense and global services divisions.

Boeing has said most laid-off employees remain on payroll for about two months and will receive severance pay, career transition services and subsidized health insurance benefits for up to three months.

“As announced in early October, we are adjusting our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and a more focused set of priorities,” Boeing spokespeople have said about the layoffs.

Boeing, based in Arlington, Virginia, has been in financial trouble since two crashes of its 737 Max jetliner killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019. The company’s fortunes and reputation took an additional hit when a panel blew off the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane in January.

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Data from Google Trends shows the topics and people searched the most this year. For instance, "Copa América," "UEFA European Championship," and "ICC Men's T20 World Cup" top the list of the most trending topics in 2024 globally.

Various athletic events boosted search trends across other categories, such as Usher, who became the top trending musician in the US after his halftime show. Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen loved "Olympics chocolate muffins," making it the top trending food and drink recipe globally.

Donald Trump, Catherine, Princess of Wales, and Kamala Harris found themselves among the top-searched people globally. But the world lost some popular personalities, including the English singer and songwriter Liam Payne and the country music singer Toby Keith.

In the news section, "U.S. Election," "Excessive Heat," and "Olympics" remained the top three most trending topics. Google notes that about half of the world's population went to the polls this year, and global interest in elections surged. Speaking of popular movies and TV shows, Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Baby Reindeer, and Fallout managed to score the top spots.

The search giant has also published data from Google Maps to highlight the places people wanted to explore this year. Italy's Arena di Verona, Madrid's Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, and England's Wembley reached the top three most searched stadium complexes on Google Maps.

Museum buffs were most interested in exploring London's British Museum, Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, and Chicago's Science and Industry Museum. Meanwhile, New York's Central remained the leader among top park searches.

You can check out all the lists on the Google Trends website to find the top trending searches in various categories. Google has also released 2024 annual recaps for YouTube Music and Google Photos.

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A handful of dairy farms sprawl across the valley floor, ringed by the spikey, copper-colored San Jacinto mountains. This is the very edge of California’s dairy country—and so far, the cows here are safe.

But everyone worries that the potentially lethal bird flu is on the way. “I hope not,” says Clemente Jimenez, as he fixes a hose at Pastime Lakes, a 1,500-head dairy farm. “It’s a lot of trouble.”

Further north and west, in the San Joaquin Valley—the heart of the state’s dairy industry—the H5N1 virus, commonly known as bird flu, has rippled through the massive herds that provide most of the country’s milk. Farmworkers have piled carcasses into black and white heaps. This week the state reported 19 new confirmed cases in cows and more than 240,000 in chickens. Another 50,000 cases were confirmed at a chicken breeding facility in Oklahoma.

Most worrying, though, is the spillover from livestock to humans. So far, 58 people in the United States have tested positive for bird flu. Fifty-six of them worked either on dairy or poultry farms where millions of birds had to be culled.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that four of the cases in humans had no known connection to livestock, raising fears that the virus eventually could jump from one human to another, though that hasn’t happened yet. On Thursday, a study published in Science by researchers at The Scripps Research Institute said it would take only a single mutation in the H5N1 virus for it to attach itself to human receptor cells.

Large livestock facilities in states across the country, and especially in California, have become the epicenters of these cases, and some researchers say that’s no surprise: Putting thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of animals together in confined, cramped barns or corrals creates a petri dish for viruses to spread, especially between genetically similar and often stressed animals.

More drought and higher temperatures, fueled by climate change, supercharge those conditions.

“Animal production acts like a connectivity for the virus,” said Paula Ribeiro Prist, a conservation scientist with the EcoHealth Alliance, a not-for-profit group that focuses on research into pandemics. “If you have a lot of cattle being produced in more places, you have a higher chance of the virus spreading. When you have heat stress, they’re more vulnerable.”

So far, this bird flu outbreak has affected more than 112 million chickens, turkeys, and other poultry across the US since it was first detected at a turkey-producing facility in Indiana in February 2022. In March of this year, officials confirmed a case of the virus in a Texas dairy cow—the first evidence that the virus had jumped from one livestock species to another. Since then, 720 cows have been affected, most of them in California, where there have been nearly 500 recorded cases.

In the United States, a trend of consolidation in agriculture, particularly dairies, has seen more animals housed together on ever-larger farms as the number of small farms has rapidly shrunk. In 1987, half of the country’s dairy cows were in herds of 80 or more, and half in herds of 80 or fewer. Twenty years later, half the country’s cows were raised in herds of 1,300 or more. Today, 5,000-head dairies are common, especially in the arid West.

California had just over 21,000 dairy farms in 1950, producing 5.6 billion pounds of milk. Today, it has 1,100 producing around 41 billion pounds. Total US milk production has soared from about 116 billion pounds in 1950 to about 226 billion today.

“The pace of consolidation in dairy far exceeds the pace of consolidation seen in most of US agriculture,” a recent USDA report said.

Initially, researchers thought the virus was spreading through cows’ respiration, but recent research suggests it’s being transmitted through milking equipment and milk itself.

“It’s been the same strain in dairy cows… We don’t necessarily have multiple events of spillover,” said Meghan Davis, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Now it’s transmission from one cow to the next, often through milking equipment.”

It’s still unclear what caused that initial jump from wild birds, which are the natural reservoirs of the virus, to commercial poultry flocks and then to cows, but some research suggests that changing migration patterns caused by warmer weather are creating conditions conducive to the spreading of viruses. Some wild birds are migrating earlier than usual, hatching juvenile birds in new or different habitats.

“This is leading to a higher number of young that are naive to the virus,” Prist explained. “This makes the young birds more infectious—they have a higher chance of transmitting the virus because they don’t have antibodies protecting them.

“They’re going to different areas and they’re staying longer,” Prist added, “so they have higher contact with other animals, to the other native populations, that they have never had contact [with] before.”

That, researchers believe, could have initiated the spillover from wild birds to poultry, where it has become especially virulent. In wild birds, the virus tends to be a low pathogenic strain that occurs naturally, causing only minor symptoms in some birds.

“But when we introduce the virus to poultry operations where birds live in unsanitary and highly confined conditions, the virus is … able to spread through them like wildfire,” said Ben Rankin, a legal expert with the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group. “There are so many more opportunities for the virus to mutate, to adapt to new kinds of hosts, and eventually, the virus spills back into the wild and this creates this cycle, or this loop, of intensification and increasing pathogenicity.”

Rankin pointed to an analysis that looked at 39 different viral outbreaks in birds from 1959 to 2015, where a low pathogenic avian influenza became a highly pathogenic one. Out of those, 37 were associated with commercial poultry operations. “So it’s a very clear relationship between the increasing pathogenicity of this virus and its relationship with industrial animal raising,” Rankin said.

Some researchers worry that large farms with multiple species are providing the optimal conditions for more species-to-species transfer. In North Carolina, the second-largest hog-producing state after Iowa, some farmers have started raising both chickens and hogs under contracts that require huge numbers of animals.

“So you’ve got co-location at a pretty substantial scale of herd size, on a single property,” said Chris Heaney, an associate professor of environmental health, engineering, epidemiology, and international health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Another concern is seeing it jump into swine. That host, in particular, is uniquely well suited for those influenza viruses to re-assort and acquire properties that are very beneficial for taking up residence in humans.”

In late October, the USDA reported the first case of bird flu in a pig that lived on a small poultry and hog farm in Oregon.

Farmworker advocates say the number of cases in humans is likely underreported, largely because the immigrant and non-English speaking workforce on farms could be reluctant to seek help or may not be informed about taking precautions.

“What we’re dealing with is the lack of information from the top to the workers,” said Ana Schultz, a director with Project Protect Food Systems Workers.

In northern Colorado, home to dozens of large dairies, Schultz started to ask dairy workers in May if they were getting protective gear and whether anyone was falling ill. Many workers told her they were feeling flu-ish but didn’t go to the doctor for fear of losing a day of work or getting fired.

“I feel like there’s a lot more avian flu incidents, but no one knows about it because they don’t go to the doctor and they don’t get tested,” Schultz said. “In all the months that we’ve been doing outreach and taking protective gear and flyers, we haven’t had one single person tell us they’ve been to the doctor.”

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Struggling businesses are still heavy users or credit cards, and are twice as likely to fail to pay their monthly balance in full compared to more financially stable businesses, according to a Dec. 3 press release on the results of a small business survey from market research firm J.D. Power.

The survey found that 61% of small businesses that are considered financially unhealthy carry a revolving credit card balance, and 63% use their cards for operating expenses. Of those small businesses considered financially healthy, 31% carry revolving debt and 71% use their credit cards for operating expenses.

“Business credit cards have been a lifeline, but the buildup of revolving debt they are accumulating should raise some concerns,” said John Cabell, managing director of payments intelligence at J.D. Power.

Dive Insight:

The survey was conducted between July and September, and included responses from more than 3,000 U.S. businesses with annual revenue between $10,000 and $10 million. 

This is the first year J.D. Power’s annual small business survey asked about credit card balances and spending.

Cabell is uneasy over the findings, he told Payments Dive in an interview, because it means that financially unhealthy businesses have to pay credit card interest rates on top of other financial struggles.

“For those businesses that are financially unhealthy, they are paying a higher interest rate than what they might find with other borrowing options,” Cabell said. “But they may be stuck in a situation where they can’t get other credit, which of course, means that this may be one of the few options they have.”

Other results of the survey give him even more reason for alarm. Of the small businesses surveyed, 26% said they are heavy users of credit cards and payment plans. 

Even so, small business owners say credit cards are useful to them. Nearly half (49%) of respondents say they depend on benefits like priority boarding and free shipping.

Slightly more than a third of respondents (36%) said credit card rewards help their business.That figure suggests that most small businesses are not satisfied with the rewards offered by their credit card issuer, Cabell said.

Small businesses also told J.D. Power that they use buy now, pay later plans for business expenses, with 24% saying they use BNPL for business purchases.

While J.D. Power has not previously asked small business owners about their use of buy now, pay later, the roughly one-fourth of small businesses using it indicate the payment method has moved beyond its traditional consumer clientele, Cabell said.

”You think of buy now, pay later as being more of a consumer option, but clearly small business is relying on that too,” Cabell said. “I don’t think the credit card is going to go away, but we’re seeing a broadening of the spectrum of payment options” that small businesses use.

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EVs are practically worthless secondhand, because the huge batteries will need expensive replacement after a few years. At least, that’s what some articles or forum discussions in recent years may lead you to believe. However, while secondhand prices for EVs have been plummeting, evidence is building that their batteries could last longer than the eight-year warranties most come with. In fact, they could still be very usable even after 20 years, potentially giving full-electric cars a longer useful life than many fossil-fuel equivalents.

“There is an immense amount of consumer concern around the state of the battery that you buy in a secondhand vehicle,” says James Wallace, cofounder of Fortescue’s battery intelligence division Elysia. His company, formerly Williams Advanced Engineering prior to the Fortescue acquisition, has been developing software to optimize battery performance in intensive-use situations such as motorsport (including Formula E), mining, and for automaker JLR. Wallace is hoping Elysia’s technology will filter down to the mainstream, to help “give consumers more transparency on the secondhand batteries that they buy.”

People base assumptions on existing experience. When it comes to battery longevity, that’s mostly likely going to be their smartphones. Most of us see the battery life of our handsets start to drop after a couple of years. Apple’s Batterygate likely won’t have helped with the popular image of the durability of lithium-ion cells, either.

Built to Last

But there is growing indication that EV batteries are much sturdier than those in smartphones. Just for starters, you don’t tend to recharge your EV every day like your handset. It might be as infrequently as once a week or less. Real-world studies show how this affects an electric car’s battery. Consulting firm P3 recently analyzed 7,000 fleet electric vehicles, in partnership with Austrian battery testing specialist Aviloo. Their report showed that, on average, EV batteries have 90 percent capacity after 100,000 kilometers of driving, and at 300,000 kilometers they still have 87 percent of their original kilowatts left.

Similarly, data from fleet telematics company Geotab has revealed that battery depletion is much lower than originally predicted over time. While the P3 research is based on vehicles between three and five years old, mapping remaining battery capacity against mileage, the Geotab analysis looks at age. “We did a study in 2019, and then we did a more recent study as well,” says Charlotte Argue, senior manager for sustainable mobility at Geotab. “The most recent study was 11 different models and brands. Our 2019 study included 23 different models with multiple generations.”

In both these reports, Geotab was tracking the state of charge and measuring the energy flow of the vehicle in use, which was also the approach taken by P3 and Aviloo. “Using that we can estimate at any given time what the total battery capacity is in that vehicle's life,” says Argue. “Plotted over time, we can start to look at trends of how battery capacity is changing. In the most recent study, we looked at over 5,000 vehicles, and many trips.” Geotab saw that the average degradation rate was just 1.8 percent per year. In Geotab's 2019 study, it was 2.3 percent per year. “This most recent study didn't have as many of the early-gen vehicles,” says Argue, “telling us that battery management systems are getting better, and batteries are lasting longer.”

If this 1.8 percent annual degradation continued in a linear fashion, after 10 years an EV would still have 82 percent of its battery capacity, much more than the 70 percent most batteries are warrantied for after eight years.

Dial that forward 20 years and the car would still have 64 percent. If a vehicle started off with 300 miles of WLTP-rated range (the standard test cycle used in Europe), it could have 192 miles of range 20 years later. That remains quite usable, and now there are lots of cars on the market that begin with well over 300 miles of WLTP range.

We Don’t Know How Long EV Batteries Will Last … Yet

Of course, there is still guesswork involved here, because there are no 20-year-old mainstream EVs, and precious few even over 10 years. Many of the latter are Nissan Leafs, which lacked the thermal management that keeps batteries in their best health, so they probably aren’t the best guide for more modern EVs.

But BMW i3 cars from a decade ago are reportedly faring well, with most still providing over 80 percent of their original capacity. BMW, which has conducted its own studies, confirmed to WIRED that i3 batteries have lasted considerably longer than the company expected. Indeed, in 2023, BMW UK purchased the oldest i3 the company could find in its Approved Used network for testing. It was a 2013 BEV model fitted with a 22.6-kWh battery, chosen purely on age. The car had 83 percent battery capacity after almost 10 years on the road.

Tesla Model S vehicles from 2013 show a similar capacity, according to Plug In America results reported by Nimblefins. Tesla even has a 2015 Model S in its UK press fleet with more than 250,000 miles on the clock, on the same battery, with approximately 86 percent of its original capacity remaining.

However, Argue advises caution. “We can't predict the future. It's 1.8 percent per year to date,” she says. “There is an argument that there could be what we call a heel curve towards the end of the life of the vehicle, where the battery starts degrading faster than it did for most of its life. We haven't observed enough bad vehicles hitting that heel to be able to predict or analyze when that will happen. All we can say right now is if it continues to degrade at the average rate that we're seeing, these batteries should last 20 years or more.”

“We do see variation across different vehicles and models,” continues Argue. There are other factors as well. “So far, we haven’t seen a significant impact from high mileage on degradation rates, so you shouldn't be afraid to use your EV.” This finding is in line with P3’s research.

“But we have seen a correlation with the frequency of DC rapid charging,” warns Argue. “Cars that frequently rapid-charged did have an observable increase in degradation rates.”

Hot weather is also a factor that affects durability. “The worst case was three times more for a particular model driven in hot climates and using frequent rapid charging,” says Argue. This would mean losing 5.4 percent of battery capacity per year. However, “the best had on average 1 percent degradation per year. It's definitely a positive trend we're seeing.”

“When the electric vehicle market started, there was a large concern around the factors that can lead to increased battery degradation,” says Neil Cawse, CEO of Geotab. “For example, discharging completely, charging in cold weather versus warm weather, using high-speed charging versus low-speed charging. But battery tech has gotten much better, particularly around management systems—for example, making sure that lithium-ion cells charge properly when cold.”

This better battery performance could provide longer warranties for a higher remaining capacity. Toyota already offers a 10-year warranty on its EV batteries, and MG has been experimenting with a lifetime guarantee in Thailand. “You still generally have warranties that promise 70 percent state of health at eight years, but the degradation that we're seeing on those batteries is much less,” says Wallace.

Your EV Could Still Be Good After 20 Years

However, research so far has been based on how the car’s systems report the battery’s state of health. “I would take all those values with a pinch of salt,” says Wallace. “The reported state of health on the dashboard that the customer sees is often significantly different from what the actual state of health is from that battery.” According to a report published by Elysia in 2023, the true state of health can be up to 9 percent different from what is reported.

Another issue is the buffer that manufacturers leave in their batteries, which is the difference between the net and gross capacity in kWh. “OEMs are oversizing these batteries,” says Wallace. However, Argue explains that “there must be some safety buffer, because what we know from battery science is that if a battery sits completely full or completely empty for a prolonged period, that causes more stress. Having a buffer protects the battery from degradation.”

Wallace reckons this buffer is overly conservative, given the low degradation being seen with EV batteries. “They don't need as much excess capacity,” he says. “Smaller buffers mean smaller batteries, bringing down the cost of EVs.” Trouble is, Wallace believes many traditional automakers don’t yet have the necessary data about their own batteries to take this step.

Still, if batteries continue to last like the studies from P3 and Geotab imply, EVs could well be in better condition than combustion engine vehicles of the same mileage and age. The rest of an EV is less expensive to run as well. “The cost of maintenance is significantly lower,” says Cawse. “You maintain the brake pads and change the wipers—and that’s about it.”

A 10-year-old EV could be almost as good as new, and a 20-year-old one still very usable. That could be yet another disruption to an automotive industry that relies on cars mostly heading to the junkyard after 15 years.

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Thursday, 12 December

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 19:33 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: This mission will see the launch of 23 Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket. They will be placed into a low Earth orbit where they will beam internet connectivity to customers on Earth. This group of satellites has been designated as Starlink Group 11-2. You can refer to this identifier on apps like ISS Detector which tells you what satellites you can see in the sky. After the launch, the first stage of the rocket will likely perform a landing so it can be reused.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 20:58 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying two O3b mPOWER broadband internet satellites into a medium Earth orbit. These two satellites belong not to SpaceX but to the Luxembourgish satellite telecommunications network provider SES. These satellites will enable high-speed internet in remote and underserved areas worldwide.

Saturday, 14 December

• Who: Space One
• What: KAIROS
• When: 02:00 - 02:20 UTC
• Where: Space Port Kii, Japan
• Why: Space One will launch its KAIROS rocket from the Kii private spaceport in Japan on its second mission. It will be carrying a 50 kg micro-satellite and four 3U CubeSats. This mission will be live-streamed on YouTube and could be an interesting watch if you've not seen the rocket blast off yet.

Recap

• The first launch since the publication of TWIRL #190 last week was China's Long March 12. It was the first time the country had ever launched it.

• Later in the week, we got two SpaceX Starlink launches which you can see below. After the launches, the first stages of the rockets performed landings for reuse.

• The next big launch of the week was ISRO's PSLV carrying the European Space Agency's PROBA-3 mission which will use two satellites to snap photos of the Sun's corona.

• The last notable launch we got was a Vega C carrying the Sentinel 1C Earth observation satellite. The satellite will be used to track things like changes in land use, deforestation, and ice cover.

That's all for this week, check in next time.

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GenCast, a new AI model from Google DeepMind, is accurate enough to compete with traditional weather forecasting. It managed to outperform a leading forecast model when tested on data from 2019, according to recently published research.

 

AI isn’t going to replace traditional forecasting anytime soon, but it could add to the arsenal of tools used to predict the weather and warn the public about severe storms. GenCast is one of several AI weather forecasting models being developed that might lead to more accurate forecasts.

 

“Weather basically touches every aspect of our lives ... it’s also one of the big scientific challenges, predicting the weather,” says Ilan Price, a senior research scientist at DeepMind. “Google DeepMind has a mission to advance AI for the benefit of humanity. And I think this is one important way, one important contribution on that front.”

 

Price and his colleagues tested GenCast against the ENS system, one of the world’s top-tier models for forecasting that’s run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). GenCast outperformed ENS 97.2 percent of the time, according to research published this week in the journal Nature.

 

GenCast is a machine learning weather prediction model trained on weather data from 1979 to 2018. The model learns to recognize patterns in the four decades of historical data and uses that to make predictions about what might happen in the future. That’s very different from how traditional models like ENS work, which still rely on supercomputers to solve complex equations in order to simulate the physics of the atmosphere. Both GenCast and ENS produce ensemble forecasts, which offer a range of possible scenarios.

 

When it comes to predicting the path of a tropical cyclone, for example, GenCast was able to give an additional 12 hours of advance warning on average. GenCast was generally better at predicting cyclone tracks, extreme weather, and wind power production up to 15 days in advance.

 

An ensemble forecast from GenCast shows a range of possible storm tracks for Typhoon Hagibis, which

become more accurate as the cyclone draws closer to the coast of Japan.

Image: Google

 

One caveat is that GenCast tested itself against an older version of ENS, which now operates at a higher resolution. The peer-reviewed research compares GenCast predictions to ENS forecasts for 2019, seeing how close each model got to real-world conditions that year. The ENS system has improved significantly since 2019, according to ECMWF machine learning coordinator Matt Chantry. That makes it difficult to say how well GenCast might perform against ENS today.

 

To be sure, resolution isn’t the only important factor when it comes to making strong predictions. ENS was already working at a slightly higher resolution than GenCast in 2019, and GenCast still managed to beat it. DeepMind says it conducted similar studies on data from 2020 to 2022 and found similar results, although that hasn’t been peer-reviewed. But it didn’t have the data to make comparisons for 2023, when ENS started running at a significantly higher resolution.

 

Dividing the world into a grid, GenCast operates at 0.25 degree resolution — meaning each square on that grid is a quarter degree latitude by quarter degree longitude. ENS, in comparison, used 0.2 degree resolution in 2019 and is at 0.1 degree resolution now.

 

Nevertheless, the development of GenCast “marks a significant milestone in the evolution of weather forecasting,” Chantry said in an emailed statement. Alongside ENS, the ECMWF says it’s also running its own version of a machine learning system. Chantry says it “takes some inspiration from GenCast.”

 

Speed is an advantage for GenCast. It can produce one 15-day forecast in just eight minutes using a single Google Cloud TPU v5. Physics-based models like ENS might need several hours to do the same thing. GenCast bypasses all the equations ENS has to solve, which is why it takes less time and computational power to produce a forecast.

 

“Computationally, it’s orders of magnitude more expensive to run traditional forecasts compared to a model like Gencast,” Price says.

 

That efficiency might ease some of the concerns about the environmental impact of energy-hungry AI data centers, which have already contributed to Google’s greenhouse gas emissions climbing in recent years. But it’s hard to suss out how GenCast compares to physics-based models when it comes to sustainability without knowing how much energy is used to train the machine learning model.

 

There are still improvements GenCast can make, including potentially scaling up to a higher resolution. Moreover, GenCast puts out predictions at 12-hour intervals compared to traditional models that typically do so in shorter intervals. That can make a difference for how these forecasts can be used in the real world (to assess how much wind power will be available, for instance).

 

“You would want to know what the wind is going to be doing throughout the day, not just at 6AM and 6PM,” says Stephen Mullens, an assistant instructional professor of meteorology at the University of Florida who was not involved in the GenCast research.

 

While there’s growing interest in how AI can be used to improve forecasts, it still has to prove itself. “People are looking at it. I don’t think that the meteorological community as a whole is bought and sold on it,” Mullens says. “We are trained scientists who think in terms of physics ... and because AI fundamentally isn’t that, then there’s still an element where we’re kind of wrapping our heads around, is this good? And why?”

 

Forecasters can check out GenCast for themselves; DeepMind released the code for its open-source model. Price says he sees GenCast and more improved AI models being used in the real world alongside traditional models. “Once these models get into the hands of practitioners, it further builds trust and confidence,” Price says. “We really want this to have a kind of widespread social impact.”

 

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Deaths in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from an as-yet unidentified disease are continuing to rise. So far there have been 71 confirmed fatalities, with 27 recorded in hospitals and 44 in communities in the southern province of Kwango. The World Health Organization (WHO) has sent a team of experts to the field to collect samples and conduct laboratory tests to try to identify the pathogen responsible.

The results of testing should be available either later today or tomorrow, Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a press conference earlier today. “Initial diagnoses lead us to think it is a respiratory disease, but we have to wait for laboratory results.” Of the hospitalized patients, 17 died due to respiratory problems. Kaseya stressed that there are many aspects still unknown about the disease, including whether it is contagious and how it is transmitted. About 380 cases are thought to have been identified so far, with nearly half involving children under 5.

People infected with the mystery disease present with flu-like symptoms, such as coughing, vomiting, “high fever and severe headaches,” Remy Saki, deputy governor of Kwango province, and Apollinaire Yumba, the DRC’s provincial minister of health, told Reuters. Authorities are urging citizens to exercise caution and avoid contact with dead bodies to avoid potential contagion. The number of infected people, however, continues to rise, as does the alert level.

This area of the DRC is highly fragile from a health perspective, with 40 percent of residents suffering from malnutrition, and access to medical care being difficult for many, with medicines in short supply. This new outbreak is coinciding with the DRC grappling with an epidemic of mpox, which the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern in August.

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

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Lizards are ancient creatures. They were around before the dinosaurs and persisted long after dinosaurs went extinct. We’ve now found they are 35 million years older than we thought they were.

Cryptovaranoides microlanius was a tiny lizard that skittered around what is now southern England during the late Triassic, around 205 million years ago. It likely snapped up insects in its razor teeth (its name means “hidden lizard, small butcher”). But it wasn’t always considered a lizard. Previously, a group of researchers who studied the first fossil of the creature, or holotype, concluded that it was an archosaur, part of a group that includes the extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs along with extant crocodilians and birds.

Now, another research team from the University of Bristol has analyzed that fossil and determined that Cryptovaranoides is not an archosaur but a lepidosaur, part of a larger order of reptiles that includes squamates, the reptile group that encompasses modern snakes and lizards. It is now also the oldest known squamate.

The misunderstandings about this species all come down to features in its bones that are squamate apomorphies. These are traits unique to squamates that were not present in their ancestral form, but evolved later. Certain forelimb bones, skull bones, jawbones, and even teeth of Cryptovaranoides share characteristics with those from both modern and extinct lizards.

Wait, what is that thing?

So what does the new team argue that the previous team that studied Cryptovaranoides gets wrong? The new paper argues that the interpretation of a few bones in particular stand out, especially the humerus and radius.

In the humerus of this lizard, structures called the ectepicondylar and entepicondylar foramina, along with the radial condyle, were either not considered or may have been misinterpreted. The entepicondylar foramen is an opening in the far end of the humerus, which is an upper arm bone in humans and upper forelimb bone in lizards. The ectepicondylar foramen is a structure on the outer side of the humerus where the extensor muscles attach, helping a lizard bend and straighten its legs. Both features are “often regarded as key lepidosaur and squamate characteristics,” the Bristol research team said in a study recently published in Royal Society Open Science.

The radial condyle, a round structure on the head of the radius (a lower forelimb bone) that allows the radius to move, is also an important skeletal characteristic in squamates but was not mentioned by the other team.

Another bone that wasn’t viewed as diagnostic in the earlier analysis was the septomaxilla. This small triangular bone is located on the upper jaw of a lizard, inside the nares or nasal openings. When the holotype was compared to a larger Cryptovaranoides skeleton that was unearthed later, both showed septomaxilla.

There was a bone that had been thought to be present but appears not to be. Most squamates, extant or extinct, lack a posterior projection on the back of the jugal bone, a skull bone that connects to muscles involved in chewing. After studying the original fossil, the Bristol team disputed the other team’s claim that there was possibly a projection there.

If it looks like a lizard…

In addition to pointing out problems with the interpretations made by the team that previously examined Cryptovaranoides, the Bristol researchers identified features of the animal that could only belong to a squamate, and they start in its deadly jaws.

Cryptovaranoides has pleurodont teeth, meaning they are fused to the jawbones instead of being held in place by sockets. This is a common occurrence in squamates but not so much in archosaurs. On the premaxilla (upper jawbone where the four incisive teeth are located) of Cryptovaranoides, there were four teeth on the right side and three on the left, something that was observed in both the initial fossil and a larger one discovered later. Cryptovaranoides was also the only animal from British fossil deposits that they knew to have seven incisive teeth. Both fossils also showed two bony growths near the back of the premaxilla, which distinguished them from archosaurs.

Something else that distinguishes Cryptovaranoides as a squamate is something called a choanal sulcus. The two openings in the back of the nasal passage of both reptiles and mammals are known as the choanae, and in the ancient lizard, each of these has a depression, or suclus. What it has in common with modern lizards here is that the sulcus becomes less deep further back, and as in modern squamates, the sulcus does not stretch across the facial bone that makes up part of the nasal cavity and palate. These features are, the Bristol team argues, “undoubtedly squamate in nature.”

On the skull of Cryptovaranoides was another unmistakable squamate feature. This is the large occipital recess, a hollow space in the back of its braincase, which appeared in squamates living around the late Triassic and early Jurassic.

The observations made by the Bristol team have reclassified Cryptovaranoides microlanius as a lizard, which makes squamates more ancient than we realized. The species is now considered to be a crown squamate, a member of the earliest clade, or group, descended from one common ancestor. This group includes all of the descendants of the first squamate ancestor. The Bristol team does not think there is any dispute that Cryptovaranoides is a squamate, and though they will continue analyzing the holotype, they do not think much, if anything, will change.

“Ctyptovaranoides is not a ‘problematic fossil,’” they said in the same study. “It is clearly a lepidosaur and a squamate.”

Royal Society Open Science, 2024.  DOI: 10.1098/rsos.231874

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On the evening of November 19, art adviser Adam Biesk was finishing work at his California home when he overheard a conversation between his wife and son, who had just come downstairs. The son, a kid in his early teens, was saying he had made a ton of money on a cryptocurrency that he himself had created.

Initially, Biesk ignored it. He knew that his son played around with crypto, but to have turned a small fortune before bedtime was too far-fetched. “We didn’t really believe it,” says Biesk. But when the phone started to ring off the hook and his wife was flooded with angry messages on Instagram, Biesk realized that his son was telling the truth—if not quite the full story.

Earlier that evening, at 7:48 pm PT, Biesk’s son had released into the wild 1 billion units of a new crypto coin, which he named Gen Z Quant. Simultaneously, he spent about $350 to purchase 51 million tokens, about 5 percent of the total supply, for himself.

Then he started to livestream himself on Pump.Fun, the website he had used to launch the coin. As people tuned in to see what he was doing, they started to buy into Gen Z Quant, leading the price to pitch sharply upwards.

By 7:56 pm PT, a whirlwind eight minutes later, Biesk's son’s tokens were worth almost $30,000—and he cashed out. “No way. Holy fuck! Holy fuck!” he said, flipping two middle fingers to the webcam, with tongue sticking out of his mouth. “Holy fuck! Thanks for the twenty bandos.” After he dumped the tokens, the price of the coin plummeted, so large was his single trade.

To the normie ear, all this might sound impossible. But in the realm of memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency with no purpose or utility beyond financial speculation, it’s relatively routine. Although many people lose money, a few have been known to make a lot—and fast.

In this case, Biesk’s son had seemingly performed what is known as a soft rug pull, whereby somebody creates a new crypto token, promotes it online, then sells off their entire holdings either swiftly or over time, sinking its price. These maneuvers occupy something of a legal gray area, lawyers say, but are roundly condemned in the cryptosphere as ethically dubious at the least.

After dumping Gen Z Quant, Biesk’s son did the same thing with two more coins—one called im sorry and another called my dog lucy—bringing his takings for the evening to more than $50,000.

The backlash was swift and ferocious. A torrent of abuse began to pour into the chat log on Pump.Fun, from traders who felt they had been swindled. “You little fucking scammer,” wrote one commenter. Soon, the names and pictures of Biesk, his son, and other family members were circulating on X. They had been doxed. “Our phone started blowing up. Just phone call after phone call,” says Biesk. “It was a very frightening situation.”

As part of their revenge campaign, crypto traders continued to buy into Gen Z Quant, driving the coin’s price far higher than the level at which Biesk’s son had cashed out. At its peak, around 3:00 am PT the following morning, the coin had a theoretical total value of $72 million; the tokens the teenager had initially held were worth more than $3 million. Even now the trading frenzy has died down, they continue to be valued at twice the amount he received.

“In the end, a lot of people made money on his coin. But for us, caught in the middle, there was a lot of emotion,” says Biesk. “The online backlash became so frighteningly scary that the realization that he made money was kind of tempered down with the fact that people became angry and started bullying.”

Biesk concedes to a limited understanding of crypto. But he sees little distinction between what his son did and, say, playing the stock market or winning at a casino. Though under California law someone must be at least 18 years old to gamble or invest in stocks, the unregulated memecoin market, which has been compared to a “casino” in risk profile, had given Biesk’s teenage son early access to a similar arena, in which some must lose for others to profit. “The way I understand it is he made money and he cashed out, which to me seems like that's what anybody would've done,” says Biesk. “You get people who are cheering at the craps table, or angry at the craps table.”

Memecoins have been around since 2013, when Dogecoin was released. In the following years, a few developers tried to replicate the success of Dogecoin, making play of popular internet memes or tapping into the zeitgeist in some other way in a bid to encourage people to invest. But the cost and complexity of development generally limited the number of memecoins that came to market.

That equation was flipped in January with the launch of Pump.Fun, which lets people release new memecoins instantly, at no cost. The idea was to give people a safer way to trade memecoins by standardizing the underlying code, which prevents developers from building in malicious mechanisms to steal funds, in what’s known as a hard rug pull.

“Buying into memecoins was a very unsafe thing to do. Programmers could create systems that would obfuscate what you are buying into and, basically, behave as malicious actors. Everything was designed to suck money out of people,” one of the three anonymous cofounders of Pump.Fun, who goes by Sapijiju, told WIRED earlier in the year. “The idea with Pump was to build something where everyone was on the same playing field.”

Since Pump.Fun launched, millions of unique memecoins have entered the market through the platform. By some metrics, Pump.Fun is the fastest-growing crypto application ever, taking in more than $250 million in revenue—as a 1 percent cut of trades on the platform—in less than a year in operation.

However, Pump.Fun has found it impossible to insulate users from soft rug pulls. Though the platform gives users access to information to help assess risk—like the proportion of a coin belonging to the largest few holders—soft rug pulls are difficult to prevent by technical means, claims Sapijiju.

“People say there’s a bunch of different stuff you can do to block [soft rug pulls]—maybe a sell tax or lock up the people who create the coin. Truthfully, all of this is very easy to manipulate,” he says. “Whatever we do to stop people doing this, there’s always a way to circumnavigate if you’re smart enough. The important thing is creating an interface that is as simple as possible and giving the tools for users to see if a coin is legitimate or not.”

The “overwhelming majority” of new crypto tokens entering the market are scams of one form or another, designed expressly to squeeze money from buyers, not to hold a sustained value in the long term, according to crypto security company Blockaid. In the period since memecoin launchpads like Pump.Fun began to gain traction, the volume of soft rug pulls has increased in lockstep, says Ido Ben-Natan, Blockaid founder.

“I generally agree that it is kind of impossible to prevent holistically. It’s a game of cat and mouse,” says Ben-Natan. “It’s definitely impossible to cover a hundred percent of these things. But it definitely is possible to detect repeat offenders, looking at metadata and different kinds of patterns.”

Now memecoin trading has been popularized, there can be no putting the genie back in the bottle, says Ben-Natan. But traders are perhaps uniquely vulnerable at present, he says, in a period when many are newly infatuated with memecoins, yet before the fledgling platforms have figured out the best way to protect them. “The space is immature,” says Ben-Natan.

Whether it is legal to perform a rug pull is also something of a gray area. It depends on both jurisdiction and whether explicit promises are made to prospective investors, experts say. The absence of bespoke crypto regulations in countries like the US, meanwhile, inadvertently creates cloud cover for acts that are perhaps not overtly illegal.

“These actions exploit the gaps in existing regulatory frameworks, where unethical behavior—like developers hyping a project and later abandoning it—might not explicitly violate laws if no fraudulent misrepresentation, contractual breach, or other violations occur,” says Ronghui Gu, cofounder of crypto security firm CertiK and associate professor of computer science at Columbia University.

The Gen Z Quant broadcast is no longer available to view in full, but in the clips reviewed by WIRED, at no point does Biesk’s son promise to hold his tokens for any specific period. Neither do the Pump.Fun terms of use require people to refrain from selling tokens they create. (Sapijiju, the Pump.Fun cofounder, declined to comment on the Gen Z Quant incident. They say that Pump.Fun will be “introducing age restrictions in future,” but declined to elaborate.)

But even then, under the laws of numerous US states, among them California, “the developer likely still owes heightened legal duties to the investors, so may be liable for breaching obligations that result in loss of value,” says Geoffrey Berg, partner at law firm Berg Plummer & Johnson. “The developer is in a position of trust and must place the interests of his investors over his own.”

To clarify whether these legal duties apply to people who release memecoins through websites like Pump.Fun—who buy into their coins like everyone else, albeit at the moment of launch and therefore at a discount and in potentially market-swinging quantities—new laws may be required.

In July 2026, a new regime will take effect in California, where Biesk’s family lives, requiring residents to obtain a license to take part in “digital financial asset business activity,” including exchanging, transferring, storing or administering certain crypto assets. President-elect Donald Trump has also promised new crypto regulations. But for now, there are no crypto-specific laws in place.

“We are in a legal vacuum where there are no clear laws,” says Andrew Gordon, partner at law firm Gordon Law. “Once we know what is ‘in bounds,’ we will also know what is ‘out of bounds.’ This will hopefully create a climate where rug pulls don't happen, or when they do they are seen as a criminal violation.”

On November 19, as the evening wore on, angry messages continued to tumble in, says Biesk. Though some celebrated his son's antics, calling for him to return and create another coin, others were threatening or aggressive. “Your son stole my fucking money,” wrote one person over Instagram.

Biesk and his wife were still trying to understand quite how their son was able to make so much money, so fast. “I was trying to get an understanding of exactly how this meme crypto trading works,” says Biesk.

Some memecoin traders, sensing there could be money in riffing off the turn of events, created new coins on Pump.Fun inspired by Biesk and his wife: QUANT DAD and QUANTS MOM. (Both are now practically worthless.)

Equally disturbed and bewildered, Biesk and his wife formed a provisional plan: to make all public social media accounts private, stop answering the phone, and, generally, hunker down until things blew over. (Biesk’s account is active at the time of writing.) Biesk declined to comment on whether the family made contact with law enforcement or what would happen to the funds, saying only that his son would “put the money away.”

A few hours later, an X account under the name of Biesk’s son posted on X, pleading for people to stop contacting his parents. “Im sorry about Quant, I didnt realize I get so much money. Please dont write to my parents, I wiill pay you back [sic],” read the post. Biesk claims the account is not operated by his son.

Though alarmed by the backlash, Biesk is impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit and technical capability his son displayed. “It’s actually sort of a sophisticated trading platform,” he says. “He obviously learned it on his own.”

That his teenager was capable of making $50,000 in an evening, Biesk theorizes, speaks to the fundamentally different relationship kids of that age have with money and investing, characterized by an urgency and hyperactivity that rubs up against traditional wisdom.

“To me, crypto can be hard to grasp, because there is nothing there behind it—it’s not anything tangible. But I think kids relate to this intangible digital world more than adults do,” says Biesk. “This has an immediacy to him. It’s almost like he understands this better.”

On December 1, after a two-week hiatus, Biesk’s son returned to Pump.Fun to launch five new memecoins, apparently undeterred by the abuse. Disregarding the warnings built into the very names of some of the new coins—one was named test and another dontbuy—people bought in. Biesk’s son made another $5,000.

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