The Federal Trade Commission’s click-to-cancel rule seeks to “regulate consumer contracts for all companies in all industries and across all sectors of the economy” in which a subscription model is employed, several industry groups said in a petition filed Oct. 23 with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The agency exceeded its legislative mandate and the regulation should be vacated as unlawful, according to the associations’ brief filing.

The plaintiffs — the Electronic Security Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and NCTA-The Internet & Television Association — represent companies with hundreds of millions of monthly subscribers. The security association includes home-security providers such as ADT, and NCTA represents cable TV and broadband providers and programmers including Comcast, Cox Communications, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery.

The FTC has no comment on the petition, an agency spokesman said Friday. Most provisions of the rule, published Oct. 16, take effect in mid-2025.

Dive Insight:

In announcing the “click-to-cancel” rule, the commission said it receives an average of about 70 complaints per day, up from 42 daily in 2021. Consumers sometimes end up with automatic payments to service providers on their monthly credit card statements that they have forgotten about and may have trouble canceling.

The FTC said it collected 16,000 comments from consumers, trade associations and state and federal agencies, since proposing the rule in March 2023. 

The rule attempts to target recurring subscriber charges that companies may make difficult to end, by requiring a phone call or written letter. The changes to the 1973 marketing rule also allow the FTC to pursue civil penalties. The agency is also making companies track consumers’ consent for such products and bans material misrepresentations when selling a product or service. 

The commission’s revised cancellation mandate is “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion within the meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act,” the companies told the Fifth Circuit. The agency’s action also exceeded its authority from Congress and violated the Constitution, they said.

In the rule, the FTC wrote that “far from exceeding Congressional intent, the Rule merely effectuates that intent in a way wholly consistent with the specific requirements set forth in Section 18 of the FTC Act.”

The revision to the FTC’s “negative option” rule deems all such subscriptions “to be deceptive unless they comply with onerous new regulatory obligations regarding disclosures, how those disclosures are communicated, a ‘separate’ consent requirement, regulations of truthful company representative communications with customers, and prescriptive mandates for service cancellation, among others,” the plaintiffs wrote.

The plaintiffs’ request is far less comprehensive than the dissent FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak filed on Oct. 16. Holyoak, a former solicitor general for Utah, wrote an extensive 13-page legal brief decrying the rule. 

The rule is overly broad in its reach and fails to define specifically which acts and practices are unfair or deceptive, “improperly generalizing from narrow industry-specific complaints and evidence to the entire American economy,” Holyoak wrote.

“The Rule represents a missed opportunity to devote scarce staff resources to bringing enforcement actions related to negative option features using the clear tools that Congress gave us, rather than conducting an overbroad rulemaking that cost years of staff time to propose and finalize, but will likely not survive legal challenge,” she wrote.

The Electronic Security Association is based in Dallas, which the plaintiffs said makes the circuit a proper venue for the injunction request. One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Allyson Ho, a Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner in Dallas, is married to a judge on the Fifth Circuit Court, James Ho.

Source

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers.

For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that we lack. The static electricity they accumulate by flying—similar to the charge generated when you shuffle across carpet in thick socks—could be potent enough for them to sense and influence surrounding objects through the air. Aquatic animals such as eels, sharks, and dolphins are known to sense electricity in water, which is an excellent conductor of charge. By contrast, air is a poor conductor. But it may relay enough to influence living things and their evolution.

In 2013, Daniel Robert, a sensory ecologist at the University of Bristol in England, broke ground in this discipline when his lab discovered that bees can detect and discriminate among electric fields radiating from flowers. Since then, more experiments have documented that spiders, ticks, and other bugs can perform a similar trick.

This animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks and roundworms, hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators.

This new research goes beyond documenting the ecological effects of static: It also aims to uncover whether and how evolution has fine-tuned this electric sense. Electrostatics may turn out to be an evolutionary force in small creatures’ survival that helps them find food, migrate, and infest other living things.

This developing field, known as aerial electroreception, opens up a new dimension of the natural world. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” said Anna Dornhaus, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved with the work. “This whole field, studying electrostatic interactions between living animals, has the potential to uncover things that didn’t occur to us about how the world works.”

“We know from all these brilliant experiments that electric fields do have a functional role in the ecology of these animals,” said Benito Wainwright, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of St. Andrews who has studied the sensory systems of butterflies and katydids. “That’s not to say that they came on the scene originally through adaptive processes.” But now that these forces are present, evolution can act on them. Though we cannot sense these electric trails, they may guide us to animal behaviors we never imagined.

Electrostatic Discoveries

In 2012, Víctor Ortega-Jiménez stumbled into electrostatics while playing with his 4-year-old daughter. They were using a toy wand that gathers static charge to levitate lightweight objects, such as a balloon. When they decided to test it outside, he made a startling observation.

“My daughter put the wand close to a spiderweb, and it reacted very quickly,” recalled Ortega-Jiménez, who studies the biomechanics of animal travel at the University of California, Berkeley. The wand attracted the web. He immediately began to draw connections to his research about the strange ways insects interact with their environments.

All matter—wands, balloons, webs, air—strives for balance between its positive and negative particles (protons, electrons and ions). At an unfathomably small scale, Ortega-Jiménez’s toy buzzes with an imbalance: A motor draws negative charges inward, forcing positive charges to the wand’s surface. This is static. It’s like when you rub a balloon against your head. Friction sheds electrons from your hair to the rubber, loading it up with static charge, so that when you lift the balloon, strands of hair float with it.

In a similar way, Ortega-Jiménez considered, friction from beating insect wings could shed negative charges from body to air, leaving the insects with a positive charge while creating regions of negative static. He realized that if a web carries negative charge and insects a positive one, then a spiderweb might not just be a passive trap—it could move toward and attract its quarry electrostatically. His lab experiments revealed precisely that. Webs deformed instantly when jolted with static from flies, aphids, honeybees, and even water droplets. Spiders caught charged insects more easily. He saw how static electricity altered the physics of animal interactions.

The magic of animal electrostatics is all about size. Large animals don’t meaningfully experience nature’s static—we’re too big to feel it. “As humans, we are living mostly in a gravitational or fluid-dynamics world,” Ortega-Jiménez said. But for tiny beings, gravity is an afterthought. Insects can feel air’s viscosity. While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size. Intermolecular forces flex beneath the feet of water striders on a pond, capillary forces shoot water impossibly upward through a plant’s thin roots, and electrostatic forces can ensnare any oppositely charged flecks that lie in their path.

“Charged fleck” is an apt physical description of a pollen grain. A few years after Ortega-Jiménez noticed spiderwebs nabbing bugs, Robert’s team found that bees can gather negatively charged pollen without brushing up against it. When a bee drank nectar from a flower, the pollen shot right onto its body. “There was no contact required between the bee and the flower for that pollen to jump,” Robert said. “This is a trajectory that responds to electrostatic forces.”

The discovery suggested to Robert that electrostatics can enable a plant-pollinator mutualism, a well-known example of coevolution. This dynamic—in which a bee feeds on a flower’s nectar and gathers pollen to feed larvae, and also propagates pollen from flower to flower, enabling plant reproduction—was already well established. The potential role of static charge was brand-new.

Over the past decade, Robert has built a body of work that reveals the many ways insects and arachnids use and experience static. Ticks jump, spiders balloon, bees sense the negative charge of a flower recently visited by another positively charged bee. He even found that the charged relationship between air and insects goes both ways: Honeybee swarms shed so many negative charges that they alter the electrical gradient around them. Based on Robert’s estimates, the atmospheric charge resulting from a swarm of desert locusts rivals that of clouds and electrical storms.

Robert’s and Ortega-Jiménez’s conclusions were provocative. But to them, the physics of arthropods makes electrostatic forces inevitable. Bugs are light and angular with a high ratio of surface area to volume—“all these parameters that physicists can tell you call for higher charge density,” Robert said. “It turns out that their world is way more electrical than ours.”

Still, the experiments couldn’t conclude that the creatures control this electrostatic function, or how it evolved—if it even did evolve. Robert wondered: Is the use of static fields by bugs coincidental or adaptive?

Static for Survival

Sam England wears his love of nature on his sleeve. He has half a dozen animal tattoos, including a treehopper decorated with the planets of our solar system—an homage to his background in physics. The marriage of these worlds drives his curiosity: How does physics mold animal behavior? He pivoted to sensory ecology for graduate school and joined Robert’s lab at the University of Bristol to chase the hypothesis that insects actively use static to affect their environments.

Because the electrostatic world is invisible to human researchers, its forces are hard to study, even before you add unpredictable creatures to the mix. “Doing research in biology can be so much harder than physics because you have to rely on live animals to do something,” England said. He wanted to test whether Lepidoptera, the order of flying insects that includes butterflies and moths, build up enough static during flight to collect pollen from the flowers they visit for nectar, as bees do. But first he had to rig up a way to measure the insects’ static charge.

A “walk” is England’s best analogy for his method of tricking the insects into staying airborne for 30 seconds. “I had to tie little lassos around their waists,” he said. He leashed each flier with fishing line and coaxed them through a metal loop fixed to measure their charge.

England studied 11 species of butterflies and moths native to various climates, ecosystems, and lifestyles. After they flew around their cages for 30 seconds—enough time to accumulate electrostatic charge—he guided them through the loop. All 11 species charged up during flight. Some reached static charge of around 5 kilovolts per meter—enough to yank negatively charged pollen from 6 millimeters away, he calculated.

When lepidopterans land directly on a flower, pollen naturally sticks to their bodies. If static charge causes pollen to skip across air gaps, “it’s going to increase their efficiency as pollinators,” England said. “It makes it more likely that pollination will occur.”

To gauge static’s evolutionary significance, he looked for patterns in how the animals’ behavior in the wild correlates with their electrical charge. He found a few. For example, nocturnal moths tend to hold less charge than other species. Why? It’s possible, England speculates, that strong charges make insects more visible to predators that rely on nonvisual cues, such as static, at night. Minimizing charge could therefore help the moths survive.

“It’s great new data,” Ortega-Jiménez said. He cautioned that the study’s 11 species are a modest representation of the world’s 180,000 or so lepidopterans. “For claiming electrostatic adaptation, it needs to be more broad. But it’s a good hypothesis.”

For insects to act on static information, they must be able to detect electrical fields. Microscopic hairs on bees and spiders seem to aid in sensing, according to work from Robert’s lab. England recently expanded this unresolved science by studying how the minuscule hairs of caterpillars deflect under static, to glean how electric information may help a caterpillar survive.

When England’s team exposed caterpillars to electric fields similar to those generated by a flying wasp, caterpillars displayed defensive behaviors such as coiling, flailing, or biting. “This basically insinuates,” England said, that “prey and predator can detect each other just using static electricity.”

Dornhaus, the behavioral ecologist, questioned whether electroreception buys the caterpillar much time. Yet the high stakes of predator-prey conflict suggest that any advantage may count. “For the individual caterpillar, even just getting a small increase in the chance of surviving that encounter makes it an evolutionarily relevant behavior,” she said.

“Organisms are always opportunists,” said Ortega-Jiménez, who is hesitant but impressed by England’s research. He is eager for more data—ideally from wild animals—that examines naturalistic behaviors. “Who is winning this game? Who is taking more advantage of electrostatics?” he asked. “What kinds of predator and prey?”

As more evidence links static to survival, a story is emerging that evolution may fine-tune the capacity to sense or carry charge just like any other trait. “The fact that there’s such a diverse range of species with different ecologies is what makes it so interesting,” said Beth Harris, a graduate student in Robert’s lab. “There’s a real treasure chest to be opened.”

Electrical Inheritance

As work continues in Robert’s lab, the suspicion that static detection and accumulation among insects and arachnids is no accident does as well. Caterpillars with better electroreception, or nocturnal moths that carry lower charge, may better dodge predators. If they survive to reproduce more, those genes and traits—including those that help organisms sense and use static fields—could become stronger and more common in generations down the line.

It’s starting to become impossible to ignore the idea that electrostatics may be more influential in the animal kingdom than we know today. Whole ecosystems may depend on hidden electric fields. “If you suddenly took away electrostatics, I don’t think you’d get a mass extinction,” England said. “But I think we’d be surprised by how many animals would have to adapt to not using it.”

Electrostatic forces act on a scale of millimeters and centimeters, but their collective impact could be much larger. For instance, social bees such as bumblebees collect food for other colony members and larvae. Foragers make hundreds of decisions about flowers every day, and many other bees depend on those decisions. “What we think of as a fairly subtle difference on an individual level—being able to detect the flower just a second faster—could be quite significant for them evolutionarily,” said Dornhaus, who studies how bees interact with flowers.

If static charges aid pollination, they could shift plant evolution too. “Maybe some fundamental features of flowers are actually just in service of generating the correct electrostatic field,” Dornhaus said, “and because we can’t see them, we’ve ignored that whole dimension of a flower’s life.” The idea isn’t so far-fetched: In 2021, Robert’s team observed petunias releasing more compounds that attract bugs around beelike electric fields. This suggests that flowers wait until a pollinator is nearby to actively lure them closer, Robert said.

“Humans are very visually oriented, so we tend to emphasize flowers that are showy and large,” Dornhaus said. But we already know that flowers transmit strong invisible signals, like scents or ultraviolet patterns. “It may well be that for some flowers, the electric field is actually a more prominent signal to bees than color is.”

However, evolutionary details surrounding electrostatic ecology remain murky at best. “It’s amazing, really, how little we know,” said Wainwright, the insect evolutionary ecologist. Even within better-understood visual and acoustic systems, ecologists are only beginning to connect evolutionary dots.

Because electrostatics has flown under the radar, England worries that humans unknowingly hinder the ability of animals to use these forces. “We’re spitting electrostatic stuff into the environment all the time,” he said. Electronic devices, appliances, power lines, fertilizers, and even clothing bear static charges. “If [insects are] sensitive to the wingbeat of a wasp, they’re probably sensitive to a power line, and it might be messing up that entire system.”

Since completing his doctoral work, England now studies animal vision as a postdoctoral researcher with Berlin’s Natural History Museum. He hopes to one day run his own lab to explore these conservation questions and discover new cases of aerial electroreception or electrostatic behaviors, such as mating.

“The dream would be that aerial electrostatic sensing is well known and considered to be a regular part of the sensory repertoire of animals,” he said. Realizing that dream will take more research that seeks out the evolutionary secrets of critters far smaller than us, and thereby enlarges our world.

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

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As Boeing’s latest chief executive, Kelly Ortberg’s job was never going to be easy. On Wednesday, it got harder still.

That morning, Ortberg had faced investors for the first time, telling them that ending a debilitating strike by Boeing’s largest union was the first step to stabilizing the plane maker’s business.

But as the day wore on, it became clear that nearly two-thirds of the union members who voted on the company’s latest contract offer had rejected it. The six-week strike goes on, costing Boeing an estimated $50 million a day, pushing back the day it can resume production of most aircraft and further stressing its supply chain.

The company that virtually created modern commercial aviation has spent the better part of five years in chaos, stemming from fatal crashes, a worldwide grounding, a guilty plea to a criminal charge, a pandemic that halted global air travel, a piece breaking off a plane in mid-flight and now a strike. Boeing’s finances look increasingly fragile and its reputation has been battered.

Bank of America analyst Ron Epstein says Boeing is a titan in a crisis largely of its own making, comparing it to the Hydra of Greek mythology: “For every problem that’s come to a head, then [been] severed, more problems sprout up.”

Resolving Boeing’s crisis is critical to the future of commercial air travel, as most commercial passenger aircraft are made by it or its European rival Airbus, which has little capacity for new customers until the 2030s.

Ortberg, a 64-year-old Midwesterner who took the top job three months ago, says his mission is “pretty straightforward—turn this big ship in the right direction and restore Boeing to the leadership position that we all know and want.”

Resolving the machinists’ strike is just the start of the challenges he faces. He needs to motivate the workforce, even as 33,000 are on strike and 17,000 face redundancy under a cost-cutting initiative.

He must persuade investors to support an equity raise in an industry where the returns could take years to materialize. He needs to fix Boeing’s quality control and manufacturing issues, and placate its increasingly frustrated customers, who have had to rejig their schedules and cut flights owing to delays in plane deliveries.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in our industry, to be honest. I’ve been around 30 years,” Carsten Spohr, chief executive of German flag carrier Lufthansa, said this month.

Eventually, Boeing needs to launch a new aircraft model to better compete with Airbus.

“If Kelly fixes this, he is a hero,” says Melius Research analyst Rob Spingarn. “But it’s very complex. There’s a lot of different things to fix.”

Ortberg started his career as a mechanical engineer and went on to run Rockwell Collins, an avionics supplier to Boeing, until it was sold to engineering conglomerate United Technologies in 2018.

His engineering background has been welcomed by many who regard previous executives’ emphasis on shareholder returns as the root cause of many of Boeing’s engineering and manufacturing problems.

Longtime employees often peg the shift in Boeing’s culture to its 1997 merger with rival McDonnell Douglas. Phil Condit and Harry Stonecipher, who ran Boeing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were admirers of Jack Welch, the General Electric chief executive known for financial engineering and ruthless cost cuts.

Condit even moved Boeing’s headquarters from its manufacturing base in Seattle to Chicago in 2001, so the “corporate center” would no longer be “drawn into day-to-day business operations.”

Jim McNerney, another Welch acolyte, instituted a program to boost Boeing’s profits by squeezing its suppliers during his decade in charge. He remarked on a 2014 earnings call about employees “cowering” before him, a dark quip still cited a decade later to explain Boeing’s tense relationship with its workers.

Ken Ogren, a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751, says managers at Boeing often felt pressured to move planes quickly through the factory.

“We’ve had a lot of bean counters come through, and I’m going to be in the majority with a lot of people who believe they’ve been tripping over dollars to save pennies,” he says.

Dennis Muilenburg headed the company in October 2018, when a new 737 Max crashed off the coast of Indonesia. Five months later, another Max crashed shortly after take-off in Ethiopia. In total, 346 people lost their lives.

Regulators worldwide grounded the plane—a cash cow and a vital product in Boeing’s competition with Airbus—for nearly two years. Investigations eventually showed a faulty sensor triggered an anti-stall system, repeatedly forcing the aircraft’s nose downward.

Boeing agreed in July to plead guilty to a criminal charge of fraud for misleading regulators about the plane’s design. Families of the crash victims are opposing the plea deal, which is before a federal judge for approval.

The manufacturer’s problems were compounded by COVID-19, which grounded aircraft worldwide and led many airlines to hold off placing new orders and pause deliveries of existing ones. Boeing’s debt ballooned as it issued $25 billion in bonds to see it through the crisis.

Regulators cleared the 737 Max to fly again, starting in November 2020. But hopes that Boeing was finally on top of its problems were shattered last January, when a door panel that was missing bolts blew off an Alaska Airlines jet at 16,000 feet.

While no one was injured, the incident triggered multiple investigations and an audit by the US Federal Aviation Administration, which found lapses in Boeing’s manufacturing and quality assurance processes and led to an uncomfortable appearance by then chief executive Dave Calhoun at a Senate subcommittee hearing.

The company also has struggled with its defense and space businesses. Fixed-price contracts on several military programs have resulted in losses and billions of dollars of one-off charges. Meanwhile, problems with its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft resulted in two astronauts being left on the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle will be used to return them to Earth early next year.

Boeing’s stumbles have resulted in loss of life, loss of prestige, and a net financial loss every year since 2019. On Wednesday, it reported a $6 billion loss between July and September, the second-worst quarterly result in its history.

One of Ortberg’s first big moves as chief executive was to move himself—from his Florida home to a house in Seattle. He told analysts that Boeing’s executives “need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops, and in our engineering labs” to be more in tune with the company’s products and workforce. Change in Boeing’s corporate culture must “be more than the poster on the wall,” he added.

His approach represents a shift from his predecessor Calhoun, who was criticized for spending more time in New Hampshire and South Carolina than in Boeing’s factories in Washington state.

Bill George, former chief executive at Medtronic and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, says Ortberg is doing a “terrific job” so far, particularly for moving to the Pacific Northwest and pressuring other itinerant executives to follow.

“If you’re based in Florida, and you come occasionally, what do you really know about what’s going on in the business?” he says, adding that Boeing has “no business being in Arlington, Virginia,” where the company moved its headquarters in 2022.

Scott Kirby, chief executive at one of Boeing’s biggest customers, United Airlines, told his own investors this month that he was “encouraged” by Ortberg’s early moves, adding that the company suffered for decades from “a cultural challenge, where they focused on short-term profitability and the short-term stock price at the expense of what made Boeing great, which is building great products.”

“Kelly Ortberg is pivoting the company back to their roots,” he said. “All the employees of Boeing will rally around that.”

But Ogren of the machinists’ union cautions that previous commitments to culture change have been hollow. “You’ve got people at the top saying, ‘We’ve got to be safe, oh, and by the way, we need these planes out the door...’ They said the right thing. They didn’t emphasize it, and that’s not what they put pressure on the managers to achieve.”

When workers eventually return to work—Peter Arment, an analyst at Baird, expects the dispute to be resolved in November—Ortberg wants better execution, even if it means lower output. “It is so much more important we do this right than fast,” he said.

The company had planned to raise Max output from about 25 per month before the strike to 38 per month by the end of the year, a cap set by the FAA. It will not reach that goal and Spingarn, the Melius analyst, says the strike will probably delay any production increase by nine months to a year. Some workers would need retraining, Ortberg said, and the supply chain’s restart was likely to be “bumpy.” The manufacturer also has established a quality plan with the FAA that it must follow.

Boeing also needed to launch a new airplane “at the right time in the future,” Ortberg said. Epstein of BofA called this “one of the most important messages” from the new chief executive, likely “to reinvigorate the workforce and culture at Boeing.”

In the meantime, Boeing will continue to consume cash in 2025, having burnt through $10 billion so far this year, according to chief financial officer Brian West. Spingarn says that investors may be disappointed in the cash flow at first, but adds that “fixing airplanes isn’t one year, it’s three years.”

For all the challenges, Ortberg has the right personality to turn Boeing around, says Ken Herbert, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

“If he can’t do it, I don’t think anyone can.”

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The U.S. Copyright Office just handed down a ruling that marks an important victory for Right to Repair: we can now legally repair commercial food preparation equipment, including McDonald’s machines, without running afoul of copyright law. 

We’ve been fighting for years to challenge the digital locks that manufacturers like Taylor (which makes McDonald’s ice cream machines) use to keep repair information out of reach, forcing expensive service calls for simple fixes. Digital locks blocking repair come from an archaic 1998 copyright law, and every three years, we get a chance to ask the Copyright Office to give us exemptions to that law. Last time, we won exemptions for basically all consumer equipment, vehicles, and medical devices. The time before that, we won smartphones and home appliances. This time, the FTC and DOJ even weighed in to support our petition. 

But while this is a significant step forward, the battle is far from over. Any McDonald’s franchisee can hack your own machine, but if you want to share what you found with your friends or sell a tool to help diagnose and fix your machine, you’re out of luck. Plus, the ruling didn’t go nearly far enough in granting broader exemptions for repairing other commercial or industrial equipment. 

Trust us, we’re not stopping there. This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.

The Win: You’re Now Free to Hack Your Ice Cream Machine

For years, McDonald’s franchise owners have struggled with error codes and malfunctioning ice cream machines that could only be fixed by manufacturer-authorized technicians. The machines would often sit broken for extended periods because owners couldn’t troubleshoot or repair them on their own, due to digital locks embedded in the machine’s software. These locks are protected under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which generally makes it illegal to bypass software locks known as “technological protection measures,” even for legitimate repairs.

That changes today. Thanks to the new exemption granted by the Copyright Office, owners, repair technicians, and tinkerers can now legally bypass the software locks on retail-level commercial food preparation equipment, such as the Taylor ice cream machines. This allows for the diagnosis, maintenance, and repair of the machines without needing to rely on costly service calls or manufacturer intervention. The exemption also applies to other commercial kitchen equipment—we’ve heard about undocumented error codes in commercial espresso machines, restaurant owners getting locked out of their own commercial ovens, and missing service manuals for insulated cabinets. But we’re especially excited about the ice cream win.

For ice cream lovers everywhere, this could mean fewer “machine broken” signs at McDonald’s and more sundaes and McFlurries available when you want them. It’s tangible progress in the fight to regain control over the products we own.

The Problem: We Still Don’t Have Repair Tools

Here’s the catch: while it’s now legal to circumvent the digital locks on these machines, the ruling does not allow us to share or distribute the tools necessary to do so. This is a major limitation. Most franchise owners and independent repair shops won’t have the technical expertise to create their own unlocking tools from scratch, meaning that while the door to repair has been opened, few will be able to walk through it without significant difficulty.

It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame. The ruling doesn’t change the underlying statute making it illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks. This leaves most of the repair work inaccessible to the average person, since the technical barriers remain high. Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.

The Miss: Broader Exemptions for Commercial and Industrial Equipment

Even more disappointing is the denial of broader exemptions for commercial and industrial equipment. While we succeeded in securing an exemption for retail-level food equipment, the Copyright Office declined to extend similar protections to a wider class of commercial devices—meaning the ruling does not apply to things like heavy machinery, factory equipment, or even broader categories of restaurant hardware.

This was a key part of our petition, as the same issues plague repair in other industries. Many businesses, from farmers to factory owners, face the same frustrations: they are locked out of their own equipment by digital restrictions that prevent them from making repairs without calling in a certified technician. We pointed to examples like the Polish trains that were locked “for arbitrary reasons after being serviced at third-party workshops” with “bogus error codes,” multi-million dollar factory machines getting bricked for a lack of software access, and a school that lost access to its HVAC system when the maintenance technician passed away.

We asked for an exemption that would cover all software-enabled commercial and industrial devices, but the Copyright Office denied this broader request, citing a lack of sufficient evidence that digital locks were creating adverse effects across a wider range of equipment.

Without this broader exemption, a significant portion of the repair market is still controlled by manufacturers, who can charge exorbitant prices for repair services and restrict access to parts and tools. This leaves many small businesses with no choice but to endure downtime and extra costs, even when a simple repair could get them back up and running quickly.

Renewals: What We Won, What We Didn’t

Every three years, the Copyright Office reviews the current exemptions and decides which ones to renew, expand, or let expire. This year, we secured several important renewals, though some gaps remain.

What We Won:

Medical Devices:

Renewals were granted for medical devices, allowing technicians to access software controlling devices like defibrillators and insulin pumps. This helps ensure that life-saving equipment can be repaired quickly and efficiently, which is crucial for patient care. This renewal is essential for hospitals repairing their own equipment, and came despite heated opposition from AdvaMed. The medical device manufacturers are so upset about all of this that they are suing the Copyright Office over the last rulemaking that originally granted this exemption three years ago.

Repair of Motorized Vehicles, Marine Vessels, and Agricultural Equipment:

Exemptions allowing the repair of computer programs in motorized land vehicles, marine vessels, and mechanized agricultural equipment were renewed. This means farmers can continue to repair their tractors, and boat owners can fix their vessels without worrying about digital locks.

Consumer Devices:

We also successfully renewed the exemption that allows repairs on consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and home appliances. This is a critical exemption for everyday consumers who want the right to repair their own gadgets without voiding warranties or violating copyright law.

Assistive Technologies:

The exemptions for assistive technologies were renewed as well, ensuring that people with disabilities can access and use literary and musical works through assistive software without running afoul of copyright restrictions.

What We Didn’t Win:

Video Game Accessibility:

Unfortunately, the exemption allowing circumvention of digital locks on video games for accessibility purposes (introduced in 2021) was not renewed. No petition for renewal was submitted, and as a result, individuals with disabilities who need alternative input methods to play video games are left out.

Broader Exemptions for Industrial Devices:

As mentioned earlier, we failed to secure a broader exemption for industrial and commercial equipment. This leaves a huge number of businesses still locked out of the right to repair their own machinery.

Why Does This Matter?

The Copyright Office’s ruling is a step in the right direction, but it’s far from the finish line. We’re thrilled to be able to fix ice cream machines, but without tools, most franchise owners won’t be able to take full advantage of this new freedom. And while retail food equipment is now covered, the vast world of commercial and industrial devices remains stuck in a repair monopoly, where manufacturers control who can fix what and at what cost.

This ruling highlights the ongoing battle between consumers and manufacturers over the right to repair. We’ve made significant strides, but we’re still facing systemic barriers that prevent small businesses and consumers from taking control of their own products.

What’s Next?

We’ll take today’s victory and keep fighting for more. Next on our list? Fixing federal copyright law, which is the only way we can secure access to the tools we need and share what we find as we troubleshoot our machines. iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens testified before congress last year about why this is so important, and we’re hoping to see US federal legislation like last session’s Freedom to Repair Act.

Meanwhile, Canada is in the final stages of considering legislation that would fix the Canadian version of the DMCA, a bill called C-244 that is in its third reading in the Senate and expected to move before the end of the month. If Canada legalized circumventing technological protection measures for the purposes of repair, we might just have to head north to find the tools we need to do repairs.

So go enjoy that McFlurry—just know that the fight to fix isn’t over yet.

Source

Members of the IAM were voting at union halls in the Seattle area and elsewhere on a contract that includes pay raises of 35 percent over four years. Their strike since mid-September has served as an early test for Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who became chief executive in August.

In his first remarks to investors, Ortberg said Boeing needs “a fundamental culture change.”

“The trust in our company has eroded. We’re saddled with too much debt. We’ve had serious lapses in our performance across the company, which have disappointed many of our customers,” he said.

But Ortberg also highlighted the company’s strengths, including a backlog of airplane orders valued at a half-trillion dollars.

“It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy, but with the right focus and culture, we can be an iconic company and aerospace leader once again,” he said in a statement following the release of the company’s third-quarter financial results.

“Going forward, we will be focused on fundamentally changing the culture, stabilizing the business, and improving program execution while setting the foundation for the future of Boeing.”

Ortberg expressed hope that the 33,000 striking machinists in the Pacific Northwest would vote to approve the company’s latest contract offer. Their union district was expected to announce the results on Wednesday night.

Boeing’s stock price closed at $157.06 on Wednesday, down by 1.79 percent from the previous day.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source

Ioneer Ltd.'s mine will help expedite production of a key mineral in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles at the center of Biden's push to cut greenhouse gas emissions, administration officials said Thursday in Reno.

Acting Deputy Interior Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis said bolstering domestic lithium supplies is "essential to advancing the clean energy transition and powering the economy of the future.”

“This project demonstrates how partnership and collaboration can effectively balance mineral production with the protection of vulnerable species and irreplaceable natural resources,” added Steve Feldgus, principal deputy assistant U.S. interior secretary for land and minerals management.

In the works for nearly eight years, construction of the Rhyolite Ridge mine should start next year in the high desert halfway between Reno and Las Vegas, the Australia-based Ioneer said.

Production is scheduled to begin in 2028 at the mine, which should produce enough lithium for 370,000 vehicles annually for more than two decades, officials said.

It’s unique because it includes a chemical processing facility that will process the lithium on-site instead of having to ship it to China, then back to the U.S. Worldwide demand for lithium is projected to have grown six times by 2030 compared to 2020. The biggest producer of lithium in the world is China, which processes most lithium currently.

“I can say with absolute confidence there are few deposits in the world as impactful as Rhyolite Ridge,” Ioneer Executive Chairman James Calaway said.

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management issued the permit after the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded — in consultation with the bureau required under the Endangered Species Act — that the mine would not jeopardize the survival of Tiehm's buckwheat.

The service added the 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter-tall) wildflower with yellow and cream-colored blooms to the list of U.S. endangered species on Dec. 14, 2022, citing mining as the biggest threat to its survival.

The bureau initiated the mine's permitting process five days later. The agencies say Ioneer's subsequent changes to the mine's footprint alleviated concerns about potential harm to the flower.

Environmentalists said the mine's final approval was a politically motivated violation of multiple U.S. laws. An hour after the bureau posted its formal record of decision approving the permit, the Center for Biological Diversity sent Interior Secretary Deb Haaland a 60-day notice of the group's intent to sue under the Endangered Species Act.

“We need lithium for the energy transition, but it can’t come with a price tag of extinction,” said Patrick Donnelly, the center's Great Basin director. He said Biden's administration “ is abandoning its duty to protect endangered species like Tiehm’s buckwheat and it’s making a mockery of the Endangered Species Act."

Fewer than 30,000 of the plants remain in Nevada at the only place they're known to exist in the world across eight sub-populations that combined cover 10 acres (4 hectares) — an area equal to the size of about eight football fields.

USFWS said the project — including the infrastructure and waste rock dump — will come within 15 feet (5 meters) of the buckwheat and result in the loss of some of its designated critical habitat that is home to neighboring bees and other pollinators integral to its reproduction.

But the service said the operation will cause no direct disturbance to individual plants and that reclamation, mitigation and monitoring promised in the blueprint should provide necessary protections for it to coexist with the open pit mine deeper than the length of a football field.

“I don’t think the mine at all will lead to the extinction of Tiehm’s buckwheat," Ioneer CEO Bernard Rowe said Thursday. "If anything, I think we now are going to be part of the solution because we are going to continue providing significant resources ... to ensure it doesn’t become extinct.”

Construction of the mine is expected to employ about 500 workers, with about 350 full-time employees when the mine is fully operational — a boon for tiny Esmeralda County with a population of about 1,000.

Esmeralda County Commissioner Ralph Keys said the rural county that's now the least populous in Nevada was its most populated during the gold and silver boom in the late 1800s.

“This is going to put us back on the map,” he said Thursday.

Opponents of the project say it’s the latest example of Biden’s administration running roughshod over U.S. protections for native wildlife, rare species and sacred tribal lands in the name of slowing climate change by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and bolstering national security by easing reliance on foreign sources of critical minerals.

Daniel-Davis denied environmentalists’ claims that the administration is rushing to develop so-called “green energy” projects at the expense of increased risk to troubled species.

“The urgency of climate change and the need to move to a clean energy economy has been critical to everything we have worked on since day one in the Biden-Harris administration,” she said. “Does that make us look at projects like this or others that would support transition to a clean energy economy differently? I have to say categorically, no.”

Nevada is home to the only existing lithium mine in the U.S. Another is currently under construction near the Oregon line 220 miles (354 kilometers) north of Reno — Lithium Americas' Thacker Pass mine.

Source

Welcome to Edition 7.17 of the Rocket Report! Next week marks 10 years since one of the more spectacular launch failures of this century. On October 28, 2014, an Antares rocket, then operated by Orbital Sciences, suffered an engine failure six seconds after liftoff from Virginia and crashed back onto the pad in a fiery twilight explosion. I was there and won't forget seeing the rocket falter just above the pad, being shaken by the deafening blast, and then running for cover. The Antares rocket is often an afterthought in the space industry, but it has an interesting backstory touching on international geopolitics, space history, and novel engineering. Now, Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace are developing a new version of Antares.

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

Astra gets a lifeline from DOD. Astra, the launch startup that was taken private again earlier this year for a sliver of its former value, has landed a new contract with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to support the development of a next-gen launch system for time-sensitive space missions, TechCrunch reports. The contract, which the DIU awarded under its Novel Responsive Space Delivery (NRSD) program, has a maximum value of $44 million. The money will go toward the continued development of Astra’s Launch System 2, designed to perform rapid, ultra-low-cost launches.

Guarantees? ... It wasn't clear from the initial reporting how much money DIU is actually committing to Astra, which said the contract will fund continued development of Launch System 2. Launch System 2 includes a small-class launch vehicle with a similarly basic name, Rocket 4, and mobile ground infrastructure designed to be rapidly set up at austere spaceports. Adam London, founder and chief technology officer at Astra, said the contract award is a "major vote of confidence" in the company. If Astra can capitalize on the opportunity, this would be quite a remarkable turnaround. After going public at an initial valuation of $2.1 billion, or $12.90 per share, Astra endured multiple launch failures with its previous rocket and risked bankruptcy before the company's co-founders, Chris Kemp and Adam London, took the company private again this year at a price of just $0.50 per share. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin debuts a new New Shepard. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture successfully sent a brand-new New Shepard rocket ship on an uncrewed shakedown cruise Wednesday, with the aim of increasing the company’s capacity to take people on suborbital space trips, GeekWire reports. The capsule, dubbed RSS Karman Line, carried payloads instead of people when it lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. But if all the data collected during the 10-minute certification flight checks out, it won’t be long before crews climb aboard for similar flights.

Now there are two ... With this week's flight, Blue Origin now has two human-rated suborbital capsules in its fleet, along with two boosters. This should allow the company to ramp up the pace of its human missions, which have historically flown at a cadence of about one flight every two to three months. The new capsule, named for the internationally recognized boundary of space 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth, features upgrades to improve performance and ease reusability. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

China has a new space tourism company. Chinese launch startup Deep Blue Aerospace targets providing suborbital tourism flights starting in 2027, Space News reports. The company was already developing a partially reusable orbital rocket named Nebula-1 for satellite launches and recently lost a reusable booster test vehicle during a low-altitude test flight. While Deep Blue moves forward with more Nebula-1 testing before its first orbital launch, the firm is now selling tickets for rides to suborbital space on a six-person capsule. The first two tickets were expected to be sold Thursday in a promotional livestream event.

Architectural considerations ... Deep Blue has a shot at becoming China's first space tourism company and one of only a handful in the world, joining US-based Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic in the market for suborbital flights. Deep Blue's design will be a single-stage reusable rocket and crew capsule, similar to Blue Origin's New Shepard, capable of flying above the Kármán line and providing up to 10 minutes of microgravity experience for its passengers before returning to the ground. A ticket, presumably for a round trip, will cost about $210,000. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

France's space agency aims to launch a FROG. French space agency CNES will begin flight testing a small reusable rocket demonstrator called FROG-H in 2025, European Spaceflight reports. FROG is a French acronym that translates to Rocket for GNC demonstration, and its purpose is to test landing algorithms for reusable launch vehicles. CNES manages the program in partnership with French nonprofits and universities. At 11.8 feet (3.6 meters) tall, FROG is the smallest launch vehicle prototype at CNES, which says it will test concepts and technologies at small scale before incorporating them into Europe's larger vertical takeoff/vertical landing test rockets like Callisto and Themis. Eventually, the idea is for all this work to lead to a reusable European orbital-class rocket.

Building on experience ... CNES flew a jet-powered demonstrator named FROG-T on five test flights beginning in May 2019, reaching a maximum altitude of about 100 feet (30 meters). FROG-H will be powered by a hydrogen peroxide rocket engine developed by the Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation in Poland under a European Space Agency contract. The first flights of FROG-H are scheduled for early 2025. The structure of the FROG project seeks to "break free from traditional development methods" by turning to "teams of enthusiasts" to rapidly develop and test solutions through an experimental approach, CNES says on its website. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Falcon 9 sweeps NSSL awards. The US Space Force's Space Systems Command announced on October 18 it has ordered nine launches from SpaceX in the first batch of dozens of missions the military will buy in a new phase of competition for lucrative national security launch contracts, Ars reports. The parameters of the competition limited the bidders to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA). SpaceX won both task orders for a combined value of $733.5 million, or roughly $81.5 million per mission. Six of the nine missions will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, beginning as soon as late 2025. The other three will launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Head-to-head ... This was the first set of contract awards by the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 procurement round and represents one of the first head-to-head competitions between SpaceX's Falcon 9 and ULA's Vulcan rocket. The nine launches were divided into two separate orders, and SpaceX won both. The missions will deploy payloads for the National Reconnaissance Office and the Space Development Agency. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

SpaceX continues deploying NRO megaconstellation. SpaceX launched more surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office Thursday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. While the secretive spy satellite agency did not identify the number or exact purpose of the satellites, the Falcon 9 likely deployed around 20 spacecraft believed to be based on SpaceX's Starshield satellite bus, a derivative of the Starlink spacecraft platform, with participation from Northrop Grumman. These satellites host classified sensors for the NRO.  This is the fourth SpaceX launch for the NRO's new satellite fleet, which seeks to augment the agency's bespoke multibillion-dollar spy satellites with a network of smaller, cheaper, more agile platforms in low-Earth orbit.

The century mark ... This mission, officially designated NROL-167, was the 100th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket this year and the 105th SpaceX launch overall in 2024. The NRO has not said how many satellites will make up its fleet when completed, but the intelligence agency says it will be the US government's largest satellite constellation in history. By the end of the year, the NRO expects to have 100 or more of these satellites in orbit, allowing the agency to transition from a demonstration mode to an operational mode to deliver intelligence data to military and government users. Many more launches are expected through 2028. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ULA is stacking its third Vulcan rocket. United Launch Alliance has started assembling its next Vulcan rocket—the first destined to launch a US military payload—as the Space Force prepares to certify it to loft the Pentagon's most precious national security satellites, Ars reports. Space Force officials expect to approve ULA's Vulcan rocket for military missions without requiring another test flight, despite an unusual problem on the rocket's second demonstration flight earlier this month, when one of Vulcan's two strap-on solid-fueled boosters lost its nozzle shortly after liftoff.

Pending certification … Despite the nozzle failure, the Vulcan rocket continued climbing into space and eventually reached its planned injection orbit, and the Space Force and ULA declared the test flight a success. Still, engineers want to understand what caused the nozzle to break apart and decide on corrective actions before the Space Force clears the Vulcan rocket to launch a critical national security payload. This could take a little longer than expected due to the booster problem, but Space Force officials still hope to certify the Vulcan rocket in time to support a national security launch by the end of the year.

Blue Origin's first New Glenn has all its engines. Blue Origin published a photo Thursday on X showing all seven first-stage BE-4 engines installed on the base of the company's first New Glenn rocket. This is a notable milestone as Blue Origin proceeds toward the first launch of the heavy-lifter, possibly before the end of the year. But there's a lot of work for Blue Origin to accomplish before then. These steps include rolling the rocket to the launch pad, running through propellant loading tests and practice countdowns, and then test-firing all seven BE-4 engines on the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Seven for seven … The BE-4 engines will consume methane fuel mixed with liquid oxygen for the first few minutes of the New Glenn flight, generating more than 3.8 million pounds of combined thrust. The seven BE-4s on New Glenn are similar to the BE-4 engines that fly two at a time on ULA's Vulcan rocket. Dave Limp, Blue Origin's CEO, said three of the seven engines on the New Glenn first stage have thrust vector control capability to provide steering during launch, reentry, and landing on the company's offshore recovery vessel. "That gimbal capability, along with the landing gear and Reaction Control System thrusters, are key to making our booster fully reusable," Limp wrote on X. "Fun fact: The vehicle's max design gimbal condition is during ascent when it has to fight high-altitude winds."

Next Super Heavy booster test-fired in Texas. SpaceX fired up the Raptor engines on its next Super Heavy booster, numbered Booster 13, Thursday evening at the company's launch site in South Texas. This happened just 11 days after SpaceX launched and caught the Super Heavy booster on the previous Starship test flight and signals SpaceX could be ready for the next Starship test flight sometime in November. SpaceX has already test-fired the Starship upper stage for the next flight.

Great expectations … We expect the next Starship flight, which will be program's sixth full-scale demo mission, will include another booster catch back at the launch tower at Starbase, Texas. SpaceX may also attempt to reignite a Raptor engine on the Starship upper stage while it is in space, demonstrating the capability to steer itself back into the atmosphere on future flights. So far, SpaceX has only launched Starships on long, arcing suborbital trajectories that carry the vehicle halfway around the world before reentry. In order to actually launch a Starship into a stable orbit around Earth, SpaceX will want to show it can bring the vehicle back so it doesn't reenter the atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner. An uncontrolled reentry of a large spacecraft like Starship could pose a public safety risk.

Next three launches

Oct. 26: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-8 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21:47 UTC

Oct. 29: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-9 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 11:30 UTC

Oct. 30: H3 | Kirameki 3 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 06:46 UTC

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In the 1940s, scientists at the recently established National Cancer Institute were trying to breed mice that could inform our understanding of cancer, either because they predictably developed certain cancers or were surprisingly resistant.

The team spotted a peculiar litter in which some baby mice had short, kinked tails and misplaced ribs growing out of their neck bones. The strain of mice, nicknamed “tail short,” has been faithfully bred ever since, in the hope that one day, research might reveal what was the matter with them.

After more than 60 years, researchers finally got their answer, when Maria Barna, a developmental biologist then at the University of California San Francisco, found that the mice had a genetic mutation that caused a protein to disappear from their ribosomes—the places in cells where proteins are made.

This came as a complete surprise, says Barna: Everyone had expected the cause to be a mutation in a gene that orchestrated development, not one involved in ribosome structure. Ribosomes, which under the microscope look like millions of specks scattered across the cell, or—closer up—like a bread roll torn into unequal halves, appear similar in all life forms. They exist in every cell and were thought to do the same thing everywhere: translate instructions contained in DNA into the proteins that do most of the work in cells.

How could a defect in this dependable, ubiquitous little workhorse reshuffle the body plan of a mouse in such a curiously specific way?

Today, based on findings like these, a growing number of scientists have come to believe there’s more going on with ribosomes than they once thought—and that ribosome variety may sometimes have biological functions.

Barna, now at Stanford University, reported her finding in the journal Cell in 2011. Since then, researchers have uncovered several other genes that, like the one in “tail short” mutants, code for proteins in ribosomes and appear to distort development in a specific way when mutated.

In the unfortunate mouse that first intrigued Barna, a protein known as RPL38 was not being made correctly. In another mouse, a faulty version of a protein called RPL10A led to even more drastic (and deadly) deformities. “These embryos looked as if a guillotine had cut off their posterior end right after the hindlimb,” Barna recalls.

Picky ribosomes

There are other reasons researchers were surprised that unusual ribosomes lay behind the unusual development of these mutant mice. First, quality control on ribosomes is tight: Since faulty ones may churn out ill-conceived proteins that can do a lot of damage, they tend to be quickly eliminated. Second, embryos that have mutations in genes coding for ribosomal proteins generally don’t make it all the way through a pregnancy.

Yet there are exceptions, including in people. Children with isolated congenital asplenia, for example, are born without spleens, often due to a mutation in a single ribosomal protein, while the rest of the body is completely normal. Again—how could one missing or unusual protein in the ribosomes cause such a thing?

Barna believes that affinity is key. To make a protein, ribosomes don’t receive instructions directly from the unwieldy DNA, but from more succinct messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules that carry instructions about single genes. RNA is made up of a long string of four different building blocks, and every three blocks code for an amino acid. The ribosome reads these instructions and correctly joins the amino acids together to form a protein.

As far as scientists know, mRNA molecules just float around until they encounter a ribosome, at which point they get translated into protein. But Barna believes—and has evidence to suggest — that different ribosomes have different affinities and may be more apt to translate some mRNA types than others.

For example, the cells of mouse embryos with an Rpl38 mutation produce just as much protein as other embryos do. But they make substantially less of some proteins that are crucial during development. Known as homeobox proteins, they are essential for the embryo to sort out its back end. Barna discovered that ribosomes without RPL38 are less likely to bind to and translate homeobox mRNA. This results in a deficiency of these organizing proteins and perturbed development of vertebrae, ribs, and tails.

Similarly, ribosomes without the ribosomal protein RPL10A are less likely to bind to mRNA that codes for another crucial set of embryonic development proteins—ones involved in what’s called the Wnt signaling pathway. Reduced numbers of these crucial proteins cause development to abruptly end after the hindlimb, creating the impression that the back end was cut off.

While some genetic disorders involving ribosomal proteins seem rooted in activities of unusual ribosomes, others may be due to ribosome shortages that result from the cell’s strict quality control, Barna says. Treacher Collins syndrome, which causes abnormalities of the face, and Shwachman-Diamond syndrome, which causes abnormal development of the skeleton, are likely examples.

Those are defects. But sometimes, Barna argues, differences in ribosome structure and composition may be functional. “We are discovering that certain ribosomal proteins occur more often in some cell types than others, say in neurons versus gut cells,” she says. Recent results from her lab suggest that there may even be different types of ribosomes within the same cell that specialize in making certain proteins over others.

In ribosomes, she says, “there appears to be a core that is invariable, and then in the outer shell, proteins that can vary within and between cells and tissues.” She believes this provides our body with yet another way of regulating which proteins get made, and where.

Credit: Knowable Magazine (CC BY-ND)

Salty yeast

In November 2023, a two-day conference in London that Barna co-organized brought together many scientists who are intrigued by the variation they have found in the ribosomes they’ve looked at, and what, if anything, its functions may be.

Some aren’t quite so convinced that unusual ribosomes do anything beyond causing trouble. Katrin Karbstein, a biochemist at Vanderbilt University who coauthored a 2024 article about ribosome quality control in the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, notes that most of the known examples of ribosome variation cause disorders or disease. “Few if any have been demonstrated to be helpful to the organism,” she says.

Karbstein thinks that most genetic disorders associated with ribosome genes are probably just caused by the ribosome shortages that result when faulty ones are eliminated, rather than any special property of the divergent ribosomes themselves. If humans or mice end up with specific defects, she says, that may just be because low ribosome levels are a bigger problem in some cell types than others.

Yet in her own talk at the meeting, Karbstein revisited a discovery she herself made in the yeast cells she studies that, much to her surprise, did reveal a useful ribosome variant. When growing in very high salt concentrations, yeast cells lose a ribosomal protein, Rps26, from about half of their ribosomes. Ribosomes without the protein are different, Karbstein found. They seem more inclined to translate mRNA molecules that are produced in reaction to that stressor.

And when Karbstein and her team went on to deliberately remove Rps26 proteins from yeast cells, they found the cells became resistant to high salt. “In fact,” she says, “they now grow better under high salt.”

Karbstein also found that yeast responds nimbly to salt stress, quickly removing Rps26 proteins from ribosomes when needed and popping them right back in when the stressful situation subsides.

When growing in very high salt concentrations, yeast cells lose a ribosomal protein, Rps26, from about half of their ribosomes, with the assistance of what’s known as a chaperone protein. Yeast cells without Rps26 are better adapted to high salt.

Credit: Knowable Magazine (CC BY-ND)

Resistant ribosomes

Ribosomes aren’t made just from proteins: About half their structure consists of RNA. And in eukaryotes (life forms with complex cells like ours) there is plenty of extra RNA sticking out of the ribosomes, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. “We think this may provide a mechanism for trapping messenger RNA,” says Barna.

Ribosomal RNA also performs the most crucial and ancient function inside ribosomes: the fascinatingly efficient translation of mRNA into protein. The very first proteins must have been made by ribosomal RNA, argues structural biologist Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who shared a Nobel Prize in 2009 for her work figuring out the structure of the ribosome.

Yonath notes that the pocket in ribosomal RNA where amino acids are joined together to form proteins looks very similar in all species, and she does not consider this to be a coincidence. “We think this is the proto-ribosome from which full ribosomes have evolved,” she says.

Ribosome researchers have long focused most of their attention on this neat, central area where mRNA is read and amino acids are joined together; they’ve spent less time studying the ribosomes’ outskirts. In addition, the ways in which ribosome structure has been studied created a strong impression that all ribosomes were the same. But new methods have uncovered more variation.

Yonath says she wants to see more evidence that differences between ribosomes can be helpful. Her lab is now collaborating with Barna and others to find out whether ribosomes that lack certain proteins or contain unusual ones have different three-dimensional structures that might explain why they work differently.

Yonath has long been interested in the differences between ribosomes of different species. These, she says, might be useful in developing antibiotics that target only the ribosomes of pathogens while avoiding significant damage to the beneficial microbes that live in our body, or to our own cells. “Over 40 percent of the clinically useful antibiotics target protein synthesis, mostly by paralyzing the ribosome,” she notes.

But her interactions with pharmaceutical companies about new possible targets she has identified have been disappointing, she adds: “They say the bacteria will become resistant.” Indeed, in a clear example of ribosomal variation that is helpful—not to us, but to the pathogen—antibiotics targeting bacterial ribosomes may favor the survival of bacteria with slightly different ribosomes that the antibiotic can no longer block.

Powering proliferation

Another area of medicine where variation in ribosomes may turn out to be good news is in cancer treatment and diagnosis. Around 25 percent of cancers are associated with genetic changes in ribosomal proteins, says Yonath, whose lab is working in this area, too.

Molecular biologist Davide Ruggero of the University of California San Francisco is a pioneer in research to understand and leverage those differences. “Cancer cells hijack things that evolved for other reasons and use them for their own benefit,” he says—and that includes firing up the activity of ribosomes. Rapidly dividing cancer cells need plenty of protein to keep going.

Studies also show that certain proteins can be made in large amounts during tumor growth or when cancer cells spread through the body, when they have to survive in blood and other places they’ve never been before.

These overproduced proteins include growth factors and other proteins that are known to increase cancer risk, and Ruggero’s lab has found that the mRNAs that code for them are translated in higher amounts in the cancer cells. “Normal cells need to be extremely careful to regulate these,” he says. “Cancer cells do the opposite.”

Ruggero and Barna have found evidence that a ribosomal protein called RPL24 is involved: When it goes missing from the ribosomes of mice, the increase in protein production that is required for cancer cell proliferation doesn’t occur. “I do believe that the more we understand this dynamic, the more we can improve cancer therapy,” Ruggero says.

Cancer treatments that specifically target ribosome variants are nowhere near implementation today, but some products already used in the clinic hint at their potential importance. Some of these target polymerase I, an enzyme involved in the production of ribosomal RNA that is often hyperactive in cancer cells. And Ruggero’s own work has inspired experimental drugs that block proteins called translation initiation factors that affect how likely mRNA is to be transcribed at the ribosomes. They are used by all cells, but many cancer cells strongly depend on them.

One of these drugs is currently being evaluated in three phase 2 clinical studies to test its effectiveness and safety in the treatment of breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancer.

There is not yet evidence that differences in ribosomes themselves might be leveraged to enhance treatments. But researchers like Barna and Ruggero see it as yet another strand of research suggesting that exploring ribosome variation is worthwhile, even in the face of skepticism. “I’ve been in the ribosome story for almost 50 years, and I’ve heard almost everything,” says Yonath, whose early work also met disbelief. “Yet I do expect great medical progress can come from a better understanding of translation.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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Local union leaders in Seattle said 64% of members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers who cast ballots Wednesday voted against accepting the contract offer.

“After 10 years of sacrifices, we still have ground to make up, and we’re hopeful to do so by resuming negotiations promptly,” Jon Holden, the head of the IAM District 751 union, said in a statement Wednesday evening. “This is workplace democracy — and also clear evidence that there are consequences when a company mistreats its workers year after year."

A spokesperson for Boeing said officials didn’t have a comment on the vote.

The labor standoff comes during an already challenging year for Boeing, which became the focus of multiple federal investigations after a door panel blew off a 737 Max plane during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.

The strike has deprived the company of much-needed cash that it gets from delivering new planes to airlines. On Wednesday, the company reported a third-quarter loss of more than $6 billion.

Union machinists assemble the 737 Max, Boeing’s best-selling airliner, along with the 777 or “triple-seven” jet and the 767 cargo plane at factories in Renton and Everett, Washington.

The latest rejected offer included pay raises of 35% over four years. The version that union members rejected when they voted to strike last month featured a 25% increase over four years.

The union, which initially demanded 40% pay boosts over three years, said the annual raises in the revised offer would total 39.8%, when compounded.

Boeing has said that average annual pay for machinists is currently $75,608.

Boeing workers told Associated Press reporters that a sticking point was the company’s refusal to restore a traditional pension plan that was frozen a decade ago.

“The pension should have been the top priority. We all said that was our top priority, along with wage,” Larry Best, a customer-quality coordinator with 38 years at Boeing, said on a picket line outside a Boeing factory in Everett, Washington. “Now is the prime opportunity in a prime time to get our pension back, and we all need to stay out and dig our heels in.”

Theresa Pound, a 16-year Boeing veteran, also voted against the deal. She said the health plan has gotten more expensive and her expected pension benefits would not be enough, even when combined with a 401(k) retirement account.

“I have put more time in this place than I was ever required to. I have literally blood, sweat and tears from working at this company,” the 37-year-old said. “I’m looking at working until I’m 70 because I have this possibility that I might not get to retire based on what’s happening in the market.”

The strike started Sept. 13 and has served as an early test for Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who became chief executive in August.

In his first remarks to investors, Ortberg said earlier Wednesday that Boeing needs “a fundamental culture change,” and he laid out his plan to revive the aerospace giant after years of heavy losses and damage to its reputation.

Ortberg repeated in a message to employees and on the earnings call that he wants to “reset” management’s relationship with labor “so we don’t become so disconnected in the future.” He said company leaders need to spend more time on factory floors to know what is going on and “prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause.”

Ortberg, a Boeing outsider who previously ran Rockwell Collins, a maker of avionics and flight controls for airline and military planes, said Boeing is at a crossroads.

“The trust in our company has eroded. We’re saddled with too much debt. We’ve had serious lapses in our performance across the company, which have disappointed many of our customers,” he said.

But Ortberg also highlighted the company’s strengths, including a backlog of airplane orders valued at a half-trillion dollars.

“It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy, but with the right focus and culture, we can be an iconic company and aerospace leader once again,” he said.

In recent weeks, Ortberg announced large-scale layoffs — about 17,000 people — and a plan to raise enough cash to avoid a bankruptcy filing.

Boeing hasn’t had a profitable year since 2018, and Wednesday’s numbers represented the second-worst quarter in the manufacturer’s history. Boeing lost $6.17 billion in the period ended Sept. 30, with an adjusted loss of $10.44 per share. Analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research had expected a loss of $10.34 per share.

Revenue totaled $17.84 billion, matching Wall Street estimates.

The company burned nearly $2 billion in cash, in the quarter, weakening its balance sheet, which is loaded down with $58 billion in debt. Chief Financial Officer Brian West said the company will not generate positive cash flow until the second half of next year.

Boeing’s fortunes soured after two of its 737 Max jetliners crashed in October 2018 and March 2019, killing 346 people. Safety concerns were renewed this January, when a panel blew off a Max during an Alaska Airlines flight.

Ortberg needs to convince federal regulators that Boeing is fixing its safety culture and is ready to boost production of the 737 Max — a crucial step to bring in much-needed cash. That can’t happen, however, until the striking workers return to their jobs.

Early in the strike, Boeing made what it termed its “best and final” offer. The proposal included pay raises of 30% over four years, and angered union leaders because the company announced it to the striking workers through the media and set a short ratification deadline.

Boeing backed down and gave the union more time. However, many workers maintained the offer still wasn’t good enough. The company withdrew the proposed contract on Oct. 9 after negotiations broke down, and the two sides announced the latest proposal on Saturday.

Charles Fromong, a mechanic who has worked at Boeing for 38 years, said Wednesday night after the results were announced that the company needs to take care of its workers.

“I feel sorry for the young people,” he said. “I’ve spent my life here and I’m getting ready to go, but they deserve a pension and I deserve an increase.”

The last Boeing strike, in 2008, lasted eight weeks and cost the company about $100 million daily in deferred revenue. A 1995 strike lasted 10 weeks.

Source

•

A 7000-year-old genome from the Caucasus links the Volga’s first herders to farmers of W. Asia

•

Human DNA points the spread of farming through the Caucasus to the Eastern European steppes

SUMMARY

The Darkveti-Meshoko culture (c.5000–3500/3300 BCE) is the earliest known farming community in the Northern Caucasus, but its contribution to the genetic profile of the neighbouring steppe herders has remained unclear.

We present analysis of human DNA from the Nalchik cemetery— the oldest Eneolithic site in the Northern Caucasus— which shows a link with the LowerVolga’s first herders of the Khvalynsk culture.

The Nalchik male genotype combines the genes of the Caucasus hunter-gatherers, the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic farmers of western Asia.

Improved comparative analysis suggests that the genetic profile of certain Khvalynsk individuals shares the genetic ancestry of the Unakozovo-Nalchik type population of the Northern Caucasus’ Eneolithic.

Therefore, it seems that in the first half of the 5th millennium BCE cultural and mating networks helped agriculture and pastoralism spread from West Asia across the Caucasian, into the steppes between the Don and the Volga in Eastern Europe.

Graphical abstract

This paper is only available as a PDF.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(24)02188-6.pdf

Source

The case, brought forward by seven plaintiffs who claim to have suffered vaccine injuries, marks a significant blow to Gates, who has been a key figure in pushing COVID-19 vaccination efforts worldwide.

According to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, the plaintiffs filed the lawsuit last year, naming Gates, along with former Dutch Prime Minister and current NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, members of the Dutch government’s COVID-19 Outbreak Management Team, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and the Dutch state itself.

Gates is one of the “experts” who made several claims about the COVID experimental vaccines:

They said the vaccine would stop transmission.

They said the vaccinated could quit wearing a mask.

They said the vaccinated would not get sick.

They said the vaccinated were not going to die.

The plaintiffs argue that Gates, through his involvement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum (WEF), was involved in a far-reaching agenda—referred to as “The Great Reset Project”—which sought to exploit the global crisis in order to implement sweeping societal changes, all under the guise of combating the pandemic.

According to the lawsuit, this agenda included pushing vaccines that were known to be unsafe.

The plaintiffs claim they were deceived into taking these dangerous injections, and the consequences have been devastating. Physical and mental injuries have allegedly plagued them since receiving the vaccine.

One of the seven plaintiffs has reportedly died since the initial filing, leaving six others to carry on the fight against Gates and his cohorts. These ordinary Dutch citizens, whose identities have been redacted from the court documents, say they trusted the vaccine narrative and are now paying the price.

The plaintiffs referenced various public statements made by Gates, including a widely viewed YouTube video from April 2020 titled “The Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine, Explained,” as part of their evidence.

Despite Gates’ attempts to evade the Dutch court’s jurisdiction by claiming that, as an American citizen, he should not be subject to legal proceedings in the Netherlands, the court rejected this argument, according to independent researcher and reporter Penny Marie.

On October 16, 2024, the Leeuwarden District Court announced that it does indeed have jurisdiction to hear the case against Gates.

The billionaire was represented in court by a lawyer from PelsRijcken but did not attend the September 18 hearing in person. His legal team’s defense crumbled when the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.

According to the judgment:

Article 7 paragraph 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure provides that if the Dutch court has jurisdiction over one of the defendants, it also has jurisdiction over other defendants involved in the same proceedings, provided that there is such a connection between the claims against the various defendants that reasons of expediency justify joint proceedings.

[…]

As the court understands, [redacted] et al. argue that Hofstra et al., and therefore Gates, are part of a worldwide group of individuals, legal entities and other entities that, in the context of the implementation of a project called Covid 19: The Great Reset, have misled people into taking Covid-19 injections, while they knew or should have known that these injections were not safe and effective. The court infers from Gates’ plea that Gates also understood [redacted] et al.’s position in this way. The court understands that [redacted]  et al. further argue in this context that Gates committed this deception internationally through two videos that were published on YouTube in April and December 2020, in which Gates allegedly gave a false representation of the necessity of the Covid-19 injections and the safety of those injections respectively. To the extent that [redacted] et al. intended to state that any actions by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should also be regarded as unlawful acts by Gates in this group context, the court disregards this in the context of this incident, as they have not substantiated this.

[…]

Based on the foregoing, this court has international jurisdiction to hear the claims against Gates on the basis of Article 7 paragraph l Rv.

The court ruled that Gates, who attempted to have the case dismissed or contest the court’s jurisdiction, was in the wrong. His legal challenge was dismissed, and as a result, he has been ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs.

According to court documents, Gates is required to cover the plaintiffs’ legal costs, which amount to €1,406.00 ($1,518.44). This includes:

€1,228.00 ($1,326.17) for the plaintiffs’ lawyer’s fees.

€178.00 ($192.23) in additional legal expenses.

Gates must pay these costs within 14 days, or face further penalties. Should Gates fail to comply within the designated timeframe, an additional €92.00, plus service costs, will be added to the total.

Gates will now have to respond to the allegations in Dutch court, with a new hearing set for November 27, 2024.

Source

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) board has agreed to spend $212 million to get its Muni Metro light rail off floppy disks.

The Muni Metro’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) has required 5¼-inch floppy disks since 1998, when it was installed at San Francisco’s Market Street subway station. The system uses three floppy disks for loading DOS software that controls the system’s central servers. Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, gave further details on how the light rail operates to Ars Technica in April, saying: “When a train enters the subway, its onboard computer connects to the train control system to run the train in automatic mode, where the trains drive themselves while the operators supervise. When they exit the subway, they disconnect from the ATCS and return to manual operation on the street." After starting initial planning in 2018, the SFMTA originally expected to move to a floppy-disk-free train control system by 2028. But with COVID-19 preventing work for 18 months, the estimated completion date was delayed.

On October 15, the SFMTA moved closer to ditching floppies when its board approved a contract with Hitachi Rail for implementing a new train control system that doesn't use floppy disks, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Hitachi Rail tech is said to power train systems, including Japan’s bullet train, in more than 50 countries. The $212 million contract includes support services from Hitachi for "20 to 25 years," the Chronicle said.

The new control system is supposed to be five generations ahead of what Muni is using now, Muni director Julie Kirschbaum said, per the Chronicle. Further illustrating the light rail's dated tech, the current ATCS was designed to last 20 to 25 years, meaning its expected expiration date was in 2023. The system still works fine, but the risk of floppy disk data degradation and challenges in maintaining expertise in 1990s programming languages have further encouraged the SFMTA to seek upgrades.

Lots of work to do

Beyond the floppies, though, the Muni Metro needs many more upgrades. The SFMTA plans to spend $700 million (including the $212 million Hitachi contract) to overhaul the light rail's control system. This includes replacing the loop cable system for sending data across the servers and trains. The cables are said to be a more pressing concern than the use of floppy disks. The aging cables are fragile, with "less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem," Roccaforte previously told Ars. The SFMTA is reportedly planning for Hitachi to start replacing the loop cables with a new communication system that uses Wi-Fi and cellular signals for tracking trains by 2028. However, the SFMTA's board of supervisors still needs to approve this, the Chronicle said.

In addition to old storage formats and the communication infrastructure, the Muni's current ATCS includes onboard computers tied to propulsion and brake systems, as well as local and central servers, and more. The SFMTA's website says that the current estimated completion date for the complete overhaul is "2033/2034." According to the provided timeline, it looks like the subway technology replacement phase is expected to take place in “2027/2028,” after which there’s an on-street technology installation phase.

Like with other entities, the SFMTA’s slow move off floppy disks can be attributed to complacency, budget restrictions, and complications in overhauling critical technology systems. Various other organizations have also been slow to ditch the dated storage format, including Japan, which only stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems in June, and the German navy, which is still trying to figure out a replacement for 8-inch floppies.

Source

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Victoria Milko

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Whether it's digging for metals and minerals for cellphones and electric vehicles or coal for power generation, mining around the world has skyrocketed since 2000, causing widespread destruction of tropical forests, degrading the environment and displacing Indigenous and local communities, the World Resources Institute says in a report released Wednesday.

The analysis highlighted that from 2001 to 2020, the world lost nearly 1.4 million hectares (3,459,475 acres) of trees due to mining — an area roughly the size the country of Montenegro. Nearly a third were in tropical primary rainforests. Protected areas were also damaged.

This tree loss released 36 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year into the atmosphere, an amount similar to Finland’s fossil fuel emissions in 2022, according to the analysis.

Those figures are likely conservative since they do not include indirect tree loss from mining-related infrastructure like access roads and storage facilities, says the report by the World Resources Institute, a global nonprofit organization researching environmental issues.

Mining-related loss in tropical primary rainforests is especially concerning because they are some of the most carbon-rich and biodiverse areas of the world. They also help regulate local and regional climate effects like rainfall and temperatures.

Mining often involves digging up vegetation and soil, intensifying disasters from severe weather and climate change. It can also pollute the air and water.

“Where industrial scale extraction happens around the world right now ... it comes with significant harm to the environment and to the communities that rely on it," said Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance.

Losses were concentrated in eleven countries, led by Indonesia and Brazil. Other notable contributors included Russia, the United States, Canada, Peru, Ghana, Suriname, Myanmar, Australia, and Guyana.

Lands used by Indigenous and local communities were heavily impacted in some countries: In Suriname, Venezuela and Ecuador, nearly two-thirds of mining-related forest loss occurred in such areas, according to the analysis.

Gold and coal have historically been the biggest drivers of tree cover loss related to mining. According to a World Wildlife Fund study, gold and coal extraction resulted in over 70% of all mining-related deforestation from 2001 to 2019.

While coal use is declining, it still dominates the global energy mix. According to a WWF study, 57% of tree cover loss linked to coal extraction from 2000 to 2019 happened in Indonesia alone. Indonesian coal production has accelerated over the last 10 years as it became one of the world's largest coal exporters.

Deforestation for coal production is not only a tropical problem: A WWF study showed that 20% of global coal-related tree cover loss happened in the United States between 2001 and 2019. From 2001 to 2020, 120,000 hectares (296,525 acres) of forest loss was related to mining, much of it linked to surface coal mining in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee.

The current gold mining boom started shortly after the 2008 global financial crisis, when the price of gold skyrocketed. Tree loss in Brazil and Ghana is largely linked to gold mining.

Critical materials for smartphones, solar panels and electric vehicles have also become a new driver of mining, according to the analysis. That includes deforestation for Indonesia's nickel boom, Myanmar's murky rare earths industry and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

WRI's analysis noted that miners have the opportunity to improve and to minimize environmental damage as they open new mines.

That should include mining that incorporates the best available technologies and practices, rehabilitation plans and robust environmental monitoring, said Michael Goodsite, an expert on sustainable mining practices and technology.

“There is a conundrum: How do we get to the minerals that we need without doing more harm to the environment?" said Goodsite. “A holistic understanding, view and systematic approach is needed.”

Credit: Universal History Archive

Colossal, the company founded to try to restore the mammoth to the Arctic tundra, has also decided to tackle a number of other species that have gone extinct relatively recently: the dodo and the thylacine. Because of significant differences in biology, not the least of which is the generation time of Proboscideans, these other efforts may reach many critical milestones well in advance of the work on mammoths.

Late last week, Colossal released a progress report on the work involved in resurrecting the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct when the last known survivor died in a zoo in 1936. Marsupial biology has some features that may make de-extinction somewhat easier, but we have far less sophisticated ways of manipulating it compared to the technology we've developed for working with the stem cells and reproduction of placental mammals. But, based on these new announcements, the technology available for working with marsupials is expanding rapidly.

Cane toad resistance

Colossal has branched out from its original de-extinction mission to include efforts to keep species from ever needing its services. In the case of marsupial predators, the de-extinction effort is incorporating work that will benefit existing marsupial predators: generating resistance to the toxins found on the cane toad, an invasive species that has spread widely across Australia.

The primary threat from cane toads comes from bufotoxins, a group of related, complicated chemicals that bind to a protein found on the surface of cells called ATP1A1, which helps control the traffic of ions across the cell membrane. Andrew Pask, who is leading Colossal's marsupial efforts, told Ars that animals in the cane toad's native range in Africa share a mutation in ATP1A1 that greatly reduces bufotoxin binding. Now, the team has engineered that change into the genome of a marsupial stem cell line and showed that it boosted resistance by a factor of over 6,000. (A manuscript describing some of this work is available.)

For the de-extinction process, the goal would be to ensure that the thylacine could survive in the presence of the cane toad. But Colossal has branched out into a conservation effort, called the Colossal foundation, that aims to keep threatened species from needing its services in the future. As part of that effort, the research team has generated stem cell lines from a surviving Australian carnivore, the quoll, which has become officially endangered largely due to cane toad ingestion. The goal is to ultimately engineer can toad resistance into the quoll stem cells and get the gene circulating with the wild population, allowing them to survive contact with their invasive neighbors.

Key changes

Meanwhile, that edit and more has been going on in stem cells derived from the fat-tailed dunnart, the closest living relative of the thylacine. Pask's team is announcing that they've made over 300 distinct edits in its genome. Ben Lamm, Colossal's CEO, told Ars that they've worked out ways of doing more edits at once without off-target effects (where editing occurs in the wrong location) and have been doing multiple rounds of editing in a single cell line.

What those edits are has been the product of several efforts. To begin with, Colossal has obtained a nearly complete genome sequence from a thylacine sample that was preserved in ethanol a bit over a century ago. According to Pask, this sample contains both the short fragments typical of older DNA samples (typically just a few hundred base pairs long), but also some DNA molecules that were above 10,000 bases long. This allowed them to do both short- and long-read sequencing, leaving them with just 45 gaps in the total genome sequence, which the team expects to close shortly.

This is exceptionally complete for an extinct species and can help provide a greater degree of confidence that the team has identified all the DNA differences between the thylacine and its closest living relatives.

The same sample also provided something that's almost impossible to get from extinct species: messenger RNA molecules, the products of active genes. By analyzing these molecules in specific tissues (the sample was limited to the animal's head), we can get a picture of what genes were active in the adult animal. "By looking in the adult tissues it can inform us about the expression of olfactory receptors and its sense of smell, taste receptors and its sense of taste, eye gene expression can inform us about its vision spectrum, and brain samples can inform us about brain function," Pask said.

The team has also identified a set of genes that may be involved in craniofacial development by reasoning that the similarity between a thylacine's head and that of a wolf might be due to some similar genetic changes. So they looked for regions where dogs, wolves, and thylacines have picked up a large number of changes, suggesting that evolution may be selecting for something new. They've identified multiple “Thylacine Wolf Accelerated Regions” or TWARs, which were all segments of DNA that controlled the activity of nearby genes.

They started by confirming that these could drive gene activity in bone cells. They then chose three TWARs from the thylacine genome and swapped them into the equivalent locations in the mouse genome. They did cause differences in craniofacial development, despite the roughly 150 million years separating the different lineages. Unfortunately, the details of this work haven't been published yet.

Ex utero?

The final thing the company announced was that it was working on getting dunnart embryos to develop outside of the womb. Marsupials are born at a point that's roughly only halfway through normal mouse development—all the organs are in place, but haven't matured—and finish developing in their mother's pouch. Rather than working with surrogate dunnart parents for a much larger thylacine, Pask's team is considering trying to get them to develop to birth in an artificial uterus. And they say they're making progress, getting dunnart embryos to get about two-thirds of the way through a normal pregnancy.

At this point, they've got immature neural cells and have started forming the cells that will go on to form muscles and the vertebrae. But many critical events need to happen in the remaining one-third of the pregnancy, and Colossal isn't ready to talk about what goes wrong to stop development here. And when asked about how the embryos were kept during their earlier development, Lamm said, "We are not sharing much about this at this time."

It's a bit frustrating that more details on this work aren't available. It's nice to know that progress is being made on a very risky project, but one of the better ways to reduce risk is to have other labs validate the things you're doing along the way. Some of this information, such as the DNA segments involved in craniofacial development, would be of general interest to developmental biologists. Hopefully, over time, the company will continue to submit some of its work to peer-reviewed journals.

In the meantime, the clear indications of progress suggest that some of the unique features of the marsupials—relatively rapid generation times, accessible reproductive system, and many similarities to well-studied placental mammals—are helping this project move ahead at a reasonably rapid clip. That's not a guarantee it'll get all the way to something resembling a thylacine. But if it doesn't, then it will at least help us understand why de-extinction doesn't work sooner than work on the mammoth will.

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Elon Musk may have personally used AI to rip off a Blade Runner 2049 image for a Tesla cybercab event after producers rejected any association between their iconic sci-fi movie and Musk or any of his companies.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, lawyers for Alcon Entertainment—exclusive rightsholder of the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 movie—accused Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon's copyright to benefit financially off the brand association.

According to the complaint, WBD did not approach Alcon for permission until six hours before the Tesla event when Alcon "refused all permissions and adamantly objected" to linking their movie with Musk's cybercab.

At that point, WBD "disingenuously" downplayed the license being sought, the lawsuit said, claiming they were seeking "clip licensing" that the studio should have known would not provide rights to livestream the Tesla event globally on X (formerly Twitter).

Musk’s behavior cited

Alcon said it would never allow Tesla to exploit its Blade Runner film, so "although the information given was sparse, Alcon learned enough information for Alcon’s co-CEOs to consider the proposal and firmly reject it, which they did." Specifically, Alcon denied any affiliation—express or implied—between Tesla's cybercab and Blade Runner 2049.

"Musk has become an increasingly vocal, overtly political, highly polarizing figure globally, and especially in Hollywood," Alcon's complaint said. If Hollywood perceived an affiliation with Musk and Tesla, the complaint said, the company risked alienating not just other car brands currently weighing partnerships on the Blade Runner 2099 TV series Alcon has in the works, but also potentially losing access to top Hollywood talent for their films.

The "Hollywood talent pool market generally is less likely to deal with Alcon, or parts of the market may be, if they believe or are confused as to whether, Alcon has an affiliation with Tesla or Musk," the complaint said.

Musk, the lawsuit said, is "problematic," and "any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account."

In bad faith

Because Alcon had no chance to avoid the affiliation while millions viewed the cybercab livestream on X, Alcon saw Tesla using the images over Alcon's objections as "clearly" a "bad faith and malicious gambit... to link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands at a time when Tesla and Musk are on the outs with Hollywood," the complaint said.

Alcon believes that WBD's agreement was likely worth six or seven figures and likely stipulated that Tesla "affiliate the cybercab with one or more motion pictures from" WBD's catalog.

While any of the Mad Max movies may have fit the bill, Musk wanted to use Blade Runner 2049, the lawsuit alleged, because that movie features an "artificially intelligent autonomously capable" flying car (known as a spinner) and is "extremely relevant" to "precisely the areas of artificial intelligence, self-driving capability, and autonomous automotive capability that Tesla and Musk are trying to market" with the cybercab.

The Blade Runner 2049 spinner is "one of the most famous vehicles in motion picture history," the complaint alleged, recently exhibited alongside other iconic sci-fi cars like the Back to the Future time-traveling DeLorean or the light cycle from Tron: Legacy.

As Alcon sees it, Musk seized the misappropriation of the Blade Runner image to help him sell Teslas, and WBD allegedly directed Musk to use AI to skirt Alcon's copyright to avoid a costly potential breach of contract on the day of the event.

For Alcon, brand partnerships are a lucrative business, with carmakers paying as much as $10 million to associate their vehicles with Blade Runner 2049. By seemingly using AI to generate a stylized copy of the image at the heart of the movie—which references the scene where their movie's hero, K, meets the original 1982 Blade Runner hero, Rick Deckard—Tesla avoided paying Alcon's typical fee, their complaint said.

Musk maybe faked the image himself, lawsuit says

During the live event, Musk introduced the cybercab on a WBD Hollywood studio lot. For about 11 seconds, the Tesla founder "awkwardly" displayed a fake, allegedly AI-generated Blade Runner 2049 film still. He used the image to make a point that apocalyptic films show a future that's "dark and dismal," whereas Tesla's vision of the future is much brighter.

In Musk's slideshow image, believed to be AI-generated, a male figure is "seen from behind, with close-cropped hair, wearing a trench coat or duster, standing in almost full silhouette as he surveys the abandoned ruins of a city, all bathed in misty orange light," the lawsuit said. The similarity to the key image used in Blade Runner 2049 marketing is not "coincidental," the complaint said.

Key art from Blade Runner 2049.

via Alcon Entertainment's complaint

 

Suspected AI-generated slide at Tesla event.

via Alcon Entertainment's complaint

 

If there were any doubts that this image was supposed to reference the Blade Runner movie, the lawsuit said, Musk "erased them" by directly referencing the movie in his comments.

"You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future," Musk said at the event. "I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.”

The producers think the image was likely generated—"even possibly by Musk himself"—by "asking an AI image generation engine to make 'an image from the K surveying ruined Las Vegas sequence of Blade Runner 2049,' or some closely equivalent input direction," the lawsuit said.

Alcon is not sure exactly what went down after the company rejected rights to use the film's imagery at the event and is hoping to learn more through the litigation's discovery phase.

Musk may try to argue that his comments at the Tesla event were "only meant to talk broadly about the general idea of science fiction films and undesirable apocalyptic futures and juxtaposing them with Musk’s ostensibly happier robot car future vision."

But producers argued that defense is "not credible" since Tesla explicitly asked to use the Blade Runner 2049 image, and there are "better" films in WBD's library to promote Musk's message, like the Mad Max movies.

"But those movies don’t have massive consumer goodwill specifically around really cool-looking (Academy Award-winning) artificially intelligent, autonomous cars," the complaint said, accusing Musk of stealing the image when it wasn't given to him.

If Tesla and WBD are found to have violated copyright and false representation laws, that potentially puts both companies on the hook for damages that cover not just copyright fines but also Alcon's lost profits and reputation damage after the alleged "massive economic theft."

Musk responds to Blade Runner suit

Alcon suspects that Musk believed that Blade Runner 2049 was eligible to be used at the event under the WBD agreement, not knowing that WBD never had "any non-domestic rights or permissions for the Picture."

Once Musk requested to use the Blade Runner imagery, Alcon alleged that WBD scrambled to secure rights by obscuring the very lucrative "larger brand affiliation proposal" by positioning their ask as a request for much less expensive "clip licensing."

After Alcon rejected the proposal outright, WBD told Tesla that the affiliation in the event could not occur because X planned to livestream the event globally. But even though Tesla and X allegedly knew that the affiliation was rejected, Musk appears to have charged ahead with the event as planned.

"It all exuded an odor of thinly contrived excuse to link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands," Alcon's complaint said. "Which of course is exactly what it was."

Alcon is hoping a jury will find Tesla, Musk, and WBD violated laws. Producers have asked for an injunction stopping Tesla from using any Blade Runner imagery in its promotional or advertising campaigns. They also want a disclaimer slapped on the livestreamed event video on X, noting that the Blade Runner association is "false or misleading."

For Musk, a ban on linking Blade Runner to his car company may feel bleak. Last year, he touted the Cybertruck as an "armored personnel carrier from the future—what Bladerunner would have driven."  This amused many Blade Runner fans, as Gizmodo noted, because there never was a character named "Bladerunner," but rather that was just a job title for the film's hero Deckard.

In response to the lawsuit, Musk took to X to post what Blade Runner fans—who rated the 2017 movie as 88 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes—might consider a polarizing take, replying, "That movie sucks" on a post calling out Alcon's lawsuit as "absurd."

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A groundbreaking new study published in Applications in Engineering Science challenges the increasingly prevalent narrative that rising atmospheric CO2 levels will lead to catastrophic climate change. The research, conducted by scientists at the Military University of Technology in Poland, suggests that the impact of additional CO2 emissions on global temperatures may be far less significant than commonly portrayed.1

The study, titled "Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases," introduces the concept of "saturation mass" - the amount of an absorbing gas above which further increases produce negligible additional absorption of radiation. Through laboratory experiments and theoretical analysis, the researchers determined that for CO2, this saturation mass is approximately 0.6 kg/m2.2

Critically, the authors note that the current amount of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere is already over 6 kg/m2 - about ten times the saturation mass. This implies that additional CO2 emissions may have little to no further warming effect, as the gas has already absorbed nearly all the infrared radiation it can within its absorption spectrum.3

"It should be noted that unlike the used cuvette, the vertical structure of the atmosphere undergoes changes in both pressure and temperature," the authors write. "Nevertheless, the question arises as to whether the additionally emitted carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will absorb thermal radiation."4

The study's findings align with the work of independent researchers like Randall Carlson, who have long argued that the climate impact of CO2 has been overstated while its benefits are often ignored. In his essay "The Redemption of the Beast: The Carbon Cycle and the Demonization of CO2," Carlson contends that rising CO2 levels are having an overall positive effect on the biosphere.5

Carlson writes: "Hundreds of studies have consistently demonstrated significant improvements in plant growth, crop yields, and drought resistance under elevated CO2 conditions." He cites research showing that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 increased agricultural yields by an average of 33%.6

Furthermore, Carlson points to evidence of global greening in recent decades, with satellite data showing an 8% increase in vegetation cover in Australia from 1981-2006 and increased foliage cover across Earth's warm, arid environments in proportion to rising CO2 levels. Some studies attribute 70% of observed greening to the CO2 fertilization effect.7

The new Polish study adds weight to Carlson's argument that the prevailing narrative around CO2 and climate change may be overly simplistic and alarmist. The researchers conclude: "This unequivocally suggests that the officially presented impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on Earth's climate is merely a hypothesis rather than a substantiated fact."8

While acknowledging the need for responsible environmental stewardship, the study's authors caution against unsubstantiated arguments that could hinder economic development. They call for more empirical research to definitively resolve disputed issues in climate science.

"In science, especially in the natural sciences, we should strive to present a true picture of reality, primarily through empirical knowledge," the researchers assert.9

This study, along with the work of independent thinkers like Randall Carlson, underscores the need for a more nuanced and empirically-grounded approach to understanding CO2's role in Earth's complex climate system. As the scientific debate continues, it's clear that simplistic narratives about CO2 as an unmitigated environmental threat may not align with the latest research findings.

Furthermore, advocates of the prevailing global warming narrative that focuses myopically on carbon dioxide and methane emissions, including Bill Gates, are taking this view to such extremes that recently, Bill Gates suggested a methane vaccine scheme to 'fight climate change.' Clearly the thinking has gone in the wrong direction, and we need to have deeper, more open, and more constructive discussions around how anthropogenic climate change is affecting the environment, e.g. asking questions on how are microplastics and the petroleum industry as a whole polluting our bodies and our environment. 

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This was in the news a little over a week ago. So here's an actual science educator explaining it all, rather than some goofy news anchor or clickbait "science" outlet.

This is basically going to make the process of creating new drugs and finding cures for diseases a million times faster. Such as the influenza vaccine mentioned in the video.

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Like nuclear fusion, the idea of space-based solar power has always seemed like a futuristic technology with an actual deployment into communities ever remaining a couple of decades away.

The concept of harvesting solar power continuously from large satellites in space—where there are no nights, no clouds, and no atmosphere to interfere with the collection of photons—is fairly simple. Large solar arrays in geostationary orbit collect solar energy and beam it back to Earth via microwaves a continuous source of clean energy.

But implementing this technology is not so simple. In recent years, in search of long-term power solutions and concerned about climate change, the European Space Agency has been studying space-based solar power. Some initial studies found that a plan to meet one-third of Europe's energy needs would require massive amounts of infrastructure and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At best, such a system of very large satellites in geostationary space might come online by the middle of this century.

In short, the plan would require massive up-front costs, with no guarantee that it all would work out in the end.

A physicist with a plan

So when a physicist with a background in financial services told me he wants to reinvent the idea of space-based solar power beginning with a relatively small investment—likely a bit north of $10 million—it's fair to say I was a bit skeptical.

That physicist is Baiju Bhatt, who co-founded the electronic trading platform Robinhood in 2013. Bhatt served as co-CEO of the company until November 2020, when he became chief creative officer. Robinhood has, at times, courted controversy, particularly during the GameStop frenzy in 2021. Bhatt left the company in the spring of this year to focus on his new space solar startup. Space, Bhatt said, has always been his true passion.

The company is called Aetherflux, and it is starting small, with only about 10 employees at present.

"It's beyond my creativity how to bootstrap something that's going to be the size of a small city in geostationary space, and I think that's one of the reasons why the idea has died on the vine," he told Ars. "I also think it's one of the reasons why there is skepticism about the idea of space-based solar power. Our approach is very different."

That approach starts in low-Earth orbit rather than 36,000 km away from the surface of the Earth. Aetherflux plans to begin with a single satellite, launching into an orbit about 500 km above the planet on a SpaceX transporter mission about 12 to 15 months from now.

This initial satellite will be based on a commercially available bus from Apex, which will produce, on average, about 1 kilowatt of power. It's a modest amount, enough electricity to power a dishwasher. This satellite will also include a high-powered infrared laser to transmit this power back to Earth. A mobile ground station, about 10 meters across, will receive the energy.

With a single satellite in low-Earth orbit, power beaming will only be available for any location on Earth for a few minutes as the spacecraft passes from horizon to horizon.

"We've spent a lot of time over the last year with folks within Department of Defense, and with some of the folks within DARPA," Bhatt said. "The idea is like do a demonstration mission which kind of establishes the core functionality."

Where is all this headed?

One of the key aspects of the test is to determine both the safety and efficiency of collecting the solar energy in space, transmitting it through the atmosphere, and then producing a usable source of power on the ground.

If the demo mission works, Aetherflux plans to develop a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit that could provide power continuously and at greater amounts. Initially, the company seeks to deliver power in remote locations, such as disaster relief areas, off-the-grid mining operations, or forward operating bases for the military.

"If we can make that business model work, that's kind of the jumping-off point to being able to say, hey, could we put this on things like freight shipping?" Bhatt said. "Could we meaningfully address the ability to do freight shipping across large bodies of water with renewable energy?"

Long term, there's the potential to provide a base load of power to augment the intermittent availability of terrestrial wind and solar energy—a key need if the world is to de-carbonize its electricity generation.

But that's probably putting the cart before the horse. One of the biggest challenges of space-based solar power is that it has always been theoretical. It should work. But will it work? Trying out a low-cost demonstrator mission in the next couple of years is a fine way of finally putting that question to rest.

Source

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The elite press rode to Biden’s defense. The idea of a migrant crime wave was a myth, media outlets proclaimed, noting studies of Texas incarceration data from years ago, which seemed to suggest that illegals commit crimes at low rates. This ignored other surveys, based on federal multistate data, which show a far more troubling reality. And after years of a migrant border “surge”—with countless asylum-seekers inadequately vetted and then allowed to enter the U.S.—state law-enforcement agencies now warn that immigrant gangs have seized control of many drug- and human-trafficking networks and have unleashed robbery sprees across the nation. With polls showing Americans alarmed about illegal immigration—a majority even backing mass deportations—Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin reflected public anger when he charged that “every state” is now “a border state.”

Underlying the escalating controversy is the sheer number of migrants entering America during the Biden administration. In a 2020 debate with Trump, Biden seemed to encourage an immigration surge, and it followed soon after his election, with about 8 million people, on some estimates, flocking to the U.S. border without applying first for legal entry. The administration has released up to 3.3 million of them into the U.S. to await immigration hearings, many of which won’t occur for years. At the same time, the number of immigrants who enter by avoiding border security and remain fraudulently in America has also skyrocketed, to an estimated 1.6 million to 1.7 million since Biden’s election, compared with about 1.4 million over the entire previous decade.

Yet, even as more illegals arrived, removals of those convicted or accused of a crime have dropped. In 2021, illegal immigrants deported because of accusations or convictions of lawbreaking fell to 45,432, from a high of 123,128 in 2019, according to Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s annual report on enforcement-removal operations; in 2022, ICE removed just 46,400 aliens. Similarly, ICE prosecutions of illegals for criminal actions have plunged by two-thirds, from 6,739 in 2019 to just 2,208 in 2022.

We have no reason to think that this reflects reduced levels of criminality. Shortly after taking office, in fact, the Biden administration narrowed the criteria for expelling criminal aliens, requiring immigration officials to remove only those deemed an immediate risk to public safety; others, even felony offenders, were permitted to stay. The order also mandated newly extensive investigation of individual cases, which, combined with the border influx, overwhelmed immigration services. The crisis is captured in the numbers: the caseload of immigration-removal operations has soared from about 3 million in 2019 to 6 million under Biden in 2023, while staffing has stayed flat.

Against this backdrop, numerous high-profile crimes—including the murder of Riley, an assault by several immigrants in Times Square on NYPD officers, and police cautions about foreign home-invasion gangs hitting wealthy neighborhoods—have intensified the debate over just how much crime the Biden immigrant surges have unleashed. Much of the mainstream media and immigration advocates, for their part, accuse conservatives of making it all up. Headlines like “The Myth of the Migrant Crime Wave,” “Migrant Crime Wave Not Supported by Data,” and “Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes” have been common, especially after Trump made immigrant crime a 2024 campaign issue.

Most of these stories rely on studies like one from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which used data from 2012 through 2018 collected by Texas’s Department of Public Safety. That study estimated that illegals commit crimes only two-thirds as often as legal state residents. Critics note that the report is limited, focusing on only one state—by necessity, since few local jurisdictions have released data on immigrant prisoners (in so-called sanctuary states and cities, intentionally so). Officials at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions, say that the PNAS study also undercounted the number of incarcerated illegals because of limitations on how Texas collected the data.

To overcome the data deficit, the Federation for American Immigration Reform considered statistics from the federal State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which enables states to get reimbursed by Washington for the cost of incarcerating illegals. To be paid, states must verify that prisoners are illegal immigrants and file detailed reports to the feds. Examining the SCAAP data for ten states with the highest illegal-alien populations, the FAIR study found that, on average, illegals were more than twice as likely to be in prison in California, compared with other state residents; they were twice as likely to be in prison in New York, too; in New Jersey, they were nearly four times as likely, and in Arizona, nearly five times. Among the states studied, Texas showed the smallest difference between legal residents and illegal immigrants in rates—probably, the FAIR authors theorized, thanks to tougher border enforcement, which deters immigrant criminals from remaining in the state.

The arrest of eight Tajikistan nationals with terrorist ties earlier this year exposes the porousness of U.S. borders. American immigration officials had supposedly vetted the accused men, who were then released into the U.S.; their terror links emerged only later, thanks to the U.S. intelligence services’ monitoring of ISIS communications. Such vulnerability led FBI director Christopher Wray recently to warn of “dangerous individuals” illegally getting into America, part of the “threats that emanate from the border,” which also include extensive drug smuggling.

That the migrant surge began just months after a defund-the-police movement swept America has doubtless fueled the immigrant crime problem. The anti-law-enforcement push, intensifying after George Floyd’s 2020 death in Minneapolis, has decimated forces in many places, as demoralized cops quit, and has led to a rollback of proactive enforcement methods, including in immigrant-heavy cities like New York and Los Angeles. The rise of soft-on-crime progressive prosecutors, who back bail reforms that put wrongdoers quickly back on the street or seek light sentences for those convicted, has further weakened crime deterrents. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a prime example. He sparked outrage in early 2024 when he released, without bail, several immigrants after they had attacked NYPD officers—this despite clear video evidence of the violence. A grand jury subsequently indicted the migrants, leading to a nationwide hunt to recapture them.

The Bragg-style soft-on-crime approach—especially combined with sanctuary policies that keep cops from cooperating with immigration authorities—has resulted in countless examples of repeat-offender aliens getting off scot-free. NYPD officials slammed New York’s sanctuary policies, which forbid the police from cooperating with federal immigration officials, after an illegal alien with previous convictions and a deportation order against him brutally raped a New York woman in August. “When will our sanctuary city laws be amended to allow us to notify federal authorities regarding the deportation of non-citizens convicted of violent crimes?” the NYPD’s chief of patrol asked the press. Sometimes, deadly consequences have ensued, like the horrifying case of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray of Houston, whom two illegals allegedly dragged under a bridge, raped, and killed. Border officials had earlier stopped and released the two men. Testifying before Congress last year, the president of Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, Donald Rosenberg, said that almost all illegal-alien-caused deaths in the U.S. are preventable. “In the past 12 years, I have reviewed hundreds, maybe over a thousand, cases that resulted in a fatality. I can’t remember one where the killer didn’t have prior convictions or, at the very least, contact with law enforcement. Why were these people still here?”

Recently, several whistleblowers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that immigration officials have been failing to enforce a federal law that mandates collection of DNA samples from illegals. The result: a failure to identify criminals who are then released back into society instead of being detained. “The continued, prolonged, willful failure to comply with the DNA Fingerprint Act has resulted in the harm that Americans are dead, and these deaths were preventable,” border agent Fred Wynn recently said. 

Riley’s alleged killer had been arrested several times and let go, despite his illegal status. At the time of the murder, Georgia authorities wanted Ibarra for failing to appear in court after a shoplifting arrest and release. A 2018 Government Accountability Office study found the problem particularly acute in sanctuary states. The average criminal illegal alien in California has six convictions, yet remains in the United States. According to a recent letter from ICE officials to Congress, there are 662,566 immigrants on an ICE non-detain docket—that is, they have been accused or convicted of a crime but aren’t being deported, including 435,719 convicted criminals and 226,847 with charges pending. This includes 62,231 convicted of assault (15,811 of sexual assault) and 14,301 convicted of burglary.

Immigration advocates counter that significant immigrant wrongdoing can’t be going on, as crime rates are now falling. That’s disingenuous. As former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics Jeffrey Anderson explained in City Journal, though the sharp rise in crime that began in late 2020 appears to have peaked, violent crime levels remain well above 2019 levels, after increases of as much as 73 percent in urban areas, according to victimization reports. Elevated crime “is not a figment of Americans’ imaginations,” Anderson observes.

Meantime, despite the media’s minimizing the issue, governors and public-safety officials in many states have talked openly about how they’ve had to redirect money and law-enforcement personnel to fight illegal-immigrant crime. The cost of this effort figures prominently in a lawsuit against the Biden administration, filed by 18 largely Republican-led states, stretching from Virginia and Tennessee in the east to Utah in the west to Iowa and Wyoming, over 1,000 miles north of the southern border. Iowa officials, for instance, say that they’ve had to boost spending by “tens of millions of dollars each year for increased law enforcement related to immigrant criminals.” The state’s residents, the officials complain, “suffer increased crime, unemployment, environmental harm, and social disorder, due to illegal immigration.” Despite its distance from the southern border, the state has become “a hot spot for trafficking activity.”

Mexican migrant gangs have invaded Montana, a northern border state, seizing control of the illegal opioid market and driving an epidemic of overdose deaths on Indian reservations. “People are surprised,” the U.S. attorney for Montana, Jesse Laslovich, notes. “You’re as far north as you can get in the United States, and yet we have the cartel here.” After visiting the southern border in early 2023, Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, added, “The situation has never been more dire for our country. Human traffickers and drug cartels are profiting on catastrophe the Biden administration has made worse, with thousands of illegal crossings each day.”

Democrat-led California wasn’t part of the lawsuit, but it, too, has struggled with climbing criminality by illegal aliens. In 2023, for example, the state spent roughly $30 million to expand the California National Guard’s border drug-interdiction work, assigning some 370 soldiers to a task force that seized over 60,000 pounds of fentanyl that year alone—a tenfold increase in just two years. In early summer 2024, federal and state authorities busted a drug-smuggling and money-laundering operation in Los Angeles run jointly by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Chinese gangs.

Entering America illegally, Chinese gangs have cornered the black market for pot in Oklahoma. Though pot legalization was supposed to ease drug-related crime, the spread of legal recreational cannabis and so-called medicinal marijuana has produced a new kind of black market, in which criminal gangs cultivate the drug and then sell it more cheaply than government-approved retailers. In the Sooner State, the gangs have imported an army of migrant workers to work the fields and distribute the illicit product. State leaders estimate that roughly 3,000 illegal-immigrant growers are operating in Oklahoma, with about 80 percent of them under Chinese mafia control; they’re selling $18 billion to $40 billion yearly in pot, a ProPublica investigation estimated. Chinese women get trafficked across the border to serve as prostitutes for the men working the farms. And the criminal activity doesn’t stop there. As one former Drug Enforcement Administration official recently noted, “Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level—gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.” ProPublica listed some of the crimes associated with illegals in Oklahoma: “violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity.”

Lax border security has also enabled foreign criminals to exploit the larceny du jour in America: retail theft. Organized shoplifting has exploded in recent years, as states softened penalties against theft and passed bail reforms that let nonviolent criminals remain on the streets. Illegal-immigrant gangs noticed. In congressional testimony, National Retail Federation officials detailed how crews of Eastern European illegals have launched roughly 170 shoplifting rackets nationwide. Members wear specially designed clothing with extra-large pouches, so that they can cart lots of merchandise away. Similarly, Latin American gangs have come to the U.S. and stolen “high-value electronic devices,” which they then move to central locations to get shipped overseas for sale. Disrupting these multistate networks, the retail executives told Congress, has been tough, partly because “it has been challenging to get state or federal prosecution or collaboration” against the gangs.

This “burglary tourism” has lately extended to breaking and entering in residential neighborhoods. South American gangs, especially from Chile, have obtained visas to get into the U.S. without criminal background checks, through a Homeland Security program called the Electronic System for Travel Authorization–Visa Waiver Program, and have gone on a burglary spree. (The program was paused this summer after an internal report found massive fraud, a Fox News investigation uncovered.) These sophisticated crews use Wi-Fi suppression equipment to disarm home alarms, cell-phone trackers to determine the location of homeowners, and fake IDs, and have committed break-ins in Orange County in California, Oakland County in Michigan (where one foray yielded an $800,000 haul), and Raleigh, North Carolina, among other locations. The gangs face minimal risks. Even when cops bust them, the perpetrators, typically with no criminal history in the U.S., are often speedily let go. Then they vanish, skipping their court dates. The leaky immigration system has made some criminals so bold that they deliberately get themselves arrested at the California border, knowing that they will be immediately released into America. They then proceed to commit residential burglaries and other thefts, according to Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Bradley Schoenleben’s testimony before Congress. Schoenleben blamed “soft-on-crime policies and federal failures to verify criminal histories for Chilean Visa Waiver applicants” for unleashing this crime wave.

A more lethal problem is a sharp upsurge in U.S. criminal activity attributed to members of infamously violent Latin American gangs, often fleeing authorities in their home countries. The suspect in the murder of Maryland mother Rachel Morin, for instance, is a Salvadorean street-gang member. He fled to the U.S. after killing a woman in El Salvador, then attacked a mother and her nine-year-old daughter in Los Angeles, before traveling cross-country to end Morin’s life, say police. She was the second woman in Maryland allegedly murdered within a year by illegals linked with Salvadorean street gangs. “[This] should not be happening,” Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler of Harford County, Maryland, said. The assailant “did not come here to make a better life for himself, or for his family; he came here to escape a crime he committed in El Salvador.” The murder is part of a disturbing pattern. Texas’s Department of Public Safety, for instance, has issued a 10 Most Wanted Criminal Illegals list—all are sought for sexual crimes and violence against women and children, among other offenses.

Many illegal South American gang members are settling in immigrant communities, where they’ve joined gang members already here, sometimes engaging in criminal enterprises that exploit law-abiding migrants. Such infiltration has long been a law-and-order concern. Research has shown that illegals make up more than half the ranks of some domestic Hispanic gangs. Now, the migrant influx is feeding a new generation of gang membership. Police in several cities have noticed a rise in arrests of Venezuelan illegals, many appearing to belong to a feared Venezuelan gang called the Tren de Aragua. Last year, 38 members were arrested in six locations around the country. A man linked to the group, which runs prostitution rings in South America, was arrested for the murder of a retired Venezuelan cop in Miami.

Venezuelan newcomers are also propelling a recent crime wave in New York City, in which thieves on scooters snatch valuables and zoom off. The scheme’s instigator, which involved at least 14 individuals living in migrant shelters, was a Venezuelan, a 2023 New York arrival. He and his coconspirators are part of an enormous spike in illegal immigration, under Biden, from that troubled country. In fiscal year 2023, more than 330,000 Venezuelans traversed the southern U.S. border. By contrast, in 2017, immigration officials recorded only 2,800 border encounters with Venezuelans.

Police in New York City put up wanted posters after killings near a Brooklyn migrant shelter. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The true scale of illegal-alien offending is hard to determine, due to insufficient data and local authorities’ stonewalling. Some states are trying to address this issue. Tennessee, for example, recently mandated that local officials report crime data involving illegals to the federal government. We can get a sense of the problem’s magnitude through a Government Accountability Office study of crimes committed by illegals subsequently incarcerated in federal and local prisons. Analyzing data from 2011 through 2016, the study attributed more than 1 million drug violations, 33,000 homicides, 500,000 assaults, 110,000 auto thefts, and 132,000 sex offenses to illegals. And these figures predate the 2021 border surge, recent bail reforms that have let offenders walk free, and the reduction in public-safety efforts following the defund-the-police movement.

“We know for a fact that not every individual who crosses the border illegally into the U.S. goes on to commit violent acts. But given the number [of illegals], even a very small percentage results in a definite increase in crime in the United States,” ICE whistleblower Wynn has said.

Illegal immigration shows up in some surveys as the top issue for voters—even more important than inflation. And about two-thirds of them disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of it. In early June, the administration tried to correct course with an executive order that significantly restricts the granting of asylum requests at the border. Voters appeared underwhelmed, with only 40 percent approving of it in one poll, probably because it seems “too little, too late.” The issue presents a headwind for Vice President Kamala Harris in her presidential campaign.

Republicans want more sweeping action. Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn has proposed a law that would require local authorities to work with federal immigration officials to deport criminal illegals, denying federal funds to states that fail to comply. After North Carolina officials arrested an illegal immigrant for the murder of a Wake County sheriff, Senator Ted Budd offered legislation to deport any illegal who assaults a police officer. Trump, meantime, has stepped up attacks on Harris over immigrant crime, promising to increase deportations massively.

Surveys show that a majority of Americans back illegal-immigration policy solutions that the media often describe as part of an extreme MAGA agenda. Even as the press decried Trump’s deportation promises, a spring poll found that six in ten voters endorsed a “new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants.” A third of Democrats backed the idea. A crucial starting point would be to remove thousands of known illegal felons, and to end many local authorities’ practice of releasing criminal illegals back into society. This is the least that America should do to protect its citizens, as well as those foreigners here legally.

Steven Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal’s senior editor.

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The FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) initially showed a slight 2.1% decrease in violent crime from 2021 to 2022, however the revision, which was only briefly mentioned on its website, shows an increase in violent crime of 4.5%, according to RCI. The revision comes after the release of the 2023 UCR data in September, which showed a 3% decrease in national violent crime, according to an FBI press release.

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in crime, told RCI. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

The change is only discoverable when downloading the new set of data now and comparing it to the old, with the FBI issuing no statement reflecting the change, RCI reported.

The post-release change is similar to the revisions the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does for its jobs numbers, which overestimated the amount of jobs in America in 2023 by an average of 105,000 a month.

Law enforcement officials put up police tape at the Perry Middle School and High School complex in response to a school shooting on January 04, 2024 in Perry, Iowa. Students were returning to classes today following the holiday break. 

“The [FBI’s] processes, such as how it tries to ‘estimate’ unreported figures, has long been a black box, even to the Bureau of Justice Statistics – the Department of Justice’s actual statistical agency,” Jeffrey Anderson, who headed the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021, told RCI. “We definitely would have highlighted in a press release or a report the 6.6% change recorded for 2022, which moved the numbers from a drop to a rise in violent crime.”

The BJS releases its own measure of crime called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which reported a rise in violent crime victimizations in 2022, according to the report summary. The NCVS is a national survey that also accounts for unreported crimes, unlike the FBI UCR data, which relies on reported crimes to police departments around the nation.

“With the media using the 2022 FBI data to tell us for a year that crime was falling, it is disappointing that there are no news articles correcting that misimpression,” Moody told RCI. “We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers.”

The FBI did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark, and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is greater than the weight of an elephant on every square inch of your body. Yet Earth’s deepest places are home to life uniquely suited to these challenging conditions. Scientists have studied how the bodies of some large animals, such as anglerfish and blobfish, have adapted to withstand the pressure. But far less is known about how cells and molecules stand up to the squeezing, crushing weight of thousands of feet of seawater.

“The animals that live down in the deep sea are not ones that live in surface waters,” said Itay Budin, who studies the biochemistry of cell membranes at the University of California, San Diego. “They’re clearly biologically specialized. But we know very little, at the molecular level, about what is actually determining that specialization.”

In a recent study published in Science, researchers took the deepest look yet at how cells have adapted to life in the abyss. In 2018, Budin met Steve Haddock, a deep-sea biologist, and they combined forces to investigate whether cell membranes—specifically, the lipid molecules that membranes are made of—could help explain how animals have come to thrive in such a high-pressure environment.

To find out, they turned to comb jellies, the simple, diaphanous animals that Haddock studies at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Led by his student Jacob Winnikoff, the interdisciplinary team discovered that the membranes of comb jellies that reside in the depths are made of lipid molecules with completely different shapes than those of their shallow-water counterparts. Three-quarters of the lipids in the deep-sea comb jellies were plasmalogens, a type of curved lipid that is rarer in surface animals. In the pressure of the deep sea, the curvy molecule conforms to the exact shape needed to support a sturdy yet dynamic cell membrane.

“It’s an amazing paper … with quite profound implications,” said Douglas Bartlett, who studies how microbes sustain life at depth and pressure at the University of California, San Diego and was not involved in the new study. “They provide another explanation for how the lipids of deep-sea animals, and likely deep-sea microbes and a range of organisms, are adapted in a way that’s pressure-specific.”

“They are looking into an area that, to a large degree, has not been explored,” said Sol Gruner, who researches molecular biophysics at Cornell University; he was consulted for the study but was not a co-author.

Plasmalogen lipids are also found in the human brain, and their role in deep-sea membranes could help explain aspects of cell signaling. More immediately, the research unveils a new way that life has adapted to the most extreme conditions of the deep ocean.

Insane in the Membrane

The cells of all life on Earth are encircled by fatty molecules known as lipids. If you put some lipids in a test tube and add water, they automatically line themselves up back to back: The lipids’ greasy, water-hating tails commingle to form an inner layer, and their water-loving heads arrange together to form the outer portions of a thin membrane. “It’s just like oil and water separating in a dish,” Winnikoff said. “It’s universal to lipids, and it’s what makes them work.”

For a cell, an outer lipid membrane serves as a physical barrier that, like the external wall of a house, provides structure and keeps a cell’s insides in. But the barrier can’t be too solid: It’s studded with proteins, which need some wiggle room to carry out their various cellular jobs, such as ferrying molecules across the membrane. And sometimes a cell membrane pinches off to release chemicals into the environment and then fuses back together again.

For a membrane to be healthy and functional, it must therefore be sturdy, fluid, and dynamic at the same time. “The membranes are balancing right on the edge of stability,” Winnikoff said. “Even though it has this really well-defined structure, all the individual molecules that make up the sheets on either side—they’re flowing around each other all the time. It’s actually a liquid crystal.”

One of the emergent properties of this structure, he said, is that the middle of the membrane is highly sensitive to both temperature and pressure—much more so than other biological molecules such as proteins, DNA or RNA. If you cool down a lipid membrane, for example, the molecules move more slowly, “and then eventually they’ll just lock together,” Winnikoff said, as when you put olive oil in the fridge. “Biologically, that’s generally a bad thing.” Metabolic processes halt; the membrane can even crack and leak its contents.

To avoid this, many cold-adapted animals have membranes composed of a blend of lipid molecules with slightly different structures to keep the liquid crystal flowing, even at low temperatures. Because high pressure also slows a membrane’s flow, many biologists assumed that deep-sea membranes were built the same way.

But it turns out these researchers weren’t getting the full picture. It would take an unexpected collaboration between biochemists and marine biologists, and more advanced technology, to see that deep-sea membranes had evolved a different way of going with the flow.

Going Deep

Comb jellies, or ctenophores, are voracious predators in fragile bodies. They are the largest animals that swim with cilia, which are lined up in rows known as combs, and they feed on a wide range of prey. Genetic evidence suggests that they were the first organisms to branch off the animal tree on their own evolutionary path. Though they resemble jellyfish in some ways, humans are actually more closely related to jellyfish than ctenophores are. And they have successfully colonized all kinds of ocean habitats, from surface waters to ocean trenches, and from the tropics to the poles.

You would expect such a wide-ranging group to be adaptable, and indeed comb jellies from the deep are built differently than those that live near the ocean’s surface. “You collect the deep guys, and you bring them up to the surface, and they just fall apart,” Bartlett said. “They just melt away. It’s really quite dramatic.” Similarly, if the ones adapted to shallow water end up at depth, they beat their cilia faster and faster, and eventually die. But no one really knew the molecular differences that separated them.

In 2018, Haddock, an expert on comb jellies, attended a conference on the origin of eukaryotes. After watching Budin present research on cell membranes’ response to temperature, he approached the lipid expert. Haddock had a graduate student, Winnikoff, who wanted to study adaptations to extreme pressure. It was known that lipids are sensitive to pressure, so cell membranes were a prime target for investigation. They decided to collaborate.

Haddock, Budin, and Winnikoff started by collecting comb jellies from different parts of the ocean. In scuba gear, Winnikoff carefully coaxed comb jellies from Monterey Bay’s surface waters into jars. From one of MBARI’s oceanographic vessels, he helped operate a deep-sea robot to collect comb jellies from depths of 12,000 feet. To control for the effects of the cold temperatures in the deep sea, he and Budin asked friends who were on their own expedition to gather surface comb jellies from frigid Arctic waters. In total, the team collected 66 animals from 17 related species.

By the time the molecular part of the project was set to begin, the pandemic had hit. So Winnikoff set up an experiment in his garage. Using a fluorescence spectrometer, he sent rays of ultraviolet light into test tubes filled with small globs of membrane material from the creatures they’d collected. The results puzzled him. The deep-sea membranes didn’t become more fluid as he raised the temperature—a response considered universal among lipid membranes.

So he and Budin consulted Gruner, the former director of Cornell’s particle accelerator. If they really wanted to know what was happening in the membranes, Gruner said, they would need powerful, high-energy X-rays. And he knew the perfect source.

Under Pressure

Buried 50 feet beneath the main athletic fields at Cornell is a synchrotron: a particle accelerator that uses a high-frequency electric field and a low-frequency magnetic field to speed up charged particles. Part of the facility, which Gruner fought to establish, may as well have been designed for studying deep-sea cell membranes. Its small-angle X-ray scattering operation, which opened in 2020, can not only distinguish the finer details and shapes of molecules such as lipids, but also increase and decrease the pressure they’re under.

The team experienced some pressure, too, as they had to endure late nights to make the most of their limited time at the facility. The powerful X-rays they shot at their lipid samples revealed the clearest picture yet of cell membranes from the abyss. The deep-sea comb jellies had membrane lipids that, at our standard atmospheric pressure, have a curvier shape than those in surface cell membranes. The animals had especially increased production of the group of lipids known as plasmalogens.

“In these deep-sea comb jellies, [plasmalogens] can make up three-quarters of all the lipids, and we’re talking about all the membrane lipids in the entire body of the animal, which is kind of crazy,” Winnikoff said. “We did a lot of checks to make sure that wasn’t a mistake.”

At the surface, a plasmalogen has a small phosphate head and a pair of wide, flaring tails, resembling a badminton shuttlecock, he said. But at high pressure, the tails squeeze together to form the necessary sturdy yet dynamic structure.

“They start their lipids at a different shape,” Budin said. “So when you compress them, they still maintain the right Goldilocks shape that you see in our own cells, but at these extreme pressures.” Budin and Winnikoff named this novel modification “homeocurvature adaptation.”

Taking a plasmalogen membrane to the deep sea is like pushing down on a spring, Bartlett said. At the surface, when the spring’s tension is released, it extends dramatically. “That’s when you can imagine the cells, their membranes, falling apart.” Meanwhile, if a surface membrane with straighter lipids is brought down to the deep, it compresses too much and becomes too rigid to function properly.

Notably, curvy plasmalogens were not present in comb jellies from the cold, shallow waters of the Arctic. “The composition of the membrane almost restricts the organisms to a particular pressure range,” said Peter Meikle, a lipid biologist who works on plasmalogens at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Australia and was not involved in the study.

But Budin wanted to see these lipids in action, and something occurred to him during a late session at the synchrotron. “In the middle of the night when you’re deliriously tired,” he said, sometimes you have a good idea. He stumbled on a paper with an intriguing approach to studying lipids. The authors had engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to produce plasmalogens in their membranes instead of their normal lipids. Budin realized that his team could similarly coax the bacteria to produce more plasmalogens and pressurize them to see how the membranes held up in living cells.

Following the paper’s methods, they showed that the bacteria with plasmalogen membranes could indeed better tolerate pressure than typical ones. These experimental membranes were made up of only 20 percent plasmalogens, but it was “enough to make a difference,” Winnikoff said.

Bartlett was impressed that the effect of the curved lipid shapes occurred in such unrelated species. “What is likely to come out of this is that we’ll find that this principle of homeocurvature adaptation will become a universal property of life,” he said.

Curvy Flexibility

Plasmalogens aren’t limited to the deep sea. They’re also found to varying degrees in other organisms, including humans. The percentage of plasmalogens within humans depends on the cell type. In the liver, plasmalogens make up 5 percent of phospholipids. In muscles, they can range between 20 percent and 40 percent. And in the brain, they make up about 60 percent.

In fact, the deterioration of plasmalogens has been linked to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. “The evidence suggests that the plasmalogens are more protective,” said Meikle, who studies plasmalogens because of their links to mammalian health.

Winnikoff speculates that plasmalogens might give nerve cells the right flexibility for their communication needs. To send signals, neurons fill cellular sacs with neurotransmitters; then those sacs fuse with the cell membrane to release the signaling compounds on to the next neuron. Maybe plasmalogens’ curvy structure makes that possible, Winnikoff suggested.

Meikle likes the idea. “Certainly, they’re the primary sort of cone shape that allows membranes to form those types of curvatures,” he said. As studies better understand the role of lipids in membrane function, the findings could be relevant for a broader range of membranes.

“They’ve opened up more questions than they’ve answered,” Gruner said. “But hopefully it will catalyze people to start thinking about and doing more experiments going deeper into the subject.”

Indeed Winnikoff, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, is looking into how universal this lipid adaptation mechanism is across different organisms. He’s started experiments to figure out whether organisms found at hydrothermal vents—deep ocean areas where magma and seawater meet—have similar adaptations.

What would be really interesting, he added, would be to look at archaea, the third branch of life. Archaea lipids behave differently than those found in bacteria and eukaryotes: They follow different chemistry, Winnikoff said. “Do they follow the same physics?”

Disclosure: Itay Budin has received funding from the Simons Foundation, which also funds Quanta Magazine, which is editorially independent. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage.

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

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Hurricane Oscar as it appeared on satellite on Sunday morning.

Credit: NOAA

A hurricane so small that it could not be observed by satellite formed this weekend, surprising meteorologists and even forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.

Hurricane Oscar developed on Saturday near Turks and Caicos, and to the northeast of Cuba, in the extreme southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Saturday evening, hurricane-force winds extended just 5 miles (8 km) from the center of the storm.

This is not the smallest tropical cyclone—as defined by sustained winds greater than 39 mph, or 63 kph—as that record remains held by Tropical Storm Marco back in 2008. However, this may possibly be the smallest hurricane in terms of the extent of its hurricane-force winds.

Not detected by satellite

Oscar was so small that its winds could not be detected by Earth-observation satellites that estimate wind speeds in tropical cyclones.

Writing in his summary of Oscar's development on Saturday afternoon, National Hurricane Center forecaster Philippe Papin noted that the hurricane was only discovered due to a last-minute flight by Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft.

"It is fair to say its been an unexpected day with regards to Oscar," he wrote in his 5 pm ET advisory. "After being upgraded to a tropical storm this morning, a resources-permitting Air Force Reconnaissance mission found that Oscar was much stronger than anticipated and in fact was a tiny hurricane. It is worth noting that remote sensing satellite intensity estimates are currently much lower."

Satellites do not have the capability to directly measure wind speeds, so they make estimates based upon other observable variables, using instruments such as a scatterometer. Yes, that's a real word. By these indirect estimates, Oscar had sustained winds between 48 mph and 63 mph (77 kph to 101 kph), which remains well below the threshold for a hurricane (74 mph, 119 kph).

The Air Force aircraft found sustained winds, in a tiny area to be sure, of 85 mph (137 kph). Hence, Hurricane Oscar.

How this happened

Oscar's development shocked forecasters. There was only a modest indication from satellite imagery, as of Friday, that anything would form; and none of the major global models indicated development of any kind. It was thought that the area of low pressure would get swamped by vertical wind shear this weekend as it neared Cuba.

However, the tiny size of Oscar confounded those expectations. Weather models struggle with the development of small hurricanes, and this is largely because the micro-physics of the smallest storms occur below the resolution of these models. Additionally, tiny hurricanes organize much more quickly and efficiently.

In other words, small storms can more easily make quick changes. Which is what happened with Oscar. The storm will bring heavy rain and winds to the eastern half of Cuba on Sunday before it lifts to the northeast, and brings rainfall and some storm surge into the Bahamas early next week.

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A sensational science paper has blown holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging. Just published results in Nature show “limited evidence” for a warming surge. “In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,” the paper says. Written by an international group of mathematicians and scientists, it is unlikely to be acknowledged in the mainstream media where general hysteria reigns over the anomalous 2023 experience. As we have seen, constant misinformation is published to scare the general public and this is exemplified by climate comedy-turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale forecasting almost daily Armageddon and exhorting people to “join up the dots”.

In science, one swallow does not make a summer and in climate science it is impossible to show a trend by picking on short periods or individual weather events. This paper is an excellent piece of climate science work since it takes the long statistical view and challenges the two-a penny clickbait alarmists looking for a headline on the BBC. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a biased body but it understands the importance of long-term climate trends by stating, much to the chagrin of Net Zero-promoting activists, that it can find little or no human involvement in most extreme weather events either in the past or in the likely immediate future.

But these findings, along with the paper on the warming trend, are inconvenient to those promoting the unproven claim that humans control the climate thermostat by utilising hydrocarbons.

The paper is highly technical and mathematically-inclined readers can study the full workings out in the open access publication. It notes that global temperature datasets fluctuate due to short-term variability and this often creates the appearance of surges and slowdowns in warming. It is important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration”, it adds. In fact there have been a number of plausible explanations given for the recent spike, with attention focused on the massive Hunga Tonga submarine volcano adding 13% extra water vapour to the stratosphere, a strong El Niño and even the reduction in atmospheric particulates caused by recent changes in shipping vessel fuel. Several “changepoints” were used by the mathematicians and it was found that “a warming surge could not be reliably detected any time after 1970”.

While the focus was on whether there had been a continued acceleration in the rate of global warming, it was recognised how unusual the surface temperature anomalies were in 2023. Indeed they were, and it was widely argued that this showed the climate was breaking down, or in the silly words of the UN chief Antonio Guterres that the planet was “boiling”. Last year’s hysterics were useful for short-term alarmism but they help destroy the ‘settled’ science around CO₂. If human-caused CO₂ is responsible for the rise, why did the temperature pause from 1998-2012 when atmospheric levels of the gas were on the up. Does alarmism on the BBC and most other mainstream media only apply when the temperatures spikes upwards for a few months?

One of the key conclusions in the paper arises from considering two time series – 1970-2023 and 2013-2023. This of course includes the early 1970s when global cooling fears were all the rage and average temperatures were falling. Estimated temperature trends were said to be 0.019°C per year for the first time segment and 0.029°C for the second that includes the spike from last year. This 0.029°C estimated slope “falls far short” of an increase needed to point to a change in the warming trend in the recent past. This is because of short-term variability in the U.K. Met Office HadCRUT global database since 1970 and “uncertainty” of the 2012 changepoint. This uncertainty arises over speculation as to whether 2012 and the ending of the pause was a year marking an important change in the longer time series. ”The HadCRUT record is simply not long enough for the surge to be statistically detectable at this time,” they note.

Cliff Mass is the Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington. He has a golden rule of weather extremes: “The more extreme a climate or weather record is, the greater the contribution of natural variability, and the smaller the contribution of human-caused global warming.”

The mathematicians used changepoint statistical techniques which were designed to identify structural changes over time. Four global mean surface temperature records over 1850-2023 were used including HadCRUT. This of course is problematic since there is substantial evidence that these datasets hype the warming trend by their careless treatment of urban heat corruptions – the fact that urban areas become warmer through ongoing development. In addition, substantial retrospective adjustments are made, often cooling the past and warming the near present to increase the ‘trend’. Despite writing copiously about the 1998-2012 ‘pause’, the Met Office has now removed it from its own record by adding 30% retrospective warming. Perhaps the Met Office need not have worried, with the mathematicians noting that the pause was “not unusual” given the level of short-term variability present in the data. But these datasets are the best we have and nobody doubts that the planet has warmed a small amount over the last 200 years since the lifting of the little ice age. For want of anything better, using these datasets for scientific analysis is fair, although it could be suggested that overall warming is probably less than suggested by this paper.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

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Wolsingham School, in County Durham, was planning its Blue Nose Day on Friday in a bid to reduce its carbon footprint and raise awareness about sustainability.

But it said it had dropped the plans after speaking to parents "about their concerns".

The school added the heating would be switched on as normal, with staff and students "not needing to wear extra layers of clothing".

The plans had drawn criticism on social media.

In a letter sent to parents on Tuesday, the school said the date for the event had been "carefully" chosen by looking at the weather forecast and average temperatures by month.

"After careful consideration and speaking to several parents regarding their concerns, the Blue Nose Day scheduled for Friday 18 October 2024 will now not go ahead as planned," the letter said.

It added the event had been postponed until the summer 2025 term.

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