On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto for their foundational work in machine learning with artificial neural networks. Hinton notably captured headlines in 2023 for warning about the threat that AI superintelligence may pose to humanity. The win came as a surprise to many, including Hinton himself.

"I'm flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen. I'm very surprised," said Hinton in a telephone call with members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences during a live announcement press conference streamed to YouTube that took place this morning.

Hopfield and Hinton's research, which dates back to the early 1980s, applied principles from physics to develop methods that underpin modern machine-learning techniques. Their work has enabled computers to perform tasks such as image recognition and pattern completion, capabilities that are now ubiquitous in everyday technology.

The win is perhaps made more eye-catching because Hinton, who is often called one of the "godfathers of AI," resigned from Google in May 2023 so he could "speak freely" about potential risks from AI systems. At the time, Hinton said that the tech industry's drive to develop AI products could result in dangerous consequences, such as a threat to humanity.

"Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now," Hinton told The New York Times last year. "Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary." Since then, Hinton has continued warning about the potential dangers of AI systems that may become more intelligent than humans.

Techniques drawn from physics

The win is already turning heads on social media because it seems unusual that research in a computer science field like machine learning might win a Nobel Prize for physics. "And the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics does not go to physics..." tweeted German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder this morning.

From the Nobel committee's point of view, the award largely derives from the fact that the two men drew from statistical models used in physics and partly from recognizing the advancements in physics research that came from using the men's neural network techniques as research tools.

Nobel committee chair Ellen Moons, a physicist at Karlstad University, Sweden, said during the announcement, "Artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, material science and astrophysics."

Hopfield, a 91-year-old theoretical biologist with a physics background, made a breakthrough in 1982 by developing a network that described connections between nodes as physical forces, as Nature describes in a report. His innovation, known as the Hopfield network, uses concepts from physics that describe how atomic spins behave in materials. In particular, it stores patterns as low-energy states, allowing the system to recreate images when prompted with similar patterns. This approach mimicked associative memory, resembling how the brain recalls words or concepts.

A Nobel Prize handout illustration describing neurons and artificial neurons.

Credit: ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Hinton, who is 76, built upon Hopfield's research in the early 1980s by developing a layered version of the Hopfield network that incorporated probabilities. Hinton drew parallels to physics studies of large systems of similar elements like gas molecules. Instead of tracking individual molecules, physicists examine collective properties like pressure or temperature. The Boltzmann equation from 19th-century physics calculates the probability of different states in such systems. Hinton applied this concept to neural networks, naming his 1985 method the "Boltzmann machine," which highlighted the connection between machine learning and statistical physics. A Boltzmann machine is capable of recognizing and classifying images and generating new examples based on its training data.

The techniques pioneered by Hopfield and Hinton vastly simplify and approximate processes suspected to occur inside biological neural networks like those found inside animal brains, but they have still proved useful, underpinning much of the machine intelligence in AI fields today. Neural networks have brought automation techniques to machines that must deal with approximations and fuzzy edge cases; they must also learn from unstructured data such as giant scrapes of the Internet that let conversational chatbots such as ChatGPT look like they know everything, among many other uses.

Not their only claim to fame

It's worth noting that both of today's winners have a deep history in science that extends beyond their Nobel Prize-winning contributions. Hopfield's influence spans several fields, as his early work bridged physics, biology, and computation. Beyond the well-known Hopfield network, he made important strides in understanding how neural systems process and store information, shaping early theories on brain-like computation.

Hinton's involvement in artificial intelligence dates back to 1972, and his achievements have significantly shaped modern generative AI. In 1987, Hinton, together with David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, helped bring attention to backpropagation, a key method for training neural networks that is fundamental to today's generative AI models. In 2012, Hinton collaborated with Alex Krizhevsky and future OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever to develop AlexNet, a pivotal innovation in computer vision and deep learning widely credited with launching the current era of generative AI. In 2018, Hinton was awarded the Turing Award—often regarded as the "Nobel Prize of Computing"—alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. He is often called one of the "godfathers of AI."

The men will share an 11 million Swedish kroner (about $1 million US) prize.

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A few years ago, Egyptian archaeologists discovered what they thought were the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple dating back to the sixth century BCE. Subsequent finds at the site indicate that the structure was actually an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found, according to Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The L-shaped structure was found within a larger complex called the Temple of Buto (a later Greek name), known to the ancient Egyptians as Per-Wadjet and located east of Alexandria in the Nile Delta. It's now called Tell El Fara'in ("Hill of the Pharaohs"). Buto was once a sacred site dedicated to the goddess Wadjet, believed to be the matron and protector of lower Egypt, who took on a cobra form. Buto was well-known for its temple and the oracle of Wadjet, with an annual festival held there in her honor.

There were archaeological excavations of the site in the 1960s and 1980s, revealing a palace dating back to the Second Dynasty, as well as six Greek bathhouses. An Egyptian team began fresh excavations a few years ago. In 2022, they uncovered a hall at the southwestern end of the temple, with the remains of three papyrus-shaped columns aligned on a north-south axis. They also found  engraved stone fragments and a limestone painting of a bird's head wearing a white crown within two feathers.

An overview of the excavation site at Tell El-Faraeen, where archaeologists uncovered the first known ancient

Egyptian observatory.

Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The approximately 9,150-square-foot structure had a traditional gateway at the east entrance and a carving facing east (toward the rising sun). Within the hall were images of various Egyptian deities typically associated with the sky, notably Horus in the form of a falcon, who is also the son of Wadjet. The team found numerous smaller artifacts associated with ritualistic practices as well, such as a bronze statue of Osiris, amphorae covers, pottery, and a beaded necklace (menat) often worn as a protective amulet.

All this seemed consistent with the structure having been a temple—except for the unusual placement of the pillars at the entrance. (In Egyptian monuments, pillars are often placed at the end of halls.)  The team thought the trio might have been a symbolic means of dividing time into seasons or months. They also uncovered a large stone sundial used to determine sunrise, noon, and sunset, as well as an ancient Egyptian time-keeping artifact known as a merkhet—basically a bar with an attached plumb line typically used to track certain stars.

There was even the remains of what might have once been a stone observatory tower with astronomical inscriptions. "Everything we found shattered our expectations," Hossom Ghonim, head of the expedition and director-general of Kafr El-Sheikh Antiquities told Live Science, suggesting the site had a dual role as both a spiritual and a scientific place.

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Since then, the measurement of the average intelligence quotient (IQ) by country has been updated several times, most recently in Lynn and David Becker’s book The Intelligence of Nations, released in 2019. It calculates the average IQ of citizens in 132 nations and provides estimated scores for 71 others. In the past two decades, these national IQ lists have sparked much debate. While they have been welcomed by some scholars who have used them for empirical studies — such as Anat Belasen and Rik Hafer’s paper on the correlation between intelligence and alcohol consumption — others have been heavily critical.

Criticisms of the National IQ Dataset

They were dismissed as being “highly deficient” by Thomas Volken in 2003 and “virtually meaningless” by Susan Barnett and Wendy Williams a year later. More recently, Rebecca Stear described the latest version by Lynn and Becker as “not fit for purpose,” adding that the “majority of data included originates from samples which are wholly unrepresentative of their national populations.” Many critics argue that these samples are simply too small and the criterion for collecting the data is not clear. There is also the assertion that the national IQ dataset is reliant on culturally biased intelligence tests.  

Right now, though, it is the most comprehensive study available on a nation’s average IQ. It may not be perfect, but you probably won’t hear too many Japanese people complaining about it.

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On Monday, the Nobel Committee announced that two US researchers, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, will receive the prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of a previously unknown mechanism for controlling the activity of genes. They discovered the first of what is now known to be a large collection of MicroRNAs, short (21-23 bases long) RNAs that bind to and alter the behavior of protein-coding RNAs. While first discovered in a roundworm, they've since been discovered to play key roles in the development of most complex life.

The story behind the discovery is typical of a lot of the progress in the biological sciences: genetics helps identify a gene important for the development of one species, and then evolutionary conservation reveals its widespread significance.

In the worm

Ambros and Ruvkun started on the path to discovery while post-doctoral fellows in the lab of earlier Nobel winner Robert Horvitz, who won for his role in developing the roundworm C. elegans as an experimental genetic organism. As part of the early genetic screens, people had identified a variety of mutations that caused developmental problems for specific lineages of cells. These lin mutations included lin-4, which Ambros was characterizing. It lacked a number of specialized cell types, as well as the physical structures that depended on them.

Ruvkun was working on lin-14. The protein encoded by this gene is normally active early in development, but mutations that allowed it to persist to later stages cause early embryonic cell types to continue to develop. As they moved on to faculty positions, Ambros and Ruvkun both made some key discoveries about the system. Ambros demonstrated that lin-4 acts to block the activity of lin-14, while Ruvkun found that the regulation occurred after the lin-14 gene produced a mature messenger RNA. (A lot of gene regulation focuses on determining whether or not a messenger RNA is produced in the first place.) Some of the mutations that altered the activity of lin-14 turned out to be in a part of the RNA that doesn't code for a protein (the 3' untranslated region).

The key to the discovery took place in Ambros' lab, which narrowed down the DNA that contained lin-4 to a small region of DNA that didn't appear to include any protein-coding genes. Eventually, he was able to demonstrate that the area the gene was in encoded two extremely short RNAs: a 61 base long one, and one that was just a 22 bases subset of the longer one. At that point, Ambros and Ruvkun exchanged the sequences of their genes, and both recognized that the lin-4 RNA could base-pair with the portion of the lin-14 RNA that was critical to its regulation.

And that's where things stayed for the better part of a decade. With just one example of a microRNA from a single species that was notable for a number of developmental oddities, there was little indication that microRNAs were a significant biological phenomenon. But Ruvkun had ended up characterizing a gene called let-7 (let stands for lethal—animals die when eggs build up and explode through the animal's side) that also turned out to be a microRNA.

Critically, sequences related to let-7 show up in a huge range of animals, including other experimental organisms, like zebrafish and fruit flies, but also more distant relatives, like mollusks and humans.

And everywhere else

With their significance established, biochemical characterization of microRNAs has identified how the system operates. The longer form of the RNA produced from a microRNA gene acts as a precursor. It's able to fold over and base-pair with itself, forming a structure called a hairpin. An enzyme called Dicer cleaves it, forming the shorter, mature microRNA, which is able to base-pair with messenger RNAs. These mature microRNAs recruit a complex of proteins to the messenger RNA, which either causes the RNA to be digested or prevents them from being translated into proteins.

Based on the stereotypical hairpin structure, researchers have scanned genomes and found over 38,000 likely precursors; nearly 50,000 mature microRNAs have been discovered by sequencing all the RNA found in cells from a variety of species. While found widely in animals, they've also been discovered in plants, raising the possibility that they existed in a single-celled ancestral organism.

While some microRNA genes, including lin-4 and let-7, have dramatic phenotypes when mutated, many have weak or confusing effects. This is likely in part due to the fact that a single microRNA can bind to and regulate a variety of genes and so may have a mix of effects when mutated. In other cases, several different microRNAs may bind to the same messenger RNA, creating a redundancy that makes the loss of a single microRNA difficult to detect.

Nevertheless, there's plenty of evidence that, collectively, they're essential for normal development in many organisms and tissues. Knocking out the gene that encodes the Dicer protein, which is needed for forming mature microRNAs, causes early embryonic lethality. Knockouts of the gene in specific cell types cause a variety of defects. For example, B cells never mature if Dicer is lost in that cell lineage, and a knockout in nerve cells causes microcephaly and limiting branching of connections among neurons, leading the animals to die shortly after birth.

This being the Medicine prize, the Nobel Committee also cite a number of human genetic diseases that are caused by mutations in microRNA genes.

Overall, the award highlights just how complex life is at the cellular level. There's a fair number of genes that have to be made by every cell simply to enable their survival. But as for the rest, they exist embedded in complex regulatory networks that interact to ensure that proteins are made only where and when they're needed, and often degraded if they somehow get made anyway. And every now and then, fundamental research in an oddball species is still telling us unexpected things about those networks.

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In less than a day, Hurricane Milton has rapidly intensified over the southern Gulf of Mexico, exploding from a small Category 1 hurricane into a Category 5 storm. Unfortunately, the hurricane is likely to strengthen further as it tracks eastward toward Florida.

The National Hurricane Center reported that Milton had reached sustained winds of 160 mph as of 11:44 pm ET on Monday, with a central pressure of 925 millibars. The storm is moving steadily eastward and is likely to reach the west coast of Florida on Wednesday evening as a major hurricane.

Based upon Atlantic basin records, Milton has tied Hurricane Maria (2017) for the second-fastest intensification from a Category 1 to Category 5 hurricane, taking just 18 hours. Only Hurricane Wilma (2005) did so more rapidly, in just 12 hours.

Wilma holds another record for intensification, with the lowest central pressure ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. That storm reached a central pressure of just 882 millibars.

Milton still has a ways to go to reach this level of organization, but with warm waters and a relatively calm atmosphere ahead of it, Milton should intensify further. Based upon the storm's satellite appearance, the clearing of its eye, and increasing temperature in the center of the storm, it is likely that Milton's pressure will continue to fall and its winds increase for another day or so. The all-time record for maximum sustained winds in the Atlantic basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, is 190-mph winds set in 1980 by Hurricane Allen.

All of these nerdy meteorological details are especially sobering given that Milton remains on course for an impactful landfall later this week along Florida's west coast. Most of our best modeling continues to indicate that Milton will make landfall in the vicinity of the Tampa Bay region on Wednesday afternoon, evening, or night.

Tampa in the crosshairs

The Tampa Bay metro area, with a population of more than 3 million people, has grown into the most developed region on the west coast of Florida. For those of us who follow hurricanes, this region has stood out in recent years for a preternatural ability to dodge large and powerful hurricanes. There have been some close calls to be sure, especially of late with Hurricane Ian in 2022, and Hurricane Helene just last month.

But the reality is that a major hurricane, defined as Category 3 or larger on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, has not made a direct impact on Tampa Bay since 1921.

It remains to be seen what precisely happens with Milton. The storm should reach its peak intensity over the course of the next day or so. At some point Milton should undergo an eyewall replacement cycle, which leads to some weakening. In addition, the storm is likely to ingest dry air from its west and north as a cold front works its way into the northern Gulf of Mexico. (This front is also responsible for Milton's odd eastward track across the Gulf, where storms more commonly travel from east to west.)

So by Wednesday, at the latest, Milton should be weakening as it approaches the Florida coast. However, it will nonetheless be a very large and powerful hurricane, and by that point the worst of its storm surge capabilities will already be baked in—that is, the storm surge will still be tremendous regardless of whether Milton weakens.

By Wednesday evening a destructive storm surge will be crashing into the west coast of Florida, perhaps in Tampa Bay, or further to the south, near Fort Meyers. A broad streak of wind gusts above 100 mph will hit the Florida coast as well, and heavy rainfall will douse much of the central and northern parts of the state.

For now, Milton is making some history by rapidly strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico. By the end of this week, it will very likely become historic for the damage, death, and destruction in its wake. If you live in affected areas, please heed evacuation warnings.

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In Granbury, Texas, residents can hear the sound of money being made at all hours of the day, but it’s not making them rich. Instead, neighbors in the town southwest of Fort Worth say that the persistent low hum emanating from the Bitcoin mine operated by Marathon Digital has caused them stress, loss of sleep, and other unexplained ailments.

They filed a lawsuit in Texas state court Friday in Hood County alleging that the noise from the Bitcoin mine creates a nuisance that has ruined their quality of life. The environmental law group Earthjustice is representing a group of neighbors organized under the name Citizens Concerned About Wolf Hollow. The suit is seeking a permanent injunction to stop operation of the facility unless it can operate without producing disruptive noise.

The 300 megawatt Marathon Digital facility is located alongside a gas-fired power plant called Wolf Hollow II. Residents recently spoke out against a proposed expansion to upgrade the natural gas facility currently providing electricity for Bitcoin mining and releasing up to 760,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide per year.

Texas has become the epicenter of a rise in Bitcoin mining, with companies flocking to the state for its low taxes, vast land, minimal regulations, and multiple ways to profit from connecting directly to the electric grid. While some attention has been paid to Bitcoin by politicians worried about the increased power demand from crypto mining on an already stressed grid, noise pollution has come into focus as having the most direct effect on communities.

A Bitcoin, currently worth about $62,500, can be purchased on a cryptocurrency exchange such as Coinbase using digital wallets. To keep transactions secure, a computer algorithm assigns a unique identifying code to a set of transactions known as a block. Bitcoin “mining” is when computers, operated round-the-clock by Bitcoin miners like Marathon, generate an endless series of random numbers before guessing the correct code to validate the block. Each time they do this, the miner such as Marathon receives 3.125 Bitcoins as a reward.

At the Granbury facility, a mix of liquid immersion and fans prevent more than 20,000 computers from overheating. But those fans are loud enough that neighbors say the noise has disrupted their lives, and according to Earthjustice, more than two dozen individuals “suffer direct health impacts due to the constant noise pollution,” including vertigo, hearing loss, migraines, fatigue, anxiety, and tinnitus.

Earthjustice’s lawyers are planning to request a jury trial to rule on whether the Bitcoin mine qualifies as a private nuisance by infringing on homeowners’ rights to free use and enjoyment of their property. A judge would then decide whether to issue the permanent injunction.

“If you’re constantly being denied a good night’s sleep, or you’re constantly having to deal with the noise in the background, that’s an unreasonable impact,” Rodrigo Cantú, senior attorney at Earthjustice, told Inside Climate News.

Marathon Digital said it has already converted 30 percent of computers at the Granbury site to quiet liquid immersion cooling and intends to convert half of the computers by the end of the year. In an email, a company spokesperson said that “sounds from our operations are within the normal range experienced every day from a variety of sources.”

Moreover, the company is “not aware of any scientific basis to conclude that our operations are causing any health problems,” the spokesperson said.

But for the neighbors closest to the facility, the noise continues to cause significant disruption.

Danny Lakey, 55, lives about 600 yards from the Bitcoin mine. “We used to sit out on the porch and watch the sun go down every day,” he said. But now he and members of his family cannot relax in this way anymore because it’s too loud, he added.

Inside the house, Lakey can still hear the fans humming. His sleep quality has suffered, and he worries that the stress caused by constant noise is having a multiplying effect on his wife’s diabetes, making her overall health worse.

Lakey renovated a mobile home on the property for his daughter. But after she moved in with her husband and their son, Lakey said his grandson suffered four ear infections that they believed were caused by the Bitcoin mine’s fans. It was so bad that his daughter moved her family to Missouri, and Lakey said his grandson hasn’t suffered an ear infection since.

“We wanted to remodel the house so that our kids could live there, which they can no longer do,” Lakey said.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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A satellite Image of Robert Island on the Antarctic Peninsula showing vegetation.

Tom Roland

Parts of icy Antarctica are turning green with plant life at an alarming rate as the region is gripped by extreme heat events, according to new research, sparking concerns about the changing landscape on this vast continent.

Scientists used satellite imagery and data to analyze vegetation levels on the Antarctic Peninsula, a long mountain chain that points north to the tip of South America, and which has been warming much faster than the global average.

They found plant life — mostly mosses — had increased in this harsh environment more than 10-fold over the past four decades, according to the study by scientists at the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire in England, and the British Antarctic Survey, published Friday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Vegetation covered less than 0.4 square miles of the Antarctic Peninsula in 1986 but had reached almost 5 square miles by 2021, the study found. The rate at which the region has been greening over nearly four decades has also been speeding up, accelerating by more than 30% between 2016 and 2021

Vegetation growing on Green Island on the Antarctic Peninsula, which is warming much faster than the global average.

Matt Amesbury

A part of Barrientos Island that has given way to plant life.

Dan Charman

While the landscape is still almost entirely snow, ice and rock, this small, green area has grown dramatically since the mid 1980s, said Thomas Roland, a study author and environmental scientist at the University of Exeter.

“Our findings confirm that the influence of anthropogenic climate change has no limit in its reach,” Roland told CNN. “Even on the Antarctic Peninsula – this most extreme, remote and isolated ‘wilderness’ region – the landscape is changing, and these effects are visible from space.”

Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, has recently been gripped by extreme heat events.

This summer, parts of the continent experienced a record-breaking heat wave with temperatures climbing up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal from mid-July.

In March 2022, temperatures in some parts of the continent reached up to 70 degrees above normal, the most extreme temperature departures ever recorded in this part of the planet.

As fossil fuel pollution continues to heat up the world, Antarctica will keep on warming and this greening is only likely to accelerate, the scientists predict.

The more the peninsula greens, the more soil will form and the more likely the region will become more favorable for invasive species, potentially threatening native wildlife.

“Seeds, spores and plant fragments can readily find their way to the Antarctic Peninsula on the boots or equipment of tourists and researchers, or via more ‘traditional’ routes associated with migrating birds and the wind – and so the risk here is clear,” he said.

Antarctica's Ardley Island, which is around a mile long and home to a number number of penguin colonies.

Dan Charman

Vegetation growing on the rocky landscape at Norsel Point in Antarctica.

Dan Charman

The greening could also reduce the peninsula’s ability to reflect solar radiation back into space, because darker surfaces absorb more heat.

These impacts would likely only be local, but could help further accelerate the growth of plant life as the climate continues to warm, said one of the authors, Olly Bartlett, a senior lecturer in remote sensing and geography at the University of Hertfordshire.

“This iconic landscape could be changed forever,” he said.

Matthew Davey, associate professor of physiological ecology at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, and an expert on polar plant and microbe ecology, told CNN the study was “an important progression” for understanding plant life on Antarctica.

There could even be more vegetation than identified, said Davey, who was not involved in the research. The methods used by the scientists would mainly detect larger, greener moss fields, he said. “But we know that there are also large areas of lichens, grass and green and red snow algae that will also contribute to the vegetation area in Antarctica.”

While the actual area increase of plant life is small, he added, the percentage rise is dramatic and it shows “the trend that vegetation is spreading, albeit slowly, in Antarctica.”

The next stage for the scientists will be to study how plants colonize recently exposed bare land as Antarctica’s glaciers retreat further.

CNN meteorologist Mary Gilbert contributed to this report.

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Monday, 7 October

• Who: Blue Origin
• What: New Shepard
• When: 13:00 UTC
• Where: Texas, United States
• Why: Blue Origin will launch its New Shepard suborbital rocket as part of an uncrewed mission. This is a little bit unusual before New Shepard launches are known for their crewed launches to the edge of space for paying customers. It will fly with tech upgrades to improve the vehicle's performance and reusability.

Some of the 12 payloads include new nav systems for New Shepard and New Glenn, LIDAR sensors for the Lunar Permanence program, and ultra-wide proximity operations sensors as part of NASA's TechFlights grant. The mission is NS-27.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 14:52 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch the European Space Agency's Hera mission to asteroid 65803 Didymos to observe the aftermath of NASA's DART mission on Dimorphos, the other asteroid in the binary system. The Hera mission will demonstrate several new technologies, such as autonomous navigation around the asteroid. Two CubeSats will join the mission as secondary payloads called Milani and Juventas. Juventas will perform a radar probe of the asteroid, while Milani will perform a multispectral mineral survey on the asteroid's makeup.

Wednesday, 9 October

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 06:03 - 06:43 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch 20 Gen 1 satellites for OneWeb. These will fly in a near-polar orbit at an altitude of 500 km after launch and then raise themselves to an operational orbit of 1,200 km. Similar to Starlink, these OneWeb satellites will beam internet connectivity to Earth for customers.

Thursday, 10 October

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 05:52 - 09:52 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch 22 of its Starlink satellites, which it uses to beam internet down to customers on Earth. This batch is known as Starlink Group 10-10, and you'll be able to locate them after launch on apps like ISS Detector using this identifier. The first stage of the rocket will likely land after launch.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon Heavy
• When: 16:31 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the Europa Clipper mission for NASA. The Europa Clipper space probe will study Jupiter's moon, Europa, by doing flybys while in Jupiter's orbit. It will carry nine science instruments and use them to study Europa's icy surface and its subsurface ocean to see whether the moon can support life. Europa Clipper is NASA's biggest-ever planetary exploration spacecraft with a span of 30 meters when its solar arrays are extended. The spacecraft will do a flyby gravity assist of Mars with its closest approach in February 2025. It will then use the Earth to get a gravity assist in December 2026, and then it will enter Jupiter orbit on April 11, 2030, with 45 orbits planned.

Recap

• The only launch we got last week was United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket. It flew on its second certification (Cert-2) mission, carrying an inert payload and experiments and demonstrations associated with future Centaur V technologies.

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

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

A little bit of alcohol was once thought to be good for you. However, as scientific research advances, we’re gaining a clearer picture of alcohol’s effect on health—especially regarding cancer.

The complex relationship between alcohol and cancer was recently highlighted in a new report from the American Association for Cancer Research. The report’s findings are eye-opening.

The authors of the report estimate that 40 percent of all cancer cases are associated with “modifiable risk factors”—in other words, things we can change ourselves. Alcohol consumption being prominent among them.

Six types of cancer are linked to alcohol consumption: head and neck cancers, esophageal cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and stomach cancer.

The statistics are sobering. In 2019, more than one in 20 cancer diagnoses in the West were attributed to alcohol consumption, and this is increasing with time. This figure challenges the widespread perception of alcohol as a harmless social lubricant and builds on several well-conducted studies linking alcohol consumption to cancer risk.

But this isn’t just about the present—it’s also about the future. The report highlights a concerning trend: rising rates of certain cancers among younger adults. It’s a plot twist that researchers like me are still trying to understand, but alcohol consumption is emerging as a potential frontrunner in the list of causes.

Of particular concern is the rising incidence of early-onset colorectal cancer among adults under 50. The report notes a 1.9 percent annual increase between 2011 and 2019.

While the exact causes of this trend are still being investigated, research consistently shows a link between frequent and regular drinking in early and mid-adulthood and a higher risk of colon and rectal cancers later in life. But it’s also important to realize this story isn’t a tragedy.

It’s more of a cautionary tale with the potential for a hopeful ending. Unlike many risk factors for cancer, alcohol consumption is one we can control. Reducing or eliminating alcohol intake can lower the risk, offering a form of empowerment in the face of an often unpredictable disease.

The relationship between alcohol and cancer risk generally follows a dose-response pattern, meaning simply that higher levels of consumption are associated with greater risk. Even light to moderate drinking has been linked to increased risk for some cancers, particularly breast cancer.

Yet it’s crucial to remember that while alcohol increases cancer risk, it doesn’t mean everyone who drinks will develop cancer. Many factors contribute to cancer development.

Damages DNA

The story doesn’t end with these numbers. It extends to the very cells of our bodies, where alcohol’s journey begins. When we drink, our bodies break down alcohol into acetaldehyde, a substance that can damage our DNA, the blueprint of our cells. This means that alcohol can potentially rewrite our DNA and create changes called mutations, which in turn can cause cancer.

The tale grows more complex when we consider the various ways alcohol interacts with our bodies. It can impair nutrient and vitamin absorption, alter hormone levels, and even make it easier for harmful chemicals to penetrate cells in the mouth and throat. It can affect the bacteria in our guts, the so-called microbiome, that we live with and is important for our health and well-being.

Alcohol consumption is also linked to other aspects of our own health and lifestyle and it’s important not just to consider this alone. Tobacco use and smoking, for instance, can significantly amplify the cancer risks associated with alcohol. Genetic factors play a role too, with certain variations affecting how our bodies metabolize (break down) alcohol.

Physical inactivity and obesity, often associated with heavy drinking, also separately increase cancer risks but on top of alcohol makes this much worse. Despite this, misconceptions persist. The type of alcoholic beverage, be it beer, wine, or spirits, doesn’t significantly alter the cancer risk. It’s the ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) itself that’s carcinogenic (cancer-causing).

And while some studies have suggested that red wine might have protective effects against certain diseases, there’s no clear evidence that it helps prevent cancer.

The potential risks of alcohol consumption probably outweigh any potential benefits. The takeaway is not that we should never enjoy a glass of wine or a beer with friends. Rather, it’s about being aware of the potential risks and making choices that align with our health goals. It’s about moderation, mindfulness, and informed decisionmaking.

Alcohol has lots of effects not just in terms of causing cancer. A recent large study of more than 135,000 older drinkers in the UK has shown that the more people drink, the higher the risk of death from any cause.

These and similar findings underscore the importance of public awareness and education about the potential risks associated with alcohol consumption. As our understanding of the alcohol-cancer link grows, it becomes increasingly clear that what many consider a harmless indulgence may have more significant health implications than previously thought.

Unfortunately, not many people appear to be aware of these risks. In the US, around half of people don’t know that alcohol increases the risk of cancer. Clearly, a lot of work needs to be done to overcome this lack of awareness.

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This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some 50 miles southwest of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, and strategically located close to a cluster of the island’s top universities, the 3,500-acre Hsinchu Science Park is globally celebrated as the incubator of Taiwan’s most successful technology companies. It opened in 1980, the government having acquired the land and cleared the rice fields,with the aim of creating a technology hub that would combine advanced research and industrial production.

Today Taiwan’s science parks house more than 1,100 companies, employ 321,000 people, and generate $127 billion in annual revenue. Along the way, Hsinchu Science Park’s Industrial Technology Research Institute has given birth to startups that have grown into world leaders. One of them, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), produces at least 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips. Collectively, Taiwan’s companies hold a 68 percent market share of all global chip production.

It is a spectacular success. But it has also created a problem that could threaten the future prosperity of both the sector and the island. As the age of energy-hungry artificial intelligence dawns, Taiwan is facing a multifaceted energy crisis: It depends heavily on imported fossil fuels, it has ambitious clean energy targets that it is failing to meet, and it can barely keep up with current demand. Addressing this problem, government critics say, is growing increasingly urgent.

Taiwan’s more than 23 million people consume nearly as much energy per capita as US consumers, but the lion’s share of that consumption—56 percent—goes to Taiwan’s industrial sector for companies like TSMC. In fact, TSMC alone uses around 9 percent of Taiwan’s electricity. One estimate by Greenpeace has suggested that by 2030 Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry will consume twice as much electricity as did the whole of New Zealand in 2021. The bulk of that enormous energy demand, about 82 percent, the report suggests, will come from TSMC.

Taiwan’s government is banking on the continuing success of its technology sector and wants the island to be a leader in AI. But just one small data center, the Vantage 16-megawatt data center in Taipei, is expected to require as much energy as some 13,000 households. Nicholas Chen, a lawyer who analyzes Taiwan’s climate and energy policies, warns that the collision of Taiwan’s commitments to the clean energy transition and its position in global supply chains as a key partner of multinational companies that have made commitments to net-zero deadlines—along with the explosive growth in demand—has all the makings of a crisis.

“In order to plan and operate AI data centers, an adequate supply of stable, zero-carbon energy is a precondition,” he said. “AI data centers cannot exist without sufficient green energy. Taiwan is the only government talking about AI data center rollout without regard to the lack of green energy.”

It is not just a case of building more capacity. Taiwan’s energy dilemma is a combination of national security, climate, and political challenges. The island depends on imported fossil fuel for around 90 percent of its energy and lives under the growing threat of blockade, quarantine, or invasion from China. In addition, for political reasons, the government has pledged to close its nuclear sector by 2025.

Taiwan regularly attends UN climate meetings, though never as a participant. Excluded at China’s insistence from membership in the United Nations, Taiwan asserts its presence on the margins, convening side events and adopting the Paris Agreement targets of peak emissions before 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050. Its major companies, TSMC included, have signed up to RE100, a corporate renewable-energy initiative, and pledged to achieve net-zero production. But right now, there is a wide gap between aspiration and performance.

Angelica Oung, a journalist and founder of the Clean Energy Transition Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for a rapid energy transition, has studied Taiwan’s energy sector for years. When we met in a restaurant in Taipei, she cheerfully ordered an implausibly large number of dishes that crowded onto the small table as we talked. Oung described two major blackouts—one in 2021 that affected TSMC and 6.2 million households for five hours, and one in 2022 that affected 5.5 million households. It is a sign, she says, of an energy system running perilously close to the edge.

Nicholas Chen argues that government is failing to keep up even with existing demand. “In the past eight years there have been four major power outages,” he said, and “brownouts are commonplace.”

The operating margin on the grid—the buffer between supply and demand—ought to be 25 percent in a secure system. In Taiwan, Oung explained, there have been several occasions this year when the margin was down to 5 percent. “It shows that the system is fragile,” she said.

Taiwan’s current energy mix illustrates the scale of the challenge: Last year, Taiwan’s power sector was 83 percent dependent on fossil fuel: Coal accounted for around 42 percent of generation, natural gas 40 percent, and oil 1 percent. Nuclear supplied 6 percent, and solar, wind, hydro, and biomass together nearly 10 percent, according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Taiwan’s fossil fuels are imported by sea, which leaves the island at the mercy both of international price fluctuations and potential blockade by China. The government has sought to shield consumers from rising global prices, but that has resulted in growing debt for the Taiwan Electric Power Company (Taipower), the national provider. In the event of a naval blockade by China, Taiwan could count on about six weeks reserves of coal but not much more than a week of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Given that LNG supplies more than a third of electricity generation, the impact would be severe.

The government has announced ambitious energy targets. The 2050 net-zero road map released by Taiwan’s National Development Council in 2022 promised to shut down its nuclear sector by 2025. By the same year, the share of coal would have to come down to 30 percent, gas would have to rise to 50 percent, and renewables would have to leap to 20 percent. None of those targets is on track.

Progress on renewables has been slow for a number of reasons, according to Oung. “The problem with solar in Taiwan is that we don’t have a big area. We have the same population as Australia and use the same amount of electricity, but we are only half the size of Tasmania, and 79 percent of Taiwan is mountainous, so land acquisition is difficult.” Rooftop solar is expensive, and roof space is sometimes needed for other things, such as helicopter pads, public utilities, or water tanks.

According to Peter Kurz, a consultant to the technology sector and a long-term resident of Taiwan, there is one renewable resource that the nation has in abundance. “The Taiwan Strait has a huge wind resource,” he said. “It is the most wind power anywhere in the world available close to a population.”

Offshore wind is under development, but the government is criticized for imposing burdensome requirements to use Taiwanese products and workers that the country is not well equipped to meet. They reflect the government’s ambition to build a native industry at the same time as addressing its energy problem. But critics point out that Taiwan lacks the specialist industrial skills that producing turbines demands, and the requirements lead to higher costs and delays.

Despite the attraction of Taiwan’s west coast with its relatively shallow waters, there are other constraints, such as limited harbor space. There is also another concern that is unique to Taiwan’s geography: The west side of the island faces China, and there are continuing incursions into Taiwan’s territorial waters from China’s coast guard and navy vessels. Offshore wind turbines are within easy rocket and missile range from China, and undersea energy cables are highly vulnerable.

Government critics regard one current policy as needless self-harm: the pledge to shut down Taiwan’s remaining nuclear reactor by next year and achieve a “nuclear free homeland.” It is a pledge made by the current ruling party, the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), and as the deadline approaches, it is a policy increasingly being questioned. Taiwan’s civil nuclear program was started under the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT party with half an eye on developing a nuclear weapons program. Taiwan built its first experimental facility in the 1950s and opened its first power plant in 1978. The DPP came into existence in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster, and its decision to adopt a no-nuclear policy was reinforced by the Fukushima disaster in neighboring Japan in 2011.

“I think the DPP see nuclear energy as a symbol of authoritarianism,” said Oung, “so they oppose it.”

Of Taiwan’s six nuclear reactors, three are now shut down, two have not been brought online, and the one functioning unit is due to close next year. The shuttered reactors have not yet been decommissioned, possibly because, in addition to its other difficulties, Taiwan has run out of waste storage capacity: The fuel rods remain in place because there is nowhere else to put them. As some observers see it, politics have got in the way of common sense: In 2018, a majority opposed the nuclear shutdown in a referendum, but the government continues to insist that its policy will not change. Voters added to the confusion in 2021 when they opposed the completion of the two uncommissioned plants.

On the 13th floor of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taipei, the deputy director general of Taiwan’s energy administration, Stephen Wu, chose his words carefully. “There is a debate going on in our parliament,” he said, “because the public has demanded a reduction of nuclear power and also a reduction in carbon emissions. So there is some discussion about whether the [shuttered] nuclear plants will somehow function again when conditions are ready.”

Wu acknowledged that Taiwan was nudging against the limits of its current supply and that new entrants to Taiwan’s science and technology parks have to be carefully screened for their energy needs. But he took an optimistic view of Taiwan’s capacity to sustain AI development. “We assess energy consumption of companies to ensure the development of these companies complies with environmental protection,” he said. “In Singapore, data centers are highly efficient. We will learn from Singapore.”

Critics of the government’s energy policy are not reassured. Chen has an alarming message: If Taiwan does not radically accelerate its clean energy development, he warns, companies will be obliged to leave the island. They will seek zero-carbon operating environments to comply with the net-zero requirements of partners such as Amazon, Meta, and Google, and to avoid carbon-based trade barriers such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

“Wind and solar are not scalable sources of zero-carbon energy,” he said. “Nuclear energy is the only scalable, zero-carbon source of energy. But the current laws state that foreign investment in nuclear energy must be capped at 50 percent, with the remaining 50 percent owned by Taipower. Given that Taipower is broke, how could a private investor want to partner with them and invest in Taiwan?”

Chen argues that Taiwan should encourage private nuclear development and avoid the burdensome regulation that, he says, is hampering wind development.

For Kurz, Taiwan’s energy security dilemma requires an imaginative leap. “Cables [carrying offshore wind energy] are vulnerable but replaceable,” he says. “Centralized nuclear is vulnerable to other risks, such as earthquakes.” One solution, he believes, lies in small modular nuclear reactors that could even be moored offshore and linked with undersea cables. It is a solution that he believes the Taiwan’s ruling party might come around to.

There is a further security question to add to Taiwan’s complex challenges. The island’s circumstances are unique: It is a functioning democracy, a technological powerhouse, and a de facto independent country that China regards as a breakaway province to be recovered—if necessary, by force. The fact that its technology industry is essential for global production of everything from electric vehicles to ballistic missiles has counted as a security plus for Taiwan in its increasingly tense standoff with China. It is not in the interest of China or the United States to see semiconductor manufacturers damaged or destroyed. Such companies, in security jargon, are collectively labelled Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” a shield the government is keen to maintain. That the sector depends inescapably on Taiwan’s energy security renders the search for a solution all the more urgent.

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Back in 2017, NASA graphics indicated that New Horizons would be at the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt by

around 2020. That hasn't turned out to be true.

Credit: NASA

In the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the ice giant Neptune, lies a ring of comets and dwarf planets known as the Kuiper Belt. The closest of these objects are billions of kilometers away. There is, however, an outer limit to the Kuiper Belt. Right?

Until now, it was thought there was nothing beyond 48 AU (astronomical units) from the Sun, (one AU is slightly over 150 million km). It seemed there was little beyond that. That changed when NASA’s New Horizons team detected 11 new objects lurking from 60 to 80 AU. What was thought to be empty space turned out to be a gap between the first ring of Kuiper Belt objects and a new, second ring. Until now, it was thought that our Solar System is unusually small when compared to exosolar systems, but it evidently extends farther out than anyone imagined.

While these objects are only currently visible as pinpoints of light, and Fraser is allowing room for error until the spacecraft gets closer, what their existence could tell us about the Kuiper Belt and the possible origins of the Solar System is remarkable.

Living on the edge

The extreme distance of the new objects has put them in a class all their own. Whether they are similar to other Kuiper Belt objects in morphology and composition remains unknown since they are so faint. As New Horizons approaches them, observations are now simultaneously being made with its LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) telescope and the Subaru Telescope, which might reveal that they actually do not belong to a different class in terms of composition.

“The reason we’re using Subaru is its Hyper Suprime-Cam, which has a really wide field of vision,” New Horizons researcher Wesley Fraser, who led the study, told Ars Technica (the results are soon to be published in the Planetary Science Journal). “The camera can go deep and wide quickly, and we stare down the pipe of LORRI, looking down that trajectory to find anything nearby.”

These objects are near the edge of the heliosphere of the Solar System, where it transitions to interstellar space. The heliosphere is formed by the outflow of charged particles, or solar wind, that creates something of a bubble around our Solar System; combined with the Sun’s magnetic field, this protects us from outside cosmic radiation.

The new objects are located where the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field starts to break down. They might even be far enough for their orbits to occasionally take them beyond the heliosphere, where they will be pummeled by intense cosmic radiation from the interstellar medium. This, combined with their solar wind exposure, might affect their composition, making it different from that of closer Kuiper Belt objects.

Even though it is impossible to know what these objects are like up close for now, how can we think of them? Fraser has an idea.

“If I had to guess, they are probably red and dark and devoid of water ice on the surface, which is quite common in the Kuiper Belt,” he said. “I think these objects will look a lot like the dwarf planet Sedna, but it’s possible they will look even more unusual.”

Many Kuiper Belt objects are a deep reddish color as a result of their organic chemicals being exposed to cosmic radiation. This breaks the hydrogen bonds in those chemicals, releasing much of the hydrogen into space and leaving behind an amorphous organic sludge that keeps getting redder the longer it is irradiated.

Fraser also predicts these objects are lacking in surface water ice because more distant Kuiper Belt objects (though not nearly as far-flung as the newly discovered ones) have not shown signs of it in observations. While water ice is common in the Kuiper Belt, he thinks these objects are probably hiding water ice underneath their red exterior.

Emerging from the dark

Investigating objects like this could change views on the origins of the Solar System and how it compares to the exosolar systems we have observed. Is our Solar System even normal?

Because the Kuiper Belt was thought to end at a distance of about 48 AU, the Solar System used to seem small compared to exosolar systems, where there are still objects floating around 150 AU from their star. The detection of objects at up to 80 AU from the Sun has put the Solar System in more of a normal range. It also seems to suggest that, since it is larger than we thought, that it also formed in a larger nebula.

“The timeline for Solar System formation is what we have to work out, and looking at the Kuiper Belt sets the stage for that very earliest moment, when gas and dust start to coalesce into macroscopic objects,” said New Horizons researcher Marc Buie. Buie discovered the object Arrokoth and led another study recently published in The Planetary Science Journal.

Arrokoth itself altered ideas about planet formation since its two lobes appear to have gently stuck together instead of crashing into each other in a violent collision, as some of our ideas had assumed. Nothing like it has ever been observed before or since.

Dust to dust

There is another potential thing that the New Horizons team is watching out for, and that is whether the new objects are binary.

About 10 to 15 percent of all known Kuiper Belt objects orbit partners in binary systems, and Fraser thinks binarity can reveal many things about the formation of planetesimals, solid objects that form in a young star system through gentle mergers with other objects that cause them to stick together. Some of these objects can become gravitationally bound to each other and form binaries.

As New Horizons travels farther, its dust counter, which sends back information about the velocity and mass of dust that hits it, shows that the amount of dust in its surroundings has not gone down. This dust comes from objects running into each other.

“It’s been finding that, as we go farther and farther out, the Solar System is getting dustier and dustier, which is exactly the opposite of what is expected at that distance,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern told Ars Technica. "There might be a massive population of bodies colliding out there.”

NASA had previously decided that it was unlikely New Horizons would be able to pull off another Kuiper Belt object flyby like it did with Arrokoth, so the mission’s focus shifted to the heliosphere. Now that the New Horizons team has found unexpected objects this distant with the help of the Subaru Telescope, and dust keeps being detected as the spacecraft travels farther out, there might be an opportunity for another flyby. Stern is still cautious about the chances of that.

“We’re going to see how they compare to closer Kuiper Belt objects, but if we can find one we can get close to, we’ll get a chance to really compare their geology and their mode of origin,” Stern said. “But that’s a longshot because we’re running on a tenth of a tank of gas.”

The advantage of using Subaru combined with LORRI is that LORRI can be pointed sideways to see objects, or at least slightly past them, at right angles. This will be the dream team of telescopes if New Horizons can approach at least one of the new objects. If an object is behind the spacecraft, combining observations from different angles gives information about the physical surface of an object.

Using the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could yield even more surprising observations in the future. It has a smaller mirror and a very wide field of view, Stern likens it to space binoculars, and it only has to be pointed at a target region once or twice (in comparison to hundreds of times for the James Webb Space Telescope) to search for and possibly discover objects in an extremely vast expanse of sky. Most other telescopes would have to be pointed thousands of times to do that.

“The desperate hope for all of us is that we will find more flyby targets,” Buie said. “If we could just get an object to register as a couple of pixels on LORRI, that would be incredible.”

Just a note to you on some stuff that’s going on in the background here. About a year ago, NASA decided that another KBO flyby was really unlikely, so they switched the mission focus to heliophysics (i.e., the edge of the heliosphere). Stern tried to fight that, and he has really looked to keep the focus on KBOs, which NASA now considers a “if we find one it can image, it will” situation. So I think a lot of his phrasing is in keeping with what he wants—more flybys. But it’s our job to give an accurate picture, which is that this event is unlikely.

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To make the perfect scoop of ice cream, you first need a dairy base—its natural proteins, fat, and sugar provide the rich, distinct mouthfeel. Heavy cream is added, further smoothing the texture. The introduction of sugar isn’t just for sweetness: like scattering salt on snow, it lowers the freezing point, minimizing ice formation. Flavoring can now be brought to the mix, from the quintessential (chocolate chips or vanilla pods) to the more daring (spices, salt, or booze).

This recipe takes you just under halfway to the ideal dollop. Next is the 0.5 percent of emulsifiers and stabilizers added to the liquid, helping the water content and fats stick together. The mix is homogenized, then cooled and aged for 24 hours at 5 degrees Celsius (40 Fahrenheit), for an even richer, smoother taste before it’s frozen.

Then comes the secret ingredient. “We sell air,” says Elsebeth Baungaard Andersen, product manager at Swedish multinational food packaging and processing company Tetra Pak. “Half the volume of your favorite tub of ice cream is air. But it’s those air bubbles and whipped texture that provide the special mouthfeel as it melts in your mouth, releasing the delicious flavor.”

At Tetra Pak’s Product Development Center in Aarhus, Denmark—a lab for the biggest and smallest ice-cream brands to test and taste their latest experiments—air is a precious, invisible commodity. During the freezing stage, in which the mix is cooled to -5 degrees Celsius (23 Fahrenheit) inside a rotating cylinder, the dasher’s scraper knives not only scoop out frozen batches of the good stuff, they also whip in air. Stabilized by fat globules and proteins, air bubbles create that soft, familiar, luxurious feel. “We have to be so precise with our dosing,” says Baungaard. “Ice cream is a science: Too much air and it’s frothy, too little air and it’s hard to scoop and eat.”

The exact dosage depends on the recipe: the lower the overrun—that is, the percentage by which the air increases the mixture’s volume—the more premium the product. An artisanal gelato has a denser texture—its overrun may be just 20 percent. Budget supermarket ice-cream may have an overrun even exceeding 100 percent.

This is just some of the complex chemistry involved in making the world’s favorite dessert. Tetra Pak may be more famous for its packaging, but it takes a sizable scoop of the estimated $113 billion ice cream industry: Each of its continuous freezers pumps out 4,000 liters every hour, typically for small producers looking to scale. Besides tubs, its production lines churn out 2 million ice-cream sticks every day. Major clients also use its Aarhus facility to trial new concepts. (“We’re in the Silicon Valley of ice cream,” says Andersen.)

Tetra Pak ice cream engineers have indeed innovated the industry: In the late 1980s, its technology meant ice cream could be extruded on a stick at a cooler temperature, meaning more air bubbles, creating a more premium taste. The product became the Magnum Classic. Today, collaborative robots (or cobots) ensure there’s no generous overfilling of portions on the factory floor—and that each scoop has an equal amount of sauce. Their human colleagues, meanwhile, test new prototypes via 3D printers.

A breakthrough in the ice cream industry, says Sampson Anankanbil, ingredients application specialist at Tetra Pak, has been the development of heat-shock-resistant ice cream, ideal for transporting tubs to distribution centers and beyond, particularly in hot climates. Stabilizing solutions create a cryogel, so when ice crystals melt, it mops up excess water—the ice cream melts more slowly, and the eating quality remains.

The next frontier is about creating a plant-based scoop that’s as good as its dairy counterpart. Lacking the same natural fat, texture, and richness of flavor, it’s the Holy Grail of ice cream. In the name of sustainability, Andersen and Anankanbil believe that “hybrid” ice cream, combining both proteins into a single product, is the future of the industry. Tetra Pak is exploring fava beans (also known as broad beans) as a potential solution. “We don’t want to compromise on indulgence,” says Anankanbil. “But we see that it has a very good profile, flavor, and clean taste compared to other vegan protein sources.”

While Tetra Pak has slowed the melting process, it has no interest in eliminating it altogether. That scoop of chocolate gelato in a cone—steadily dripping down your arm on your summer vacation—is going nowhere. “Ice cream is surprisingly complex,” says Anankanbil. “It has air, fat, and ice crystals in a frozen state, then all these ingredients come together in your mouth in an unfrozen state—melting is what releases the flavor.”

This article appears in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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Most of us don’t know how our food is made. We don’t know much about what our burger ate when it was part of a cow, where that cow lived, or how it died. Ditto for the wheat in our bread, or the leaves in our salad. The food system is mostly a black box to us.

This disconnection is why farm-to-table has been so successful—it seeks to reacquaint us with our food, and to consider the water, emissions, labor, and care that go into our meals.

Now, I’m all in favor of this, but there is one area where I wouldn’t mind hearing less about how our food is made: plant-based meats. I’m convinced we need plant-based alternatives to animal products, but I suspect alt-protein companies sometimes get a little too caught up in how these meats are made—Fiber-spinning! Air fermentation! Weird forms of extrusion!—and forget about the taste.

I get the focus on food nerdery. I am a WIRED journalist, after all. But when I hear the buzz of tech frenzy at food conferences I have just one question: Is it delicious?

This is why I was pretty nonplussed when someone offered to send me a bunch of 3D-printed meat from a company in Israel. Then again, I thought, plant-based meat has been in the doldrums recently. Maybe it did need a technological breakthrough to take it to the next level. Plus, 3D-printing a steak is kinda cool, and these testing kits were apparently “quite costly” and not available to the public yet. I asked the PR to send them over.

Plant-based meats need to be more than just buzz, says Arik Kaufman, CEO of Steakholder Foods, the Israeli company that sent me the 3D-printed meat. “You need to eat a product that is amazing,” he says. Stakeholder sent me a few different plant-based meats. There were 3D-printed whitefish filets, 3D-printed filet steak, and 3D-printed marbled steak. There were also burgers and fish kebabs, neither of which were 3D printed. In a clear sign that the future of food had arrived, the cuts were packaged in a medical freight box stuffed with dry ice that quickly filled my kitchen with fog.

Floppy Fish

The advantage of 3D-printing food is all about creating delicious structures, says Kaufman. His company has made two different printers: one that prints fish, and another that makes cuts of meat—both using a premixed blend of ingredients. The meat printer can produce around 500 kilos of plant-based meat an hour, with the fish printer coming in at 100 kilos an hour.

I cooked the whitefish filet as directed by the pamphlet inside the box: brushed with oil, then roasted for 10 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius (360 degrees Fahrenheit). The filet still looked a little pallid after 10 minutes, so I gave it a little longer until it had some color on top. I suspected searing the filet in a pan would have added a nicer crust, but feared it would not have the structural integrity to put up with that flipping. Then, as my filet disintegrated on the journey between baking tray and plate, my suspicions were confirmed. To the floppy filet I added a (vegan) lemon butter and caper sauce, sprinkled on some parsley, and served it with couscous.

Kaufman says that 3D printing the whitefish re-creates the flakey texture of a fish filet. That wasn’t my experience in eating it. When cooked, the fish had a thin outer layer that flaked away, but inside the filet had the texture of mousse, with just the slightest hint of fish flavor.

There was no resistance, no structure, no bite, just an undifferentiated mush. Later, I tried frying the fish in a nonstick pan, which yielded better results visually—I could see the structure at least—but not much improvement in terms of texture.

Measly Meat

Next up I tried a 3D-printed filet steak. I was sent two diminutive cuts, each weighing in at around 40 grams. Kauffman says that the combination of his 3D printers and the mixes of water, soy and pea protein, oil, and other ingredients used to print the steaks nets out as cost-competitive to other plant-based products. Although, the PR rep who sent me the steaks had said they were “quite costly,” which may explain the size. In any case, I fried them in a stainless steel pan until the thin steaks were browned on both sides, and served them with a chimichurri sauce, green beans, and potatoes.

The steak fell apart in vertical strips that at least resembled the columns of muscle fiber you’d see in its animal counterpart. And the crust on the outside suggested that Steakholder had nailed the Maillard reaction that gives browned meat that delicious, umami-sweet flavor. But on the inside, the steak was dry and strangely lacking in taste—like it had been made by someone who had seen a picture of a filet steak, but never experienced the thrill of eating one.

These 3D-printed meats were technically food, I’ll give them that. The filet steak even had a texture that was passably meaty (at least for the initial bite), but they had all the joy of licking a catering catalog. There was little in the way of depth, savoriness, or surprise. At best they were a passable platform for something that might impart real pleasure, but they didn’t suggest to me that 3D printing was any kind of breakthrough for plant-based meat.

This is all the more frustrating because other plant-based meats—probably made with much more tedious production methods—really do excite me. For all the drubbing Beyond Meat gets in the press, its burgers are delicious: They’re packed with fatty indulgence and the umami heft of a great burger, and they stay juicy once cooked. Juicy Marbles’ great hunks of plant-based beef hold their own in a salt beef bagel. The rashers from British plant-based brand This look nothing like bacon, but they add pops of salty deliciousness to a carbonara, or—as I will be doing this Christmas—pan fried with chestnuts and brussels sprouts.

I could go on, but in all of these cases, it’s not that these plant-based meats precisely mimic whatever cut they’re aiming at, but that they are packed with flavor in their own right. The danger when companies reduce plant-based-meats down to purely technological challenges is that they forget that food must first delight us. Only then can we come to appreciate how it is made.

A Rising Tide

Some in the alternative-protein industry fear that bad experiences with mediocre plant-based meats are putting people off the category altogether. Kaufman says that the opposite might also be true. “When a company comes and changes everything, then I think it takes the whole industry up,” he says. “That’s what we are trying to do.”

When I speak with Kaufmann I tell him I’m just about to try his marbled steak, which he describes as his company’s flagship product. The steak has lines of 3D-printed fat dotted throughout, giving it a distinctly pixel art vibe.

Wary of my experience with the filet steak, I pan-fried this one on a lower heat and with more oil, flipping the steak every 10 to 20 seconds as directed in the Steakholder pamphlet. In the pan, the steak browned nicely and left behind delicious remnants that I incorporated into a red wine sauce. Although the 3D-printed fat is a nice touch, during cooking it melted away, leaving some disconcerting gaps in the steak—rendering the finished product much less juicy than it was in the pan.

Just as with the filet steak, this marbled cut was texturally intriguing but utterly lacking in flavor. Once I passed the browned exterior, it was little more than a neutral vehicle for the sauce—no amount of seasoning seemed to bring out anything much in the way of flavor or interest.

Both of these steaks were functional enough, if that’s all you’re looking for in food. Maybe Steakholder is finding its market. The company has just signed an agreement to provide non-3D-printed, plant-based meats to an Israeli company that supplies hotels and the military, Kaufman says.

Perhaps the most damning moment, however, came when I also tried one of Steakholder’s non-3D-printed burgers and found it far superior to the 3D-printed cuts I was sent. Technologically speaking, it was in the Stone Age, but flavor-wise, it was a renaissance.

Toward the end of our call I asked Kaufman whether—with the plant-based industry on the rocks—the window to persuade meat eaters to swap their animal-based grub was narrowing. “The beauty of creating commodities is that people will always need to eat,” Kaufman says. “People will love to eat amazing products. They don’t like to eat shitty products.” Indeed.

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Welcome to Edition 7.14 of the Rocket Report! For readers who don't know, my second book was published last week. It's titled Reentry, and tells the story behind the story of SpaceX's development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. The early reviews are great, and it made USA Today's bestseller list this week. If you're interested in rockets, and since you're reading this newsletter we already know the answer to that, the book is probably up your alley.

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

Vega C cleared for next launch in November. Italian rocket firm Avio successfully tested a redesigned Zefiro-40 solid rocket motor for the second time on Thursday, the European Space Agency said. This second firing follows an initial firing test of the motor in May 2024 and concludes the qualification tests for the new engine nozzle design of the Zefiro-40. This rocket motor powers the second stage of the Vega C rocket.

Flight three almost ready ... The redesign of the motor was necessitated by the failure of a Vega C rocket in December 2022, which was just the second flight of the launch vehicle. Then, in June 2023, a test to re-certify the motor for flight also failed. Now that the second-stage issue appears to be resolved, Vega C is on the launch calendar for November of this year, although there's the possibility the third mission of the rocket could slip a bit further. The rocket will be carrying the Sentinel-1C satellite to Sun-synchronous orbit. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Impulse Space raises $150 million. Los Angeles-based space startup Impulse Space, which is led by renowned rocket scientist Tom Mueller, has raised $150 million in a new fundraising round led by venture capital firm Founders Fund, CNBC reports. Impulse is scaling a product line of orbital transfer vehicles, and so far is building two, the smaller Mira and the larger Helios. While rockets get satellites and payloads into orbit, like an airplane carrying passengers to a metro area, space tugs deliver them to specific destinations, like taxis taking those passengers home from the airport.

Taking the next step after launch ... Mueller, who founded Impulse Space three years ago, said the funds will fuel growth of the company. "This means that we’re sufficiently funded through the development of Helios and the upgraded version Mira and out past the first flights of both of these products," Mueller told the publication. Impulse flew its first mission, called LEO Express-1, with a Mira vehicle carrying and deploying a small satellite, last November. In Mueller’s view, while SpaceX reduced the cost to launch mass to orbit, the in-space delivery systems on the market are lacking. (submitted by Tom Nelson and Ken the Bin)

Polish company receives ESA support. Did you know there is a launch startup in Poland? Until this week, I confess I did not. However, that changed when the European Space Agency awarded 2.4 million euros to Poland’s SpaceForest for further development of its Perun rocket. SpaceForest has developed an 11.5-meter-tall sounding rocket capable of carrying payloads of up to 50 kilograms to an altitude of 150 kilometers, European Spaceflight reports.

Boosting up commercial companies ... To date, the company has completed two test flights, one reaching an altitude of 22 kilometers and another topping out at 13 kilometers. With the new funding from ESA, SpaceForest will implement upgrades to the combustion chamber of its in-house developed SF1000 paraffin-powered hybrid rocket engine. ESA awarded the funding as part of the agency’s Boost! initiative. Adopted by member states in 2019, Boost! aims to foster the development of new commercial space transportation services. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

A new take on a kinetic launch system. Longshot Space is developing a straight-line kinetic launch system that will gradually accelerate payloads to hypersonic speeds before launching them to orbit, TechCrunch reports. The startup is betting it can achieve very, very low costs to orbit compared to a rocket, possibly as low as $10 per kilogram. The company raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round in April 2023 and now, nearly 18 months later, Longshot closed a little over $5 million in combined venture capital and funding from the US Air Force’s TACFI program.

Pulling some serious Gs ... The new capital will be used to build a large, 500-meter-long gun in the Nevada desert to push 100-kilogram payloads to Mach 5. The system has to be so long in order to keep acceleration forces low, which is better for both the vehicle and payload. For eventual space missions, Longshot is aiming to keep the maximum gravitational forces to 500–600 times the force of gravity. The company's name serves a dual purpose, as its technology requires a longshot to reach space, and its prospects for success are probably a longshot. Nevertheless, it's great to see someone trying new ideas. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Falcon 9 rocket upper stage misfires. SpaceX is investigating a problem with the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage that caused it to reenter the atmosphere and fall into the sea outside of its intended disposal area after a launch last Saturday with a two-person crew heading to the International Space Station, Ars reports. The upper stage malfunction occurred after the Falcon 9 successfully deployed SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Hague and Gorbunov safely arrived at the space station Sunday to begin a five-month stay at the orbiting research complex.

Returning to flight shortly? ... Safety warnings issued to mariners and pilots before the launch indicated the Falcon 9's upper stage was supposed to fall somewhere in a narrow band stretching from southwest to northeast in the South Pacific east of New Zealand. Most of the rocket was expected to burn up during reentry, but SpaceX targeted a remote part of the ocean for disposal because some debris was likely to survive and reach the sea. This is the third time SpaceX has grounded the Falcon 9 rocket in less than three months, ending a remarkable run of flawless launches. A return to flight is expected as early as October 7 with the European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft.

New Zealand seeks to reduce rocket regulations. New Zealand plans to implement a new "red tape-cutting" strategy for space and aviation by the end of 2025, the New Zealand Herald reports. "We have committed to having a world-class regulatory environment by the end of 2025," Space Minister Judith Collins told the NZ Aerospace Summit recently. "To do that we're introducing a light-touch regulatory approach that will significantly free up innovators to test their technology and ideas."

Kiwis have a different attitude ... The goal of reducing regulations is to allow companies to focus more on innovation and less on paperwork. New Zealand officials are motivated by concerns that Australia may seek to lure some of its space and aviation industries. Among the space companies with a significant presence in New Zealand are Rocket Lab, Dawn Aerospace, as well as smaller firms such as Astrix Astronautics. The move comes as US-based firms such as SpaceX, Varda, and others are pushing the country's launch regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, to be more nimble.

H2A nears the end of the road. Japan launched the classified IGS-Radar 8 satellite early Thursday with the second-to-last H-2A rocket, Space News reports. Developed and operated by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the H-2A rocket debuted in 2001 and has flown 49 times with a single failure, suffered in 2003. It has been a reliable medium-lift launch vehicle for Japan's national space interests, as well as a handful of commercial space customers.

The rocket’s 50th launch will be its last ... The final H-2A core stage is now completed and is scheduled for shipment to the Tanegashima Space Center. That launch, expected in late 2024, will carry the Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle satellite. The H3 will succeed the H-2A. The new generation H3 had a troubled start, with its first flight in March 2023 suffering a second-stage engine failure. However, the new rocket has since flown successfully twice. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Russians can invest in SpaceX now? Da. One of the odder stories this week concerns a Russian broker apparently offering access to privately held shares of SpaceX. An article in the Russian newspaper Kommersant suggests that a Moscow-based financial services company, Finam Holdings, managed to purchase a number of shares from a large foreign investment fund. The article says the minimum investment for Russians interested in buying into SpaceX is $10,000.

On bonds and broomsticks ... Honestly, I have no idea about the legality of all this, but it sure smells funny. SpaceX, of course, periodically sells shares of the privately held company to investors. In addition, employees who receive shares in the company can sometimes sell their holdings. Given the existing sanctions on Russia due to the war on Ukraine and the potential for additional sanctions, it seems like these shareholders are definitely taking some risk.

ULA chief "supremely confident" in Vulcan's second launch. The second flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, planned for Friday morning, has a primary goal of validating the launcher's reliability for delivering critical US military satellites to orbit. Tory Bruno, ULA's chief executive, told reporters Wednesday that he is "supremely confident" the Vulcan rocket will succeed in accomplishing that objective, Ars reports. “As I come up on Cert-2, I’m pretty darn confident I’m going to have a good day on Friday, knock on wood," Bruno said. "These are very powerful, complicated machines."

A lengthy manifest to fly ... The Vulcan launcher, a replacement for ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, is on contract to haul the majority of the US military's most expensive national security satellites into orbit over the next several years. If Friday's test flight goes well, ULA is on track to launch at least one—and perhaps two—operational missions for the Space Force by the end of this year. The Space Force has already booked 25 launches on ULA's Vulcan rocket for military payloads and spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. Including the launch Friday, ULA has 70 Vulcan rockets in its backlog, mostly for the Space Force, the NRO, and Amazon's Kuiper satellite broadband network.

NASA's mobile launcher is on the move. NASA's Exploration Ground Systems Program at Kennedy Space Center in Florida began moving the mobile launcher 1 from Launch Complex 39B along a 4.2-mile stretch back to the Vehicle Assembly Building this week. First motion of the mobile launcher, atop NASA’s crawler-transporter 2, occurred early on the morning of October 3, the space agency confirmed. Teams rolled the mobile launcher out to Kennedy’s Pad 39B in August 2023 for upgrades and a series of ground demonstration tests in preparation for the Artemis II mission.

Stacking operations when? ... After arriving outside the Vehicle Assembly Building later on Thursday, the launch tower will be moved into High Bay 3 on Friday. This is all in preparation for stacking the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission, which is nominally scheduled for September 2025 but may slip further. NASA has not publicly said when stacking operations will begin, and this depends on when the space agency makes a final decision on whether to fly the Orion spacecraft with its heat shield as-is or adopt a different plan. Stacking will take several months.

Next three launches

Oct. 4: Vulcan | Cert-2 mission | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10:00 UTC

Oct. 7: Falcon 9 | Hera | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 14:52 UTC

Oct. 9: Falcon 9 | OneWeb-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06:03 UTC

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We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of years. Various ant species cooperate with fungi, creating a home for them, providing them with nutrients, and harvesting them as food. This reaches the peak of sophistication in the leafcutter ants, which cut foliage and return it to feed their fungi, which in turn form specialized growths that are harvested for food. But other ant species cooperate with fungi—in some cases strains of fungus that are also found growing in their environment.

Genetic studies have shown that these symbiotic relationships are highly specific—a given ant species will often cooperate with just a single strain of fungus. A number of genes that appear to have evolved rapidly in response to strains of fungi take part in this cooperative relationship. But it has been less clear how the cooperation originally came about, partly because we don't have a good picture of what the undomesticated relatives of these fungi look like.

Now, a large international team of researchers has done a study that traces the relationships among a large collection of both fungi and ants, providing a clearer picture of how this form of agriculture evolved. And the history this study reveals suggests that the cooperation between ants and their crops began after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs, when little beyond fungi could thrive.

Tracing the farmers

One of the key features of this work is its exhaustiveness; it obtained DNA from 475 species of fungus and 276 species of ants. These include both the agricultural species and their close relatives who don't engage in this practice. In addition, the researchers studied over 2,000 genes from each of these species in order to estimate which species were most closely related to each other, and when these species split off from a common ancestor.

The use of that many genes is critical since some of these genes will likely have evolved rapidly in response to the altered conditions created by the adoption of agriculture. These genes likely have more mutations than would be expected based on the time between the present and when the species split off, making the split appear older than it actually is. By surveying a large number of genes, the effect of any outliers like this is much less likely to distort the analysis.

The researchers break the analysis down according to the kind of farming practiced by each ant species. Some of them farm yeast, others farm a group of species called coral fungi, and others engage in a more sophisticated form of agriculture involving fungi that are more adapted to this lifestyle. Leafcutter ants fall into this latter category. And, with a single exception (a group of leafcutters that aren't especially related to any of the rest), all of these groups cluster tightly together. All of these are embedded within a large group that opportunistically cooperates with fungi but don't specialize in growing a single species.

Both yeast and coral fungus farmers are closely related to each other, and each derives from a single ancestral species. The most sophisticated farming species also cluster together. Leafcutter species are interspersed with these (aside from that one exception).

On the fungus side, similar things were true. The yeast species that are farmed all cluster together. Same with the coral fungi, although there are two wild-living strains within that species cluster. The strains that are most adapted to farming form their own cluster, though they're all closely related to the yeast strains, with only a single wild-living strain separating them. Finally, all the species grown by leaf cutters are in a single cluster within this group.

Timing is everything

Tracing the lineages of agricultural ants to their most recent common ancestor revealed that the ancestor probably lived through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction—the one that killed off the dinosaurs. The researchers argue that the two were almost certainly related. Current models suggest that there was so much dust in the atmosphere after the impact that set off the mass extinction that photosynthesis shut down for nearly two years, meaning minimal plant life. By contrast, the huge amount of dead material would allow fungi to flourish. So, it's not surprising that ants started to adapt to use what was available to them.

That explains the huge cluster of species that cooperate with fungi. However, most of the species that engage in organized farming don't appear until roughly 35 million years after the mass extinction, at the end of the Eocene (that's about 33 million years before the present period). The researchers suggest that the climate changes that accompanied the transition to the Oligocene included a drying out of the tropical Americas, where the fungus-farming ants had evolved. This would cut down on the availability of fungi in the wild, potentially selecting for the ability of species that could propagate fungal species on their own.

This also corresponds to the origins of the yeast strains used by farming ants, as well as the most specialized agricultural fungal species. But it doesn't account for the origin of coral fungus farmers, which seems to have occurred roughly 10 million years later.

The work gives us a much clearer picture of the origin of agriculture in ants and some reasonable hypotheses regarding the selective pressures that might have led to its evolution. In the long term, however, the biggest advance here may be the resources generated during this study. Ultimately, we'd like to understand the genetic basis for the changes in the ants' behavior, as well as how the fungi have adapted to better provide for their farmers. To do that, we'll need to compare the genomes of agricultural species with their free-living relatives. The DNA gathered for this study will ultimately be needed to pursue those questions.

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adn7179  (About DOIs).

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Unsettling news emerged from Missouri in late September. Six health care workers in the state developed mild respiratory symptoms after caring for a somewhat high-profile patient—the first person to have caught bird flu despite having no known contact with infected animals. The fear was that the virus could be spreading from person to person.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasize that so far only the original patient has tested positive for bird flu, however; one of the workers has tested negative for the virus, while the others were not tested and have provided blood samples for further analysis.

This kind of bird flu is caused by the H5N1 virus, one of many subtypes of influenza A, the most common type of flu virus known to infect people. H5N1 has circulated in birds and some other animal populations for years but has only occasionally caused small outbreaks in humans. The concern is that this could change. H5N1 is constantly evolving and might be getting better at transmitting between humans. Since the vast majority of people have no immunity to this particular flu virus, some worry that it could cause the next pandemic.

“So far, it doesn’t seem like it’s widespread in humans,” says Gabrielle Scher, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “On the chance that [that changes], we need to be ready.”

Scher and her colleagues are working on messenger RNA vaccines for bird flu. A revelation during the Covid-19 pandemic, mRNA jabs can be manufactured very quickly, which is useful in a pandemic scenario. They work by depositing short pieces of RNA—molecules that carry genetic information—into your body. These snippets of genetic code prompt your immune system to replicate—for example—part of a virus encoded by that mRNA and then learn how to fight it off. With the Covid vaccines, those instructions targeted a key part of the coronavirus’ outer structure, the spike protein.

Scher has seen for herself what happens when an mRNA bird flu vaccine is put to work. She has watched a lab instrument detect tiny amounts of fluorescence as antibodies in blood from vaccinated mice bind to H5N1 proteins—like tiny countermeasures neutralizing an incoming missile. She and her colleagues published the results of their work on an H5N1 vaccine tested in animals earlier this year and are now working toward human trials.

Scientists have been developing mRNA influenza vaccines since before the pandemic. Drug companies such as Moderna, Pfizer, and GSK are working on mRNA jabs that would target various different flu strains responsible for regular seasonal outbreaks; all three are also separately developing bird flu vaccines.

But clinical trials have yielded some mixed results. Last year, Moderna reported that a trial of one of its mRNA flu vaccines showed good results against strains of influenza A but insufficient efficacy against strains of influenza B, the second most common type of flu. Pfizer has had similar problems, according to brief reports about one of its mRNA flu vaccines that emerged in August; a spokesperson says the company is analyzing the full data from the study. GSK has also grappled with efficacy against influenza B but last month reported improved success of its mRNA flu candidate against B strains, following adjustments.

It isn’t necessarily obvious what part of a flu virus any potential mRNA vaccine should aim for. “You need to make sure you’re targeting the right part of the virus,” says Scher. With Covid-19, the prominent spike protein fit the bill. But influenza viruses are arguably more complicated and mutate more quickly, meaning that if you pick the wrong protein, your jab could prove less effective than hoped. The flip side, Scher suggests, is that mRNA vaccines could make it possible to target multiple proteins or parts of proteins on the same virus—a multipronged strategy.

And while they’re tricky to develop, the speed with which mRNA vaccines can be produced could be hugely beneficial. Traditionally, flu vaccines contain inactivated viruses that are grown in hens’ eggs. This works reasonably well, but it takes a long time to make such jabs, which means health authorities have to publish their predictions about which strains of flu will be circulating during the upcoming winter well in advance. If you could manufacture vaccines more quickly, you could make more accurate predictions nearer to flu season.

Not only that, researchers hope that a single mRNA shot could one day target 20 or more strains of flu at once, relieving the need for some of this guesswork. Scher’s colleagues are working on such a “universal” flu vaccine.

With clinical trials ongoing, it’s still early days. Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist at the University of Manchester, has watched reports about emerging mRNA flu jabs with interest but says that questions remain. “We don’t yet know how long-lasting the immunity they produce is,” she says.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, concurs, though he notes that all flu jabs, regardless of how they are made, have a waning immunity problem—your protection could decline by around 10 percent every month following injection.

A concern specific to mRNA vaccines is that they tend to cost more than traditional flu vaccines and must be kept refrigerated, which may make them difficult to roll out in areas with poor infrastructure. Researchers are also concerned that they may meet with more vaccine hesitancy. “The mRNA vaccine platform, per se, is probably the one that seems to get the most misinformation,” notes Cruickshank. “That could be a disadvantage.”

A new wave of mRNA flu vaccines could be particularly impactful for older patients, says Jenna Bartley, an assistant professor at UConn Health, a health research center and hospital. Older people are among the most at risk from flu, but current vaccines are less effective in higher age groups, as their immune response tends to be weaker. mRNA Covid-19 jabs, however, have proven effective in older people as well as younger people.

It may be some time before mRNA jabs are available for seasonal flu. However, if H5N1 starts infecting a lot more people, and especially if we find that it is transmitting frequently between humans, there’s a chance that an mRNA bird flu vaccine could be the first such jab rolled out on a wide scale. US health officials have said that an mRNA H5N1 vaccine could be made available within weeks, if required.

Osterholm agrees that such a timeframe is realistic. The real challenge, he points out, would be getting any new H5N1 vaccine to the people who most need it. Covid-19 jabs emerged in wealthy countries and were delivered to people very quickly, he says, but “for much of the world, that wasn’t the case at all.”

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The next year is crucial for the future of NASA and its plans to extend human activity in low-Earth orbit. For the first time in decades, the US space agency faces the not-too-distant prospect of failing to have at least one crew member spinning around the planet.

Over the next several months, NASA will finalize a strategy for its operations in low-Earth orbit after 2030. Then, toward the end of next year, the space agency will award contracts to one or more private companies to develop small space stations for which NASA and other space agencies will become customers rather than operators.

But none of this is certain, and as NASA faces a transition from its long-established operations on the International Space Station to something new, there are many questions. Foremost among these is whether NASA really needs to continue having a presence on low-Earth orbit at all, especially as the space agency's focus turns toward the Moon with its Artemis Program.

Microgravity research remains essential

The answer to that question is definitively yes, said Pam Melroy, the deputy administrator of NASA, in an interview.

“It really is on us to tell our story as well as we can," she said. "I don’t think people realize the connection between low-Earth orbit to Artemis, and Moon to Mars, and future human exploration. I hope to help people understand better why it’s so important for us to push hard on this.”

In recent years, as NASA has been able to support a crew of four astronauts at a time on the space station, the space agency has started to maximize the scientific potential of the orbiting laboratory. This is not just for basic research in microgravity but for studying the long-term health impacts of humans in space.

"We are so not done with research in microgravity," Melroy said. "We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we kind of understand the risks of a one-year duration mission in space, but we’re going to have to keep pressing on that because we really have to get our arms around mitigations and solutions for what will likely be a two- or three-year trip to Mars."

That goes for life support as well, known in NASA jargon as ECLSS. On the space station, NASA has pushed water recycling and other critical technologies toward 95 or 97 percent efficiency. But for long-duration missions to Mars and elsewhere, these technologies need to be 100 percent or very, very close to it.

In August, the space agency published a draft version of its "Microgravity Strategy" that will formally establish its low-Earth orbit research and technology development goals in the 2030s and beyond and determine which capabilities it needs to complete them. After collecting feedback from the space community, Melroy said a final version of this document should be completed by the end of this year.

NASA's needs in low-Earth orbit will set the stage for the pivotal second phase of the space agency's commercial space station program.

Can anyone actually build a commercial space station?

Three years ago, NASA awarded contracts to three companies—Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman—valued at between $125 million and $160 million—to begin preliminary work on commercial space stations. A fourth firm, Axiom Space, had received $140 million a year earlier. But the road has not been easy for these companies as they embarked on NASA's CLD program, which stands for "Commercial LEO Destinations."

Some of the CLD bidders have already hit roadblocks. Axiom Space is facing significant financial headwinds and has repeatedly delayed its timelines for module launches. Northrop Grumman dropped out, essentially saying its business case could not close. Northrop later joined a team led by Voyager Space, which had acquired Nanoracks.

Much will depend on how NASA structures the "request for proposals" for the second phase of the CLD program, which is expected to be issued next year. The commercial companies want to see how much funding is on offer—and specifically what the space agency's requirements are. There are also likely to be new entrants, including Vast Space and SpaceX, and potentially other vendors. NASA would like to award two contracts to create competition, but this is not certain.

One problem for NASA is that none of these companies are sure bets. Axiom had been considered a favorite, but its funding challenges are pretty grim. Although it has met its contractual milestones, Blue Origin does not seem overly committed to the program, and it may be waiting to see how much money is available in the next phase of CLDs. Voyager Space has some good international partnerships, but the company is unproven. Vast Space is intriguing, but it's not clear that the company's station concept will meet NASA's requirements. And SpaceX, with its Starship vehicle, is a wildcard. However, sources indicate the CLD program is not a priority for SpaceX, which already has so much else on its plate with Starship.

For NASA's part, Melroy acknowledged that the space agency is asking a lot of commercial providers. She said it's likely that NASA will ask for basic operations in 2030 before seeking a broader array of services from private space stations later on.

“One of the things we realize is that this might take longer to get to the ultimate destination," Melroy said. "Maybe we’ll get a minimum viable product by 2030, but all of our requirements or desires will probably take some time. We could take a phased approach."

Does NASA really care about this?

One way to assess NASA's prioritization of CLDs, and the support for the program in Congress, is to look at budgets requested by the White House and funding allocated by Congress. This is what the program has asked for and received since its inception in fiscal year 2019, according to data from The Planetary Society:

• FY 2019: $150 million requested, $40 million allocated
• FY 2020: $150 million requested, $15 million allocated
• FY 2021: $150 million requested, $18.1 million allocated
• FY 2022: $101 million requested, $102.1 million allocated
• FY 2023: $224 million requested, $224.3 million allocated
• FY 2024: $228.4 million requested, $228.4 million allocated
• FY 2025: $169.6 million requested
• FY 2026: $403.4 million requested

For the first three years, the program was virtually unfunded. "Initially, Congress almost treated the program as a joke," said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. However, in recent years, as it has sunk in that the International Space Station really is likely to reach its end of life in 2030, Congress has become more amenable to funding the program.

But it remains to be seen, Dreier said, whether NASA is truly committed. The space agency has repeatedly stated that it wants to maintain a presence in low-Earth orbit, but it has yet to fully make the case for why that is necessary. (This is one reason for the work on the Microgravity Strategy discussed above). Geopolitics plays a major role, of course. If the United States were to deorbit the International Space Station in 2030, it would be "grounded," whereas China would still be flying a fairly large orbiting space station. US space agency officials are understandably sensitive to being perceived to be falling behind China.

Nevertheless, Dreier said, NASA appears to be treating the CLD program as more of an experiment than fully committing to the strategy. Commercial space stations will likely require billions in funding and a commitment from NASA to be an anchor customer for years. NASA has not been acting that way in its budget requests so far.

“It’s an experiment that’s been worth running, with only $650 million spent over the last five years on this,"  he said. "That's a single-year budget overrun on some projects. So it’s interesting to try it. But is there really a national priority to maintain a presence in low-Earth orbit? Because if it is, we’re not treating it that way."

Is a gap really that bad?

When you talk to knowledgeable people at NASA and within the commercial space industry, there is a general sense that we will be lucky to have a single commercial space station option by the end of 2030, when an uncrewed SpaceX Dragon vehicle is due to pilot the International Space Station into the Pacific Ocean.

Some people have suggested that NASA keep flying the space station longer, but there are issues with this. First, there is a problematic partnership with Russia, which is increasingly difficult to maintain as the war in Ukraine drags on. Additionally, by then, parts of the station will be more than 30 years old, and cracking problems may only worsen. There is also the budget. Flying, operating, and supporting the station costs NASA about $3 billion a year, and it likely could cut that by two-thirds with a private station alternative.

But perhaps most importantly, stalling on ending the International Space Station's life only further weakens the business case for private space station operators. Particularly for companies like Axiom and Voyager, uncertainty in the end of life for the station makes fundraising that much more difficult. Investors want to know that NASA really will need their private stations.

For all of these reasons, NASA will likely end the space station's life about six years from now. Is it the end of days if NASA goes without a low-Earth orbit space station for several months or even years? One key commercial space official at the space agency, Phil McAlister, suggested that maybe it wouldn't be.

"That would be bad, and I don't want a gap," McAlister said in November 2023. "But if the CLDs are not ready, we might have one. Personally, I don't think that would be the end of the world. It would not be unrecoverable, especially if it's relatively short-term. It might impact some research somewhat, but we could leverage Crew Dragon and Starliner to lessen the impact of a gap."

McAlister led the CLD program until this past summer, at which time he was moved within the agency to a senior advisory position. Needless to say, the acceptability of a gap is not NASA's official position.

If you build it, will they come?

There are other uncertainties hanging over the CLD program and its long-term viability. One is whether there really is any market demand beyond government astronauts. An influential report completed in 2017 found that the answer to that is "maybe not." The problem then, as now, is that there is no killer app that makes it profitable for humans to live and work in space.

"Venture capitalists whom we interviewed noted that the projections of revenues and costs are so uncertain that they would have no interest in financing a space station until projected revenues from these activities show signs of materializing," the report stated, highlighting this concern.

Eventually, NASA would like to transition from being an anchor customer to becoming one of many customers. But who would these other customers be? Certainly governments of some nations will want to send individuals to these stations for prestige purposes. There will probably be at least a trickle of space tourists. But no one is sure of the overall demand, where it will come from, and how much people will be willing to pay.

There is also a concern that automated manufacturing in low-Earth orbit might cannibalize some of the potential human activity in space. For example, Varda has already demonstrated the ability to do pharmaceutical research in orbit, with its first mission landing earlier this year after spending eight months in space. Varda and others are working to develop automated spacecraft that could do manufacturing and research work in microgravity for far less money than a worker on a private space station.

Then there is SpaceX, with Starship. Although the company may not be ready to bid for NASA's formal CLD program, if Starship begins flying regularly, it is not too difficult to see the potential for short-duration orbital flights for dozens of customers in the 2030s. This may offer a more appealing, lower-cost option for space tourists who might otherwise be interested in time on one of the private space stations.

Ultimately, if NASA decides it needs private space stations to succeed, it must commit to supporting the private companies. Space stations are big, difficult, and expensive problems. NASA isn't seeking another International Space Station, which took more than a decade and $100 billion to construct, but it needs safe and functional habitats. That won't come cheap, and the clock is ticking.

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The Exploring Jacket isn’t your regular anorak. Its color comes not from dyes, but from a pigment-producing bacteria called Streptomyces coelicolor. When applied directly to a fabric and left to incubate, the bacteria cells produce a compound in a spectrum ranging from reds and pinks to blues and purples—in eye-catching patterns that evoke the grain of polished marble.

This jacket is just one of the unusual products for sale on Normal Phenomena of Life (NPOL), an online platform launched in 2023 by Natsai Audrey Chieza, the founder of London-based R&D studio Faber Futures, and Christina Agapakis, the creative director of Boston-based biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks. Their goal? To harness the power of living organisms to develop materials and objects. This is biodesign.

“Nature has evolved over billions of years to assemble atoms in much smarter and more efficient ways than human beings have been able to achieve. And so, as we look to decarbonize and divest from fossil fuels, it turns out that nature has solutions that biotechnology is enabling us to leverage,” says Chieza, who has a degree in architecture but became fascinated by biodesign when pursuing a master’s degree in material futures at Central Saint Martins in London.

By tapping into naturally occurring living systems, many of the products in NPOL’s catalog have a lower carbon footprint than their everyday counterparts. For instance, the bacterial dye used to create the Exploring Jacket uses significantly less water than conventional plant-based dyes, as no farmland is needed.

NPOL’s latest product is the Gathering Lamp, which is made from bioconcrete. Grown at ambient temperatures using limestone-producing bacteria, bioconcrete has 95 percent fewer emissions than traditional cement—which is typically manufactured by burning limestone—and is three times as strong. Plus, the Gathering Lamp is designed to be easily repaired, upgraded, or recycled at the end of its useful life. “We’re looking at keeping materials in circulation. After all, we can’t be investing billions of dollars into building new biobased materials, only for them to end up in landfill,” Chieza explains.

NPOL also works with like-minded brands to help bring their products to market. “We’re trying to speed up how these technologies are created and deployed,” she says. Many biodesigned materials are difficult to scale as they have to be carefully engineered, which often translates into high price points. The Exploring Jacket retails at £4,000 (around $5,400), which Chieza says is already priced lower than it should be. “It’s really amazing when something happens in the lab, but the question is, do we have the infrastructure to match the scale-up journey?”

While plenty of thought and consideration underpins each NPOL product, this might not be immediately apparent to the consumer, Chieza says. “On one hand, that’s good because it means we’re meeting their expectations of what a product should be,” she says. “Of course, we want them to notice that our product is beautiful and amazing and different, but purchasing decisions are sometimes made around what feels familiar and dependable. It’s a very interesting balance we have to articulate.”

Nevertheless, Chieza hopes NPOL will inspire consumers—and crucially, brands—to embrace the potential of biodesign and explore how it can pave the way for a more sustainable future. “Ultimately, it’s about leveraging things at their source as opposed to having long supply chains to make redundant products that don’t bring meaning,” she says. “What comes out of this is hopefully beautiful products that people are going to learn from.”

This article appears in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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Officer Brendan Sullivan was hit with a fine for harassing a Brooklyn resident who had complained about illegally parked police cruisers.

New Yorkers have frequently complained about cruisers parked on the sidewalk, like

     this one at the 77th Precinct on Tuesday.Credit...Yuvraj Khanna for The New York Times

Officer Brendan Sullivan first used the breathy voice of a seductive woman.

Then he panted.

Then came the animal noises.

Paul Vogel, a 52-year-old Brooklyn man, was the recipient of the menagerie of voice mail messages. For years, he had been frustrated at police cruisers and Fire Department vehicles parked on the sidewalk and in crosswalks in his Prospect Heights neighborhood, which drove him to call the city’s 311 complaint line hundreds of times. Officer Sullivan retaliated, calling him and leaving voice mail messages for 10 months, according to city records.

On May 16, 2021, the officer used his department-issued phone and left a voice mail of dolphin noises, according to the records. Nine days later, he escalated the harassment, adding seal barks and the bleating of sheep.

The six messages that Officer Sullivan left between March 2, 2021, and Jan. 24, 2022, came to light after the city’s Department of Investigation began looking into retaliation by the police against people who had complained about illegal parking. Streetsblog, an online news organization,had been publishing stories about the allegations, including one that quoted Mr. Vogel.

Last month, Officer Sullivan agreed to pay the price: a $500 fine to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, which concluded in a disposition that Officer Sullivan had “sought to discourage a citizen from exercising his constitutional right about government action.” He also had to give up 60 days of annual leave, which is worth about $25,000 in pay.

Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/nyregion/nypd-officer-harassment-dolphin-noises.html

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Schubarth saw a financial opportunity if he could bring argali sheep to the US to produce larger animals for domestic hunters, but the sheep are listed in the US Endangered Species Act and the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Importing an argali would require CITES paperwork from the host country and Fish and Wildlife permission from the US government.

 

Schubarth ignored these rules and instead sent his son to Kyrgyzstan on a hunting trip in 2012. The son killed an argali and brought parts of it back in his luggage without declaring them, but they were unsuitable for cloning. So it was back to Kyrgyzstan in 2013, where the son killed another argali and again brought its body parts home without alerting US or Montana authorities.

 

This time, the argali material looked good, so Schubarth signed a "cell storage agreement" with an unnamed cloning firm in January 2013 and shipped the somatic cells off to storage. It took until 2015, perhaps for financial reasons, before Schubarth signed an "Ovine Cloning Contract" with the same firm, which required a $4,200 deposit.

 

In 2016, Schubarth received 165 cloned argali embryos at his Montana ranch, and in 2017, the first pure Marco Polo argali sheep was born to him. Schubarth named it "Montana Mountain King."

 

Soon, Schubarth was up to his eyeballs in sheep semen (metaphorically, though perhaps literally as well). He was harvesting semen from Montana Mountain King in order to inseminate local ewes. He was also shipping "straws" of semen to buyers in Texas. And he was letting ranchers from around the country haul their own sheep to Montana, where Schubarth inseminated them and sent them back home. The goal was to use Schubarth's "pure" argali to create even larger "hybrid" sheep for hunting.

 

All of this shipping required copious falsification of documents, making clear that Schubarth knew exactly how illegal his little operation was. He had even petitioned the state of Montana for special permission to keep argali sheep; when the state said no, Schubarth just did it anyway.

 

All of this cloning and impregnating finally came to the attention of the feds, who charged Schubarth in early 2024 with animal trafficking and conspiracy. He pled guilty and "exhibited remorse and has been compliant" ever since, said the government. He allowed officials onto his ranch to do genetic testing and to quarantine or remove animals as necessary, and Schubarth's beloved Montana Mountain King was confiscated. The government did end up killing some of the animals on the ranch, though it notes that "the meat from those animals has been donated to Montana families in need."

 

Yesterday, Schubarth was sentenced to six months in prison along with a $20,000 fine and a $4,000 payment to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

 

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On Monday, the UK will see the closure of its last operational coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which has been operating since 1968. The closure of the plant, which had a capacity of 2,000 megawatts, will bring an end to the history of the country's coal use, which started with the opening of the first coal-fired power station in 1882. Coal played a central part in the UK's power system in the interim, in some years providing over 90 percent of its total electricity.

 

But a number of factors combined to place coal in a long-term decline: the growth of natural gas-powered plants and renewables, pollution controls, carbon pricing, and a government goal to hit net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

From boom to bust

It's difficult to overstate the importance of coal to the UK grid. It was providing over 90 percent of the UK's electricity as recently as 1956. The total amount of power generated continued to climb well after that, reaching a peak of 212 terawatt hours of production by 1980. And the construction of new coal plants was under consideration as recently as the late 2000s. According to the organization Carbon Brief's excellent timeline of coal use in the UK, continuing the use of coal with carbon capture was given consideration.

 

But several factors slowed the use of fuel ahead of any climate goals set out by the UK, some of which have parallels to the US's situation. The European Union, which included the UK at the time, instituted new rules to address acid rain, which raised the cost of coal plants. In addition, the exploitation of oil and gas deposits in the North Sea provided access to an alternative fuel. Meanwhile, major gains in efficiency and the shift of some heavy industry overseas cut demand in the UK significantly.

 

Through their effect on coal use, these changes also lowered employment in coal mining. The mining sector has sometimes been a significant force in UK politics, but the decline of coal reduced the number of people employed in the sector, reducing its political influence.

 

These had all reduced the use of coal even before governments started taking any aggressive steps to limit climate change. But, by 2005, the EU implemented a carbon trading system that put a cost on emissions. By 2008, the UK government adopted national emissions targets, which have been maintained and strengthened since then by both Labour and Conservative governments up until Rishi Sunak, who was voted out of office before he had altered the UK's trajectory. What started as a pledge for a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 now requires the UK to hit net zero by that date.

 

These have included a floor on the price of carbon that ensures fossil-powered plants pay a cost for emissions that's significant enough to promote the transition to renewables, even if prices in the EU's carbon trading scheme are too low for that. And that transition has been rapid, with the total generations by renewables nearly tripling in the decade since 2013, heavily aided by the growth of offshore wind.

How to clean up the power sector

The trends were significant enough that, in 2015, the UK announced that it would target the end of coal in 2025, despite the fact that the first coal-free day on the grid wouldn't come until two years after. But two years after that landmark, however, the UK was seeing entire weeks where no coal-fired plants were active.

 

To limit the worst impacts of climate change, it will be critical for other countries to follow the UK's lead. So it's worthwhile to consider how a country that was committed to coal relatively recently could manage such a rapid transition. There are a few UK-specific factors that won't be possible to replicate everywhere. The first is that most of its coal infrastructure was quite old—Ratcliffe-on-Soar dates from the 1960s—and so it required replacement in any case. Part of the reason for its aging coal fleet was the local availability of relatively cheap natural gas, something that might not be true elsewhere, which put economic pressure on coal generation.

 

Another key factor is that the ever-shrinking number of people employed by coal power didn't exert significant pressure on government policies. Despite the existence of a vocal group of climate contrarians in the UK, the issue never became heavily politicized. Both Labour and Conservative governments maintained a fact-based approach to climate change and set policies accordingly. That's notably not the case in countries like the US and Australia.

 

But other factors are going to be applicable to a wide variety of countries. As the UK was moving away from coal, renewables became the cheapest way to generate power in much of the world. Coal is also the most polluting source of electrical power, providing ample reasons for regulation that have little to do with climate. Forcing coal users to pay even a fraction of its externalized costs on human health and the environment serve to make it even less economical compared to alternatives.

 

If these later factors can drive a move away from coal despite government inertia, then it can pay significant dividends in the fight to limit climate change. Inspired in part by the success in moving its grid off coal, the new Labour government in the UK has moved up its timeline for decarbonizing its power sector to 2030 (up from the previous Conservative government's target of 2035).

 

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The Southeastern United States is reeling from Hurricane Helene, a monstrous storm that made landfall in Florida on Thursday before cutting a terrifying path all the way up to Tennessee. How did it get this bad?

 

The storm has killed more than 100 people, and hundreds more are still missing. Power is out for millions of people. Residents around Asheville, North Carolina — one of the hardest-hit areas — are reportedly struggling to find food, water, and cellphone service. We don’t yet know what the full impact of the storm is; search and rescue missions are still underway, and scientists are finalizing data on how powerful the storm was.

 

But it’s clear that the storm was disastrous because of its unusual size, intensity, and speed. The perfect conditions were in place to supercharge the storm.

 

“Everything that we say a hurricane can do, Helene did do.”

 

“It had all the different weapons at its disposal that a hurricane [can have],” says John Knox, distinguished teaching professor and undergraduate coordinator of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia. “Everything that we say a hurricane can do, Helene did do.”

 

While Helene was still churning in the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters were already warning that the storm was going to be “unusually large.” At its maximum, tropical storm-force winds extended nearly 350 miles away from Helene’s center. That enormous reach put Helene in the 90th percentile for storm size, according to the National Hurricane Center. On the ground, that means the effects of the storm — wind, storm surge, and heavy rainfall — were felt across an unusually large area.

 

Not only was the storm huge but it was also stronger than most. Storm systems this large don’t always develop a small inner core that allows them to quickly strengthen. But Helene was able to form a relatively small eye and then rapidly intensify, a term used to describe tropical storms with sustained wind speeds that rise by at least 30 knots (roughly 35 miles per hour) in a 24-hour period.

 

It made landfall with winds reaching 140 miles per hour, making it a major storm and a Category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.

 

Helene packed a punch with water, too. When it hit Florida’s Big Bend region, it brought a massive storm surge, inundating the coastline with up to 15 feet of seawater. The underwater topography off Florida’s west coast, with a more gradual incline, acted like a ramp, making it easier for the storm to bring a taller wall of water with it. The sheer size of the hurricane also meant that the storm surge flooded a wider area.

 

Heavy rainfall dropped more water onto communities, leading to historic flooding in western North Carolina. Close to 14 inches of rain were recorded at the Asheville airport over three days between September 25th and 27th. The highest preliminary total was more than 31 inches of rain, recorded in Busick, North Carolina.

 

“It certainly has been a very catastrophic event in portions of Southeast US, especially the southern Appalachians where they’ve seen just tremendous amounts of rainfall and flooding,” says Daniel Brown, branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the National Hurricane Center. But with damage and fatality reports still coming in, it’s probably still too soon to know how Helene compares to other storms, he says.

 

Adding to its rampage, the storm was fast, with a forward speed reaching between 20 to 30 miles per hour. By comparison, storms that land along the Gulf of Mexico typically only move forward at a speed of about 10 to 15 miles per hour, Brown said. Tropical storms tend to weaken once they move over land since they draw strength from heat energy from warm waters at the surface of the sea. Helene’s speed, however, allowed it to keep more of its strength as it moved inland.

 

“That is why the impacts were felt much farther inland than [people are] typically used to,” says Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The farther inland it goes, I mean, more people would be exposed to this hazard.” Another risk factor is that inland communities may not have as much experience preparing for hurricanes as coastal areas more used to coping with this kind of disaster.

 

Climate change is altering the calculus for storms like Helene. Rising global temperatures create conditions conducive to more intense storms that can gain strength quickly and stay more powerful onshore. Helene developed amid soaring sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Waters along the storm’s early path got as high as 31 degrees Celsius (87.8 degrees Fahrenheit), providing ample fuel. The atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture is increasing because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, allowing for more severe downpours.

 

Sea surface temperatures on September 23rd.

Image: NASA Earth Observatory

 

To know how big of a role climate change played with Helene specifically, scientists will have to conduct more research. But Balaguru likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. “It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick,” Balaguru says.

 

Altogether, the pieces were in place for the perfect storm with Helene. “The storm started big, which was bad, it went over hot water, which was bad, it hit a place that is prone to high storm surge, and then it accelerated and went into populated areas and took wind and rainwater to those populated areas,” Knox says. “You don’t want to see much worse.”

 

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The sense line is redundant, so SpaceX removed the component and successfully resumed launching the Falcon 9 rocket 15 days later.

 

Then, on August 28, a reusable Falcon 9 booster tipped over moments after landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. This launch with another batch of Starlink satellites was otherwise a success, but this marked the first time SpaceX lost a rocket after landing 267 boosters in a row.

 

After both of these flights, the Federal Aviation Administration required SpaceX to conduct an investigation into the failures. The FAA is the regulatory agency that licenses commercial launch vehicles, and its responsibility includes ensuring launch and reentry operations do not endanger the public.

 

The FAA allowed SpaceX to resume launches after these two incidents after determining the failures did not have an impact on public safety. After the July 11 and August 28 incidents, the FAA issued a "public safety determination" that allowed SpaceX to return to flight with the Falcon 9 rocket after 15 days and three days, respectively.

 

SpaceX said it was putting Falcon 9 flights on hold after the problem with the Falcon 9 upper stage Saturday. As of early Monday, the FAA had not responded to questions from Ars on whether the agency will mandate an investigation.

 

The upper stage malfunction over the weekend is unlikely to ground the Falcon 9 rocket for long, but SpaceX has already postponed the next Falcon 9 launch, which was scheduled to lift off Sunday night from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with a group of Internet satellites for OneWeb. A Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral with Starlink satellites Wednesday has also been delayed.

 

The Falcon 9 rocket is a workhorse in the launch industry, flying an average of about one mission every three days. While history suggests SpaceX will resume flying the Falcon 9 rather quickly, important interplanetary science missions are hanging in the balance.

 

A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch October 7 with the European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft to visit the binary asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos and investigate the system after the impact of NASA's DART spacecraft in 2022. DART tested an asteroid deflection technique that could move an object off a collision course with Earth.

 

Three days later, on October 10, SpaceX is supposed to launch NASA's $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket to begin a six-year journey to Jupiter, where it will explore one of the giant planet's icy moons. The Falcon Heavy uses essentially the same upper stage design as the Falcon 9.

 

Both of these missions will require two burns of the upper stage's Merlin vacuum engine to send the Hera and Europa Clipper spacecraft out into the Solar System. They also have limited launch windows to depart Earth and still reach their destinations. Hera's launch period runs from October 7 through October 27, and Europa Clipper's window extends from October 10 through November 6.

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