Robotic machine learning company Generalist has announced GEN-1, a new physical AI system that it says “crosses into production-level success rates” on “a broad range of physical skills” that used to require the dexterity and muscle memory of human hands. Generalist is also touting the new model’s ability to respond to disruptions by improvising new moves and “connect[ing] ideas from different places in order to solve new problems.”

GEN-1 builds on Generalist’s previous GEN-0 model, which the company touted in November as a proof of concept for the applicability of scaling laws in robotics training, showing how more pre-training data and compute time improve post-training performance. But while large language models have been able to effectively process trillions of words collectively written on the Internet as part of their training, robotic models don’t have a similar, readily accessible source of quality data about how humans manipulate objects.

To help solve this problem, Generalist has relied on “data hands”, a set of wearable pincers that capture micro-movements and visual information as humans perform manual tasks. Generalist now claims it has collected over half a million hours and “petabytes of physical interaction data” to help train its physical model.

Shut up and take my money (out of my wallet) (then put it back in).

The result is an autonomous system that is precise enough to put money into a wallet and adaptable enough to fold laundry or sort auto parts. The model now reaches 99 percent success rates on repetitive but delicate mechanical tasks such as folding boxes, packing phones, and servicing robot vacuums, according to Generalist, and at roughly three times the speed of the previous GEN-0 model. GEN-1 can hit these marks after only about an hour spent adapting its pretraining to “robot data” that applies to its specific robotic embodiment, according to the company.

Recovering from mistakes

In the past, complex robotic systems have usually relied on carefully pre-programmed motions or been trained to focus exclusively on a single task with little variation. What sets GEN-1 apart, Generalist says, is the ability for a single model to improvise based on its previous experience and respond to disruptions naturally, even when they are “well outside the training distribution.”

In an interview with Forbes, for instance, Generalist engineers describe the model giving a plastic bag a little shake to get a plush toy to shimmy inside, even though such a move wasn’t explicitly programmed in the training data. A video posted by Generalist also shows robot hands adjusting intelligently as flexible objects spring out of their expected positions or refolding a shirt that gets moved in the middle of a folding task. Generalist also describes the model adjusting and regrasping small washers when they get nudged out of place, using both hands to insert them into their desired spot.

“Nobody has programmed the robot to make mistakes, therefore nobody has programmed the robot to recover from mistakes,” Generalist engineer Felix Wang says in that video. “And that just happens for free.”

Please send this robot over to my house to fold all my laundry ASAP.

Generalist isn’t the only company working to bring machine learning techniques into the physical realm. Last year, Google showed off the “visual learning action” capabilities of its Gemini Robotics models, which can understand and respond to general action prompts from humans. And Physical Intelligence has made waves with a pair of robotic hands on a wheeled platform, trained in specially designed simulated household environments to perform tasks from cleaning up spills to making beds.

Then there’s Tesla, which first rolled out its humanoid Optimus robots in late 2024 with staged demos that were actually teleoperated by remote human pilots. In January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted that current Optimus robots are still not doing “useful work” at Tesla, despite previous claims to the contrary.

With GEN-1, though, Generalist says its physical models have reached a GPT-3-style inflection point, where some tasks are starting to “cross the level of performance needed to be deployed in economically useful settings” and where “we can expect each new generation of model to result in a new set of increasingly complex tasks that can be mastered.” Color us hopeful that this means we’re finally on the path to an affordable, at-home laundry-folding robot sometime in the near future.

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Posted Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 12:57 pm AEST (my time).

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As we have been reporting on Ars, NASA’s Artemis II lunar mission has been going rather well so far. Of course, Orion’s big test is yet to come with the fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere on Friday. But so far, it’s looking like the rocket and spaceship needed for a lunar landing are getting there for NASA.

The biggest remaining piece of the architecture, therefore, is a lunar lander. Known in NASA parlance as the Human Landing System, or HLS, the space agency has contracted with SpaceX for its Starship vehicle and Blue Origin and its Blue Moon lander.

Last year NASA asked both companies for options to accelerate their lunar landers, and both replied that not having to dock with the Lunar Gateway in a highly elliptical orbit, known as near-rectilinear halo orbit, would help a lot. So the space agency has removed that requirement.

Beyond this, we don’t know much officially. NASA and the companies have not spoken publicly about their revised plans, but Ars reported a month ago that Blue Origin had a plan that did not involve orbital refueling, and SpaceX was looking at docking Starship with Orion in low-Earth orbit.

To get NASA’s official view on all of this, Ars recently interviewed Lori Glaze, who leads NASA’s deep space exploration program.

Ars: You guys haven’t talked much about the plans to publicly accelerate the Human Landing Systems. Is there going to be a time when you do that?

Lori Glaze: Yeah, I think there will be a time we do that. You know, we’ve got their proposals. They’ve each brought in some good proposals. They’ve taken this very seriously. They’ve brought proposals to us about simplifying requirements so that they can really pull things in and accelerate. The key thing that we have to complete is the analysis of the interactions with Orion, looking at power and thermal for the Orion system, and making sure that the whole case closes; that these changes we might make to the mission design aren’t going to break what we have with Orion. So we’ve got to all work together. And I think once we’ve completed that, which hopefully won’t take too much longer, we’ll be able to home in on some specific solutions for each.

Ars: You mentioned that getting out of a near-rectilinear halo orbit was a real benefit for each HLS provider in terms of delta-V. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about how finding a different orbit helps each of the companies?

Glaze: They both came up with kind of slightly different permutations on that. But they both came in and said going to NRHO requires a lot of extra fuel for them both to access the surface and then to get back to re-rendezvous with Orion. So they are looking for ways to reduce the amount of propellant that’s required. And you know, as I said in the talk, the lower they go the more it is a demand on Orion. So we’re looking to try and balance the demands on our systems to make sure that we have a solution that works for both. But there are a lot of benefits to some of the non-NRHO orbits.

Ars: I have a good sense of what some of those are. I don’t want to draw you out prematurely, but the space community is being asked to take a lot on faith here, right? Because you’re talking about a 2027 rendezvous with HLS in low-Earth orbit, and then at least one 2028 landing. We see what’s happening, or not, with Starship. That their next test flight has been pushed out to April or May, and they really had a lot of struggles last year. And Blue Moon Mk. 1 looks really cool, but it’s still in a vacuum chamber in Houston, about five minutes from where I live. What can you say to sort of give some comfort about the realism of these timelines?

Glaze: Yeah, I do recognize the challenges, and certainly as we’re thinking about trying to get to 2028 and the landing, a lot of the things we’re trying to do with the reduction in requirements is trying to make it less demanding on them so that they can have a lander that will work for 2028. The demo in Earth orbit, hopefully, really will drive down some of the requirements for those landers to let us test an earlier version of it that doesn’t require as much resources. I think the real confidence builder is that we’re closer to Earth. This is allowing us to do some of these things in a more benign environment here, closer to home.

Ars: When you say relaxing requirements, can you give me an example of what you mean?

Glaze: First and foremost, as we talked about, was the orbit, not requiring NRHO. But even on the surface, we have requirements for the communication systems between the crew and the lander itself, and the requirements on the types of additional utilization things that they need to bring with them. For example, how far the crew are going to get from the lander, and so what kind of other things do they need to bring with them if they’re going far out? All of that needs to be carried along. So there’s a variety of those kinds of things we’re looking at, how can we simplify and reduce the mass of things that need to be accommodated, and the integration of the various items that need to be accommodated. There’s a variety of those things, just the operations design. Are there ways we can simplify that helps them reduce their timeline?

Ars: I want to ask now about what milestones we should be looking for this year. I think with Starship it would be the in-flight refueling test. Is that still potentially going to happen this year? I mean, I’m checking my calendar and it’s already spring.

Glaze: I hope so. I believe that is still the plan. I think they’ve shifted their schedule around a little bit. This is something you probably need to go back and talk to SpaceX and what their schedule is right now.

Ars: They’re very forthcoming.

Glaze: Yeah, I know. But they have been making some adjustments to their schedule based on trying to make sure that they have a little more confidence in what they’re going to fly before they do the prop demo. So it’s worth having a conversation with them, or at least trying. But yes, the prop transfer, I believe, is still on schedule for this year, later this year, and it’s definitely one of the key milestones that we’re keeping an eye out for. And, of course, the uncrewed demo to the Moon.

Ars: Presumably that would not happen until after Artemis III?

Glaze: Yeah, agreed.

Ars: And with Blue Moon Mk. 1, that’s launching sometime this year. You know, presumably within a few months?

Glaze: I think it’ll launch this year.

Ars: I hope so. What should we be looking for on that flight as it pertains to HLS?

Glaze: I think some of their propulsion systems are going to feed forward into the guidance, navigation, and control. Their ability to land will be key. We all know that is not as easy as one might think. So that’ll be key, just seeing how all the systems perform in the lunar environment.

Ars: Have the companies shown a greater vigor toward executing on HLS in the last couple of months?

Glaze: Yeah, in fact, I’m glad you asked that. Because I think we really have seen them—they’re taking it very seriously. Our request to try and pull things in, to try and meet the mandate to land on the surface in 2028, I think we have seen real commitment to try and do that on both sides, from both Blue and from SpaceX, yeah, a real commitment to seeing what they can do to try and pull that in.

Ars: You mentioned the ICPS (Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, currently used by the SLS rocket, of which NASA has one left), and that you’re sort of still trading on whether to fly that on Artemis III. If you could save it, why would you fly it on Artemis III?

Glaze: If we don’t need it on Artemis III, we won’t fly it because I think there’s value. I think we all recognize that there would be value in having it available for Artemis IV, giving a little bit more development time for the Centaur V replacement. However, we haven’t closed yet on what the Artemis III mission profile looks like, and whether or not we’re going to need an upper stage to get us to the right orbit.

Ars: How far can the SLS core stage push it?

Glaze: You know, that’s a really good question. I’ll have to get back with you. I don’t know that I have a specific answer for you on that. I know we’re looking at and considering a low-Earth orbit. But I don’t know exactly what it would be. Is that an ISS orbit? Is it a little higher than ISS? We’re still looking at that, and some trades in particular orbits, and then where can we get to without the upper stage.

Ars: OK, you’ve got a busy time ahead of you. Good luck.

Glaze: Oh, you’re not kidding.

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Posted Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 5:29 am AEST (my time).

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Humanity is about to get its first in-person, up-close look at the Moon in more than half a century.

Four astronauts will spend about seven hours on Monday observing the far side of the Moon, the half that constantly points away from Earth. At their closest approach on board their Orion spacecraft Integrity, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch of NASA and Jeremy Hansen with the Canadian Space Agency will be about 4,000 miles (6,400 km) above the surface. The last time any person came that close was during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

You can tune into the webcast here, starting at 1 pm ET.

Although the primary purpose of the Artemis II crew’s observations will be to advance scientists’ understanding of lunar geology, there is no doubt a spectator and inspirational interest in this as well. The flyby of the Moon is expected to be watched by millions of people on Earth, and while any view will be impressive, it may also leave many wanting more.

“We will be getting SAW [solar array wing] camera video streaming during the flyby, except, of course, during the loss of signal when they go behind the Moon,” said Kelsey Young, NASA’s Artemis science flight operations lead, during a pre-flyby press conference. “They’ll be recording the rest on board.”

The SAW cameras are four specialized, modified GoPro cameras. One is mounted on each of four solar array wings that extend out from Orion’s service module.

“For parts of the flyby, we’ll actually be able to go on board with [the astronauts],” said Young, referring to a camera inside Integrity‘s crew cabin.

“Don’t expect high-res video,” added Judd Frieling, Artemis II ascent flight director, “but you will have, as Kelsey mentioned, the SAW cameras through our nominal low-rate video.”

Since 2017, NASA has been broadcasting in 4K from the International Space Station, so why can they not do the same from the Moon almost a decade later?

Data, daylight, and distance

For most of the Artemis II mission, communications between Integrity and NASA’s Mission Control in Houston are being handled by either NASA’s Near Space or Deep Space networks. During the flyby, any imagery being broadcast live to Earth will be via the latter, which relies on transmissions to radio antennas in California, Spain, and Australia.

Integrity is also carrying an experimental optical communication system that uses a laser (infrared light) to transmit data at a higher rate than radio waves can travel, allowing for larger video and imagery files to be transmitted back to Earth more quickly. Prior to the flyby, the demo had successfully transferred more than 100 gigabytes of data collected during the mission thus far.

Rendering of the optical communications system using laser light to convey data to the Moon on the Orion capsule Integrity.

Credit: NASA

The optical communications system, though, can only be used at night, as sunlight can cause interference, and it is subject to other limitations, including being pointed in the wrong direction while Integrity’s windows are focused on the lunar surface.

So all of the live imagery from the flyby, as well as the telemetry from the capsule, crew communications with Mission Control, and more has to all be directed through the same radio direct pipeline.

“The challenge is really the distance,” said David Israel, the space internetworking principal for program management at Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based space services, delivery, and infrastructure company, in an interview. “The space station is able to get the continuous, high-rate video that people see because it is in Earth orbit and communicates through the NASA tracking and data relay system, so it moves in and out of view of one relay to another relay providing a near continuous feed.”

“So from the Moon point of view, you have the extra distance,” he said. “And then there’s also a limited number of ground stations on Earth that are currently able to support signals to and from the Moon at high data rates.”

The Deep Space Network might be sufficient if Artemis II were the only mission out there. The reality is that the same antennae that are used to receive signals from the Moon are also needed for the two active rovers on Mars, probes around the Sun and the planets, and spacecraft at the edge of our Solar System and beyond.

Lunar relay

In 2024, NASA took a step toward making sure it could deliver live high-resolution video by the time the next humans walk on the Moon.

The agency awarded a contract to Intuitive Machines to establish a lunar satellite constellation to provide communications for the exploration and scientific study of the Moon. NASA expects lunar relays will be used by both human and robotic landing systems, expanding the number of potential landing sites by connecting them to ground stations on Earth.

Concept of an Intuitive Machines lunar data relay satellite in orbit around the Moon.

Credit: Intuitive Machines

“So if you’re [an astronaut] down inside a crater or down or at any point where Earth isn’t in view, then the lunar relay can be in a position in orbit where it’s able to give you that access point to connect,” said Israel, who, before joining Intuitive Machines, served as the architect of NASA’s Near Space Network, advancing the use of optical communications and relay satellite architectures.

“Lunar relay also has the advantage that it is much closer to the Moon, so it makes it much easier to make that connection,” Israel said. “So then user systems on the Moon can have smaller communications packages to send back video. They don’t have to send it all the way back to Earth. Just send it to the relay, and then the relay is built to be able to close that link to Earth and send the video back.”

Building upon its recent acquisition of Lanteris Space Systems (formerly Space Systems/Loral and most recently, Maxar Space Systems), an established manufacturer of satellites, Intuitive Machines is on track to deploy its first lunar relay satellite later this year from the same rocket that launches its third robotic mission (IM-3) to land government and commercial payloads on the Moon.

“Our current deployment plan is for the five relays,” said Israel. “We’ll have enough of them up there and operational to have full coverage for when the first Artemis landing happens. If they have the antennas deployed and are able to point to us, we should be able to provide live high-res video of the landing as it happens.”

Astronaut’s perspective

Intuitive Machines is among a group of 34 volunteers chosen by NASA to follow the Artemis II mission as it flies to the Moon and back. The company is using its Space Data Network (SDN) and ground station infrastructure to track the radio waves transmitted by the Orion spacecraft during its 10-day journey.

The data collected will help NASA identify ways to augment future Moon mission support, including the need for additional lunar relays.

Intuitive Machines’ chief integration officer is intimately familiar with the need for bandwidth in space.

“The more you get, the more you expect, and then it opens the gateway to new types of science and new types of interactions that you couldn’t consider before,” said Jack Fischer, who, before joining Intuitive Machines in 2021, lived on the International Space Station for four and a half months as a NASA astronaut and was there for the first live 4K broadcast. “No matter how much bandwidth there is, there’s always a way to use it.”

Intuitive Machines’ space network connects space and ground via partner sites like Goonhilly and the company’s controlled locations, offering enhanced connectivity.

Credit: Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd.

Eventually, all of the footage and photos taken by the Artemis II crew on Monday will reach Earth, even if that means landing with the astronauts aboard Orion. NASA plans to share it all with the public so everyone will get to see what Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen saw, albeit not at the same time they saw it.

Fischer foresees a day coming soon when the bandwidth will be available so we can all go along for the ride, while the same lunar relays support multiple missions and lunar surface activities, relieving the demand on the Deep Space Network.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is for us to build this infrastructure, to reduce the costs, making that economic case of everything we actually do put on the Moon. I’m very excited and proud of our team for what they’re doing to lay that groundwork,” he said.

NASA’s webcast starts at 1 pm ET.

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Posted Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 5:28 am AEST (my time).

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For half a century humans thought they understood the moon: a static, airless, waterless landscape without many mysteries to solve. But orbiting instruments and robotic missions have proven otherwise. The most studied satellite in the solar system is more complex than it seems, and many fundamental questions remain open.

NASA is about to return to the moon with the Artemis program. While Artemis II and III will be missions to orbit the satellite, Artemis IV will put astronauts on the surface for the first time since the Apollo era. The ambitious plan is to lay the groundwork for a sustained presence that will generate a steady stream of data and samples.

Some lunar mysteries will be solved because of the abundant samples and the technology being delivered. Not all the answers will come at once, and the results will probably be slow in coming, but they've never been closer to being solved. Here is a list of enigmas that could be clarified, with realistic scenarios, in the next 10 to 20 years.

What Is the Origin of the Moon?

The dominant theory of the moon's origin proposes that it arose after the collision of a Mars-sized planet with a proto-Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. Some of the material ejected by that impact clumped together and solidified to form the satellite that orbits Earth today.

However, this hypothesis depends on complex simulations and a limited set of samples brought back by Apollo 50 years ago. Direct access to new, unaltered rocks, combined with modern analysis techniques, could provide much stronger evidence. Of course, it will be necessary to access deep materials, such as mantle fragments exposed in craters or impact zones, and to reconstruct the chronology of the ancient lunar magma ocean. The hard part will be getting there; the rest is science.

How Much Water Is on the Moon—and What Is It Like?

Half a century ago it was believed that the moon was completely dry. Scientists have since established that there is ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the south pole and that some of the water is trapped in crystalline form within minerals on the surface. The big question is how much there is and whether it is usable for future lunar bases.

One of first tasks of future Artemis missions will be to explore these craters. If they find ice, they will need to determine whether it is mixed with regolith, whether it forms compact slabs, or whether there are purer deposits to be found. In the best-case scenario, the resource is abundant and processable for oxygen or fuel. In the worst case, it is so dispersed that extracting it would be unfeasible.

What Is the Moon’s Internal Structure?

The internal structure of the moon remains one of the great blind spots. Apollo seismometers detected deep and shallow moonquakes, but the data are sparse and come from only one region. Current gravitational and thermal models offer a sketch of the interior, but are far from a detailed map.

A sustained human presence would allow researchers to install seismometers in areas never before studied and expand global coverage. With a modern network, the resolution of the lunar interior would increase dramatically, and scientists could better define the size of the core, the structure of the mantle, and the distribution of residual heat. It won't be a perfect image, but it will be the most complete one to date.

Why Is the Dark Side so Different?

If the moon is a single body, why is its far side so rugged and jagged while its near side is smoother and covered in basaltic seas? This asymmetry is one of the great contemporary lunar enigmas. Several models attempt to explain it, ranging from differences in initial heat to variations in the crystallization of the magma ocean or the gravitational effects of Earth, but none quite fits.

The return to the moon opens the possibility of the first human expeditions to the surface of the dark side. If samples are obtained, researchers will be able to determine its age, composition, and thermal evolution, key data to solve a mystery that has been unanswered for half a century.

What Happened to the Lunar Magnetic Field?

The Apollo samples revealed something unexpected: Many are magnetized, as if the moon had had a powerful internal dynamo. But based on what is known about its size and interior, the satellite seems too small and cold to have sustained a strong global field for very long.

The new lunar era may shed light on this enigma thanks to fresh samples from diverse regions and more precise magnetic measurements. With well-dated rocks and better data on the interior, researchers will be able to reconstruct when the dynamo existed and how intense it was.

The Moon: Midpoint or Space Laboratory

Unlike the Apollo era, today the moon is not the final destination, but the starting point for a new stage of exploration. What happens in the next decade will not only solve outstanding mysteries; it will also redefine how we understand rocky worlds, how planets form, and how far human exploration can go when it returns to a familiar place with new questions.

Humanity may not get all the answers, but for the first time in half a century we will be asking the right questions, in the right place, and with our hands full of moon rocks.

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

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Posted Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 5:27 am AEST (my time).

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The Orion spacecraft is now much closer to the Moon than Earth on its 10-day journey into deep space and back, and overall everything is going smashingly well.

Things are going so well that, during the daily mission briefings at Johnson Space Center in Houston, there’s just not that much of substance to talk about. So the discourse keeps coming back to, of all things, the toilet on board Orion.

As you may recall, there were some toilet problems in the initial hours of the mission. During the initial checkout of spacecraft systems, Orion’s toilet was supposed to be “wetted” with water to prime the pump. Not enough water was introduced, so the pump was non-responsive. Once more water was added, it began functioning fine.

It was a minor blip, but the Internet went crazy for crap for about 24 hours.

A new problem emerges

By Friday night there was another problem. Urine is collected in a small tank, about the size of an office trash can. From there it is supposed to be vented into space, which is to say dumped overboard to sail around the cosmos until the end of time. However, flight controllers noted that astronaut pee had frozen in the tank. There were no issues with using the toilet for no. 2, but no. 1 was a no-go.

To address the problem Orion was maneuvered into an orientation such that the urine tank and vent lines received the maximum amount of sunshine to un-freeze the urine. This helped a little bit, but did not entirely solve the problem. So for now, the astronauts are continuing to pee into, essentially, bags.

During Saturday’s news conference the chair of the Mission Management Team, a NASA engineer named John Honeycutt, was asked about the public fascination with Orion’s toilet.

He said he understood the interest. “I think the fixation on the toilet is kind of human nature,” he said. Honeycutt added that it is not a mission risk, but said if the astronauts were essentially camping out in space, the current setup makes the whole situation a little more difficult. “I know we’re in a good state, but I would really like it to be in the best state it can be,” he said.

It is worth noting that space toilets are difficult. On Earth there is plenty of water and gravity to help with the process of going to the bathroom. In space it is much more challenging. The Apollo astronauts simply used bags. The toilet on the space shuttle did break from time to time. There are four toilets on the International Space Station, where there is more volume and plenty of recycled water to work with, so it is less of an issue.

Space toilets ultimately need to work

This is not a trivial matter.

One can get away with “roughing it” when using the bathroom during trips to the Moon. Going to Mars, requiring months in space, is a different matter. If the toilet breaks on the way to Mars, there is a non-zero chance the crew is dying. So it’s great to try out these systems now, on Orion. This really is the purpose of this test flight, to make sure life support systems work for the crew, to identify problems, and to implement fixes in the future.

In the big picture, the Artemis II mission continues to go splendidly. The deputy manager of the Orion program for NASA, Debbie Korth, said Saturday that the spacecraft is performing “remarkably well,” and that the vehicle’s overall performance has “pleasantly surprised” the engineers working on the program.

Everything is going so well, in fact, that much of the focus has been on frozen urine. And considering all of the things that could go wrong with a dangerous deep space journey like this, a wee problem like this seems like a big win.

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Posted Sunday 5 April 2026 at 4:50 pm AEST (my time).

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Liftoff. At 6:35 pm ET on April 2, a Space Launch System rocket lifted an Orion capsule from Earth. On board were Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. As of Thursday, they became the first humans to go beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

The crew will test technological systems that will be useful on subsequent missions, such as those involving radiation shielding or communication between the capsule and Earth at lunar distances. One of the most fascinating aspects is also the trajectory that Artemis II will follow during its mission.

Space Is the Place

Contrary to what intuition may suggest, the journey to the moon is not a direct, linear path connecting the Earth's surface with the lunar surface.

After launch, the first stage of the SLS separated from the rest of the spacecraft—the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) upper stage and the Orion capsule. The ICPS carried the capsule into high Earth orbit, but the crew remained orbiting Earth for approximately 23 hours. After all the checks and verification that everything was in order, the ICPS separated from the Orion. That's when the journey to the moon truly began.

Courtesy of NASA

The Lunar Flyover

The halfway point will occur on the evening of April 6. The Artemis II astronauts will travel approximately 10,300 kilometers beyond the moon, shattering all previous records for distance from Earth. The current record holder is the Apollo 13 mission, which reached approximately 400 kilometers beyond the moon.

The closest approach by Artemis II to the lunar surface will be 7,400 kilometers, which will be reached during the flyby of the far side. The spacecraft will not enter orbit around the moon but will fly past it and use a gravitational slingshot to return to Earth. The result is a figure-eight trajectory between the two celestial bodies. The orbit is optimized to ensure reentry to Earth, even in the event of engine failure.

The Reentry to Earth

Reentry will take place via a passive trajectory: After flying over the moon, Orion will essentially be in free fall toward Earth, without needing to use its engines. If there are problems with the propulsion or other systems, the capsule will return safely to Earth.

Reentry will take place by ditching in the Pacific Ocean on April 11, 9 days and 13 hours after the mission launch. There the astronauts will be recovered by the US Navy, thus concluding their journey home.

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

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Posted Sunday 5 April 2026 at 6:20 am AEST (my time).

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As the Artemis II lunar mission moved into its third day on Friday, and with the spacecraft’s big engine firing behind it, the four astronauts on board had a little more downtime.

So the four crew members—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—had their first opportunities to speak with their families at length, and also did a couple of media events. They held medical conferences with physicians back in Houston, although these were apparently routine since none of the crew members were experiencing space adaptation sickness.

And they had some time to take pictures. Wiseman, the mission’s commander, sent a particularly spectacular image on Friday morning that showed our planet’s night side (with a relatively long exposure). Among the beautiful details in this image were not one but two auroras, as well as zodiacal light in the bottom right of the image. The Sun is visible in the distance, lighting the far side of the Earth.

No corrective burn needed

“They are in great spirits,” said Lakiesha Hawkins, a senior exploration official at NASA, of the crew during a news conference on Friday afternoon. “Obviously, they’ve been very, very busy, especially leading up to the translunar injection.”

That firing of Orion’s main engine occurred on Thursday evening, setting Orion on course for a pass around the Moon. They will make their closest approach on Monday afternoon before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Southern California, on Friday, April 10.

Because that engine firing was so successful, NASA waved off the opportunity to perform a “corrective” burn on Friday.

During their daily briefing with reporters, NASA officials had almost no issues of any significance to report. Howard Hu, the program manager for Orion, said NASA was tracking an issue with the helium system that pressurizes Orion’s service module propulsion system to deliver fuel and oxidizer to the engine. However, he said, Orion no longer needs to use this helium regulator for the remainder of the mission, and moreover, a backup system is working as intended.

Other minor issues

There have also been some “false alarms” in the cabin from various environmental sensors. However, Hu said, these are not at all a threat to the crew but rather reflect conservative limits set for those systems. He characterized this as a “learning” that will be adjusted for the Artemis III mission, which could take flight next year.

Another image of Earth as seen from Orion.

Credit: NASA

The only other real issue experienced by the crew has been cabin temperatures, which were described by the astronauts as a little chilly overnight. One of the mission’s flight directors, Judd Frieling, said the crew started off with temperatures in the mid-70s, but after several “shell heaters” were turned off, it got about 10° F colder. A number of factors influence cabin temperature, and flight controllers were able to adjust the cabin atmosphere to a more comfortable level.

Similarly, humidity levels were slightly below optimal for devices that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These “scrubbers” work better with higher humidity, and the crew has been able to find a comfortable level of humidity between “desert dry” and “Houston humid,” Frieling said.

So the crew is comfortable as they fly farther from Earth than anyone else has in half a century.

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Posted Saturday 4 April 2026 at 12:21 pm AEST (my time).

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French fries are delicious, but notoriously unhealthy. A research team at the University of Illinois, however, has developed a deceptively straightforward method to keep the satisfying taste and crunch without requiring as much oil.

The cooking method combines traditional frying and microwave heating. Adding that microwave step could reduce the amount of oil used in the process, meaning you would absorb less fat with each bite. All the secrets to being able to cook fries in this way have been laid out in two studies published in Current Research in Food Science and The Journal of Food Science.

French Fries and Health

Although popular, fried foods contain high levels of fat, which is linked to several health problems, including obesity and hypertension. “Consumers want healthy foods, but at the time of purchase, cravings often prevail,” says Pawan Singh Takhar, author of one of the two studies. “The high oil content adds flavor, but it also contains a lot of energy and calories.”

It's precisely with the goal of helping consumers make better food choices without feeling deprived that researchers have been trying to figure out how they can cook healthier french fries, achieving lower fat content without altering their taste and texture.

One of the main difficulties in frying, as the studies explain, is preventing the oil from penetrating the food. In the early stages of the french fry process, in fact, the pores of the potato are filled with water, leaving no room for the oil.

As cooking continues, however, the water evaporates, creating empty spaces that allow the oil to be drawn in by negative pressure. Much of the frying process takes place under that negative pressure, which essentially increases the tendency of the oil to be sucked into the fries

A New Wavelength

In the new study, therefore, the researchers tried to figure out how to extend the time in positive pressure and reduce the period under negative pressure. "When we heat something in a traditional oven, the heat transfers from the outside to the inside, but a microwave oven heats from the inside to the outside because the microwaves penetrate everywhere in the material," Takhar says.

Specifically, microwaves cause water molecules to oscillate, resulting in increased vapor formation and thus shifting the pressure profile toward positive values that prevent the oil from being easily absorbed.

Microwave frying alone, however, would not produce the desired texture. "If only microwaving is used, the food turns out mushy," says Takhar. In order to achieve crispness, frying and microwaving should be combined.

To achieve the right balance, the researchers carried out an experiment in which they specially designed a microwave fryer, monitoring temperature, pressure, volume, texture, moisture, and oil content of the chips. "We propose to combine the two methods in the same device. Traditional heating maintains crispness, while microwave heating reduces oil consumption," the study concludes.

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Posted Saturday 4 April 2026 at 12:19 pm AEST (my time).

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Native Americans have been playing with dice in games of chance for more than 12,000 years, according to a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity. And the oldest examples of Native American dice predate the earliest currently known dice in the Old World by millennia.

“Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” said author Robert Madden, a graduate student at Colorado State University. “What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes, and using those outcomes in structured games, thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.”

Madden’s interest in Native American gaming started with Maya ballgames and then expanded to include Native American dice and games of chance. These were rudimentary dice with just two sides, rather than the six sides of modern dice, typically described as “binary lots.” And Madden found they were common to virtually every Native American tribe. Archaeologists had traced the use of such dice back 2,000 years, but most were hesitant to conclude that dice-like artifacts older than that were, in fact, dice.

“We always have that problem with archeology, which is you find something, and you say, well, what is this, how was it used?” Madden said in a CSU podcast. “One of the things we often rely on is something called ethnographic analogy, which is, do we have some kind of historic record of people using things like this, hopefully in the same area and hopefully with a cultural connection. If we see that, then we can make an inference that maybe the same object made in the way was used for the same purpose.”

The most comprehensive study of Native American dice, gambling, and games of chance dates back to 1907, with the publication of ethnographer Robert Stewart Culin‘s 809-page report, “Games of the North American Indians.” Culin began by delving into the collection maintained at the Field Columbian Museum of Chicago, including the field notes and manuscripts written by curator George A. Dorsey, an anthropologist. Dorsey introduced Culin to various Native tribes, where Culin collected even more information about Native American games and gaming artifacts. Culin also consulted with other scholars and collectors to produce his final report 14 years later, which includes over 1,100 illustrations and descriptions of 239 sets of dice from 130 different tribes.

A morphological test

Madden used Culin’s magnum opus to come up with four diagnostic criteria for confirming whether a given Native American artifact is an example of Native American dice. First, they must be two-sided objects. Second, the two sides must be readily distinguishable from each other, usually by applying color or markings to one side, although in rare cases they can be distinguished by shape, with one side being convex and the other being concave.

Third, they must fall into one of four shape categories: flat (bone dice or stick dice), plano-convex (one flat side and one rounded side), convex-concave or “cane dice” (one rounded side and one concave side), and convex-convex (two rounded sides), usually peach pits or plum stones marked to distinguish between the two sides. And finally, the objects must be of the right size and shape to be held in the hand and cast onto a playing surface.

Flat dice types: (left) bone dice; (right) stick dice.

Stewart Culin, 1907

 

Types of plano-convex dice: (left) round stick dice; (right) wood dice.

Stewart Culin, 1907

 

Concave-convex and convex-convex dice: (left) cane dice; (right) peach- and plum-stone dice.

Stewart Culin, 1907

 

Once Madden devised his four-pronged test, he combed through the archaeological record to apply those criteria to any artifacts labeled gaming pieces. “In most cases, these objects had already been excavated and published,” Madden said. “What was missing wasn’t the evidence, it was a clear, continent-wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at.”

Madden was able to conclusively identify 565 Native American dice from 45 different sites and designate an additional 94 artifacts as “probable” dice. Objects with a drilled or pierced hole were excluded from his assessment because they could just as easily be beads or other decorative objects rather than dice. He also excluded objects whose two sides could only be distinguished by shape, with no clear markings, for similar reasons. The oldest artifacts, from Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, date back to the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago.

According to Madden, dice and gaming in these societies weren’t anything like contemporary gambling, where the house always has the edge; rather, they likely served a social function.

“These games are one-on-one; there’s no house,” said Madden. “It’s a fair game, everybody’s got an equal opportunity, equal conditions, and it was used as a form of exchange, particularly between groups of people who did not come into frequent contact with each other, so they didn’t really know each other. It’s really a form of gifting over time that creates enduring reciprocal relationships. It’s not about a commercial transaction where you and I are going to swap something and then go our separate ways.”

The findings also shed light on early Native American concepts of probability. “When we see the origins of dice, we’re literally seeing the origins of probabilistic thinking,” said Madden. “That’s always been thought to have begun in the Old World, in the Bronze Age, about 6,000 years ago. This research shows that Native Americans were making dice, generating random outcomes and using those random streams of probability and harnessing them in games of chance 6,000 years earlier. So, if we want to understand the history of probabilistic thinking, we now need to look into the Old World at the end of the last Ice Age.”

That said, “These findings don’t claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory,” Madden added. “But they were intentionally creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers. That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.”

American Antiquity, 2026. DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2025.10158 (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 4 April 2026 at 12:18 pm AEST (my time).

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The Orion spacecraft successfully fired its main engine for 5 minutes and 50 seconds on Thursday, sending four astronauts on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. For NASA and the Artemis II crew members, this marked a point of no return for more than week.

Most Americans, indeed about three-quarters of the population around the world, have not witnessed humans leaving low-Earth orbit in their lifetimes. The last time this occurred was 1972, with the final Apollo Moon mission.

The “translunar injection” burn of Orion’s main engine occurred about one day after the successful launch of the mission on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday. This burn was the last major firing of Orion’s main engine, and sets the crew on a course to fly around the Moon on Monday, slingshot back toward Earth under lunar gravity, and splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, April 10.

“Things are going really well right now,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s senior official over exploration, during a news conference on Thursday evening. “I don’t think we could be more pleased.”

First day is filled with activity

The decision to leave Earth orbit followed a busy day on board Orion during which the four person crew; Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, pushed the spacecraft’s life support and propulsion systems to ensure the vehicle was ready for a prolonged mission in deep space.

Orion’s life support functioned very well, said Howard Hu, NASA’s Program Manager for the Orion spacecraft. This included critical systems such as the carbon dioxide “scrubbers” that remove the exhaled gas from the cabin’s atmosphere as well as water systems. There was a minor kerfuffle with Orion’s toilet during the initial checkout when it was supposed to be “wetted” with water to prime the pump. Not enough water was introduced, so the pump was non-responsive. Once more water was added, it began functioning fine.

The most significant tests involved Orion’s propulsion system, during which Pilot Victor Glover flew the vehicle through a variety of maneuvers primarily using Orion’s 24 reaction control thrusters. During this “proximity ops demonstration” Glover flew to within a few dozen feet of the rocket’s upper stage, and then went through a prescribed series of tests such as side to side maneuvers, up and down, pitch, roll, yaw, and more. Glover offered frequent narration during these maneuvers and, generally, said the vehicle handed better than expected.

Building confidence for Artemis III

Hu said the Orion team had confidence in the autonomous maneuvering capabilities of the vehicle, but that adding a human into the flight loop always introduces uncertainty. He praised Glover’s flying, saying, “Victor did exactly what he needed to do, and the spacecraft responded.”

All of the vehicle’s thrusters performed as intended during the multi-hour test, with no failures, Hu confirmed.

These tests are essential for NASA to have confidence in Orion’s handling for upcoming Artemis missions. NASA now plans to launch Orion on the Artemis III mission some time next year, and during this flight it is intended to dock with one or both of the lunar landers under development by SpaceX and Blue Origin, respectively, in low-Earth orbit. This will necessitate precise maneuvering. For lunar landing missions, beginning with Artemis IV, Orion will dock with a lunar lander that brings the crew down to the surface of the Moon and then back to Orion, which returns the crew to Earth.

After its flurry of activities on the first day in flight, Orion’s schedule will settle down a little bit now as the crew speeds outbound toward the Moon. It will make a lunar flyby on Monday, where approximately 20 percent of the far side will be lit as the crew passes nearest to the lunar surface. For now, it’s enough that they are on their way.

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Posted Friday 3 April 2026 at 5:13 pm AEST (my time).

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Octopuses are one of the most alien creatures on Earth. The lack of bones makes them amazing shapeshifters, most of them can change color like chameleons, and they pump blue copper-based blood through their bodies using three distinct hearts. They rely on a decentralized nervous system, where two-thirds of their neurons reside in their arms, allowing each limb to independently taste, touch, and make decisions for itself.

Now, a team of scientists led by Pablo S. Villar, a molecular biologist at Harvard University, for the first time took a close look at octopuses’ sex life. It turned out it was just as weird.

Love in the dark

The deep ocean is a challenging place to find a partner, especially since octopuses are solitary animals that wander the seafloor alone, mating only during highly infrequent encounters. The exact mechanics of their reproduction when they do find each other have long puzzled biologists. We knew that male octopuses don’t rely on flashy plumage or complex mating calls and that they use a specialized appendage called the hectocotylus—basically a modified tentacle—to identify females.

Any details beyond that, as Villar and his colleagues write in their Science study, were based on anecdotal evidence more than on hard science. Villar designed an experiment to change that.

His team put a wild-caught pair of Octopus bimaculoides in a tank together; it’s a relatively small species known as the California two-spot octopus and lives in the eastern waters of the Pacific Ocean. They did take some precautions, though. “These animals are solitary, so we were not sure how they would react to each other,” Villar explains. “Would they get aggressive?” Despite their size, octopuses are surprisingly strong, and the team figured they would not be able to separate their tentacled subjects if their date concluded with a serious altercation. So, they put a barrier between them.

The barrier was opaque and had holes in it with a diameter large enough for the octopus’s arms to go through. “The idea was, we start with the barrier to let them feel each other out and get comfortable with each other’s presence. Then we wanted to remove it,” Villar says. But it turned out removing the barrier was not necessary—the octopuses consummated their newly found relationship through the available holes. And the act itself was just as otherworldly as you’d expect from an octopus. “We were quite surprised—we did not expect that,” Villar says.

The docking procedure

The mating started with the male octopus extending his hectocotylus through the barrier’s opening, maneuvering it toward the female, touching her skin first and then inserting the appendage deep within her mantle. “Octopuses have a cavity, an opening where all internal organs can be reached. The male can touch all internal organs of the female, which is quite invasive,” Villar explains. Once the hectocotylus got inside this cavity, both octopuses ceased all movement for about an hour.

What the male needs to find among all the female’s internal organs is the opening of the oviduct, where he can use the specialized appendage to deliver his sperm cells. And he has to do it without any visual cues or, apparently, much in the way of feedback from his partner. “When a male is inside the mantle and the female is receptive, she will stop all movement because it’s a fine motor control behavior,” Villar says, referring to the male’s search. The process may have more in common with a spaceship docking to the International Space Station or a jet fighter refueling mid-air from a tanker plane than with the usual idea of what sex looks like.

When the scientists paired two male octopuses in the same setup, the males interacted by touching arms, but they never attempted to mate. This suggested that a specific, female-derived chemical cue was acting as a biological green light for copulation. This immediately posed some questions.

What sensing apparatus might a male octopus have in his hectocotylus that enables him to unmistakably find the oviduct? And what is this female-derived cue that triggers the search?

Chemistry of touch

To figure out how octopuses’ sex life works at the molecular level, Villar’s team looked at the female’s reproductive organs first. They found that the female’s oviducts and ovary expressed high levels of biosynthetic enzymes critical for producing sex steroids. Specifically, the oviducts were packed with an enzyme responsible for the production of progesterone.

To check whether progesterone was the trigger, the researchers removed the female from the barrier tank and replaced her with conical plastic tubes coated with various chemical stimuli, sliding them into the small holes of the wall divider. When the male encountered the tube coated with progesterone, he actively explored it, demonstrating the same mating search behavior he used on the female’s mantle. By contrast, tubes coated with structurally similar steroids, bile acids, or bitter-tasting molecules failed to elicit the same response.

It seemed that evolution solved octopus sex by repurposing mechanisms they usually use for hunting. Octopuses use their regular, non-mating arms to hunt by relying on a taste-by-touch system to explore the seafloor for prey. This predation is driven by a distributed nervous system within the arms, studded with specialized chemotactile receptors. It turned out that the chemotactile receptor, a protein called CRT1, in the hectocotylus also responds to sex cues.

Scanning electron microscopy revealed that the tip of the hectocotylus is covered in small sucker cups that are structurally identical to the sensory suckers on their regular hunting arms. What’s more, these specialized mating suckers are densely packed with neural clusters. Just like the arms used for tracking down a crab, the hectocotylus expresses a high concentration of chemotactile receptors, alongside mechanoreceptors.

According to Villar’s study, these chemotactile receptors achieved complex chemical sensing in a different way than mammals. They are ligand-gated ion channels that diverged from ancestral neurotransmitter receptors. What was once an internal system for passing signals between neurons evolved to face the outside world and sense the chemical signatures of both food and mates, specifically detecting female-derived progesterone.

And the team found similar mechanisms in other cephalopods as well.

Gears of evolution

The team tested several diverse cephalopods, including two octopuses, Octopus rubescens and Abdopus aculeatus, and the hummingbird bobtail squid. All of their ovaries expressed the enzymes required to produce sex steroids. Even though the hectocotylus arms varied physically from species to species, they all contained similar sucker cups that responded robustly to exogenously applied progesterone.

In a perspective article accompanying Villar’s paper in Science, Anna Di Cosmo, a professor of biology at the University of Naples, writes that chemosensation is one of the most ancient sensory modalities on Earth. Organisms detected one another through molecules long before visual displays or acoustic courtship signals evolved.

Animals rely on sensory systems as a gateway for reproduction. Sensory receptors act as evolutionary hotspots that can either preserve recognition among members of the same species, or limit interspecies mating, playing a foundational role in Earth’s biodiversity. If an octopus population adapts to a new ecological niche with different chemical conditions, Di Cosmo argues, its sensory receptors might shift to better detect the available prey. But because the very same receptors are used to find mates, this adaptation could simultaneously modify their preferences to select better-adapted mates.

But there are still questions Villar’s study did not answer. So far, the team just put two random opposite-sex octopuses in the tank and watched them mate. Would the mating happen between different individuals? Are octopuses selective in their mating? And finally, wouldn’t being near-perfectly still for an hour make a pair of copulating octopuses ridiculously exposed to predators?

Compartmentalized lovemaking

“We did not train these octopuses to mate through the openings in the barrier, but they did it anyway,” Villar says. “The same happened with other octopus pairs we tested: they all did it. It looked like this was kind of natural for them.” The tentative explanation he offers is that octopuses live near the seafloor in crevices between the rocks. The octopuses can safely stand still during their hour-long mating process because, Villar speculates, both male and female can be hidden in their respective rocky hideouts. Since they don’t need to see each other, the male probably just navigates his roughly 30-centimeter-long hectocotylus to the neighboring female’s crevice. The other questions, though, seem like a tougher challenge.

“We used wild octopuses in the experiment, so we don’t know exactly at which stage in their reproductive cycle they were,” Villar says. The team just chose octopuses that seemed big enough to be adults. This left them with no data on how, if at all, the synthesis of the female chemical cues changes across her lifecycle. “Maybe the amount is different, maybe the type of molecules that are released is different,” Villar said, considering some options.

Assessing the selectivity in octopuses’ mating is also rather tricky. “You will have to set up breeding pairs, and that means we’d have to use lab-grown octopuses. That is a big effort,” Villar explains. Scientists would need to grow the little octopuses from the moment they hatch, make sure they survive, and feed them over a long lifecycle that lasts roughly two years, which is a lot of time and effort.

Villar and his colleagues, though, want to learn more about chemical cues driving the octopuses’ mating process first. “We know it’s about progesterone, but is there anything else? Like specific molecules that will be a fingerprint for a particular species,” Villar says. “We’d like to compare different species of females and see.”

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aec9652

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Posted Friday 3 April 2026 at 5:12 pm AEST (my time).

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The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside bizarre creatures with no obvious modern equivalents. There are hints that some forms of present animal life predated the Cambrian. But most of the organisms we’ve found in Ediacaran deposits have no obvious relationship to anything we’re familiar with.

The complete absence of these creatures in later strata suggests they might have vanished in a mass-extinction event that cleared the way for the explosion of Cambrian species. But a new series of fossils found at a site in China includes examples of groups that flourished in the Cambrian living side by side with a few Ediacaran species. The deposits suggest that there might have been a gradual shift into the Cambrian.

Ediacaran and more

The newly described fossils, described by a team from Yunnan University and Oxford University, come from just south of Kunming, near Fuxian Lake. The rocks they’re in are part of the larger Dengying Formation, within a segment known to include Edicaran deposits, which ranged from 635 to 540 million years ago. They come from close to the end of the period, only about 7 million years before the first clearly Cambrian deposits.

The site had previously been known for abundant algae, but the new fossils include over 700 species, which the researchers are calling the Jiangchuan Biota. The fossils themselves are very small, typically one to two centimeters. They’re largely impressions in a single layer of rock and are rich in carbon—so much so that many of the fossils are simply black. Still, they preserve a lot of details, including what appear to be internal organs in some cases.

The researchers say the fossils were likely buried rapidly in sediment in what had once been a shore environment just a bit deeper than the low tide mark. The researchers suggest that it likely represents a similar environment to the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossils.

The fossils, such as this oddity, consist of carbon-rich material in very old sediment deposits.

Credit: Gaorong Li & Xiaodong Wang

But a key difference is the presence of Ediacaran species. Even if the researchers didn’t tell you, you could figure it out by the description of these creatures written in everyday English: “Four protrusions appear to be arranged in pairs, each consisting of two connected branches surrounding a central depression.” That’s largely because we really don’t understand what any of these features represent anatomically, so we can’t use the technical terms that were developed to describe more recent features.

But the big difference is how many other groups of animals are also present, many of which hadn’t been unambiguously found to predate the Cambrian.

What’s there?

These include cnidarians, a group of radially symmetric organisms including present-day jellyfish. There were six individual fossils from a species that resembles a known fossil species called Haootia quadriformis, which had tetraradial symmetry and a lot of arms. While the new species is clearly distinct from that, it shares the arms, and the fossils preserve what might be muscle fibers.

Another fossil appears to be a ctenophore, what we’d call a comb jelly today. Ctenophores were clearly present by the Cambrian, and this one looks a lot like them. The fossil appears to include the rows of cilia that these organisms use to move about the water. Critically, this pushes back the origin of some features of ctenophores to a period before we previously had confirmation that they existed.

There’s also something similar to mackenziids, an organism that one paper described as “an enigmatic and poorly understood soft-bodied organism” from the Cambrian. It also has rows of structures, although those appear to be internal tubes; its odd nature has suggested it might be a holdover of Ediacaran life, and this find suggests they were present that early.

This little guy (gal? hermaphrodite?) is a member of the group that includes jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals.

Gaorong Li & Xiaodong Wang.

 

This creature is part of a group that was only known from the Cambrian prior to these finds. It’s not clear how it relates to any known organisms.

Gaorong Li.

 

A creature with a worm-like body that also remained attached to the ocean floor.

Gaorong Li.

 

But the star of the show may be a worm. Worms are clearly bilaterian, a group of animals with left/right symmetries that includes our own species. And this place was crawling with worms, though not ones that would actually crawl, given that their posteriors were structured to attach to a surface. The mouth at the other end was able to extend some exterior structures outside the animal’s body, as is seen in some animals’ jaws today.

Overall, there are fragments of 185 individual worms of this type here. There had been some claims of Ediacaran worms previously, but they were all somewhat controversial; the sheer number of instances here is likely to make any debate much simpler. And there’s one additional example of what appears to be a fatter worm, and another four fossils of a creature that appears to be near the base of the group that includes echinoderms (think sea urchins and their relatives). Researchers have also found a number of tubes that appear to have once been occupied by worm-like creatures called hemichordates.

All of this seems to provide stronger evidence of bilaterians living before the Cambrian than we had previously. We had some traces that were very likely tracks of worm-like creatures and as many as four individual bilaterian species had been described, but those were not universally accepted as clearly bilaterian. With indications of four different species, this discovery essentially doubles the likely pre-Cambrian bilaterian count. The fact that some of the fossils appear to have details that let us assign them to specific forms of life that have persisted to the present day also strengthens the case.

If, as the Jiangchuan Biota suggests, the Ediacaran gently eased into the Cambrian, why has there appeared to be such a substantial gap between the two? The researchers behind the new work suggest that it may be a product of the distinct conditions that preserved carbon-rich materials for us to find. If these conditions were growing increasingly rare near the start of the Cambrian, then we might easily have missed the presence of a biosphere where the giants were only a few centimeters long.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adu2291

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Posted Friday 3 April 2026 at 5:11 pm AEST (my time).

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Three Americans and one Canadian launched into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday, flying the most powerful rocket ridden by humans on the first leg of a nine-day voyage around the Moon.

Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the four astronauts lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC).

Four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters flashed to life to push the nearly 6 million-pound rocket from its moorings at Launch Complex 39B. The engines and boosters collectively generated 8.8 million pounds of thrust, outclassing NASA’s Saturn V rocket used for Apollo lunar missions.

Moments later, a wave of sound reached spectators a few miles away as the rocket thundered into the sky, leaving an incandescent plume of fire and smoke in its wake.

Commander Reid Wiseman, a 50-year-old Navy captain and former test pilot, calmly radioed updates from the cockpit of the Orion spacecraft at the tip of the SLS rocket. He was joined in the cockpit by pilot Victor Glover (another Navy captain), mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

In the limelight

The liftoff of Artemis II is a key moment for NASA. The agency has spent close to $100 billion on elements of the Artemis program over 20 years and now finds itself in competition with China to return humans to the Moon’s surface. Artemis II is also making history in the annals of space exploration. Astronauts last left the Moon in 1972, and no one has been back since.

This mission won’t land. That will have to wait for a future flight, currently targeted for Artemis IV in 2028. NASA is working with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop human-rated landers to ferry crews between Orion spacecraft and the lunar surface. Axiom Space is developing new spacesuits for astronauts to wear on the Moon.

Artemis II is testing the transportation system NASA plans to use to get astronauts from Earth to the Moon and then return crews home at the end of their mission. The first major milestone was Wednesday’s successful launch, setting the stage for manual piloting demos, trajectory correction maneuvers, life-support system checkouts, and finally, a loop thousands of miles past the back side of the Moon.

If the mission goes according to plan, the astronauts will reach a distance of 252,799 miles (406,840 kilometers) from Earth on Monday, April 6, farther than anyone has ever traveled from our cosmic oasis. The crew will see parts of the far side of the Moon never seen before by human eyes. Scientists want to compare their naked-eye observations with far-side imagery captured by robotic missions.

The Orion spacecraft will follow a so-called “free return” trajectory, using gravity from its slingshot around the Moon to redirect its course back to Earth. The pull of Earth’s gravity will accelerate the capsule to some 25,000 mph, or 7 miles per second, as it plunges back into the atmosphere to conclude the mission. Splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California is scheduled for April 10.

The Artemis II crew, left to right: Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch. The astronauts departed crew quarters to head for the launch pad around four hours prior to liftoff.

Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Off to the races

Wednesday’s launch set all of that in motion. The SLS rocket surpassed the speed of sound just one minute after liftoff. The launcher’s twin boosters consumed their solid propellant in a little more than two minutes after reaching an altitude of more than 150,000 feet, then jettisoned to fall into the Atlantic Ocean. They won’t be recovered.

The four-engine core stage continued firing for another six minutes, accelerating Artemis II to near orbital velocity. During this burn, the rocket shed its launch abort system and aeroshell panels that protected the Orion spacecraft during the initial climb through the atmosphere. The rocket hit all of its milestone events right on time before the core stage shut off its engines and separated from the Orion spacecraft and upper stage a little more than eight minutes into the flight.

With engines off, the spacecraft coasted through space for more than 40 minutes. Orion extended its four power-generating solar panels before the next major event, a critical burn of the upper stage’s RL10 engine to put the spacecraft into a stable low-Earth orbit. A second firing of the RL10, nearly two hours after launch, will send the spacecraft into a much higher orbit, an elliptical arc extending more than 40,000 miles from Earth, higher than anyone has flown since 1972.

The next mission event will be the separation of Orion from the SLS rocket’s upper stage nearly three-and-a-half hours after launch. At that point, the astronauts will begin one of their first tasks of the mission. After flying a short distance from the rocket, Glover will take manual control of the Orion spacecraft to re-approach the upper stage. Glover will fire thrusters to slowly guide Orion back to the rocket, assessing the ship’s handling characteristics and its responsiveness to manual commands.

The layout of Orion’s cockpit is familiar to Glover, who flew F/A-18 Super Hornets in the Navy. Orion’s manual controls contrast with the touchscreen displays of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which Glover flew to the International Space Station on his first trip to space in 2020.

“There are physical rotational hand controllers and translational hand controllers, and this thing that we call a cursor control device, which is something you hold in your hand and hit buttons,” Glover told Ars before the Artemis II mission. “The crew (on Orion) has to be much more proficient to know where to go to see the right information. The SpaceX vehicle was built so that your kids could jump off their video games and jump in Dragon. A lot of it is intuitive, and that’s a good thing. That’s the paradigm that they are shooting for.”

Like Dragon, Orion is designed to fly on autopilot, but astronauts want to have the ability to take control of the spacecraft if necessary. Future missions will require the Orion spacecraft to dock with lunar landers in orbit around the Earth or the Moon.

“We are essentially going to make sure that the vehicle flies the way that we think it does, that we designed it to do,” Glover said. “We’re not only going to fly the vehicle manually. We’re going to execute all six degrees of freedom, so translating forward, backward, left, right, up, and down, and then also pitch, yaw, and roll.”

This phase of the mission is known as the rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration. The astronauts will not only fly the spaceship. They will also provide verbal feedback on their experiences as Orion moves as close as 30 feet, or 10 meters, from the upper stage. “I’m going to put my communication system … on voice activation, so I can just talk to the ground continuously,” Glover said.

The upper stage will vent all of its hydrogen fuel before Orion moves in close. The maneuvers will last about 90 minutes, enough time for Orion to first approach the nose of the rocket, then fly off the side of the upper stage before a final “breakout burn” to depart the rocket for good.

Wiseman will assist Glover with the manual piloting demo. Koch will make sure the pilots follow the proper procedures. Hansen will have the especially important job of watching the rocket through Orion’s window. On this mission, the spacecraft lacks a rangefinder to measure the distance between Orion and the upper stage.

“We will be using subtended angles, how big the upper stage looks out the window or through a camera,” Glover said. “So we are the primary hazard avoidance system, these eyes, in our assessment of how close we are.”

The pace of activity onboard Orion will slow down after the capsule completes its final backaway from the upper stage. The astronauts will begin activating the ship’s life support systems as mission controllers in Houston conduct a comprehensive checkout of the spacecraft. These milestones will occur as Orion continues an outbound arc toward the high point of its orbit, or apogee.

Upon reaching apogee, around 8 am EDT (12:00 UTC) Thursday, the capsule will fire its thrusters to reshape its orbit to set up for a pivotal trans-lunar injection engine firing Thursday evening. This six-minute burn by Orion’s main engine will send the spacecraft toward the Moon. This all assumes engineers don’t find any significant problems on the first day of the mission.

“On the life support system, the checkout that we get is a critical objective,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator. “If it turns out that we don’t get the performance we need after the acceleration and vibe (vibration of launch), we’ll come home. We’re not going to commit to the Moon if we don’t have the performance.”

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Posted Thursday 2 April 2026 at 12:08 pm AEST (my time).

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. March’s list includes puzzle-solving raccoons; the physics of folding a crepe; the rediscovery of a lost page from an Archimedes manuscript; and the 2026 winner of the annual Dance Your PhD contest, among other highlights.

Puzzle-solving raccoons

Credit: Hannah Griebling/CC BY

Raccoons (aka “trash pandas”) are notorious pests in urban and suburban settings because of their penchant for rooting around trash and compost bins; even latches and other safeguards can’t entirely keep them at bay. It might be more than food searching behavior, scientists at the University of British Columbia concluded. According to their paper published in the journal Animal Behavior, raccoons are not only nimble and dextrous with their paws, they also excel at solving puzzles, which might be why they thrive so well in human-centric environments.

The team tested captive raccoons by placing a tasty marshmallow in a transparent puzzle box, outfitted with latches, sliding doors, and knobs. There were nine separate ways to retrieve the marshmallow, some easy, some medium difficulty, and some hard. Each raccoon engaged in several 20-minute trials so the team could observe their behavior.

Even after retrieving the marshmallow and eating it, the raccoons still kept trying to open the other mechanisms. They were more likely to explore multiple openings when the solution was easy and tended to stick with known easier solutions when the puzzle was hard. But even at the most difficult level, they still kept exploring. The authors interpreted this as a form of flexible problem-solving, with the raccoons balancing their curiosity and effort against potential risks. The team concluded that this behavior is better described as “information foraging.”

Animal Behavior, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123491 (About DOIs).

Human sperm gets lost in space

Credit: Sperm and Embryo Biology Laboratory, Adelaide Universit

When thoughts turn to the future of space exploration, particularly the potential for extended trips in microgravity, one can’t help but wonder how humans might breed in space. Scientists have tested mice having sex (and making babies) in space, as well as geckos, but what about the potential for human reproduction? Researchers at Adelaide University in Australia discovered that one major challenge might be getting sperm to successfully navigate to an egg in space, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Biology.

The authors took sperm samples from humans, mice, and pigs and put them through a special machine that simulates zero gravity conditions, essentially flipping the sperm cells to disorient them, and then pushing them through a maze that simulates the female reproductive tract. The result: there was a significant decrease in the number of sperm that were able to find their way to the eggs under those conditions, and that decrease wasn’t due to any change in motility. Exposure to microgravity also resulted in a 30 percent reduction in the number of fertilized mouse eggs, suggesting that microgravity might impact embryo development as well.

The good news is that adding a bit of progesterone can help the befuddled sperm overcome the negative effects of microgravity. The next phase will explore how gravity on the Moon, Mars, and artificial gravity systems affect sperms’ sense of direction and early embryo development.

Communications Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-026-09734-4.

Lost Archimedes page is found

Credit: Blois, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 73.7.52. Photography IRHT-CNR

Thanks to scientific and technological advances, archaeologists and conservationists have many new cutting-edge tools for the study of ancient manuscripts, such as revealing older text underneath surface writing. Multispectral imaging, for instance, showed the first known Greek remnants of Hipparchus’ star catalog in 2022, hidden beneath Christian texts on medieval parchment, and also revealed hidden text on four Dead Sea Scroll fragments previously believed to be blank. High-energy X-rays have been used to analyze ancient Egyptian papyri and the badly charred Herculaneum scrolls that survived the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Scientists have also applied these methods to study the Archimedes palimpsest, a 13th-century prayer-book written on reused parchment. The original text is two mathematical treatises by Archimedes that have not survived anywhere else. Now housed at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, all pages of the Archimedes palimpsest were photographed in 1906 by Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg, establishing a historical record of its contents kept at the Royal Danish Library.

But since Heiberg took those photographs, three of the pages went missing. One of those pages, leaf 123, has now been found at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, France. One side contains Greek text and geometric diagrams, overwritten by medieval prayers; the other is an illumination showing the prophet Daniel surrounded by lions; there is underlying, earlier and unreadable text,  and scientists plan to study the leaf more closely, using multispectral and X-ray imaging methods in hopes of recovering that text.

Ravens remember where wolves kill

Credit: Daniel Stahler / YNP

Ravens are natural scavengers, showing up regularly at sites where wolf packs have killed and eaten prey. Scientists thought the ravens followed the wolves by air, focusing on wolf tracks and the sound of howls, thereby ensuring they were close by whenever there was a fresh kill ripe for scavenging. But a paper published in the journal Science reported that ravens might actually remember sites of prior kills and return to them regularly—and that kind of spatial memory plays a much greater role in their scavenging strategy than previously known.

Biologist Dan Stahler, who works at Yellowstone National Park, had noticed the ravens appearing to seek out the company of wolves, which had been reintroduced into the area in the mid 1990s, monitored with tracking collars. Tracking the ravens was a bit more challenging. Stahler’s team managed to trap 69 ravens by disguising the traps with rubbish and using fast food as bait and then attached tiny GPS trackers to the trapped ravens before releasing them back into the wild.

Stahler et al. collected tracking data on both wolves and ravens for two and a half years, noting locations where wolves killed their prey. There was just one case where a raven followed a wolf for more than 1 kilometer or longer than an hour. Analyzing the tracking data, Stahler realized that the ravens were regularly revisiting locations where wolves often killed rather than following them for longer periods, suggesting they were learning and remembering those locations for future reference. Ravens do follow wolves over short distances, using short-range cues, but it’s not the only tool in their scavenger’s toolbox.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adz9467.

The physics of folding a crepe

Credit: David Monniaux/CC BY-SA 3.0

Physicists are undeniable gourmands, applying their scientific expertise to all manner of food and drink: the perfect cacio e pepe, al dente spaghetti, or wok-tossed fried rice, for instance, not to mention the underlying physics of Oreos, beer foam, or champagne, or brewing the perfect espresso. Physicist Tom Marzin of Cornell University decided to explore a crucial question of crepes, a favorite dish from his native France. Specifically, he developed a formula to determine how many times one can fold this ultra-thin pancake without it flipping back over, reporting his findings at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver.

The best part is that Marzin recruited his own mother to help, since his own crepe-making skills weren’t quite good enough. “I didn’t control the thickness well,” he told New Scientist. Granted, his mother had to use commercial crepes made by a machine to get more uniform thickness, but she gamely invested in calipers and rulers and performed a series of experiments per Marzin’s instructions—letting one end stick to a tabletop while the other hung over the edge, then measuring how much it sagged. Marzin himself conducted similar experiments with plastic discs and store-bought tortillas.

According to Marzin, you just need one number: the elasto-gravity length, a combination of a material’s density, stiffness, and gravitational force. In the case of crepes, it determines how much of the area of a folded sheet ends up being looped over, which in turn determines if there’s enough flat area left over for another fold. So if a crepe was 26 centimeters in diameter and 0.9 millimeters thick, it could be folded as many as four times. By comparison, a 1.5 mm-thick tortilla of the same diameter could only fold twice, because the elasto-gravity length is 3.4 times larger.

Down to the last drop

Credit: Tang Lab / Brown University

Speaking of kitchen physics, Jay Tang of Brown University decided to take a novel approach to teaching his graduate student, Thomas Dutta, about the fluid dynamics of thin layers of fluid moving across a surface. Tang’s lab studies how bacteria swarms and other single-celled organisms expand on moist surfaces, and since the underlying physics is the same as trying to get the last few drops of a viscous liquid out of a container, a project exploring those dynamics seemed perfect. They described the results in a paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

Dutta first made some theoretical predictions about how long it would take fluids with differing viscosities to flow along a tilted surface, using the classic Navier-Stokes equations central to fluid dynamics. Then he ran actual experiments, letting different kitchen fluids flow down a plate tilted at a 45-degree angle, weighing the liquid as it flowed off the plate so he’d know when all but 10 percent had left the container. Water reached that point in just a few seconds, while cold maple syrup took several hours.

Dutta also used computer simulations to study a similar conundrum proposed by Tang: how to remove residual water after cleaning a cast-iron wok. (Those who have used a cast-iron wok will understand that drying it with a cloth could remove the all-important oil seasoning that keeps food from sticking, while letting the water slowly evaporate can produce rust.) Tang’s solution had been to wait a few minutes and let residual water gather at the center before emptying the wok again. Dutta’s simulations showed that Tang should be waiting a good 15 minutes instead. Who says you can’t learn something new from a simple training project?

Physics of Fluids, 2026. DOI: 10.1063/5.0308586.

Dance Your PhD 2026 Winner

It’s time again to honor the winners of the annual Dance Your PhD contest, where eager young scientists attempt to convey the concepts of their doctoral theses through dance. This year’s overall winner is physicist Sofia Pappa, a graduate student at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each. All category winners receive $750.

Pappa won the physics category and, as the overall champion, will receive an additional $2,750. Her video (embedded above) featured a dance representing the piezoelectric effect, with “dancers dressed in red or blue to represent positive and negative charges, respectively, with twists and turns reflecting the differences between crystalline and semicrystalline materials.”

As we’ve reported previously, the Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon, who is now a data scientist at South Park Commons. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed-out PhD students, who were in the middle of defending their theses, to let off a little steam. So he put together a dance party at Austria’s Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, including a contest to see which candidate could best explain their thesis topics through interpretive dance. The contest has continued ever since.

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Posted Thursday 2 April 2026 at 12:06 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of March) 1,297

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Launching to the Moon is an all-day undertaking, something the four astronauts waiting to climb aboard NASA’s Artemis II rocket know well.

“It is actually a very long day,” said Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis II. “We wake up about eight hours before launch, and there’s a pretty tight schedule of things to get out there.”

Glover and his three crewmates have their schedules planned to the minute throughout the nine-day Artemis II mission. If all goes according to plan, their mission will carry them more than a quarter-million miles from Earth, farther from home than anyone has ventured in human history. After looping behind the Moon, the astronauts and their Orion capsule will fall back to Earth at some 25,000 mph (40,000 km/hr), setting another record for the fastest that humans have ever traveled.

Reid Wiseman, the mission commander, will join Glover at the controls inside the Orion spacecraft’s cockpit. Mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen round out the crew. All four have critical roles during the mission to test the Orion spaceship, which is flying with humans for the first time after 20 years in development.

The journey could begin as soon as Wednesday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission has a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC). You can watch NASA’s live coverage of the countdown and launch in the YouTube stream embedded below.

The full Moon, Artemis II’s destination, will rise over the eastern horizon at the spaceport during the launch window.

Looking at the Moon has taken on a new meaning for the Artemis II astronauts since their selection for the mission three years ago. Artemis II is the first crew mission for NASA’s Artemis program. The long-term goal of Artemis is to build a sustained human presence at the Moon, with a lunar base at the Moon’s south pole, to set the stage for future expeditions to Mars.

“A destination is not just something we’re looking at,” said Koch, 47, a former spacecraft engineer and Antarctic explorer. “It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the Moon and think of it as also a destination.”

NASA flew nine Apollo missions to the Moon, accomplishing six landings, but humans haven’t been back since 1972. Artemis II will change that. Sixty years ago, America was racing the Soviet Union. Today, it’s China that aims to put its own citizens on the Moon by 2030. NASA’s current schedule calls for landing US astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028.

The Artemis II mission has six launch opportunities through Monday, April 6, or else it must wait until the end of the month for the next chance to shoot for the Moon. The periods available for launch hinge on several factors, such as the Moon’s location in its 28-day orbit around the Earth and trajectory constraints to ensure the Orion spacecraft has enough sunlight to charge its batteries. Additionally, NASA wants to ensure the Orion capsule reenters the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at precisely the correct angle. The mission’s exact trajectory depends on the day of launch.

Wiseman, the mission commander, knows there’s a chance Artemis II won’t launch Wednesday.

“The way I kind of think about it in my head is this is the first time we’re loading the crew on (the rocket), with fuel, on the pad,” said Wiseman, a 50-year-old former Navy test pilot. “NASA is ready. This vehicle is definitely ready to go. We went through the flight readiness review. We are ready to launch, but we’re also humans trying to load millions of pounds of propellant onto a giant machine and send it to the Moon.

“So it could very well be that we get on April 1, and we’re behind timeline and we’re just not ready as a team, and then we’ll probably take a 24- or 48-hour pause,” Wiseman said. “If we get off on the third, great. If we get on the sixth, great. If we’ve got an issue and we’ve got to come back in May or June or whenever the vehicle and the team are ready, we are ready for that.”

Ars has prepared a list of key things to watch for during Wednesday’s countdown. Here’s the rundown.

Will hydrogen leak again?

Sometime shortly after 7 am EDT (11:00 UTC), NASA is scheduled to begin loading more than 750,000 gallons of super-cold propellants into the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. This is not a straightforward activity.

Preparations for filling the rocket with propellant will begin about 11 hours before launch with thermal conditioning of the core stage tanks to receive their cryogenic contents.

Once the tanks are properly chilled down to cryogenic temperatures, liquid hydrogen should start flowing into the core stage at around 8:30 am EDT, followed 15 minutes later by the start of liquid oxygen loading. The launch team will ramp up flow rates to “fast fill” mode on both tanks sometime around 9:00 am EDT. This will be one of the most critical phases of the countdown, when engineers watch for buildups of gaseous hydrogen around the fueling connector near the bottom of the rocket.

Looking straight up from the base of the SLS rocket’s mobile launch platform.

Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

Liquid hydrogen must be kept at temperatures of around minus 423° Fahrenheit (minus 253° Celsius), cold enough to freeze solid any gas it comes into contact with except for helium. Hydrogen is also the lightest element on the periodic table, and it has a propensity for finding leak paths. This is something NASA knows well after struggling with hydrogen leaks in the SLS core stage fueling line four years ago on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight. The leak recurred when the launch team attempted to fuel the rocket for Artemis II for the first time in February.

Aside from its leaky nature, liquid hydrogen stresses any materials it comes in contact with. The fluid’s cryogenic temperature can change the shape and size of seals and gaskets, creating leak paths that escape detection at ambient temperatures.

After finding leaks in February, technicians replaced the hydrogen seals on Artemis II, and the launch team sailed through a successful countdown rehearsal a few weeks later, raising confidence that the seals would hold again on launch day. But NASA officials haven’t completed an investigation into what makes the seals leak. Sensors are in place to immediately detect any buildup of hydrogen during the countdown.

It will take about three hours to fill both tanks on the SLS core stage. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen will begin pumping into the rocket’s upper stage soon after the start of core stage loading. If the countdown remains on track, the rocket should be fully fueled soon after 12 pm EDT. That’s when NASA will dispatch the closeout crew to Launch Complex 39B to prepare for the arrival of the astronauts. Throughout it all, the rocket will slowly be replenished with propellant as the super-cold liquids boil off.

Crew boarding

While the launch team has its focus on activities at the launch, the Artemis II astronauts will awaken around 9:45 am EDT inside NASA crew quarters about 8 miles away. After having breakfast, the crew members will receive a weather briefing and an update on the countdown, then begin putting on their orange pressure suits they will wear for launch.

Shortly before 2 pm EDT, the four astronauts will walk out of the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building. Their families, NASA officials, and news photographers will gather outside the building to witness their departure for the launch pad. The ride inside a converted Airstream motor coach, called “Astrovan II,” will take about 20 minutes.

Upon reaching the launch pad, the astronauts will ride an elevator to the 274-foot level on the mobile launch tower next to the SLS rocket. There, they will be greeted by the closeout crew, including astronauts Jenni Gibbons and Andre Douglas, who will help strap them into their seats inside the Orion spacecraft. Crew boarding should begin shortly before 2:30 pm EDT if all remains on schedule.

The Artemis II crew, from left to right: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

“There is not a lot of time for personal ritual, I would say, but before I fly an airplane, I generally say a very short prayer, and then I try to send a note to my family, a note to tell them that I love them,” said Glover, 49, making his second flight to space. “Our families are outside the building when we walk out, and so that is the moment that I’m going to get to tell them I love them. Instead of sending a text message or a phone call, I get to tell them I love them. And I’ll still say my prayer before we all get into the vehicle. That way, I can focus on that timeline and making sure that the launch control team is not waiting on us, the crew.”

Once the crew is inside the spacecraft, the ground team at the pad will close the hatches to the Orion capsule, then swing an outer door closed on the ship’s aeroshell, which is connected to the rocket’s launch abort system. That should happen around three hours prior to liftoff, or at about 3:30 pm EDT. The closeout crew will continue configuring the launch pad for liftoff before they evacuate the complex.

Will the weather hold?

Probably. Forecasters predict an 80 percent chance of favorable weather for launch Wednesday, with a low risk of cumulus clouds and ground winds that could violate NASA’s launch commit criteria.

The concern with cumulus clouds is that if they’re tall enough, they might create a risk that the rocket could trigger lightning as it climbs through them. If the clouds reach above the freezing layer, the launch team will want to ensure the rocket will not fly through them, even if the clouds haven’t spawned an actual thunderstorm.

NASA also monitors wind direction and wind speed to ensure that the Orion spacecraft won’t be blown back over land in the event of an abort on the pad or shortly after liftoff. If onshore winds are too strong, NASA will hold the countdown.

There are other factors under consideration. Weather officers in Florida and at Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of mission control, are watching wind and wave conditions along the flight corridor over the Atlantic Ocean. If the mission suffered a launch failure, the Orion capsule could splash down anywhere along the flight path, from Florida’s east coast to the western coast of Africa. The good news is there is a less than 10 percent chance of any violation of downrange weather criteria on Wednesday.

Final poll and terminal countdown

If everything else has gone according to plan Wednesday, the countdown clock will pause at T-minus 10 minutes to allow time for NASA’s launch team to verify their readiness for launch. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s launch director, will orchestrate the countdown from her post inside NASA’s launch control center at Kennedy, approximately 4 miles from the pad.

She will poll the team for their “go” or “no go” for launch around 17 minutes before liftoff. If launch team is “go,” the four astronauts will close their helmet visors a couple of minutes later, and the countdown clock will resume at T-minus 10 minutes and counting.

The final steps to prepare for launch include activating the Launch Abort System, starting Auxiliary Power Units to power the core stage steering system, and switching control of the countdown to an automated sequencer at T-minus 30 seconds. After that moment, any hold in the countdown will result in a scrub for the day. Here is a snapshot of the key moments in the final minutes:

• T-08:00: Crew Access Arm retract
• T-06:00: Go for core stage tank pressurization; Orion spacecraft to internal power
• T-05:20: Launch Abort System is available
• T-04:30: Flight Termination System armed
• T-04:00: Core stage Auxiliary Power Unit start
• T-02:02: Upper stage to internal power
• T-02:00: Boosters to internal power
• T-01:30: Core stage to internal power
• T-00:50: All propellant tanks topped off for flight
• T-00:30: Automated launch sequencer start
• T-00:12: Hydrogen burn off igniters initiated
• T-00:10: Launch sequencer commands core stage engine start
• T-00:06: RS-25 engine start
• T-00:00: Booster ignition and liftoff

NASA launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.

Credit: NASA/Amber Jean Notvest

From KSC to the Moon

The cumulative thrust from the rocket’s four RS-25 engines and twin solid rocket boosters, all holdovers from the space shuttle program, will be enough to propel the nearly 6 million-pound vehicle from its moorings at Kennedy Space Center.

A few seconds after liftoff, the rocket will roll onto the proper heading and begin arcing over the Atlantic Ocean. The trajectory will take Artemis II toward the east or northeast. The exact heading will depend on the time of launch. The rocket has a dynamic targeting capability, meaning it can adjust its heading based on when it lifts off. The azimuth changes minute by minute, varying by as much as 9 degrees during Wednesday’s two-hour window.

The rocket will surpass the speed of sound in about a minute, and the twin boosters mounted to each side of the orange core stage will burn through their solid propellants in a little more than two minutes.

This graphic illustrates the major events during Artemis II’s climb into space.

Credit: NASA

The core stage will continue firing for more than eight minutes before jettisoning and giving way to the upper stage, which will fire its RL10 engine two times, first to reach a stable low-altitude orbit and then to climb into a higher elliptical orbit taking Orion and its crew more than 40,000 miles from Earth.

That will set the stage for the Orion capsule to separate from the upper stage about three-and-a-half hours after launch. Pilot Victor Glover and commander Reid Wiseman will take manual control of the spacecraft to maneuver it around the spent upper stage for one of the mission’s first major tests, gathering useful information to plan dockings on future missions between Orion and the landers that will ferry crews to the lunar surface.

The Artemis II astronauts will spend a day in this high-Earth orbit. Then, if Orion checks out, mission controllers will give the “go” to fire the ship’s main engine for a trans-lunar injection, or TLI, burn to kick off the journey to the Moon.

“We want to set expectations realistically,” said Hansen, the first non-US citizen to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. “It’s not [like] being on the International Space Station 250 miles away. The communications system may be really robust, and we may be able to get a lot of information back, but we might not be able to as well.”

If Artemis II lifts off Wednesday, the astronauts will soar beyond the back side of the Moon on Monday and return to Earth on April 10. We can expect live views from the Orion spacecraft and descriptions of what the astronauts see as they soar more than 4,000 miles above the Moon.

“One of the test objectives is to see how our deep space communications system works, how much bandwidth we have for transmitting high-resolution photos and video… Just imagine the Moon in the foreground and the Earth in the background, and you’re all in that shot,” Hansen said. “Yeah, we’re really excited to share that with you.”

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Posted Thursday 2 April 2026 at 5:19 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of March) 1,297

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Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has confidentially filed to go public, firing the starting gun on what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering in history.

The Texas-headquartered company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week for the listing, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Confidential filings allow companies to advance their listing plans without publicly revealing their financials. SpaceX last month acquired Musk’s loss-making AI startup xAI for $250 billion.

SpaceX was seeking to raise about $75 billion and was targeting a valuation of around $1.75 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter. In the US, only Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon have higher market capitalizations. SpaceX was valued at around $90 billion as recently as 2022.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The IPO, which would dwarf the $29 billion raised by oil major Saudi Aramco in 2019, is expected sometime in June, potentially coinciding—at Musk’s behest—with a rare planetary alignment and the billionaire’s 55th birthday.

This week’s confidential filing comes days after the Nasdaq stock exchange enacted sweeping changes to its index inclusion methodology that would direct billions of dollars in passive investments towards large newly public companies.

The exchange has removed one of the conditions for companies to join its Nasdaq 100 index of the biggest US tech stocks, which had required at least 10 percent of a company’s shares to be on offer to the public.

Exchange-traded funds that track the index manage about $520 billion. SpaceX plans to float less than 5 percent of its equity.

Nasdaq also said that large companies will be eligible to join the Nasdaq 100 after 15 days of trading, down from the current waiting period of three months. Critics argue that fast-tracking newly public companies onto widely followed indices could distort post-IPO price discovery.

SpaceX was toying with the idea of allowing some existing shareholders to sell down their stakes in the company on its first day of trading, according to people close to the deal.

This would do away with guidelines that typically prevent insiders cashing out of their positions for 180 days after a company’s market debut.

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Posted Thursday 2 April 2026 at 5:18 am AEST (my time).

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Many of the early exoplanet discoveries were exciting on their own, confirming that there really were strange new worlds out in the Universe. But over time, our focus has shifted more toward numbers, as we began using the frequency of objects like super-Earths and mini-Neptunes to learn more about how planets form. With four gravitational wave detectors now having generated years of data, we may be on the verge of seeing something similar happen with black hole mergers.

On Wednesday, researchers released an analysis suggesting that there’s a “mass gap” in the population of black holes that we’ve detected so far. And that gap supports the idea that some stars are so massive that they die in something called a pair-instability supernova, which is so violent that it leaves nothing but debris behind.

That’s not stable

Black holes result from the collapse of a star’s core during a supernova. While the outer layers of a star explode outward, the innermost layers plunge inward, funneling a fraction of the star’s mass into the black hole (or neutron star if the star’s mass is too small). We’re not sure what the upper limit on a star’s mass is, so you might naively think the distribution of black hole masses tails off gently.

But theoretical models have suggested there’s actually a sharp break. Above a certain mass, the density of photons in a star’s core can become so high that their energy is spontaneously converted into mass in the form of electron-positron pairs. Spontaneously forming a bunch of antimatter would seem to be a serious problem, but that’s actually not the worst of the star’s worries. Photons are the only things keeping the star’s core from contracting. Reducing their numbers by converting them to antimatter undercuts this force, causing a sudden compaction of the star.

If the star is sufficiently massive, this will cause the near-instantaneous onset of oxygen fusion, releasing a massive burst of energy. That energy is thought to be enough to completely destroy the star without leaving a remnant black hole behind. Alternatively, smaller bursts of oxygen fusion may blast away the star’s outer layers, leaving a much smaller star behind that will ultimately create a far less massive black hole.

While that’s pretty well established through modeling, it’s a very difficult process to confirm. There have been a number of proposed examples of potential pair-instability events, and we don’t have a clear picture of what observations would distinguish them from more run-of-the-mill stellar explosions. And while we’ve been able to estimate the mass of the black holes we’ve observed merging, that hasn’t been as helpful as we would like.

The problem is that several of the mergers we’ve seen involve black holes that seem to have merged previously. So they’re big enough to be above the cutoff where pair-instability should have blocked the formation of a black hole, but they might have gotten that hefty by swallowing another black hole.

Numbers to the rescue

The international team behind the new work considered what kinds of collisions we might see. One is two first-generation (G1) black holes merging, in which case both should be below the mass at which pair-instability destroys everything. Then there’s a G1 colliding with a second-generation (G2) that’s the product of a previous merger, with the G2 potentially being above the mass cutoff. Finally, there’s a G2-G2 merger, where both are above the cutoff.

Any black hole mergers are likely to take place within a structure filled with lots of high-mass stars, such as a globular cluster. But the merger itself tends to impart a lot of energy to the resulting black hole, which could potentially kick it out of the cluster. As a result, G2-G2 mergers would likely be far more rare than G1-G2 mergers; the team estimates that only about 1 percent of all mergers would be G2-G2.

At this relatively early stage of things, any mergers involving a G2 black hole would almost certainly be a G1-G2 merger. This means that the smaller of the two black holes involved in the merger had not previously undergone a merger and should therefore be subject to any mass limit imposed by pair-instability supernovae.

And that’s what the researchers seemed to see: There appears to be a mass limit in the smaller of the two black holes in collisions. The researchers estimate the cutoff at about 45 solar masses, not far from what theory had predicted (roughly 50 solar masses).

Adding further evidence that this is real, the spins of the more massive members of these mergers are high. That’s what you’d expect from a black hole that resulted from a merger, which will inherit some of the momentum of the orbits of the parent bodies. Doing an independent analysis based on spins also produced a limit right about in the same area: 45 solar masses. Earlier work had found a similar limit with a subset of the current data.

There is also an upper limit on the mass left behind by pair instabilities, which is a roughly 130 solar mass black hole. But our current data contains only a single example of a black hole this massive, so there’s not really anything we can say about the upper limit at the moment.

The error bars on these estimates are pretty large—literally five times the mass of the Sun. But each new year will bring more data, raising the prospect that we could narrow them down considerably with time. That should help validate whether this gap is really the product of pair-instabilities and maybe even help us understand the physical processes that create this limit.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10359-0  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 2 April 2026 at 5:18 am AEST (my time).

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SpaceX’s Starlink division confirmed yesterday that it lost contact with a satellite on Sunday and is trying to locate space debris that might have been produced by… whatever happened there.

Starlink said there appeared to be “no new risk” to other space operations and did not use the word “explosion.” But it seems that something caused a Starlink broadband satellite to break apart into at least tens of pieces. LeoLabs, which operates a radar network that can track objects in low Earth orbit, said in an X post that it “detected a fragment creation event involving SpaceX Starlink 34343,” one of the 10,000 or so Starlink satellites in orbit.

“LeoLabs Global Radar Network immediately detected tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite after the event, with a first pass over our radar site in the Azores, Portugal,” LeoLabs said. “Additional fragments may have been produced—analysis is ongoing.”

LeoLabs said the breakup was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.” Because of “the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks,” it said.

Two anomalies in orbit

Starlink said in an X post yesterday that “Starlink satellite 34343 experienced an anomaly on-orbit, resulting in loss of communications with the satellite at ~560 km above Earth.” Starlink said its “analysis shows the event poses no new risk” to the International Space Station, its crew, or NASA’s Artemis II mission that could launch as soon as Wednesday.

“We will continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the US Space Force,” Starlink said. “The event also posed no new risk to this morning’s Transporter-16 mission, which was designed to avoid Starlink with payload deploys well above or well below the constellation. The SpaceX and Starlink teams are actively working to determine root cause and will rapidly implement any necessary corrective actions.”

LeoLabs said yesterday that the new event is similar to one from December 17, 2025, which also produced “tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite” and appeared to be “caused by an internal energetic source” rather than a crash with another object. LeoLabs said it wants more information on the anomalies.

“These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable clarity of the operating environment,” it said.

Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink added that the satellite was “largely intact” but “tumbling,” and would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and “fully demise” within weeks.

In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” Starlink said in the December 18 post.

We asked SpaceX today whether it has determined the cause of the December anomaly or the one on Sunday, and will update this article if we get a response.

Starlink reported near-crash after Chinese launch

Starlink also had a near-crash in December, in a different incident about a week before the “tumbling” satellite. Starlink Senior VP Michael Nicolls wrote on December 12 that a Chinese company had launched nine satellites without coordinating with other space users. Lack of coordination increases the risk of collisions, he said.

“As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude,” Nicolls wrote at the time, referring to the Chinese launch. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators—this needs to change.”

Coordination can only become more important if SpaceX goes through with its stated plan of launching a million satellites to create an orbital data center.

Under normal circumstances, Starlink satellites reaching their end-of-life date follow “a targeted reentry approach to deorbit satellites over the open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes,” Starlink says in a document on “satellite demisability.” But satellites that fall to Earth unexpectedly should pose no risk to people on the ground because they are designed to “demise with extremely low impact energy,” according to Starlink.

“A critical aspect of sustainable satellite design is demisability, which ensures that satellites fully break up and burn up during atmospheric reentry,” Starlink says in the document. “Any fragments that do not completely demise should have negligible impact energy.”

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Posted Wednesday 1 April 2026 at 12:06 pm AEST (my time).

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires that, in the event of an emergency, all airplane passengers must be able to evacuate any aircraft within a 90-second window. But is that a realistic requirement, particularly given the increasing number of elderly passengers who might need more time and assistance? According to a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances, it is not. Various simulated scenarios showed evacuation times significantly higher than the 90-second requirement.

This isn’t the first time scientists have puzzled over this kind of optimization problem. Back in 2011, Jason Steffen, now a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, became intrigued by the question of the most efficient boarding method; he applied the same optimization routine used to solve the famous traveling salesman problem to airline boarding strategies. Steffen fully expected that boarding from the back to the front would be the most efficient strategy and was surprised when his results showed that strategy was actually the least efficient.

The most efficient, aka the “Steffen method,” has the passengers board in a series of waves. Field tests bore out the results, showing that Steffen’s method was almost twice as fast as boarding back-to-front or rotating blocks of rows and 20–30 percent faster than random boarding. The key is parallelism: The ideal scenario is having more than one person sitting down at the same time.

And in 2020, we reported on a study that found it is faster and more efficient to let slower passengers—the elderly or handicapped, people with small children—board first. The authors exploited the well-known connection between microscopic dynamics of interacting particles and macroscopic properties and applied it to the boarding process. In that case, the microscopic interacting particles were the passengers waiting in line to board, and the macroscopic property was how long it took all the passengers to settle into their assigned seats.

This latest study was partially inspired by the Emergency Vacating of Aircraft Cabin (EVAC) Act, introduced in December 2022 by US Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), calling for updated evacuation regulations to take into account more realistic cabin conditions. According to the authors, prior research on aircraft passenger evacuation has examined various factors: the effect of different landing attitudes of Airbus A350-900 planes; increasing passenger obesity; passengers obstructing others by attempting to retrieve their luggage; and the impact of passenger fear, anxiety, and panic on optimal evacuation times, among other examples.

Any air traveler has experienced the limited seat pitch and narrow aisles of newer aircraft. Those and other aspects can pose challenges to the increasing number of elderly passengers that the current regulations simply don’t address. Elderly passengers tend to have slower reaction times and mobility issues and are more likely to require assistance. They may also have vision or hearing limitations. Age-related cognitive decline could impair their situational awareness, particularly in a high-stress situation like an aircraft evacuation, resulting in possible delayed decision-making, lower situational awareness, and reduced compliance with crew instructions. Yet there has only been limited research taking elderly passengers into account when studying efficient aircraft evacuation.

A 3D full-scale geometric model

The authors decided to simulate various evacuation scenarios for an Airbus A320, one of the most common narrow-body aircraft worldwide, by using the Rhino 3D CAD tool to construct a full-scale geometric model of the A320, including seat rows, aisles, and exits. This was then imported into the agent-based evacuation simulation platform Pathfinder to model passenger behavior. The team focused on dual-engine fire scenarios, an infrequent occurrence that nonetheless poses greater risks and can render over-wing exits unusable, since both engines in the Airbus 320 are mounted directly under those exits. In such a scenario, all passengers would need to exit the aircraft through the front and rear exits.

“While a dual-engine fire scenario is statistically rare, it falls under the broader category of dual-engine failures and critical emergencies in aviation. History has shown that dual-engine failures and emergencies, such as the famous ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ involving Captain Sullenberger, can happen and lead to severe consequences,” said co-author Chenyang (Luca) Zhang of the University of Calgary in Canada. “Our study focuses on these low-probability but high-impact events to ensure the highest safety standards.”

Zhang et al. created two passenger categories: elderly adults age 60 and older and those younger than 60 years. They modeled three different ratios of those two categories—youth-dominated, evenly balanced, and elderly dominated evacuation scenarios—to capture more realistic travel dynamics and exclude edge cases (e.g., all non-elderly or all-elderly scenarios). For each of those, the model looked at three distinct seating patterns: one where elderly passengers are evenly distributed in areas near the exits; one where the elderly were concentrated in the middle of the cabin, away from the exits; and one where elderly passengers were randomly distributed throughout the cabin.

None of the tested conditions resulted in evacuation times within the FAA-mandated 90 seconds. The shortest evacuation time—20 percent elderly passengers evenly distributed near the exits—was 141 seconds. The longest—involving 80 percent elderly passengers and the same near-exit seating distribution—was 218.5 seconds.

Zhang et al. acknowledge that their study has some limitations. For instance, not all elderly passengers are the same, and their models did not incorporate the need for crew assistance for decreased mobility or similar issues. And because they focused on just the dual-engine fire scenario, their findings might not be generalizable to other evacuation scenarios.

The authors suggest future simulations could be more accurate with the addition of empirical data from real aircraft environments under controlled conditions. Future research should also test the effectiveness of different behavioral interventions, such as providing extra safety briefings tailored to elderly passengers. Airbus and other aircraft manufacturers might also consider redesigning cabins with designated seating areas for elderly passengers, giving them easier access to exits, better visibility, wider aisles, or perhaps armrests to assist with mobility.

AIP Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1063/5.0310405 (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 1 April 2026 at 5:45 am AEST (my time).

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, April 6, or else the mission will have to wait until the end of the month.

Mission managers said Monday that all systems were looking good for launch this week. The weather forecast is favorable, with an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday. The only weather concern at the launch site in Florida is a low chance of rain showers and cloud cover that could present a risk of lightning. But with a two-hour launch window, there should be plenty of time to wait out any scattered storms.

John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s mission management team, told reporters Monday that there were “no showstoppers” for launch on Wednesday. Ground teams powered up the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for final checkouts early Tuesday, setting the stage for loading super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket Wednesday morning.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will strap into their seats inside the Orion crew capsule on Tuesday afternoon. If all goes according to plan, the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket will ignite its four RS-25 main engines and twin solid rocket boosters at the opening of the launch window to propel itself off the launch pad with 8.8 million pounds of thrust.

Starting to feel real

There are several key milestones that the rocket, spacecraft, and launch team must get through before Artemis II can head for the Moon. Chief among these is fueling the SLS rocket, which hasn’t proven easy during past countdowns. Leaky seals have been a persistent problem for the SLS rocket, causing numerous delays during preparations for the rocket’s first test flight in 2022.

Another hydrogen leak cropped up during a practice countdown for this mission in January. Technicians replaced seals in the rocket’s hydrogen fueling line, and the problem did not recur during a second countdown rehearsal in February, before a separate issue forced NASA to return the rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs.

Now, the rocket is back on the pad, and NASA officials shared cautious optimism that fueling for Wednesday’s launch attempt will proceed without any significant problems. If everything else is “go” for launch, the astronauts inside the spacecraft will be ready.

“Things are certainly starting to feel real here at the Cape,” said Koch. The crew members arrived in Florida on Friday, flying a set of T-38 supersonic trainer jets from their home base in Houston.

“Hey, let’s go to the Moon!” Wiseman said as he greeted VIPs and news media at the Florida spaceport. “I think the nation and the world has been waiting a long time to do this again, and on behalf of myself, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy, we are really pumped to go do this for this entire team. It has been a lot of work. It’s been a great journey.”

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, NASA mission specialist Christina Koch, commander Reid Wiseman, and

pilot Victor Glover after arriving at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for Artemis II launch preparations.

Credit: NASA/Jim Ross

It has been a long wait. NASA and the world’s other space agencies have not ventured beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972, when the last Apollo mission returned from the Moon. The farthest anyone has traveled from Earth in that time was in 2024, when a team of commercial astronauts flew to an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission.

Artemis II will reach a distance of more than a quarter million miles from Earth, looping thousands of miles beyond the far side of the Moon before Earth’s gravity pulls the Orion spacecraft back home for a scorching 25,000 mph (40,000 km/hr) reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Depending on the launch date (the exact trajectory varies day to day), the crew will fly farther than any humans in history and set a reentry speed record on the way home.

The mission will last more than nine days from liftoff to splashdown. After separation from the SLS rocket, the Orion spacecraft will spend a little more than a day in an elliptical high-altitude orbit ranging more than 40,000 miles from Earth. The astronauts and mission controllers in Houston will spend this time activating and testing the spacecraft, with a particular focus on Orion’s environmental control and life support systems, which were not part of an unpiloted Orion test flight four years ago.

Glover and Wiseman will take manual control of the spacecraft to assess Orion’s handling characteristics, commanding thrusters to guide the capsule back toward the SLS rocket’s upper stage to practice for docking maneuvers on future Artemis missions. Assuming everything checks out, Orion will fire its main engine for a translunar injection, or TLI, burn about 25 hours into the mission. This is the event that will send the astronauts toward the Moon.

This mission will not land. That will come on a future Artemis mission—currently slated for Artemis IV—no earlier than 2028. NASA is working with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop commercial human-rated landers to ferry astronauts from the Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit down to the Moon’s surface and back. Those landers, along with new lunar spacesuits, won’t be ready for a landing mission next year, as NASA officials hoped.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a shakeup of the Artemis program last week, shifting focus from building a space station in orbit around the Moon to constructing a base on the lunar surface. The program changes also included replanning the next Artemis mission—Artemis III—from a landing mission to a flight to dock an Orion crew capsule with one or both commercial landers closer to Earth.

The change will increase the chances of launching Artemis III next year. Sending SpaceX or Blue Origin’s landers to the Moon will require a mastery of in-orbit refueling, and neither company has demonstrated the capability yet. Refueling is not required for a test mission in low-Earth orbit on Artemis III.

“Over the last 10 weeks, the agency has prepared a crewed lunar test vehicle and also restructured the program that it belongs to,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator. “This was done deliberately. A crew that understands that campaign flies with greater purpose, a workforce that sees the road ahead holds a higher standard. This flight and the future reinforce each other. This is how Apollo worked, and this is how we will work.

“Behind this flight stands a campaign, landings, a lunar base, nuclear propulsion into deep space. That begins, not ends, with what happens on Wednesday evening,” Kshatriya said.

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Posted Wednesday 1 April 2026 at 5:43 am AEST (my time).

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Although paper is a more environmentally friendly packaging material than plastic, it’s often contaminated with additives, such as adhesives used to create a secure seal. That complicates the recycling process and reduces the quality of recycled paper. Now, German researchers at four Fraunhofer institutes have developed an alternative process that can seal paper packaging without glue or plastic using a carbon monoxide laser.

The new system, currently called the Papure project, leverages the expertise of the Fraunhofer institutes, each of which focuses on areas such as polymer research, engineering and packaging, and laser beam technologies. The first step of the new sealing process involves analyzing the chemical composition and morphology of various paper types using techniques such as scanning electron microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to determine if they can be sealed without an additive. The amounts of ingredients such as hemicellulose, cellulose, lignin, talc, and calcium carbonate in the paper can affect the strength of the final packaging’s seals.

The prototype manufacturing unit is expected to be able to produce 10 packages per minute by September.

Image: Fraunhofer IVV

 

Once a paper type is approved, it’s irradiated with a CO laser in a controlled process that rapidly heats its surface, converting the lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose into short-chain compounds. From there, what researchers call “fusible cleavage products” remain on the paper’s surface and act like a natural glue, creating a tight seal when heat and pressure are applied. The researchers are still fine-tuning the various parameters of the Papure project, including laser intensity and paper seam design, to maximize bond strength. But in current testing, they’ve found that a 2cm seal that’s just 3mm wide is strong enough to support a 44-pound load.

The researchers have already built a “laboratory-scale modular paper processing manufacturing unit” capable of producing a flat, four-sided paper bag design that’s commonly used today by companies like Lego. They’re also working to streamline and shrink the design of the laser and sealing modules and to integrate measurement systems that can assess the quality of the seals being produced and automatically adjust various settings to ensure they’re meeting a specific bond strength target. By the end of September, their goal is for the pilot machine to produce 10 packages per minute.

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Posted Tuesday 31 March 2026 at 5:09 am AEST (my time).

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Following this past weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix, Formula 1 goes into a five-week hiatus now that war in the Gulf has made it impossible to hold races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The unplanned break is probably welcomed up and down the paddock as teams, drivers, and officials try to get their heads around this new generation of F1 car and the radical new demands it places on them all. Those new challenges were on full display at Suzuka.

On the plus side, the race itself was quite exciting. That’s something you could not have said in 2025, a snoozefest with cars driving in procession and few opportunities to overtake. A hefty reduction in aerodynamic downforce for 2026 means that cars can follow each other more closely. But after this visit to one of motorsport’s most-loved, most challenging circuits, it’s very hard to avoid the conclusion that F1 has painted itself into a corner with its new hybrid systems. The sport itself recognizes this; on April 9, it will hold crisis talks to try to find a solution.

You don’t have the energy

The problem, as we have been warned for some time, is the new hybrid power trains, which combine a 1.6 L V6 that generates 400 kW (536 hp) with a 350 kW (469 hp) electric motor. Getting to a near 50:50 split between internal combustion and electric power was key to attracting new auto manufacturers to the sport, and Audi, Ford, Cadillac, and Honda were all enticed by the 2026 rules. The electric motor is fed by a 1.1 kWh (4 MJ) battery pack, but depending on the track, cars are allowed to deploy 8–9 MJ from the electric side, which means recovering that energy while out on track.

A few weeks ago in Shanghai, F1 was at a circuit with plenty of low- and medium-speed corners and braking zones that allowed drivers to recharge their batteries several times a lap through regenerative braking at the rear axle. But Suzuka has far fewer braking zones, so the cars could regenerate only about 3.65 MJ of the 8 MJ allowed this weekend. At a full deployment of 350 kW, there’s enough energy to power the electric motor for less than 12 seconds. That energy deficit is made up by siphoning power from the engine via the electric motor, using it as a generator—this is known in F1 as “superclipping.”

Moving the race from the end of the year to March means we get to see the cherry blossoms.

Credit: Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Depending on the state of the battery and where the car is on track, it might have 750 kW (1,005 hp), it might have 400 kW, or it might only have 150 kW (201 hp) at the rear wheels. Each driver will use their energy differently, and the complicated nature of the hybrid systems, which are mostly automated, means they can behave erratically. Get too much wheelspin or oversteer, and the algorithms that control power delivery will adjust on the next lap.

And that in turn means cars acting unpredictably, which we saw with dramatic consequences when the Haas of Oliver Bearman had to take avoiding action to dodge the slow-moving Alpine of Franco Colapinto as the drivers approached the entry to Spoon Curve. Bearman darted left over the grass to miss the Alpine and spun, hitting the wall in a 50 G impact.

Critics of the new technical rules have long predicted that dangerous speed differentials of up to 70 km/h (43 mph) were possible, and it seems they were right. Hence, the April 9 meeting to discuss solutions. It probably won’t be easy, though. The simplest fix would be to allow a larger battery, but F1 cars are very tightly packaged, and this would require each team to undergo an expensive redesign, making the cars bigger and heavier.

Increasing the V6 engine’s fuel flow to generate more internal combustion horsepower would also help but would likewise probably require a larger fuel tank, again resulting in a redesign and bigger, heavier cars. Or the sport could limit the amount of power of the electric motor; capped at just 200 kW (268 hp), the battery could last for around 20 seconds.

No more fast corners

130R: Used to be a challenge, then it was easy flat, now they slow down and coast all the way through.

Credit: George Hitchens/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Unlike many F1 fans (and some of the drivers), I have tried hard to be positive about the 2026 technical regulations. That posture became very difficult to maintain after watching the cars qualify. The most famous corner at Suzuka is called 130R, a fast left toward the end of the lap that comes after a long flat-out run from Spoon. It used to be a challenge, but last year, 130R was barely a corner; the cars had so much downforce that they went through it on rails.

If you thought that was bad, it was all forgotten this year as drivers coasted through the corner all the way to the Casio Triangle instead, losing up to 50 km/h (32 mph) from the apex of 130R. Watching the onboard footage of cars slowing through 130R was, frankly, demoralizing, as was the similar sight of cars lifting and coasting into turn 1.

“The problem is, of course, you have a long straight and then only a little chicane and then a long straight again,” said Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. “So if you deploy in one straight, you have nothing on the other. Whereas on some other tracks, if you have a long straight, then you have maybe a few corners and you have time to charge. Here, you don’t.”

That’s now also true for turn 1 and Spoon—instead of braking from high speed, the cars begin to decelerate halfway down the straight, then begin their coast phase well before the corner.

So the fastest way around an entire lap is now no longer going flat out but instead choosing where and when to deploy that precious and limited energy. “I was a bit disappointed in qualifying, as the more you pushed, the slower you went,” said Williams driver Carlos Sainz. “That’s what happened to me in Q2. I think I had a bit less slipstream on my lap and I was in clean air, I went quicker in every corner, slower in every straight, and I went one tenth slower. And that’s simply because I spent more time at full throttle because I went faster in the corners and pushed harder. Super clipping came into the deployment a bit, and a bit of lift and coast also in that qualifying lap. Overall, not good enough, I think, for F1.”

The fans in Japan take F1 to another level.

Clive Rose – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

 

The costumes often involve some kind of Samurai.

Kym Illman/Getty Images

 

Aston Martin now uses Honda engines, so there was a lot of support for the team in green.

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

 

A Valtteri Bottas fan.

akub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Getty Images

 

Headgear is important.

Mark Sutton – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

 

Or you could just cosplay as your favorite driver.

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

 

“High-speed corners now became the charging station for the car. So you go slower, you charge the battery in the high-speed, and then you have the full power on the straight. So driver skill is not really needed anymore,” said Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso. Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was more blunt: “I can’t understand quali—it’s a fucking joke! I go faster in corners, throttle earlier… I’m losing everything in the straight!”

I have to agree. F1 is supposed to be the fastest single-seater racing cars, not just the fastest single-seaters at low- to medium-speed tracks. I sincerely hope the sport finds a solution. If it doesn’t, the Italian Grand Prix at Monza and the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa—two of the fastest and most exciting circuits on the calendar—might as well just not take place.

That said, even vocal critics like Leclerc think that there’s plenty of merit to the 2026 cars, which race well. It’s a different kind of racing from what we are used to in F1; lap times are limited by energy, not grip, and the demands on drivers are now far more mental than physical, as they have to know when and where to deploy and when to conserve. This, too, draws criticism from racing drivers who would rather that was confined to Formula E.

Four-time world champion Verstappen, in particular, has described the racing as “mushroom mode” (in reference to Mario Kart), “anti-racing,” and a “joke.” Making things worse for the Dutch driver is the fact that his Red Bull is far from competitive, perhaps the fifth-fastest team out of 11. His contract allows him to exit Red Bull if he isn’t second in the points by a certain point this summer, and as such, I would not be too surprised if Verstappen retired from the sport at the end of 2026 to compete in other races like the Nürburgring 24H or the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Verstappen was knocked out of Q2 in qualifying, started 11th, and finished eighth behind Pierre Gasly of Alpine. He is now extremely disillusioned with the sport.

Credit: Clive Rose – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

Two in a row

Kimi Antonelli of Mercedes was victorious on Sunday, adding a second win to his tally. Fast all weekend, he took pole but messed up his start and was down to sixth place as he was swarmed by the faster-moving McLarens and Ferraris. Among the issues Mercedes will no doubt be working on during the five-week break is getting off the line better, as their cars have lost positions at the start of each of the three races this year.

McLaren’s Oscar Piastri took the lead and, other than briefly being passed by the Mercedes of George Russell on lap 8, managed to stay there until his pitstop. Russell took first again before pitting a few laps later, at which point Antonelli took the lead and never gave it up. He was helped by a safety car triggered by the Bearman crash, allowing Antonelli to make a stop with far less time lost than his rivals, who stopped under green flag conditions.

Piastri, who didn’t complete a single Grand Prix lap in Australia or China, showed that McLaren is starting to figure out its new car and came home in second place, with the Ferrari of Leclerc in third. Russell, meanwhile, finished in sixth after losing several positions when a software glitch told his engine to start superclipping instead. “It was a bug in the electric system, in the software, that we thought we were going to give him an advantage by deploying energy,” explained team principal Toto Wolff.

F1’s next race will be the Miami Grand Prix, held during the first weekend in May.

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Posted Tuesday 31 March 2026 at 5:08 am AEST (my time).

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Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these ancient behemoths and asked why bugs aren’t this big anymore. Thirty years ago, they came up with an answer known as the “oxygen constrain hypothesis.”

For decades, we thought that any dragonflies the size of hawks needed highly oxygenated air to survive because insect breathing systems are less efficient than those of mammals, birds, or reptiles. As atmospheric oxygen levels dropped, there wasn’t enough to support giant bugs anymore. “It’s a simple, elegant explanation,” said Edward Snelling, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Pretoria. “But it’s wrong.”

Insect breathing

Unlike mammals, insects don’t have a centralized pair of lungs and a closed circulatory system that delivers oxygen-rich blood to their tissues. “They breathe through internalized tubing called the tracheal system,” Snelling explained.

Air enters the insect’s body through specialized portholes on their exoskeleton called spiracles. From there, it travels down larger tubes, the tracheae, which gradually branch into microscopically thin, blind-ending tubes known as tracheoles. These tracheoles are embedded deep within the insect’s tissues, and mitochondria in neighboring cells cluster next to them.

Insects can actively pump air in and out of the larger tracheae by flexing their bodies, but this active pumping stops at the very end of the line, in the tiny tracheoles. Here, oxygen delivery relies on passive diffusion to cross the final barrier into the tissue.

The problem with diffusion is that it’s notoriously slow. The oxygen constraint hypothesis argued that the larger the insect grows, the further the oxygen must travel to reach the deepest tissues.

“As the insects get bigger and bigger, the challenge of diffusion becomes greater,” Snelling said.

To prevent the muscles from suffocating, a bigger insect would need significantly wider or far more numerous tracheoles to maintain the supply of oxygen, which implied there had to be a structural tipping point. If an insect gets too big, the volume of breathing tubes required to supply its muscles with oxygen would take up too much physical space. The tracheoles would crowd the very muscle fibers they were trying to fuel, leaving the insect with severely impaired flight performance.

The late Palaeozoic was a time of hyperoxia, with atmospheric oxygen levels peaking around 30 percent, compared to the 21 percent we breathe today. Hyperoxia was supposed to let insects bypass the limitations of their breathing system and grow larger.

But recently, Snelling led a team of researchers that tested this idea, as they describe in a recent Nature study. It just didn’t hold up.

Tubing inspection

Snelling and his colleagues gathered 44 species of insects across ten distinct orders, representing nearly the entire body mass range of modern flying bugs. On the tiny end of the spectrum was the Trioza erytreae, weighing only 0.334 milligrams. On the heavy end was Goliathus albosignatus, the famous Goliath beetle that weighs 7.74 grams. “We were able to look at insects varying 10,000-fold in body size,” Snelling says.

Using transmission electron microscopes, the team took 1,320 high-resolution images of the insects’ flight muscles. They wanted to measure exactly what percentage of the muscle volume was being taken up by tracheoles, a metric known as tracheolar volume density. If the oxygen-constraint hypothesis was correct, the tracheolar volume density should have dramatically increased as the insects got larger, creeping close to a theoretical limit that would compromise the muscle’s mechanical power. “In our mind, it stands to reason that if very large insects are really challenged, then there should be evidence of this in the tracheoles,” Snelling said.

But his team found no such evidence.

It turned out that in the 0.5 milligram insects, tracheoles took up 0.47 percent of the flight muscle space. In the 5-gram insects, that number rose only to 0.83 percent. Over a 10,000-fold jump in body mass, the relative space occupied by these breathing tubes increased by a factor of just 1.8.

To put that into perspective, the blood-filled capillaries that serve the same oxygen-delivery function in the aerobic flight and cardiac muscles of birds and mammals typically take up around 10 percent of the tissue volume. Insect breathing tubes, by contrast, typically stay at 1 percent or less.

Next, the team extrapolated these findings to estimate the tracheolar volume density in the ancient giants, starting with Meganeuropsis permiana.

Supporting the giant

Assuming a mass of 100 grams, Snalling’s newly conceived scaling equations predict that Meganeuropsis permiana’s tracheoles would have still occupied only about 1 percent of its flight muscle volume. The absolute upper statistical limit places it no higher than 3 percent. So it apparently had plenty of room to spare.

Furthermore, the team ran a sensitivity analysis using a standard 1-gram locust as a physiological model to see what would happen if an insect drastically increased its tracheal plumbing. Doing calculations based on the known locust physiology, the researchers found that tripling the tracheolar volume density from 0.6 percent to 1.8 percent would increase the system’s oxygen-diffusing capacity by over four times. This, Snelling’s analysis shows, would make oxygen delivery quite efficient without much impact on the muscle’s maximum mechanical work rate and peak metabolic rate.

To put it simply, if a giant insect needed more oxygen, evolving a denser network of tracheoles would be a cheap and effective physiological upgrade. There was likely no anatomical roadblock stopping them from doing so, and they probably wouldn’t have to sacrifice flying power to achieve it.

But if the lack of oxygen didn’t kill the giant bugs, we’re still faced with an outstanding question: What’s stopping our present bugs from evolving to the size of a pigeon?

“There are a few hypotheses that are out there,” Snelling said.

Flying snacks

Snelling’s team suggests that to understand the limiting factors in insect size, we need to look beyond the molecular diffusion of oxygen and consider the broader ecology, physical mechanics, and other aspects of whole-body physiology.

One hypothesis is the rise of aerial vertebrate predators. The fossil record shows a decoupling between maximum insect wing length and atmospheric oxygen levels starting at around 135 million years ago, which roughly coincides with the evolution of birds and, later, bats. “This predatory pressure didn’t exist 300 million years ago,” Snelling said.

Giant, meaty insects were likely slow to accelerate, which made them excellent, high-calorie targets for more agile avian predators. So perhaps being huge simply became a bad evolutionary strategy once the skies became more competitive.

Another reason could lie in the physiological hurdles insects face. Flying generates a significant amount of heat. Because surface area-to-volume ratios decrease as animals get larger, a hawk-sized insect might simply cook itself from the inside out with the heat of its own flapping wings, as it wouldn’t have enough surface area to cool down efficiently. In this scenario, the key to the ancient giants was not the oxygen level but a higher density of the atmosphere that enabled the insects to dissipate heat better.

Then there’s an issue of growing XL-sized exoskeletons. Insects must molt to grow. When they shed their hard outer shells, they are temporarily soft and squishy until the new exoskeleton hardens. Surface tension and basic structural mechanics can hold this soft body together in a tiny beetle, but they might struggle to do so if the bug is much larger.

Finally, the insect cardiovascular system might also play a role. Bugs rely on an open circulation system, which might be too inefficient to power flapping flight in extremely large bodies.

But the insect breathing mechanics may still hold one mystery we haven’t solved yet. “While we looked at tracheoles, we didn’t look upstream,” Snelling said. And upstream, in the parts of the internal tubing that are closer to the atmosphere, insects often have large air sacs that act as bellows to ventilate the lateral regions of the tracheal system. Doing the same kind of comparative study on the size of the air sacs is the next step for his team.

“I imagine in the next decade or so, the synchrotron X-ray technology will become so sophisticated that it will be possible,” he said.

For now, though, Snelling doesn’t expect air sacs to suddenly cause a miraculous comeback of the oxygen-constraint hypothesis. “Any limitation upstream can be compensated by the investment in the tracheoles—there’s so much space down there,” Snelling said. “But it would be interesting to see how the air sacs’ dimensions change as a function of body size.”

Nature, 2026.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10291-3

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Posted Sunday 29 March 2026 at 5:40 am AEST (my time).

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Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too.

This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals, including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and gear can asphyxiate animals or cause fatal injuries; even when the animals are tossed back to sea, they frequently die. Bycatch is also a dilemma for fishermen—entangled creatures can destroy equipment, costing time, money, and fisheries’ reputations.

Over the decades, conservationists, researchers, and fishermen have developed ways to minimize various kinds of bycatch in different fishing stocks around the world. But putting these solutions to work is often a challenge, and many mitigation strategies are never widely implemented.

Fishing gear that entangles dolphins, porpoises, and whales is a major threat to the animals. Here,

gear trails from the North Atlantic right whale called Snowcone (known individual #3560) who

swims with her calf in waters off Georgia.

Credit: Georgia Dept. of Natural Resources NOAA permit #20556

Some approaches, however, now have a proven success rate—and more may be on the horizon. Recent research has explored nets equipped with lights; even low-tech tricks like kitting out gear with plastic water bottles show promise of reducing some kinds of bycatch while also being practical for fishermen to use.

Despite the challenges, researchers are hopeful. “There are not very many conservation issues that I’m aware of where industry and conservationists and consumers and the fishermen and the resource users all want the same thing,” says marine biologist Matthew Savoca, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. “Every stakeholder wants less bycatch.”

Keeping turtles out

The bycatch problem has always existed. “It’s a conflict that’s intrinsic to the whole idea of fishing,” says marine scientist Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist emerita at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “If you have something that’s designed to catch animals, you’re going to wind up, almost always, catching some things that you didn’t mean to catch.”

Yet mitigation measures can make a difference—and without significantly reducing the catch of the target species, says Cheng Huang, an expert in sustainability ecology at South China Normal University. Huang and colleagues recently assessed 42 different bycatch prevention measures reported in 121 case studies and found they generally do reduce bycatch of vulnerable marine species. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

“Bycatch is a multi-species, multi-gear and multi-scale problem,” says Huang. “Expecting a single technical fix to work everywhere is unrealistic.”

Sea turtles, many species of which are endangered, are among the animals harmed by bycatch—and one of the success stories. In the 1970s, populations of the animals were threatened by shrimp fisheries in waters off the southeastern United States. Researchers started working with commercial fisheries to develop turtle excluder devices that provide an escape route for turtles and other marine animals after they’ve entered the wide mouth of trawl nets. After many iterations, and eventually regulations, the devices became widely adopted, and current designs are 97 percent effective. The devices also save fishermen time and money—preventing the loss of shrimp to fish and hungry turtles.

Yet turtles are still threatened by multiple types of fishing gear: Estimates suggest that more than 250,000 of the creatures die as bycatch each year. Gillnets, which hang like curtains in the water, or bottom longlines, which string baited hooks held in place by weights along the seafloor, can be especially dangerous for the animals.

Gillnets are designed to allow a fish’s head through, but not its body; as the fish tries to back out of

the net, its gills get caught in the mesh. Gillnets are a major cause of mortality for sea turtles and

marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, and seals.

Credit: damocean via Getty

Attaching green LED lights or UV lights to gillnets in the water seems to deter turtles from the deadly traps. In one early test of the idea, researchers compared UV-illuminated gill nets to non-illuminated gill nets in Baja California, Mexico, and found that the lighted nets reduced turtle bycatch by 40 percent.

Lighted nets have since been tested for multiple species and fisheries worldwide. A study in the waters of northern Peru’s Sechura Bay, for example, showed a turtle bycatch reduction of more than 60 percent thanks to LED-illuminated nets. But they have yet to be implemented in fisheries on a large scale. Barriers include cost and the perception that lights might reduce target fish catch, says marine conservation scientist Jesse Senko of Arizona State University. Part of the expense is batteries for the lights, which need to be replaced often.

Senko and his colleagues, after consulting with local fishers, designed solar-powered lights that regularly flash and tested the approach in a coastal gillnet fishery that catches yellowtail amberjack in the Gulf of California, Mexico. They attached lights to 28 gillnets, each paired with a gillnet with deactivated lights as controls, for 650 hours in an area known for high levels of turtle bycatch. The nets with lights reduced expected turtle bycatch by 63 percent while maintaining target fish catch, the researchers reported in Conservation Letters in October 2025.

The lights didn’t only reduce power consumption, they also worked as buoys, making them easily integrated into the fishing gear. This is crucial for adoption of new techniques, says Senko. “All of a sudden, the light was more or less part of their gear,” he says. “It wasn’t some foreign thing on their net. It was just another buoy that happened to flash green light.”

Marine biologist and conservation scientist Jesse Senko fishes a solar-powered illuminated gillnet

from waters off the coast of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Tests of the lighted nets find that they

reduce bycatch of sea turtles but not the catch of the target fish species.

Credit: Lindsay Lauckner Gundlock / Arizona State University

Pingers and plastic bottles

Another bycatch prevention method that’s demonstrated some success is pingers—devices attached to the fishing gear that emit sounds that deter echolocating whales and dolphins. A field trial of the devices in three Norwegian fisheries using gillnets, for example, showed that pingers reduced bycatch of harbor porpoise by 94 percent, a team reported in Fisheries Research in 2023.

But pingers can have their downsides. An analysis of pinger effectiveness in waters off the United Kingdom, where they have been used for more than a decade, found that while they were linked to a reduction in bycatch of porpoises, they were also linked with an increase in bycatch of seals, which seem to associate the sound with a potential meal. “It’s like a dinner-bell effect,” says policy specialist Sarah Dolman of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a London-based nonprofit that campaigns for environmental issues.

Pingers that transmit at frequencies outside of pinnipeds’ hearing range and are thus considered “seal-safe” have been developed. But the devices can also be expensive, especially for artisanal fishermen, who tend to use lower-tech gear and may lack supportive government policies and investments.

Some of those small-scale fisheries may reduce bycatch of echolocating animals with a low-tech approach: fixing plastic water bottles to their nets. Detecting thin, fine nets is difficult for dolphins, porpoises, and other echolocators, but water bottles are a more easily detectable obstacle that could help them avoid the net. A preliminary study conducted in Brazil found that using plastic bottles on nets was effective at reducing the bycatch of franciscana dolphins, a threatened river dolphin species. It’s a realistic option, says Dolman, in places where fishermen don’t have the funds to buy and maintain pingers.

Practicalities, along with cost, often prevent implementation of bycatch prevention measures, even the ones that work. Many solutions that get developed and tested never end up being widespread.

“We’re very good at providing funding for scientists to conduct trials to reduce bycatch, but very rarely do those trials then continue to the whole of the fleet,” says Dolman.

For a solution to work on a large scale, a number of conditions must be met, says marine sustainability scientist Lekelia Jenkins of Arizona State University. Policies and regulations need to be in place, and they need to be enforced. And perhaps just as important, the preventive measures need to be practical for fishermen and not add extra time and money to the job. “The smaller the change, and the more it feels like their traditional fishing practices, the more likely they’re going to adopt it,” Jenkins says.

The human side of the issue also needs to be acknowledged. “Emotionally, fishermen around the world are beat up and beat down,” Jenkins says. “We say, ‘You’re the problem. You’re catching sea turtles and whales. You are the bad guy.’” Instead, fishermen should be empowered and included in the discussions and development of solutions. “The weight of saving the world’s oceans,” Jenkins says, “can’t fall solely on their shoulders.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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Posted Sunday 29 March 2026 at 5:38 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA’s exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. The shakeups come as the agency is just a week away from launching Artemis II, a circumlunar flight carrying a crew of four around the Moon. The Ars space team will be writing extensively about this mission in the days ahead, and we may skip the Rocket Report next week to focus on our Artemis II coverage.

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

NASA announces nuclear rocket demo. NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program’s official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world. The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space, Ars reports.

Introducing SR-1 Freedom... Nuclear-powered rocket engines are more efficient than chemical rockets. They come in two forms: nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric engines. Nuclear-thermal rockets produce higher thrust, using heat from a reactor to heat up a chemical rocket fuel. Nuclear-electric engines have lower thrust but greater efficiency. Neither have been demonstrated in space. NASA’s new nuclear mission, named Space Reactor-1, will use the latter approach. “We will launch the first-of-its-kind interplanetary mission called SR-1 Freedom before the end of 2028, demonstrating fission power and the extraordinary capabilities to move mass efficiently in space,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.

Isar scrubs test launch. Isar Aerospace halted the launch of its Spectrum rocket Wednesday on the cusp of its scheduled liftoff, delaying the German startup’s second attempt to get its spacecraft to orbit from a launch pad in Norway, Bloomberg reports. The launch was aborted late on Wednesday after a hold in countdown because an unauthorized boat violated the danger area of the rocket, the company said in a statement. The countdown reset exceeded the launch window, Isar said, adding it’s working to determine a suitable time for a new attempt.

An important flight... This will be the second flight of Isar’s privately developed Spectrum rocket, following a test launch a year ago that failed shortly after liftoff. The Munich-based company leads a crop of European launch startups developing small commercial rockets. The two-stage Spectrum vehicle is designed to haul payloads of up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) to low-Earth orbit. On this flight, Isar will attempt to launch five small CubeSats for European universities. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Mystery launch from Cape Canaveral. An unidentified missile launched and zoomed across the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, leaving a slim white contrail against the afternoon blue sky, Florida Today reports. No public announcements have been made about the mysterious launch, which occurred at roughly 12:30 pm EDT. None of the Space Coast’s major rocket-launch providers had missions scheduled Thursday. The launch was foretold by an unusual Coast Guard-Department of Homeland Security launch hazard zone extending eastward across the sea.

This is probably what it was... The circumstances of Thursday’s launch were similar to two previous missile tests that originated from Cape Canaveral. In April 2025, a hypersonic missile streaked skyward at great speed during a test flight conducted by the US Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs. Previously, in December 2024, the US Army and Navy conducted an unannounced, successful Dark Eagle hypersonic weapon test from Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It is likely Thursday’s flight was related to those tests.

Russia’s Starlink takes flight. A Soyuz rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on Monday carrying the first batch of Rassvet satellites for a low-orbital Internet network developed by a Moscow-based enterprise named Bureau 1440, RussianSpaceWeb.com reports. The Rassvet project has not been immune to publicity in the past, but the launch itself was surrounded by “military-level secrecy,” RussianSpaceWeb said. “No launch date had been officially announced for the mission and no visuals of the payload processing had been published ahead of the launch.” Russia’s military and civilian space agency also did not issue a post-flight statement confirming the launch, as they typically do, even for classified space missions.

Details, please... Despite this secrecy, we know a few things about the Rassvet satellites. The Soyuz rocket deployed 16 of the spacecraft, each around 815 pounds (370 kilograms), into a low-altitude orbit less than 200 miles above the Earth. Bureau 1440 is backed by Russian state funding and has announced plans to deploy a constellation of around 900 satellites by 2035. It is not clear how long it will take for the constellation to begin providing meaningful connectivity for consumers or, more importantly, for Russia’s government and Russian forces fighting in Ukraine. Up to now, Russia’s space industry has not proven it has the ability to scale production of satellites. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Site 31 is back in business. Russia’s only human-rated launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan is back in service less than four months after being damaged during liftoff of a Soyuz rocket last year. Workers erred in leaving the site’s servicing platform unsecured, and it fell into the pad’s flame trench after being blasted by the Soyuz booster’s engines. Russian officials delayed the next Soyuz launch from Baikonur as technicians scrambled to install a new platform. The repairs were completed a few weeks ago, and a Soyuz rocket lifted off from the pad Sunday with a Progress supply ship heading for the International Space Station.

Manual docking… The Progress MS-33 cargo freighter delivered several tons of fuel, water, and supplies to the International Space Station and its seven-person crew Tuesday, but the craft’s trip to the station was not free of trouble. One of the spacecraft’s Kurs rendezvous antennas failed to deploy after launch, forcing Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to take over remote control of the Progress supply ship for a manual docking at the complex. Russia’s Tele-robotically Operated Rendezvous Unit, or TORU, system allows cosmonauts on the space station to remotely pilot cargo ships as they approach the outpost. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Amazon plans to ramp up launch cadence. Amazon vowed this week to double the annual launch rate for its low-Earth orbit broadband constellation to more than 20 missions, hinging largely on rockets yet to prove themselves at scale, Space News reports. The Amazon Leo constellation now has 212 production satellites in orbit, less than 7 percent of the network’s planned 3,232 satellites. But the pace of Amazon’s satellite manufacturing appears to be going well. The company says it has more than 200 additional satellites “stacked and ready for launch.” Three more launches are planned over the next month—two on United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets and one on Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket. That would bring Amazon to 11 launches in the first year of Amazon Leo’s full-scale deployment.

Waiting on rockets… “Every satellite adds coverage and capacity to the network, and we’re on pace to more than double our annual launch rate to over 20 missions and send even more satellites to space at a time,” Amazon wrote in a post on its website. “As of mid-March, we have six fully stacked payloads at our satellite processing facility in Florida—more than 200 satellites in total—and another payload being prepared in French Guiana.” The problem is that ULA’s Vulcan rocket, which Amazon chose to launch the bulk of the Amazon Leo constellation, is grounded after a booster anomaly last month. In the meantime, ULA’s soon-to-retire Atlas V rocket will launch the next two sets of Amazon satellites, with 29 flying on each rocket. That is an increase over the 27 satellites flown on prior Atlas V launches. An Ariane 64 rocket will launch another Amazon package from French Guiana in late April. Meanwhile, Amazon confirmed earlier this year it purchased 10 more Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX to help hasten the deployment of Amazon Leo. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Fortifying spaceports from cyber attacks. The US Space Force has established two new cyber squadrons to defend against potential cyber attacks during launches, Breaking Defense reports. The new units at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California will help the military “stay ahead of the threat,” said Maj. Torius Davis, commander of the 630th Cyberspace Squadron at Vandenberg. Both ground terminals and satellites have become targets for cyber operations in recent years.

Securing the range… “Much like the anti-jamming capabilities we build into our modern satellites, our new Cyberspace Squadrons will work to secure our launch systems from a myriad of potential threats, from hijacking satellites or ground systems to using malware to gain unauthorized access to our systems,” Lt. Col. John Quinn, commander of the 645th Cyberspace Squadron at Patrick. The emphasis on cyber defense follows work done to protect launch sites from physical intrusions and drone threats, which have been on the rise in recent years.

Artemis II back on the pad. NASA’s Artemis II rocket returned to the launch pad March 20 after repairs inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Spaceflight Now reports. The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket took about 11 hours to cover the 4-mile journey to Launch Complex 39B atop a mobile launch platform and crawler-transporter. The rocket’s arrival at the pad keeps NASA on schedule to launch the Artemis II mission no earlier than next Wednesday, April 1, with a two-hour window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC).

Crew arriving soon… The four astronauts who will fly around the Moon on Artemis II will travel from Houston to Kennedy on Friday. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will spend more than nine days in space, traveling farther from Earth than any human in history.

Once again, ULA’s Vulcan can’t answer the call. For the fourth time in a little more than a year, the US Space Force needs to send up a new satellite to replenish the military’s GPS navigation network. And once again, the company the Pentagon is paying to launch it can’t answer the call, Ars reports. United Launch Alliance, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was supposed to launch the final satellite for the Space Force’s GPS Block III program this month. Space Systems Command, responsible for buying spacecraft and rockets for the military, announced March 20 it has transferred the launch to a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, ULA’s chief rival in the market for launching US government satellites.

More to come?… Lt. Gen. Doug Schiess, the Space Force’s deputy chief of operations, told a House subcommittee Wednesday that the military was looking at moving more missions off of ULA’s Vulcan rocket to other providers. Currently, only ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are certified for national security launches. The Vulcan rocket is expected to be grounded until at least this summer as engineers investigate a recurring problem with the vehicle’s solid rocket boosters.

NASA is blowing things up. A team of NASA engineers is intentionally blowing up models of methane-fueled rockets in Florida to see just how big of a bang they make when they explode, Ars reports. Methane is the launch industry’s chic new rocket fuel because it is better suited for reusable engines. Heavy- and super-heavy-lift rockets like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, ULA’s Vulcan, and SpaceX’s Starship now use it. But rockets sometimes blow up. The US Space Force and NASA, the agencies responsible for range safety at America’s federally owned spaceports, want to better understand how the hazards from an exploding methane-fueled rocket might differ from those of other launchers. This is important as launches become more routine, with companies foreseeing multiple flights per day from launch pads that are, in some cases, just 1 or 2 miles apart.

For good reason… Federal safety officials require the evacuation of blast danger areas around each launch pad as rockets are fueled for flight, and some companies have raised concerns that SpaceX, which has the largest of the methane-burning rockets, could disrupt their operations on neighboring launch pads. The ongoing explosive yield tests at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, are meant to help officials fine-tune their hazard analyses to determine the proper size of the danger areas for methane-fueled rockets. Hopefully, the data will show the danger areas are too conservative, and the keep-out zones will shrink. The concept is simple. “We put fuel in a rocket, blow it up in a remote location, and measure how big the boom is,” said Jason Hopper, deputy manager for the methalox assessment project at NASA’s Stennis Space Center.

Next three launches

March 28: Electron | Daughter of the Stars | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 09:14 UTC

March 28: Spectrum | Onward and Upward | Andøya Rocket Range, Norway | 20:00 UTC

March 29: Atlas V | Amazon Leo LA-05 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 07:53 UTC

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Posted Saturday 28 March 2026 at 5:54 am AEST (my time).

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