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Part of the statin family, rosuvastatin is commonly prescribed to manage high cholesterol levels, a key factor in preventing heart disease. However, this new research indicates that higher doses of rosuvastatin may pose significant risks to kidney health.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had approved rosuvastatin with prior indications of potential kidney-related side effects, such as blood in the urine (hematuria) and protein in the urine (proteinuria).

Despite these initial concerns, comprehensive studies evaluating these risks in practical, everyday healthcare settings were lacking until now.

The study team analyzed electronic health records spanning from 2011 to 2019. They compared the health outcomes of patients taking rosuvastatin with those taking atorvastatin, another popular statin.

The data included over 150,000 new rosuvastatin users and nearly 800,000 new users of atorvastatin.

Their findings over a three-year period showed that 2.9% of the patients developed hematuria and 1.0% developed proteinuria.

More alarmingly, the study revealed that rosuvastatin increased the risk of hematuria by 8%, proteinuria by 17%, and severe kidney failure—requiring intensive treatments like dialysis or a kidney transplant—by 15% compared to atorvastatin.

The study also highlighted a particularly troubling issue with dosage. Patients with advanced kidney disease were often prescribed higher doses of rosuvastatin than what the FDA recommends for such cases.

About 44% of these patients received doses exceeding recommended levels, intensifying concerns about the drug’s safety for this vulnerable group.

Despite these risks, both rosuvastatin and atorvastatin showed similar effectiveness in reducing heart-related complications, prompting critical questions about the trade-offs involved in using higher doses of rosuvastatin, especially among patients with pre-existing kidney conditions.

Published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, the findings from this study, led by Jung-im Shin and her team, call for a reevaluation of how rosuvastatin is prescribed, particularly concerning its dosage.

The research suggests that both doctors and patients need to carefully weigh the benefits against the risks, taking into account the potential for serious kidney damage.

This study serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of continuous monitoring and evaluation of medications after they are brought to market.

As more is learned about the effects of these drugs in real-world conditions, medical guidelines and prescription practices can be adapted to better safeguard patient health and safety.

This ongoing vigilance helps ensure that the benefits of medications truly outweigh their risks, particularly for those with additional health vulnerabilities.

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However, recent findings suggest there’s more to this medication than previously thought.

Blood pressure is essential to our health, much like the speed of cars on a highway. When blood pressure is high, it’s as if the cars are racing dangerously fast, which can lead to severe health issues such as heart attacks, strokes, and kidney problems.

To slow down these “speedy cars,” doctors recommend lifestyle changes and prescribe medications like chlorthalidone, which acts like a traffic cop for our bloodstream.

In a comprehensive study, researchers at Columbia analyzed health records from over 730,000 individuals spanning 17 years. They focused particularly on comparing chlorthalidone with another similar medication, hydrochlorothiazide.

Both medications are effective in reducing the risk of heart-related diseases and strokes, but they discovered a significant concern with chlorthalidone.

The study revealed that people taking chlorthalidone were three times more likely to experience low levels of potassium in their blood—a condition known as hypokalemia.

Potassium is crucial for proper muscle and nerve function, and its deficiency can lead to symptoms like weakness, fatigue, and even heart disturbances.

The statistics showed that 6.3% of patients on chlorthalidone suffered from hypokalemia, compared to only 1.9% of those on hydrochlorothiazide. This finding raised concerns since low potassium levels can be quite dangerous.

Furthermore, the study noted that chlorthalidone users were also more prone to electrolyte imbalances and kidney issues.

Electrolytes are vital for many bodily functions, acting like spark plugs that power our cells, and the kidneys play a crucial role in filtering and managing waste. Disruptions in these systems can have significant health implications.

So, what does this mean for individuals taking chlorthalidone? It’s a reminder of the importance of regular monitoring and consultation with healthcare providers. This study could lead doctors to reconsider the use of chlorthalidone, balancing its benefits against potential risks.

Managing blood pressure isn’t just about medication; it also involves lifestyle choices.

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, reducing salt intake, avoiding excessive alcohol, quitting smoking, engaging in regular exercise, and practicing relaxation techniques like yoga can all contribute to healthier blood pressure levels.

Looking ahead, the researchers at Columbia University plan to continue their investigations into chlorthalidone and similar medications to ensure they provide safe and effective treatment options.

For those on chlorthalidone, think of it as part of a broader strategy to maintain your “blood highways.” Keeping in touch with your doctor, having regular health check-ups, and paying attention to how you feel are crucial steps in managing your health effectively.

In conclusion, while chlorthalidone remains a valuable tool in controlling high blood pressure, this study highlights the importance of careful management and monitoring to avoid potential side effects. As research continues, it will provide a clearer picture and guide safer treatment protocols.

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In the Arctic, a mysterious atmospheric phenomenon generates some of the oddest clouds on Earth.

Up there, streaky wisps can swiftly transform into towering thunderstorms. These strange clouds are not just visually mesmerizing. Nor are they just drivers of powerful storms. They may also play a role in the Arctic’s breakneck pace of warming, researchers say, a pace about four times as fast as that of the rest of the planet (SN: 8/11/22).

But climate simulations of the region can’t accurately incorporate the birth and evolution of these clouds: There’s simply too little known about the forces that shape them.

An international team of scientists is now confronting that uncertainty head-on. From late February to early April, the researchers repeatedly soared into the Arctic’s stormy skies, employing a heavily instrumented C-130 aircraft to study the clouds’ shape-shifting and collect a wealth of data.

Its findings, the team hopes, will be the first step to piercing a longstanding, cloudy mystery.

Swells of cold Arctic air give birth to these clouds

The Arctic clouds are the result of one of the most intense collisions of air masses on the planet.

Marine cold-air outbreaks, or MCAOs, are surges of cold, dry air that regularly whoosh seaward from the land to encounter warmer air over the oceans. In response, the ocean waters release huge amounts of heat and moisture that rise into the atmosphere and condense into clouds.

The MCAO-powered clouds have a distinct pattern.  “It’s beautiful to look at in satellite imagery,” says Paquita Zuidema, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science in Key Biscayne, Fla. These clouds are “so visually stunning,” says Zuidema, who co-led the expedition.

As cold, dry air from Greenland (coming in from the upper left) meets warmer ocean air to the southeast, rows of thin puffy clouds called “streets” form perpendicular to the coastline, as seen in this NASA Worldview image. Farther to the southeast, the clouds are beginning to deepen, organizing into a denser, honeycomb-like open-cell pattern.

NASA Worldview

The first clouds to form from the MCAOs are thin rows of small, kilometer-scale “streets” that line up with the wind as they emerge just off land. Farther downwind and farther out to sea, the streaks evolve into larger, open-celled clouds, big puffs with patches of clear air at the center.

Those cells can be as much as 20 to 30 kilometers across, and up to a kilometer tall, says atmospheric scientist Bart Geerts, another co-lead on the project. Eventually, they can become towering, thick cumulonimbus clouds as tall as 5 kilometers.

Researchers have limited intel on these clouds

The cumulonimbus clouds that emerge from MCAOs are not quite like the thunderstorm-producing clouds of the lower latitudes, in that they very rarely produce lightning, says Geerts, of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. But they can produce heavy snowfall — and sometimes intense, hurricane-like storms called polar lows (SN: 1/17/23).

Compared with tropical cyclones, these cyclones are small and therefore more difficult to predict. Improving predictions of these destructive events is of intense interest to Arctic nations, Greet says — improvements that the team’s flights might help with.

Another key question the researchers hope to answer is how much liquid the clouds contain, relative to ice, and how that proportion changes as they evolve. That proportion matters, Zuidema says, because liquid clouds are brighter, reflecting more sunlight back into space than ice clouds. That means that liquid clouds can reduce warming at the surface, while ice clouds can trap more of the sun’s heat, enhancing warming.

“In the last 10 years or so, people have realized that the proportions of liquid and ice clouds are actually pretty far off in climate models,” Zuidema says. “That’s a goal for the climate modeling community.”

The trouble is that there are relatively few direct observations of the water and ice content in these Arctic clouds to help validate climate simulations of future warming. That’s in part because these phenomena occur far offshore in one of the world’s most remote regions. And the clouds, though visible to satellites, are too small for spacecraft to capture essential characteristics that help control their evolution over time, such as the small-scale vertical motions that drive upward air drafts.

What impact the region’s rapid warming is having on the rest of the planet’s weather patterns is also still unclear, she adds. “We do think that the Arctic and mid-latitude weather should be linked,” she says. But the nature of those long-range atmospheric “teleconnections” is still uncertain.

So Zuidema, Greet and colleagues have been getting up close in their tricked-out C-130.

Repeated polar flights are starting to fill in the details

During this year’s mission, the team flew eight flights over the Arctic, flying above, below and through the MCAO-spawned clouds.

The plane carried several remote sensing instruments: lidar, which uses laser pulses to measure the dimensions of clouds or land surfaces; radar, which uses radio waves for the same purpose; and radiometers, to measure fluxes of infrared radiation, or heat. The data collected by these instruments, the team says, can help assess the proportions of ice and water in the clouds. Meanwhile, the team also deployed dropsondes, metal cylinders about a third of a meter long that are attached to small parachutes. The dropsondes collect measurements of temperature, humidity and wind as they sink through the atmosphere.

The goal, Zuidema says, was to collect enough data on enough different MCAO events that scientists can begin to build a statistically robust picture of them, one that can be incorporated into computer models with confidence. The team is now beginning to analyze all their data, which they plan to present next January at the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in New Orleans.

This year’s fieldwork is a good start, she says. “We got some interesting case studies this time.” But more data is always better when it comes to validating computer models. “What we’re really hoping for is to develop the kind of statistics that a modeler would want.” That will likely require future flights into the stormy Arctic skies.

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Several months after a grave computer problem seemed to spell the end for Voyager 1, which for nearly a half century had provided data on the outer planets and the far reaches of the solar system, NASA announced on Thursday that it had restored the spacecraft to working order.

“The spacecraft has resumed gathering information about interstellar space,” NASA said in its announcement about Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object in space.

Since the problem surfaced in November, engineers had been working to diagnose and resolve the issue, a tedious and lengthy process complicated by the fact that it takes almost two days to send and receive information from Voyager 1, which was the first man-made object ever to enter interstellar space and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth.

The space community had been holding its breath since last year as the prospect of fixing the aging probe appeared as dire as ever.

In February, Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager mission project manager, said the problem, which hindered Voyager 1’s ability to send coherent engineering and science data back to Earth, was “the most serious issue” the probe had faced since she began leading the mission in 2010.

Voyager 1 and its twin probe, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore the outer planets. NASA capitalized on a rare alignment in the solar system that enabled the probes to visit the four of the outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — by using the gravity of each to swing to the next.

Its planetary mission a success, Voyager 1 continued its journey toward the edge of the solar system, and in 1990 it snapped a fabled photo of the Earth — a tiny speck in an infinite darkness that became known as the “pale blue dot.”

In 2012, the probe became the first to cross into interstellar space and had since, along with its twin, which followed six years later, collected data about the heliosphere, the space around the sun directly under the sun’s influence.

Perhaps as profound as the pale blue dot, each spacecraft is equipped with a golden phonograph loaded with sound recordings and images showing humanity and life on Earth, begging to one day be discovered by another civilization.
 

The outlook for recovering Voyager 1 improved substantially in April, when NASA reported that it had managed to get the probe to send back “usable” data about its engineering systems and its health. That was followed by news late last month that the team had restored functionality to two of Voyager 1’s science instruments, allowing it to send back science data and continue its mission.

On Thursday, the agency announced that it had brought the remaining instruments back online and restored Voyager 1 to its normal operations.

Still, Voyager 1’s new lease on life may not last very long. NASA has previously estimated that the nuclear-powered generators on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were likely to die around 2025. But Voyager 1 has already demonstrated that it can beat the odds. Ms. Dodd hopes both Voyager spacecraft can reach the mission’s 50th anniversary in 2027.

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Our body's circadian clock affects everything from sleepiness to metabolism – and it might also influence how effective certain cancer treatments are, according to recent research.

Checkpoint inhibitors are immunotherapy drugs that block crucial proteins from binding to cancerous tumors, meaning the immune system's T cells can more easily recognize and kill the cancer off. They are a good idea in theory, especially as the drugs are less toxic than chemotherapy, but scientists are trying to find ways to increase the impact of this approach in practice.

In the US, several checkpoint inhibitor therapies are currently approved for human use, but while these drugs can treat a wide variety of cancers, they only work for some patients.

Perhaps a person's circadian rhythm plays into that outcome.

Here, a team from the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) found that in mouse models of colorectal cancer, the 24-hour circadian clock cycle affected both the strength of the defenses put up by tumors, and the ability of checkpoint inhibitors to fight them.

What's more, when the circadian rhythm was disrupted in the mice, it reduced the immune system's ability to tackle cancer. This, together with plenty of previous research, suggests both lifestyle changes as well as treatment times could be helpful in fighting cancer.

"Understanding precisely how circadian disruption promotes disease progression could lead to behavior modification to reduce cancer risk," says Selma Masri, a biological chemist at UC Irvine.

In colorectal cancer, cancer tumors produce what are known as immunosuppressive cells to try and disable the body's immune system protections. The study's first finding was that the abundance of these cells changes in time with circadian rhythms.

Second, was the finding that body clock disruption increased these cells even further, helping the cancer to progress. Third, the checkpoint inhibitor treatments were found to work best when the immunosuppressive cell levels were at their peak.

It all adds to our understanding of how circadian rhythms could be utilized to give treatments a better chance – though more research will be needed to understand the other factors at play, and to confirm the same biological mechanisms in people.

"We found that proper regulation of circadian rhythms is necessary to suppress inflammation and support peak immune function," says Masri.

Scientists are continuing to explore links between our body clocks and the functions of the immune system. The managing or optimizing of our circadian rhythms has recently been linked to biological aging and Alzheimer's disease.

We also know that modern day living, from shift work to electric lighting, is interfering with our circadian rhythms – and maybe not for the better, as far as our body's natural defenses are concerned.

"As we enhance our understanding of the fundamental mechanism of circadian regulation of immunity, we will be able to harness the power of the body's natural rhythms to fight cancer and develop more personalized and effective treatment strategies," says Bridget Fortin, a biological chemistry doctoral student at UC Irvine.

The research has been published in Nature Immunology.

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Keep calm and try omega-3. The fatty acids, available as dietary supplements via fish oil capsules and thought to help with mental and physical well-being, could also cut down on aggression, according to a new study.

These findings haven't come out of nowhere: omega-3 has previously been linked to preventing schizophrenia, while aggression and antisocial behavior are thought in part to stem from a lack of nutrition. What we eat can influence our brain's chemistry.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania built on earlier, smaller studies of omega-3 supplementation effects on aggression. Their meta-analysis looked at 29 randomized controlled trials across 3,918 participants in total.

Across all the trials, a modest but noticeable short-term effect was found, translating to up to a 28 percent reduction in aggression across multiple different variables (including age, gender, medical diagnosis, and length and dosage of treatment).

"I think the time has come to implement omega-3 supplementation to reduce aggression, irrespective of whether the setting is the community, the clinic, or the criminal justice system," says neurocriminologist Adrian Raine.

The trials included in the study, carried out between 1996 and 2024, ran for an average of 16 weeks. They covered a variety of demographics, from children aged 16 and under to older people aged between 50 and 60.

What's more, the reductions in aggression included both reactive aggression (in response to provocation) and proactive aggression (behavior planned in advance). Before this study, it wasn't clear if omega-3 could help with these different types of aggression.

While larger studies across longer periods of time are going to be needed to further establish this relationship, it adds to our understanding of how fish oil pills and the omega-3 in them might be beneficial for the brain.

"At the very least, parents seeking treatment for an aggressive child should know that in addition to any other treatment that their child receives, an extra portion or two of fish each week could also help," says Raine.

The researchers think something in the way that omega-3 reduces inflammation and keeps vital brain processes ticking over might be helping regulate aggression. There are still a lot of unanswered questions, but the team suggests there's enough evidence to look into this further.

Add in the studies that show that medications derived from fish oil can help reduce the risk of fatal heart attacks, strokes, and other heart health problems, and there seems to be plenty of upside to adding some omega-3 to your diet.

"Omega-3 is not a magic bullet that is going to completely solve the problem of violence in society," says Raine.

"But can it help? Based on these findings, we firmly believe it can, and we should start to act on the new knowledge we have."

The research has been published in Aggression and Violent Behavior.

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Former President Donald Trump revealed this week that he’s used artificial intelligence to help rewrite at least one of his speeches.

During an appearance on Logan Paul’s podcast Impulsive, Trump spoke about how powerful he found AI.

“What it does is so crazy. Now, it can also be really used for good,” Trump told Paul. “I mean, things can happen. I had a speech rewritten by AI out there, one of the top people. He said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna make a speech.’ ‘Yeah.' He goes click click click, and like 15 seconds later he shows me my speech, written so beautifully, I said, ‘I’m gonna use this.’ I’ve never seen anything like it.”

When asked what he said to his speechwriter Vince Haley afterward, Trump joked that he told Haley “You’re fired, Vince!”

Trump went on to talk about how impressed he was with the speed of AI, as well as the quality of what it was able to produce.

“It comes out with the most beautiful writing, so one industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters,” Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and so quickly. A manner of literally minutes, it’s done. It’s a little bit scary.”

During his presidency, Trump signed the ‘American AI Initiative’ which federally funded artificial intelligence R&D in the United States.

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The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist on the ceiling. About 3 feet long, it was a scale model of a submersible called Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, had cofounded the company in 2009 as a sort of submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. At first, Rush acquired older, steel-hulled subs for expeditions, but in 2013 OceanGate had begun designing what the company called “a revolutionary new manned submersible.” Among the sub’s innovations were its lightweight hull, which was built from carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic, 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive. If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.

“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”

“Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.

The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.

In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.

The disaster captivated and horrified the world. Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation. Organizations that had worked with OceanGate, including the University of Washington as well as the Boeing Company, released statements denying that they contributed to Titan.

A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titan’s development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations. The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan, reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible. They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design. The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses’ high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired. (The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.) Most of all, the documents show how Rush, blinkered by his own ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGate’s progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titan’s hull, which has not been previously reported.

A representative for OceanGate, which ceased all operations last summer, declined to comment on WIRED’s findings.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush aboard the Cyclops 1 in 2015. Photograph: Courtesy of Mark Harris

I met Stockton Rush on June 24, 2015, while reporting on OceanGate for New Scientist magazine. A former flight engineer and tech investor, Rush was already styling himself a subaquatic Musk. “I wanted to be the first person on Mars until I realized there was nothing there,” Rush told me at a city center dock in Seattle. “But in the ocean, there are new life-forms, things people have never discovered.” Rush believed that Earth’s oceans, not outer space, were where humanity would find refuge from existential risks like climate change. “My goal is to move the needle,” he told me.

Around us, employees were prepping OceanGate’s prototype submersible, the Cyclops 1, for its deepest dive to date. The sub was a cylindrical, steel-hulled design rated for dives up to 500 meters. OceanGate had acquired it a few years earlier and refurbished it, adding LEDs and a PlayStation controller for easy steering, and replacing an ugly exterior cabin with a sleek white plastic fairing to protect components outside the hull. Together with the large acrylic viewport, the effect was a sort of one-eyed robot shark. Up to five people could squeeze inside—which is what Rush and I were about to do, for a test dive in Seattle’s Elliott Bay.

Ninety minutes later and 130 meters deeper, we were totally lost. First the thruster software had glitched, leaving us floating just above the seafloor. Now the sub’s compass was acting up. The shipwreck we aimed to explore, a rail ferry that had once carried Teddy Roosevelt, was nowhere to be seen. All I could spy outside the Cyclops’ forward dome was the occasional salmon dancing in the frigid water.

As I began to feel the chill seeping through the sub’s steel hull, Rush asked me to open my iPhone’s compass app. He wanted to compare it to the one on his phone. The headings did not match, but he rebooted the thrusters and we set off in what he was pretty sure was the right direction.

“You’re heading in exactly the wrong direction,” said a faint voice transmitted via an acoustic link from the support ship tracking us on the surface. We eventually located the sunken ship, its rotting bow emerging into the Cyclops’ headlight. It was an otherworldly experience, made more thrilling by the hint of danger.

Back at the dock, Rush brushed off the problems we had encountered. This is exactly why OceanGate started with the Cyclops 1, he said, rather than anything capable of diving deeper. “I could have built a multimillion-dollar version and all of a sudden I’ve got to figure out really stupid stuff like the magnetic compass,” he told me. “The Cyclops 1 is getting us ready. When we do the Cyclops 2, then all these bugs will be out.”

The Cyclops 2, which Rush renamed Titan in 2018, was already on the drawing board. And Rush believed he had the biggest bug—how to make a vessel that could safely dive 20 times deeper than America’s nuclear subs—worked out. He would use a modern wonder material: carbon fiber.

Carbon-fiber composites are some of the strongest materials available to engineers. They are formed of thin strands of atomic carbon within plastic resins, layer upon layer, then cured carefully at high temperatures. The resulting composites can be both stronger and lighter than titanium, and it was this combination that caught Rush’s attention. A carbon-fiber Titan could be roughly the same size and weight as the steel Cyclops and yet be able to dive up to 12 times deeper. It would be much cheaper for a support vessel to carry and deploy at sea than a metal sub, and would also be more buoyant, reducing the risk of getting stranded on the ocean floor. While carbon fiber has been used in everything from cars to rockets, no one had ever dived in a deep-water carbon-fiber submersible. Rush wanted to be the first.

In 2013, OceanGate struck up a partnership with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory to develop the new sub. The university has a long history of working with composites and designing its own underwater vehicles. It also already had a relationship with OceanGate, after using its subs for research; the physics lab helped write the software used by Cyclops 1. The university touted the arrangement in press releases at the time: “UW, Local Company Building Innovative Deep-Sea Manned Submarine,” read one headline from October 2013. The story was updated with a note in 2023 saying that “the vessel that resulted from this partnership” was the Cyclops 1. Emails from OceanGate leaked exclusively to WIRED indicate that UW researchers provided hundreds of detailed 3D CAD drawings of components for a carbon-fiber sub between 2013 and 2016, as part of a $5 million contract. But the relationship between the lab and OceanGate was contentious, according to emails.

UW claims that OceanGate and the lab parted ways after just $650,000 worth of work, and former OceanGate employees told WIRED that none of UW’s hardware or software work wound up in the finished sub.

OceanGate also announced that Boeing Research & Technology was helping with the project. In October 2013, two engineers at Boeing, Mark Negley and William Koch, produced a detailed 70-page preliminary design containing renderings, manufacturing advice, and technical analysis. These details of Boeing’s involvement have not been reported before. “Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it,” Jessica Kowal, a spokesperson for Boeing, said in a statement. The company declined to answer on the record any other questions from WIRED. Negley and Koch, who are still employed by Boeing, did not respond to LinkedIn messages.

“The more innovative you get, the more testing you’ve got to do. It was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn’t going to do the testing.”

- Will Kohnen, deep-sea submersibles expert

Even at this early stage, these engineers were warning of potential problems ahead.

Negley and Koch pointed out that although composites can be stronger than any metal, they have other challenges. Carbon fiber can get progressively weaker, sometimes in unexpected ways. The manufacturing process can introduce defects if the resin is cured too long or not long enough, if debris gets in, or if the material is laid or wound unevenly. And the more layers a structure has, the engineers wrote, the greater the risk of a defect that would weaken it. Titan would ultimately have 660 layers of carbon fiber. To mitigate these risks, the Boeing engineers suggested a rigorous quality assurance process during manufacture and ultrasound testing of the hull after it was made. Ultrasound scans could find defects or delaminations in the hull—places where the carbon-fiber layers had separated.

To manufacture the hull, Rush turned to a company called Spencer Composites. First, though, OceanGate needed a scaled-down model of the hull to test how it would fare against the intense pressures at the bottom of the sea. By 2015, according to a design document written by Spencer, OceanGate wanted its hull to be rated up to 6,000 meters and have a safety factor of up to 2.25—meaning that it should be stable to two and a quarter times that depth, or 13,500 meters. James Cameron’s record-setting Deepsea Challenger had a safety factor of 1.36. Alvin, the submersible that originally explored the Titanic, had a 1.8 or higher. (Spencer Composites did not respond to requests for comment.)

In June 2015, just before my trip in Cyclops 1, engineers placed a one-third scale model of Titan in an 8-foot-long testing tank at APL-UW for its first pressure test. This model was built entirely of carbon fiber, including the end domes, which ended up failing at pressures equating to around just 3,000 meters, according to a report written by Rush. OceanGate commissioned Spencer to make more domes, but these would take months to arrive. Meanwhile, the cylinder was tested again, this time with solid aluminum discs on the ends, and reached 4,100 meters without incident. But when OceanGate received the new carbon-fiber domes and tested the hull in March 2016, the new domes again imploded at 3,000 meters.

The test that “scared the shit out of everyone,” in one engineer’s words, was OceanGate’s fourth. This time, the hull (again with aluminum caps) reached the equivalent of 4,500 meters before imploding, giving it a miserly 1.18 safety factor for any dives to Titanic depths.

Damage to the scale model after imploding in the testing tank. Photograph: Courtesy of a former OceanGate employee

“Over the next months we will analyze the data in detail … and then run a test with a new cylinder through at least 1,000 cycles to confirm its durability,” Rush wrote to shareholders at the time. That replacement scale model was not made, and the new tests never happened, former employees tell WIRED, in part because Rush trusted OceanGate’s computer models. Even when OceanGate decided to change the domes in the final design from carbon fiber to titanium, Rush didn’t commission models to test the interactions between the new materials; one former employee who was familiar with Rush’s decision says the CEO balked at the high price tag.

“The modeling says it’s OK. The analysis says it’s OK,” one former employee says. “We build airplanes on the same type of analysis and then we go throw people in them.”

But a low-pressure environment, like flying, is different from a high-pressure one. Carbon fiber is inherently stronger when holding pressure in, like what happens with an aircraft in the stratosphere, than when keeping pressure out, as happens underwater. And all cylindrical vessels resist buckling better when the air pressure is higher inside.

Submersible experts not associated with OceanGate told WIRED that they would do much more testing on a new design. “We did at least 10 scale-model pressure hulls that we tested to destruction,” says Adam Wright, an engineer who had worked on explorer Steve Fossett’s 2005 carbon-fiber sub, which was shelved after Fossett died in a plane crash. And that was for a submersible that would only be used for a single mission. OceanGate was planning to use its submersible repeatedly—up to 10,000 times, according to internal design documents.

“Carbon fiber is a very sensible material if it’s been engineered correctly and manufactured in a controlled way,” says Chase Hogoboom, president and cofounder of Composite Energy Technologies, which has successfully tested small carbon-fiber vessels to the equivalent of 6,000 meters hundreds of times. “It takes millions of dollars and many years, but it’s not rocket science. It’s just connecting the dots.”

OceanGate tested the model hull to destruction only once, and never used the titanium components that would become fixtures on the final sub. Instead, the company simply increased the thickness of the carbon-fiber hull in its design specs from 4.5 to 5 inches, and commissioned Spencer to build the real thing. (Later, OceanGate engineers found that Titan’s full-size hull was too thick for portable ultrasonic scanners, and a coating Spencer had applied to it would further block the signals. Rush decided that moving the entire sub to a lab for scanning would be too expensive, says a former employee who was familiar with Rush’s thinking. As a result, no scans were made—going against the advice of both Boeing and OceanGate engineers.)

Key components of the Titan submersible

Unlike Cyclops 1, with its large, 180-degree viewing dome, Titan’s front dome was made of solid titanium, with a smaller 23-inch viewport in the center. The viewport, made from 9-inch-thick acrylic, was an entirely new design by Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s director of engineering, and it was going to be manufactured by a company called Hydrospace Group.

Will Kohnen, Hydrospace’s CEO, told WIRED that he had originally expected Rush to thoroughly test the viewport according to rigorous standards set by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Under those standards, OceanGate would test at least five windows to destruction at high pressure, cycle a viewport from low to high pressure a thousand times, and subject another viewport to five times the intended pressure for 300 consecutive hours to see how much the plastic slowly shrank under pressure, says Kohnen.

“The more innovative you get, the more testing you’ve got to do,” Kohnen says. “Over a period of years, it was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn’t going to do the testing.” The former employees who spoke to WIRED also said that OceanGate wasn’t testing the viewport to the society’s standards.

By the fall of 2017, Kohnen was getting worried. As a last-ditch effort, in November he sent Rush an email offering “a serious discount” to build a second viewport using a design that had been tested and certified to 4,000 meters. It could be swapped out for the experimental window within 24 hours, he wrote. Kohnen says that Rush told him he wasn’t interested.

Kohnen delivered OceanGate’s viewport in December. He would rate it to only 650 meters—one-sixth of the depth to the Titanic. He also shared an analysis, done pro bono by an independent expert, concluding that OceanGate’s design might fail after only a few 4,000-meter dives. OceanGate nevertheless installed the viewport in Titan later that month. Construction on the sub was almost complete, and the company was already advertising its first expedition to the Titanic in May.

It was time for the engineers to hand it over to OceanGate’s operations team for testing at sea. But there was another snag. David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe. In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day. (Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan, Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.)

Will Kohnen also couldn’t forget about Titan, and the foreboding he had about the whole enterprise. “We have a rogue element within the submersible industry,” he remembers thinking. If something went wrong with Titan, it might scare people off deep-sea exploration more widely. In March 2018, he drafted a letter, signed by more than 30 crewed submersible experts, urging Rush to test the vessel with an accredited outside group. (The letter was earlier reported by the New York Times.)

Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear. It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price. “[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.

“Titan and its safety systems are way beyond anything currently in use … I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market,” Rush wrote to McCallum. “Since [starting] OceanGate we have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often.”

Days later, Rush received an even more pointed warning from Boeing’s Mark Negley, who had stayed in contact with the CEO after he helped with a preliminary design. Negley had recently carried out an analysis of Spencer Composites’ hull based on information Rush had shared. He did not mince words when sharing his findings, which WIRED is reporting for the first time. “We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin,” he wrote in an email on March 30. “Be cautious and careful.”

Negley provided a graph charting the strain on the submersible against depth. It shows a skull and crossbones in the region below 4,000 meters.

The chart Mark Negley shared with Stockton Rush Chart: Courtesy of a former OceanGate employee

Despite repeated warnings, Rush seemed unfazed. His confidence in Titan was based in part on the new safety systems OceanGate had designed. “A lot of risk mitigation was supposed to ride on the real-time health monitoring,” says one former employee. The heart of that system, designed by an experienced electrical engineer and OceanGate board member named Mike Furlotti, was a suite of sensors and microchips that analyzed the hull’s acoustic emissions—the little pops made by carbon fibers as they break under compression.

OceanGate’s theory was that the hull would be fairly noisy on its first few dives but would get quieter when taken to the same depths over and over, one former employee explains. If the acoustic monitoring system started getting really loud on a dive, that would be a clear indication to surface immediately. (Multiple attempts to contact Furlotti for comment were unsuccessful.)

Wright and other industry experts have been extremely critical of this setup. “I’m sure you can pick up these acoustic events fine, but you just don’t know when the end point is,” he says. “You don’t know how many pops is too many, and it could be different for every vessel.”

There was even skepticism within OceanGate itself. In September 2017, the engineer responsible for integrating Furlotti’s design into Titan sent an anxious email to management expressing concerns about the system’s ability to accurately track fiber breakage over time.

OceanGate hired an outside consultant named Allen Green to assess the acoustic monitoring. Green, an authority on the sounds that materials make under stress, endorsed the system in 2018. Later, though, when Green saw how Rush was describing the system to the public—the CEO claimed it could detect the sound of “micro-buckling” in the sub’s hull “way before it fails”—he wrote a concerned email to an OceanGate employee, reported here for the first time.

Rather than warning of failure, Green explained that the sounds indicated “irreversible” damage. “It is my belief, substantiated by many years of experience, that composite structures all have a finite lifetime,” wrote Green, who died in 2021. “While I do not intend to be an alarmist, I did not sleep well and arose early to send this message.”

Rush had pitched OceanGate’s board and investors on a grand vision of what his company could be. By 2018, that included a fleet of self-driving Titans that could dive to 6,000 meters, and satellite offices in Croatia, Israel, and the South Pacific. He imagined a world whose oceans were populated by OceanGate’s crewed underwater bases, which could be used for data storage or even “Plan B habitats” for billionaire preppers.

Reality was more prosaic. Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds. Rush was trying to save money wherever he could. Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour. (When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”) Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.

According to internal documents, by 2018 the company had raised around $9 million in venture capital and another $4 million from subsidiary companies that profited off OceanGate’s research and scientific missions. But the real business opportunity would be trips to the Titanic.

Rush had planned six missions to visit the legendary shipwreck in the summer of 2018, each with nine people paying $105,000. With every mission bringing in nearly a million dollars in revenue but costing OceanGate only an estimated $333,000, the more visits Titan could make to the bottom of the North Atlantic, the better. Although the plan was for the finished sub to make more than 30 dives in shallow water before going to deeper waters, OceanGate managed just 18.

In mid-April, Titan was transported to Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas, where deep water could be found very close to land. But before Titan was even moved into the water, it was hit by lightning, damaging its electronics. Some of the damaged equipment was replaced, but the sub was without many components for weeks. Rush nevertheless insisted on attempting a shallow dive during high, rolling seas.

Choppy waves ripped fairings and foam from Titan as it was being towed back from the dive site, causing it to sink. “I was merely ‘spam in the can’ with no comms for 9+ hours inside the sub,” Rush wrote the next day. “I could see parts of the sub floating away on my cameras, but could not communicate to the tow team—a remarkably surreal and frustrating experience.”

Rush had to face facts: There was now no chance of OceanGate reaching the Titanic in 2018. Eager ticket holders (and investors) would have to wait another year.

While they were still in the Bahamas, the team did manage to lower Titan on a series of uncrewed dives, eventually reaching 4,000 meters. But engineers found the hull was warping more under compression than it was meant to, by perhaps as much as 37 percent. Nevertheless, Rush wanted to keep diving deeper with Titan, with himself at the helm. When one engineer expressed concern about performing crewed tests at this point, Nissen wrote to him, “Yesterday I told you if you don’t have the stomach for this type of engineering then OceanGate isn’t for you.”

On December 10, Rush successfully dove Titan to a depth of 3,939 meters—just enough to get to the Titanic. Nissen wrote to the engineering team: “Diving to such deep depths is extremely complicated if you want to be untethered, communicate with the surface, be location tracked with reasonable accuracy, and monitor the health of your vehicle. And, we have delivered. You all have a lot to brag about.”

Titan reached a similar depth again in April, with a crew of four including Rush. While OceanGate touted the dive as history-making proof of its submersible’s bona fides, even Rush was getting worried about loud noises the hull was making at depth. Then on June 7, three weeks before Titan’s maiden voyage to the Titanic, an OceanGate pilot inspecting the interior with a flashlight noticed a crack in the hull. He sent Rush an email warning that the crack was “pretty serious.” A detailed internal report later showed that at least 11 square feet of carbon fiber had delaminated—meaning the bonds between layers had separated.

This time, Rush couldn’t ignore the data. The hull that was meant to last for 10,000 dives to the Titanic had made fewer than 50—and only three to 4,000 meters. It would have to be scrapped, and the Titanic missions would be delayed for yet another year. When Rush shared the news with GeekWire a few days later, however, he blamed the delay on legal complications with Titan’s support vessel.

It’s true that OceanGate ran into issues with maritime law, says one former employee: “The lie is that it was not the reason we delayed.”

After the crack was found in Titan’s hull, OceanGate started searching for a new carbon-fiber contractor. By early 2020, many OceanGate engineers had been laid off or had left the company, insiders say. Tony Nissen was out, and a team that had once numbered more than 20 was reduced to just a handful. “Stockton never really wanted an engineering team, but he needed somebody to build it,” says one insider. “We were down to a skeleton team,” says another.

Rush then announced that the company had inked a partnership with NASA to “collaborate on the development, manufacturing, and testing” of a new carbon-fiber cylinder. (Covid-19 had other plans, shutting down NASA for months. Ultimately, the agency told ABC, “NASA did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities.”)

The new hull would instead be made by two aerospace firms in Washington state, Electroimpact and Janicki Industries. Electroimpact laid the carbon fibers, and Janicki cured the material in its ovens, confirmed one former employee. Electroimpact did not provide a response to questions about its role, and Janicki declined to comment.

This time, OceanGate had two scale models made, which were once again tested at the University of Washington. Once again, the models imploded early, possibly due to warping of the hulls during manufacturing, says a former employee.

OceanGate scrambled to solve the issue. One idea: Rather than cure all the layers at once, they would cure the hull in stages.

Electroimpact would wind about 100 layers of the hull, then ship it to Janicki to cure and settle. Then Janicki would send the hull back to Electroimpact to repeat the process. They were running out of time, so they went for it—skipping tests of the new procedure on samples and going straight to manufacturing the second hull. “The first time we did multiple cures was when we did the full hull,” says one former employee. The new hull was finished by January 2021. It passed pressure testing, similar to what was done at the University of Washington, but at a facility in Maryland that could accommodate the full-size cylinder.

OceanGate’s engineers now needed to integrate the new hull with the rest of Titan. But Titan’s two titanium domes were still attached to each end of the old hull, sitting on titanium rings glued to the carbon fiber with aerospace-grade epoxy adhesive. Commissioning new titanium interface rings and domes was ruled “an absolute no” by Rush, one former employee says, because of the extra cost and delay. The company that made the original titanium components told WIRED that it did not make new rings for Rush, and three former employees say that OceanGate did, in fact, salvage and reuse the originals.

But staff had difficulty working out how to separate the old hull from the interface rings without damaging even a sliver of titanium. Gaps or bumps could have weakened the join with the new hull, say the sources. On dives, the hull and the rings needed to compress under pressure in perfect harmony. “I can’t imagine a situation where you could reuse the titanium rings,” Wright, the independent engineer, says. OceanGate somehow managed it.

By February 2021, photos of the newly reconstructed Titan were popping up on OceanGate’s Facebook page and other social media. After the implosion in 2023, one ex-employee looked back at these and noticed an unexpected addition: The company had added metal lifting points to both interface rings, apparently to provide a new way to hoist Titan into and out of the water. The addition of the lifting rings, reported by WIRED for the first time, was confirmed by a former employee who saw the engineering drawings, and by another source.

Previously, OceanGate had lifted Titan using a sling beneath the sub to avoid putting stress on the critical joins between the rings and the carbon-fiber hull. As far back as 2017, when the original Titan was first shipped to OceanGate, Nissen had warned the operations team to use only the sling: “The titanium cannot take load/tension.”

“Lifting points are a very serious part of a pressure vessel design and must be considered carefully, tested, and qualified,” says Will Kohnen. “Any lifting arrangement may impose loads and stresses into the pressure vessel, and this must be mitigated by analysis and test.” It is unclear whether such analysis or tests were carried out.

OceanGate originally used a sling system to lower its sub into the water, shown here. Photograph: Courtesy of a former OceanGate employee

The diving season was about to begin, and after three years of expensive delays, OceanGate desperately needed income from the Titanic missions (whose tickets now cost $125,000 per person). “We were running out of time,” says a former OceanGate employee. Titan had only a few relatively shallow dives in Puget Sound before the company put it on a truck and sent it all the way across Canada to Newfoundland, the port closest to the Titanic wreck.

On July 13, 2021, OceanGate’s Titan made its first successful dive to the Titanic, with Rush serving as the pilot. “We had to overcome tremendous engineering, operational, business, and finally Covid-19 challenges to get here, and I am so proud of this team and grateful for the support of our many partners,” Rush said in a press release.

After the 2021 expedition, OceanGate was flush with success. The company announced plans for the following year’s expedition to document the wreck “in more detail than ever before” and urging “aspiring mission specialists” to get in touch.

The successes and warm media coverage continued in 2022. OceanGate was profiled by CBS Sunday Morning, which accompanied one of the missions that summer. When reporter David Pogue noticed how improvised the setup on the sub was, Rush reassured him. “The pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that’s where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You’re still going to be safe.” The rest of Pogue’s mission was sort of a farce—the sub got lost, things broke—but he came back safely.

That’s not what happened the following year. In June 2023, five eager people got ready to dive back down to the Titanic. They were Rush; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a deep-sea explorer; and three paying passengers: a businessman named Hamish Harding and a father-son duo, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood. On June 18, they sealed Titan and dove. Within two hours, the support ship had lost contact with them.

Their disappearance set off a media frenzy. People speculated how long the crew might be able survive without power or aid. A massive search-and-rescue operation spent four days combing the sea before finding debris from the sub. The US Navy later confirmed it had detected loud sounds “consistent with an implosion” shortly after contact with Titan ended. OceanGate ceased its commercial and exploration activities a few weeks later.

The US Coast Guard is currently leading an international investigation into the deaths.

Several former employees said they were neither shocked nor surprised at OceanGate’s deadly accident. Three had left the company on safety grounds, and two separately described Titan as a ticking time bomb.

One former employee remembers preparing Titan for multiple successful Titanic missions, prior to 2023. “I put my heart and soul into building that sub,” he says. “Many, many hours inside the sub, outside the sub, building and testing it. She was my baby.”

Each time Titan was about to dip beneath the waves, he would pat her hull lightly. “I’d say, ‘Come on back to me baby, you’ll make it, you can do it.’ And when she’d come back up to the surface, I’d say, ‘Good job. You got everyone back up safe.’”

Until one day, she didn’t.

Now the bottom of the North Atlantic is littered with more evidence of human hubris, tiny pieces of a plastic video-game controller nestling among the barnacle-encrusted gold fixtures of the Titanic. Both vessels were at the cutting edge of technology, both exemplars of safety in the eyes of their overconfident creators. And in both cases, their passengers paid the price.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

What Americans Are Anxious About

If you’re an employee, there are so many things to be anxious about from a personal level to wider workplace issues to global concerns.

You might be anxious about return-to-office mandates, layoffs and the impact of AI as it infiltrates the workplace. Or you might be anxious over a tight work deadline, the boss looking over your shoulder or the tension of waiting for the results of a job interview.

On a personal level, your intimate relationship could be on the rocks, a loved one might have a medical issue or you could face financial strain. On a global scale, The APA study finds that Americans say they’re anxious about current events (70%), the economy (77%), the upcoming United States presidential election (73%) and gun violence (69%).

The APA study also revealed additional issues that people are anxious about:

•     Keeping themselves or their families safe, 68%.

•     Keeping their identity safe, 63%.

•     Their health, 63%.

•     Paying bills or expenses, 63%.

•     The opioid epidemic, 50%.

•     The impact of emerging technology on day-to-day life, 46%.

•     Climate change, 57%

How To Apply The 3-3-3 Rule To Mitigate Anxiety

When you’re anxious, your ability to focus on tasks is compromised, you might ruminate about the future or regret a mistake you made in the past. Psychologists now use what are known as mindfulness techniques to help people bring their attention back into the present moment. Mindful awareness reduces mind wandering and mistakes at work.

During a stressful situation, the mind takes us out of the here and now. Your anxious thoughts wander and get stuck on worries about the future or on regrets of the past—making you feel out of your body or not grounded in some way. There are many ways to practice mindfulness meditation that you can find here.

But one of the easiest and simplest tools to bring you back into the present, lower your anxiety and calm your mind is a mindfulness tool called the 3-3-3- rule. When you notice moment-to-moment body sensations, mental processes and feelings that arise, this practice grounds you and aids in focus and concentration. As you practice the three steps, take one minute for each one and do it slowly. You can repeat the exercise as often as you need to reach that present-moment calm state.

1. Listen for one minute. Pay attention to three sounds you hear around you. With eyes closed, you might hear ambient noise such as a rumble of thunder, whoosh of traffic or giggling voices off in the distance or the immediate sound of a humming air conditioner or your own gurgling stomach.
2. Observe for one minute. Name three objects you can see around you. Take the time to notice their shapes, colors and any other details as vividly as you can in your mind’s eye.
3. Touch for one minute. Notice three objects you can touch and take in how the each one feels. You can brush your hand over the chair at your workstation, objects on top of your desk or the screen you’ve been looking at. Notice if the texture of each object is smooth or rough, warm or cold or heavy or light.

The Science Behind The 3-3-3 Rule

When you’re anxious, the brain becomes myopic, focusing on the threat or the anxious thoughts for survival. As the threatening thoughts circle in your head like a school of sharks, the anxiety hijacks your nervous system and throws your prefrontal cortex (or rational part of the brain) offline, eclipsing the bigger picture that you would ordinarily see when anchored in the present moment.

The 3-3-3 rule harnesses the social circuitry of your brain and resets and recharges your mind during the workday. It breaks the cycle of anxious thoughts, rumination or obsessive worry. It snatches you out of your sympathetic nervous system’s story (the fight-or-flight or stress response), activates your parasympathetic nervous system (the rest-and-digest or calming response) and anchors you in the present moment where there is no anxiety. And it enables you to be more efficient and productive and calmly navigate workplace woes.

It keeps your attention on the stream of the process, instead of focusing on completion of the task. You’re able to bring curious, nonjudgmental attention to yourself, your work and your relationships. Plus, it helps you master packed schedules, difficult work relationships and new technologies (such as AI) instead of becoming slaves to them. It eases you through work stress, business failures, job loss or worry and anxiety about career goals.

If you practice this three-step, three-minute rule once or twice a day on a regular basis, it has lasting effects over the long term. It widens your resilient zone, and over time, it prevents anxiety from hijacking you when you’re faced with career challenges.

But the best part of all is how moment-to-moment mindfulness makes you feel in your skin. You start to internalize the realization that the past is over and gone, the future never arrives and the present is right here and now where life is really happening. Calming and centering yourself there, enables you to thrive and experience life as it happens, enjoying yourself, your work and your friends and loved ones to the fullest.

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Three coronaviruses can cause severe and fatal disease in humans: MERS-CoV, SARS, and SARS-CoV-2. But four endemic coronaviruses (eCOVs) — like the common cold — typically cause symptomatic, mild respiratory illnesses. Those eCOVs make up 15% to 30% of common colds.

Investigators looked at polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test results from a group of 4,935 people who went to Boston Medical Center for respiratory illness from November 2020 to October 2021. Researchers put the participants into three categories: 501 already had COVID-19, 1,565 had the COVID-19 vaccine but no infection, and 2,869 had no prior infection and weren’t vaccinated.

Having COVID-19 before was linked to a nearly 50% lower risk for a future eCOV during the follow-up period of 120 days. Researchers noted that getting the COVID-19 vaccine didn’t seem to give people the same protection as having had the actual virus.

“Incidence of symptomatic eCoV infection was significantly lower in those with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection and no vaccination (2 of 275 or 0.7%) as compared with the individuals who had been deemed fully vaccinated but had no known prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (44 of 1,463 or 3%),” the authors wrote.

“Our observations have important implications for future pan-CoV vaccines and other disease prevention strategies,” the authors added.The news comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that it’s tracking the new COVID variant KP.3. In the two-week period of time ending June 8, the CDC said KP.3 is growing and will be the most common SARS-CoV-2 lineage nationally.

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Tang Yuhua, deputy chief designer of Chang’e-7 at the Chinese Lunar Exploration Center, and Yang Zhen, deputy director of the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, witnessed the signing. Ayman Ahmet, director of the Space Imaging Department of the Egyptian Space Agency, Ali Ocalan, senior engineer of the National Space Science Agency of Bahrain, and Han Chengshan, deputy director of the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other representatives attended the event.

Ayman Ahmet said that this cooperation is the first time EgSA and Bahrain have cooperated in a lunar exploration mission, noting that it will deepen cooperation with China in lunar and deep space exploration missions in the future.

China will launch Chang’e-7 to Shackleton Crater, following the successful launch of Chang’e-6 to the lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin to retrieve lunar samples. Chang’e-6 launched in May from the Wenchang Space Launch Center to the far side of the moon and the probe successfully landed on the far side of the moon with help from the Queqiao 2 relay satellite. The Probe has gathered the necessary lunar samples and has subsequently docked with the orbiter and returner assembly in the lunar orbit in preparation for the journey back to the Earth.

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Now a wild new study suggesting that gravity can exist without mass, conveniently eliminating the need for one of the most elusive substances in our Universe: dark matter.

Dark matter is a hypothetical, invisible mass thought to make up 85 percent of the Universe's total bulk. Originally devised to account for galaxies holding together under high speed rotation, it has yet to be directly observed, leading physicists to propose all sorts of out-there ideas to avoid invoking this elusive material as a way to plug the holes in current theories.

The latest offering in that vein comes from astrophysicist Richard Lieu at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has suggested that rather than dark matter binding galaxies and other bodies together, the Universe may contain thin, shell-like layers of 'topological defects' that give rise to gravity without any underlying mass.

Lieu started out trying to find another solution to the Einstein field equations, which relate the curvature of space-time to the presence of matter within it.

As Einstein described in his 1915 theory of general relativity, space-time warps around bundles of matter and streams of radiation in the Universe, depending on their energy and momentum. That energy is, of course, related to mass in Einstein's famous equation: E=mc2.

So an object's mass is linked to its energy, which bends space-time – and this curvature of space-time is what Einstein described as gravity, a notch more sophisticated than Newton's 17th-century approximation of gravity as a force between two objects with mass. In other words, gravity seems inextricably linked to mass.

Not so, posits Lieu.

In his workings, Lieu set about solving a simplified version of the Einstein field equations that allows for a finite gravitation force in the absence of any detectable mass. He says his efforts were "driven by my frustration with the status quo, namely the notion of dark matter's existence despite the lack of any direct evidence for a whole century."

Lieu's solution consists of shell-shaped topological defects that might occur in very compact regions of space with a very high density of matter.

These sets of concentric shells contain a thin layer of positive mass tucked inside an outer layer of negative mass. The two masses cancel each other out, so the total mass of the two layers is exactly zero. But when a star lies on this shell, it experiences a large gravitational force dragging it towards the center of the shell.

"The contention of my paper is that at least the shells it posits are massless," Lieu says. If those contentious suggestions bear any weight, "there is then no need to perpetuate this seemingly endless search for dark matter," Lieu adds.

The next question, then, is how to possibly confirm or refute the shells Lieu has proposed through observations.

"The increasing frequency of sightings of ring and shell-like formation of galaxies in the Universe lends evidence to the type of source being proposed here," Lieu writes in his paper. Although he admits that his proposed solution is "highly suggestive" and cannot alone discredit the dark matter hypothesis.

"It could be an interesting mathematical exercise at best," Lieu concludes. "But it is the first [mathematical] proof that gravity can exist without mass."

The study has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Genetic clues have unveiled a type of ritual child sacrifice at an ancient Maya site that consisted only of young boys, often chosen as closely related pairs that included twins.

The discovery stems from a burial of more than 100 people in an underground chamber discovered in 1967 at Chichén Itzá, a once dominant Maya city in what’s now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Chichén Itzá reached its pinnacle between around A.D. 800 and A.D. 1000, as many Maya cities in Mexico and Central America fell on hard times or were abandoned (SN: 12/4/23).

DNA from 64 remains in the chamber pegs the bodies as males, challenging an earlier idea that females sacrificed in fertility rites were interred there, archaeogeneticist Rodrigo Barquera and colleagues report June 12 in Nature.

Boys identified in the new study ranged in age from 3 to 6, based on their tooth development. Around one-quarter had a brother or other close relative among those with analyzed DNA. Chemical analyses of diet-related substances in bones found that closely related boys had consumed similar types and proportions of foods, a sign of having grown up in the same households. Related children included two sets of identical twins.

“This is the first evidence of Maya sacrifices involving twins, which were important for Maya [beliefs about the universe],” says Barquera, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The sacrifices may have been for maize or rain

Reasons for the fatal ritual are unclear. But the new findings fit with prior suggestions that the underground space contains children sacrificed to ensure the growth of maize crops or to appease the Maya rain deity Chaac, the researchers say.

While Barquera and colleagues regard the burial chamber as a repurposed underground cistern for storing water, archaeologist James Brady of California State University, Los Angeles says it was constructed as an artificial cave. Ancient Maya people created large numbers of artificial caves for a range of spiritual purposes, Brady notes; he examined the chamber in 2017 and 2018 (SN: 5/15/02).

Barquera’s team suspects that closely related boys were chosen for ritual sacrifices as stand-ins for powerful mythological figures known as the Hero Twins. A Maya document written in the 1550s, the Popul Vuh, recounts tales of the Hero Twins avenging the murders of their father and uncle (also twins) by underworld gods. After a series of sacrificial deaths, the Hero Twins came back to life to outwit those same deities.

Radiocarbon dating of bones from the underground chamber indicates that boys were ritually interred from around A.D. 500 to A.D. 900, Barquera’s group reports. The team cannot say for certain whether the ancient Maya placed bodies there one at a time over decades and centuries, or if sacrificed children were buried in pairs or larger sets.

There are echoes of modern rain rituals

Barquera’s findings “bring to mind ancestral Yucatec rain invocation ceremonies that are still practiced among traditional Maya communities, especially during times of drought,” says Vera Tiesler, a bioarchaeologist at the Autonomous University of Yucatán in Mérida, Mexico, who did not participate in the new study. In that context, Barquera’s scenario of agriculturally related sacrifices of closely related boys associated with the Hero Twins is plausible, she says.

But too little is known about ancient Maya rituals at Chichén Itzá to conclude that sacrificed male twins had anything to do with the Hero Twins story, says bioanthropologist Cristina Verdugo of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

During modern Cha-Chaac rites, boys sit beneath or are tied to an altar adorned with vegetation. The youngsters, no longer ritually sacrificed, imitate sounds of the four winds, frogs or other noises linked to first rains, aiming to invoke the cooperation of the rain god Chaac.

Previous Chichén Itzá researchers described a type of flute called an ocarina that lay among human remains in the underground chamber, Tiesler says. That instrument could have been used to produce rain-relevant sounds, she speculates.

The sex of the deity may determine the sex of those sacrificed

The DNA findings at Chichén Itzá fit with emerging evidence that, at least at some ancient Mexican and Central American sites, the sex of the deity to whom sacrifices were made determined the sex of those chosen as offerings, Verdugo says. The male rain god Chaac possibly motivated sacrifices of young boys at Chichén Itzá.

At an Aztec site in Mexico, other researchers have reported that a temple dedicated to the male rain god Tlaloc contained a burial place for ritually sacrificed boys. And preliminary genetic investigations, directed by Verdugo, at Midnight Terror Cave in Belize have found that four sacrificed youngsters assessed so far — out of at least 55 interred there between around A.D. 550 and A.D. 900 — are female (SN: 4/19/16).

Those four are not a lot to go on, but historical accounts describe Maya sacrifices of females divided into young and middle-aged groups meant to represent goddesses in those two age groups, Verdugo says. Further DNA work at the Belize cave will test whether sacrificed children and at least 12 adults found there represent two groups of females.

What is clear, Barquera says, is that ritual sacrifices differed in various ways across many ancient Maya sites and even within the same sites.

Aside from the sacrificial burial chamber at Chichén Itzá, more than 200 sacrificed individuals found in a large sinkhole known as the Sacred Cenote included males and females ranging in age from children to adults. Tiesler and colleagues have reported that many of those people came from as far away as Central Mexico and Central America, perhaps as part of groups involved in long-distance trading.

Reliefs and murals in the Sacred Cenote, as well as skeletal evidence, indicate that sacrificial rituals included removing heads and other body parts for public display, Tiesler says.

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Hippasus was a Pythagorean, a member of a sect that dealt with mathematics and number mysticism, among other things. A core element of the Pythagoreans’ teachings related to harmonic numerical relationships, which included fractions of whole numbers.

The whole world, they believed, could be described using rational numbers, including natural numbers and fractions. Yet when Hippasus examined the length ratios of a pentagram—the symbol of the Pythagoreans—the story goes, he realized that some of the lengths of the shape’s sides could not be expressed as fractions. He thus provided the first proof of the existence of irrational numbers.

From here, the accounts of Hippasus diverge. Some say that the Pythagoreans took offense at this assertion because such numbers went against their worldview. In other tales, Hippasus made his results public and thus violated the sect's secrecy. Either way, he drowned in the sea after his discovery. Some reports claim that the Pythagoreans threw him off a ship. Others assert that his death was an accident that the Pythagoreans regarded as divine punishment.

Current interpretations of the available historic evidence, however, suggest that these stories are pure legend. Hippasus’ discovery—assuming he even made it—was likely to have been hailed as a mathematical achievement that made the Pythagoreans proud. In fact, many questionable stories swirl around the Pythagoreans who were persecuted for their philosophical and political ideas.

The available facts are limited. The community was probably founded in what is now southern Italy by Pythagoras of Samos—the Greek scholar after whom the famous Pythagorean theorem is named (although it is also unclear whether he proved the theorem). In addition to their interest in mathematics, the Pythagoreans had a number of views that set them apart from others in ancient Greece. They rejected wealth, lived a vegetarian, ascetic lifestyle and believed in reincarnation. Eventually, the group suffered several attacks and, after Pythagoras’ death, the community disappeared completely.

Regarding the tale of Hippasus, the element that historians agree is most likely true is that the Pythagoreans at some point proved the incommensurability of certain quantities, from which the existence of irrational numbers follows.

Numbers beyond Fractions

We now learn in school that some values—the so-called irrational numbers—cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers. But this realization is far from obvious. After all, irrational values can at least be approximated by fractions—although that is sometimes difficult.

The famed proof of irrational numbers presented by Hippasus—or another Pythagorean—is most easily illustrated with an isosceles right triangle: consider a triangle with two sides, each of length a, that form a right angle opposite a hypotenuse of length c.

The existence of irrational numbers is best explained with an isosceles right triangle—that is, a triangle with two sides of an equal length that form a right angle.

Manon Bischoff/Spektrum der Wissenschaft

Such a triangle has a fixed aspect ratio a⁄c. If both a and c are rational numbers, the lengths of the sides of the triangle can be chosen so that a and c each correspond to the smallest possible natural number (that is, they have no common divisor). For example, if the aspect ratio were 2/3 , you would choose a = 2 and c = 3. Assuming that the lengths of the triangle correspond to rational numbers, a and c are integers and have no common divisor—or so everyone thought.

Proof by Contradiction

Hippasus used this line of thinking to create a contradiction, which in turn proved that the original assumption must be wrong. First, he used the Pythagorean theorem (good old a2 + b2 = c2) to express the length of the hypotenuse c as a function of the two equal sides a. Or, to put that mathematically: 2a2 = c2. Because a and c are integers, it follows from the previous equation that c2 must be an even number. Accordingly, c is also divisible by 2: c = 2n, where n is a natural number.

Substituting c = 2n into the original equation gives: 2a2 = (2n)2 = 4n2. The 2 can be reduced on both sides, giving the following result: a2 = 2n2. Because a is also an integer, it follows that a is squared and therefore is an even number. This conclusion contradicts the original assumption, however, because if a and c are both even, neither of them can be a divisor.

This contradiction allowed Hippasus to conclude that the aspect ratio of an isosceles right triangle a⁄c cannot correspond to a rational number. In other words, there are numbers that cannot be represented as the ratio of two integer values. For example, if the right angle forming sides a = 1, then the hypotenuse c = √2. And as we know today, √2 is an irrational number with decimal places that continue indefinitely without ever repeating.

From our current perspective, the existence of irrational values does not seem too surprising because we are confronted with this fact at a young age. But we can only imagine what this realization might have prompted some 2,500 years ago. It could have turned the mathematical worldview upside down. So it’s no wonder that there are so many myths and legends about its discovery.

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Kevin Hainline can time travel from his desk. Well, he can’t physically launch himself back in time. But as a user of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the University of Arizona astronomer regularly observes galaxies from billions of years ago—because it takes that long for their emitted light to reach us from across the cosmos. And recently, he tracked one further back into the universe’s history than ever before.

The record-breaking galaxy, named JADES-GS-z14-0, appears to us as it existed 290 million years after the big bang, when the universe was a mere 2 percent of its present 13.8-billion-year age. This places it well within a mysterious epoch called the cosmic dawn—when the universe’s first stars began to shine and galaxies coalesced. The former record holder, a galaxy named JADES-GS-z13-0 that was reported in 2022 by Hainline and his colleagues on the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) research team, was observed about 325 million years following the big bang. Hainline acknowledges this age difference may seem unremarkable; cosmically speaking, not a lot usually happens in just 35 million years. But JADES-GS-z14-0 has properties that are vastly different from its slightly older counterpart, making it an anomaly that has experts second-guessing how the universe’s first galaxies evolved. “I was skeptical that it was anything special for a number of reasons,” Hainline recalls of his initial glimpse of the galaxy. “It just seemed too big and too bright.... But in January of this year, when we confirmed that it is, in fact, the new record holder, I just laughed. I had to get up from my office chair and walk down the hallway and look at the faces of the other JADES scientists.”

The group’s initial doubts were well-founded, says Brant Robertson, an astronomer and JADES member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is also a co-author of the preprint paper that reported the new record holder. JWST has been unveiling candidate early galaxies that seem to shatter experts’ expectations since it began operating in early 2022, but some of them were ultimately proved to be impostors—more modern galaxies much closer to us in the universe than JWST’s first glance would suggest. Unsurprisingly, Robertson says, the farthest galaxies are the hardest to accurately observe and verify; their qualities can be the most fascinating yet deserve the most skepticism.

JADES-GS-z14-0 was no exception to this rule; at first, Hainline thought it was just one half of another galaxy. With closer examination, he found that to be illusory. The other galaxy was a “foreground” object—an entirely different system billions of light-years closer to us that just happened to overlap with JADES-GS-z14-0 in our line of sight. With that relationship untangled, the candidate’s bizarre qualities became clearer: if it was an early galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0 was abnormally large and unusually shaped. “At that point I had been looking at thousands of little smudgy galaxies,” Hainline says. “But then this one came along, and I sent it first to my colleague Jake Helton [of the University of Arizona] and said, ‘This is seriously weird.’ And after looking into it more for some time, I knew we had to get a spectrum on it.”

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured this deep field image for the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, program. Almost every object visible in this picture is a far-distant galaxy. Follow-up measurements have revealed that one in particular, JADES-GS-z14-0 (shown in the pullout), is the most distant known galaxy; we see it here as it appeared some 290 million years after the big bang.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, B. Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), B. Johnson (CfA), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), P. Cargile (CfA)

Generated by an instrument called a spectrograph, a spectrum serves as a sort of cosmic barcode—an image of light split into all of its various wavelengths, or colors, that scientists can study to reveal otherwise hidden details, such as an object’s distance from Earth.

“JWST has a spectrograph that takes the light from these distant galaxies and disperses it like a prism does into its component wavelengths to make a rainbow, basically,” Robertson says. “Based on the features of that rainbow, we can tell how far away a galaxy is. It’s pretty much how we always confirm the distance of any faraway system.”

Scientists use the spectrum of a galaxy to then calculate its cosmological redshift—a numerical value that represents the stretching of light from shorter, bluer wavelengths to longer, redder ones that is caused by the expansion of space itself between a light source and an observer. The farther away an object is, the faster it is receding because of cosmic expansion, and the higher its redshift becomes. Every celestial object visible to the naked eye is too close to exhibit this effect and thus has a redshift of zero. A redshift of one corresponds to a distance of more than 10 billion light-years. JWST’s studies showed that JADES-GS-z14-0 has a redshift of 14.32, the highest ever recorded. (JADES-GS-z13-0 has a redshift of 13.2.)

But this new galaxy’s superlative redshift isn’t what makes it so intriguing, Hainline says. In fact, the JADES team suspects several other candidates awaiting confirmation may have higher redshifts and be from even earlier points in the universe’s timeline. Instead what makes JADES-GS-z14-0 so peculiar is its exceptional brightness, size and color—all of which seem linked to its population of stars.

Most known early galaxies are relatively small and dim compared to modern ones, Robertson says, mostly because their relative youth hasn’t afforded them enough time to grow large and laden with stars. JADES-GS-z14-0 seems to be an outlier, appearing as an especially radiant blob that suggests it’s packing hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun into a diameter of approximately 1,700 light-years. (The diameter of JADES-GS-z13-0, for comparison, is nearly 10 times smaller.) Some theories might allude that such brightness comes from a burgeoning supermassive black hole feasting on gas at the center of JADES-GS-z14-0. But in that case, light is usually concentrated into a much smaller region. Instead the best explanation Hainline and colleagues have found is that this exceedingly young galaxy has somehow already manufactured about a half billion stars.

Yet the galaxy’s true stellar productivity may be even greater, based on its strange color. Typical growing galaxies produce both high-mass stars, which shine bright and blue for circa 10 million years before dying, and low-mass stars, which shine redder and fainter for hundreds of millions to billions of years. Young galaxies, then, are usually very blue because most of their bright, high-mass stars have yet to burn out. But JADES-GS-z14-0 isn’t very blue—it’s actually pretty red. Stardust may have something to do with this. “Dust is usually created when stars expel their matter or die,” Hainline says. “Galactic dust causes light shining through it to appear red. We see this clearly down here on Earth when dust in our atmosphere turns sunsets red and orange.” Another sign that stardust may be the culprit is the galaxy’s mid-infrared glow measured by JWST—a clue, Hainline and his colleagues say, that JADES-GS-z14-0 is populated with clouds of ionized oxygen, an element forged in the hearts of stars.

If dust from dead stars is the explanation, though, it raises a more perplexing question: How could a galaxy so young have already sparked so many stellar generations? “Usually gases like oxygen show up only after large groups of stars have lived their lives and died in supernova explosions,” Hainline says. “So seeing oxygen in a galaxy this young is like if you are an anthropologist and you find an enormous, ancient city that has evidence of iPhones.”

JADES-GS-z14-0 poses all kinds of new questions and theories. It’s the kind of exciting oddity that researchers were hoping JWST might reveal, says Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a member of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, a JADES competitor performing similar work with JWST. “Ever since it first started taking data, JWST has been finding galaxies at higher and higher redshifts, breaking its own records multiple times,” she says. “We can study these systems and start to really piece together how galaxies like our own Milky Way actually form.”

Kartaltepe, Hainline and Robertson agree that JWST’s power has not yet reached its limits; none of them would be surprised if the telescope unveils a new redshift record within the year. “I think that this is really only the beginning,” Robertson says. “This specific area [JADES has] been studying is pretty small. There are larger areas of the sky that have yet to be explored that maybe have even brighter and more distant galaxies.” JADES-GS-z14-0 itself still requires more investigating, too. “I’m very excited to see what the community does with this weirdo,” Hainline says.

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The auroras over Hawaii on the night of July 8, 1962, were unlike any that humans had ever witnessed. “N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling; Good View Likely,” read a headline in the Honolulu Advertiser beforehand. Nine seconds after 11 P.M., a startling flash set the sky aglow like eerie daylight, slowly fading from green to yellow to orange before settling on a vivid, unsettling red.

The U.S. had just detonated a thermonuclear bomb 100 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Launched on a missile from Johnston Atoll, a U.S. unincorporated territory between the Marshall Islands and Hawaii, the bomb exploded at 250 miles above Earth’s surface—around the altitude in low-Earth orbit of most modern-day satellites. This event, called Starfish Prime, wasn’t the first or last time that the U.S. or Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons in space (there were more than a dozen tests between 1958 and 1962), but it was the most impactful. The blast generated a power surge over the Pacific Ocean that knocked out about 300 streetlights on the island of Oahu—and destroyed or damaged about a third of the roughly two dozen satellites then in orbit.

"The Starfish Prime shot is sort of the poster child for why we don’t like nukes blowing up in space,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Indeed, only a few years later, in 1967, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed on to the Outer Space Treaty, which forbade putting weapons of mass destruction in orbit.

Now, some six decades after the last nuclear detonation in Earth orbit, the threat of another has emerged with the Department of Defense warning about a potential Russian program to place a nuke in space. When the United Nations Security Council recently put forward a resolution to reaffirm the ban on such weapons, Russia vetoed the measure. U.S. officials have said there is no “imminent danger” because no warheads are known to be in space. But they have deemed the prospect “deeply troubling” because a nuclear detonation there today would be far more destructive than even Starfish Prime.

On Earth, a nuclear explosion follows a well-documented catastrophic chronology. There’s the initial fireball itself, which can vaporize or burn everything in a wide radius. Then there’s the shock wave from the sudden change in air pressure, which can level buildings and ignite firestorms. And finally there’s the distinctive mushroom-shaped cloud formed from these effects—and the associated atmospheric fallout of deadly radioactive material, which can kill in a matter of minutes or decades.

In space, this explosion looks quite different. There’s no fireball, shockwave or mushroom cloud. Instead a bomb releases all its power as electromagnetic radiation, including gamma rays and x-rays. This unleashes three waves of destruction, explains Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability for the space sustainability organization Secure World Foundation. First, “there’s a big flash, and satellites within the line of sight are pretty much immediately taken out of commission by the radiation,” she says.

Then there’s the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. X-rays from the explosion collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere and release electrons through a process called Compton scattering. These electrons, along with other charged particles from the explosion, run along the lines of Earth’s magnetic field, causing some of the spectacular auroras witnessed across the Pacific during the Starship Prime test.

Depending on a nuclear explosion’s size and altitude, its EMP can wreak havoc on the ground and in orbit, potentially damaging or disrupting unprotected electronics in spacecraft and in devices across a large swath of Earth’s surface.

But it’s the third and most lasting wave of space-based nuclear destruction that could be most devastating—a lingering, globe-girdling belt of high radiation. “It wasn’t so much the prompt EMP that got you. It was this extra radiation dose over months and years that killed a bunch of satellites,” McDowell says. Effectively, nuclear blasts in orbit create an artificial Van Allen belt, or a ring of charged particles that loops out from Earth along its magnetic field. Engineers try to keep satellites out of Van Allen belts if they can help it because the extra doses of radiation shorten spacecraft lifespans. Starfish Prime’s radiation belt lasted years—among its casualties was a satellite called Telstar, launched the day after the detonation, which ceased functioning following months of exposure to radiation levels 100 times higher than normal.

Today there are nearly 10,000 satellites in orbit. Some of the extremely important and expensive ones may be hardened against this kind of radiation. (It is possible but not certain that this includes GPS satellites; those details are kept secret.) Many spacecraft based in low-Earth orbit would likely be taken offline, Samson says, including a significant fraction of SpaceX’s 6,000-plus Starlink satellites in orbit, which, among other things, provide critical high-speed broadband to Ukrainian forces fighting against Russia’s invasion.

And depending on a blast’s location and intensity, people on the International Space Station (ISS), as well as on China’s Tiangong habitat, might be in danger. An EMP could knock out critical electronic systems on these orbital outposts, leaving their crews ill-equipped to navigate through a minefield of dead, drifting satellites. Even if no hardware failures occurred, the radiation exposure itself “could limit [crew] safety to a matter of hours or days,” Samson says, citing simulations from a 2010 Department of Defense report.

Most chillingly, although electronics can be shielded and Earth’s atmosphere would block most harmful radiation from reaching the ground, everyone on the planet would still be threatened by any orbital blast’s potential to escalate tensions and trigger a global thermonuclear war.

It is currently uncertain whether Russia’s pursuit of a space-based nuke is actually a serious project. “What’s not clear is [whether] this is [just some] PowerPoint by some general in the Strategic Rocket Forces or a seriously funded program,” McDowell says. And it may exist only as a scare tactic, without any real intention of being used, because of its apocalyptic implications. “I’m skeptical that [the Russian government has] a serious operational plan to fire nukes in a conflict in space,” he says.

Even so, Samson notes that the U.S. government seems to be taking this threat quite seriously. “I believe [that the] U.S. government honestly believes that there’s something that the Russians are working on,” she says.

Russia’s power in space has waned since the cold war, supplanted by countries such as China and the U.S., which now have strong commercial space programs. Its main foothold is as an enabling partner on the ISS, which is set to be decommissioned by 2031.

“[Russia doesn’t] have a strong civil space program anymore. And the one thing it has that’s tying it to the international community is going away in a few years,” Samson says. But the country is still a leader in counterspace weapons and operations that could damage other nations’ space capabilities. “That’s where it’s still maintaining its legacy from the cold war,” she says.

Still, while countries jam, temporarily disable and otherwise interfere with one another’s satellites all the time, destroying satellites would be “incredibly escalatory,” Samson says. “That’s never been done, and I think that’d be a huge red line to cross.”

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When Ina Chung, a Colorado mother, first fed packaged foods to her infant, she was careful to read the labels. Her daughter was allergic to peanuts, dairy, and eggs, so products containing those ingredients were out. So were foods with labels that said they may contain the allergens.

Chung felt like this last category suggested a clear risk that wasn’t worth taking. “I had heard that the ingredient labels were regulated. And so I thought that that included those statements,” said Chung. “Which was not true.”

Precautionary allergen labels like those that say "processed in a facility that uses milk" or "may contain fish" are meant to address the potential for cross-contact. For instance, a granola bar that doesn’t list peanuts as an ingredient could still say they may be included. And in the United States, these warnings are not regulated; companies can use whatever precautionary phrasing they choose on any product.

Some don’t bother with any labels, even in facilities where unintended allergens slip in; others list allergens that may pose little risk. Robert Earl, vice president of regulatory affairs at Food Allergy Research & Education, or FARE, a nonprofit advocacy, research, and education group, has even seen such labels that include all nine common food allergens. “I would bet my bottom dollar not all of those allergens are even in the facility,” he said.

So what are the roughly 20 million people with food allergies in the US supposed to do with these warnings? Should they eat the granola bar or not?

Recognizing this uncertainty, food safety experts, allergy advocates, policymakers, and food producers are discussing how to demystify precautionary allergen labels. One widely considered solution is to restrict warnings to cases where visual or analytical tests demonstrate that there is enough allergen to actually trigger a reaction. Experts say the costs to the food industry are minimal, and some food producers across the globe, including in Canada, Australia, Thailand, and the United States, already voluntarily take this approach. But in the US, where there are no clear guidelines to follow, consumers are still left wondering what each individual precautionary allergen label even means.

Pull a packaged food off an American store shelf and the ingredients label should say if the product intentionally contains one of nine recognized allergens. That’s because in 2004, Congress granted the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate labeling of eight major food allergens—eggs, fish, milk, crustaceans, peanuts, tree nuts, soybeans, and wheat. In 2021, sesame was added to the list.

But the language often gets murkier further down the label, where companies may include precautionary allergen labels, also called advisory statements, to address the fact that allergens can unintentionally wind up in foods at many stages of production. Perhaps wheat grows near a field of rye destined for bread, for instance, or peanuts get lodged in processing equipment that later pumps out chocolate chip cookies. Candy manufacturers, in particular, struggle to keep milk out of dark chocolate.

The FDA offers no labeling guidance beyond declaring that “advisory statements should not be used as a substitute for adhering to current good manufacturing practices and must be truthful and not misleading.”

Companies can choose when to use these warnings, which vary widely. For example, a 2017 survey conducted by the FDA and the Illinois Institute of Technology of 78 dark chocolate products found that almost two-thirds contained an advisory statement for peanuts; of those, only about four actually contained the allergen. Meanwhile, of 18 bars that carried no advisory statement for peanuts specifically, three contained the allergen. (One product that was positive for peanuts did warn more generally of nuts, but the researchers noted that this term is ambiguous.) Another product that tested positive included a nut warning on one lot but not on another. Individual companies also select their own precautionary label phrasing.

For consumers, the inconsistency can be confusing, said Ruchi Gupta, a pediatrician and director of the Center for Food Allergy & Asthma Research at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. In 2019, Gupta and colleagues asked around 3,000 US adults who have allergies or care for someone who does about how different precautionary allergen label phrases make a difference when they are considering whether to buy a particular food. About 80 percent never purchase products with a may contain warning. Less than half avoid products with labels suggesting that it was manufactured in a facility that also processes an allergen, even though numerous studies show that the wording of a precautionary allergen label has no bearing on risk level. “People are making their own decisions on what sounds safe,” said Gupta.

When Chung learned that advisory labels were unregulated, she experimented with ignoring them when her then-toddler really wanted a particular food. When her daughter developed a couple of hives after eating a cereal labeled may contain peanuts, Chung went back to heeding warnings of peanut cross-contact but continued ignoring the rest.

“A lot of families just make up their own rules,” she said. “There's no way to really know exactly what you're getting.”

Most countries don’t regulate precautionary allergen labels, but many food safety experts are exploring how they could. One popular tactic hinges on thresholds: the smallest amount of an allergen that could prompt an allergic reaction. If food producers abide by thresholds, the theory goes, they could restrict labels to products that contain allergens at or above this level.

Allergen sensitivities vary widely. To determine thresholds that would protect most people, researchers combine data from thousands of individual oral food challenges, in which an allergist presents a patient with increasing doses of an allergen until they have a reaction or have consumed a meal-sized portion.

In 2022, an expert committee convened by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization established thresholds for key allergens; the vast majority of consumers with food allergies would not react at levels below these thresholds. The list initially included all allergens recognized in the US, except soy, and additionally broke tree nuts into specific examples—walnut, pecan, cashew, pistachio, almond, hazelnut. In 2023, the committee also established thresholds for celery and soy.

Precautionary allergen labels like those that say “processed in a facility that uses milk” or “may contain fish” are meant to address the potential for cross-contact. But such disclaimers aren’t regulated in the United States.

That year, the committee also made recommendations on how policymakers could use the thresholds to regulate precautionary allergen labels. “It is critical that companies incorporate appropriate quality control, hygiene, and risk-mitigation practices into their overall allergen control programs,” Joseph Baumert, an FAO/WHO expert committee member, wrote to Undark in an email. Baumert is the director of the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program, an industry-funded consortium between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and more than 100 member companies.

Companies, the recommendations suggest, should then be required to quantify the unintended allergens in products. These could range from visual inspections for allergens like whole sesame seeds to using laboratory techniques to determine how much protein from an allergen is present. Taking into account how much of a food a person is likely to eat, the food producer should then determine whether an allergen’s concentration exceeds the recommended threshold-based limit; products with concentrations higher than this limit would have a label, while others would not. And all of the labels would need a single, standardized phrase.

A system like this “would be helpful for so, so many,” said Chung.

The FAO/WHO’s Codex Committee on Food Labelling, which helps set international food-labeling standards, may use the recommendations in developing its guidance on precautionary allergen labels. If adopted, many countries will follow the recommendations, predicts Marjan van Ravenhorst, who directs Allergenen Consultancy B.V. in the Netherlands.

But some companies already use thresholds for precautionary labels through the Voluntary Incidental Trace Allergen Labelling program.

Though VITAL is based in Australia and New Zealand, companies headquartered in many countries, including the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, South Africa, and Thailand, have also subscribed, according to food safety specialist Jasmine Lacis-Lee, president of the board of directors for Allergen Bureau, an industry-run not-for-profit that runs the voluntary labeling program. In Switzerland, precautionary allergen labels are required when an allergen’s protein levels reach a concentration greater than one thousand parts per million. Japan requires companies to list unintended allergens on the ingredients list itself whenever they are detected above an exceedingly low threshold.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, a mandatory threshold-based system will become fully enforced in 2026 and will require advisory labels when allergen concentrations surpass the thresholds recommended by the FAO/WHO committee. If there is no risk of an allergen, companies will not be able to use precautionary allergen labels.

A threshold-based approach should not have a major impact on the cost of food production, said Lacis-Lee. When it comes to implementing a VITAL risk assessment, she added, “most businesses producing food should already be doing the vast majority of what is required.”

Exactly how often allergen testing is required under the threshold-based system depends on a facility’s risk level, said van Ravenhorst, who helped write the guidelines for the Netherlands’ new advisory statement requirements. “If you only cut vegetables, and there is no allergen in your facility, it's insane to test for different allergens every week.”

One concern about standardizing precautionary allergen labels is consumer comfort level. The FAO/WHO thresholds are designed to protect 95 percent of an allergic population from an allergic reaction. Five percent could still react to allergens at levels so low that they fall under the threshold, at which point using a precautionary label would be against the rules. Of these individuals, the vast majority would not experience anaphylaxis, and there are no confirmed reports of fatal anaphylaxis from allergens below the thresholds, according to the 2023 FAO/WHO report.

The report suggests that this system would improve safety for allergic consumers. Currently, unintended allergens can exist at higher levels without warning; with their proposed system, foods with allergens above the threshold would all carry a label.

Not offering a precautionary label when you know an allergen, even at very low levels, is there can feel difficult, said van Ravenhorst, who herself has several allergies. But she feels there’s a balance between overuse of labeling and protection: “We want to be informed when there is a real risk.”

Gupta’s team recently surveyed US allergists for their thoughts on precautionary allergen labels, including whether thresholds should be used; a similar survey for people with allergies is in the works. Gupta wonders whether consumers might prefer a system where each food label states whether allergens are entirely absent, present above a threshold, or present below a threshold. But she’s already concerned that this alternative would most benefit those who know their sensitivity levels from allergist visits, which may leave out many patients. Her research shows that low-income caregivers of children with allergies spend less on specialist appointments. She worries: “Will it cause a bigger divide?”

Some US companies would likely welcome more guidance on advisory labeling, said Baumert. In keeping with the Food Safety Modernization Act, most already have allergen control plans, which include monitoring for unintended allergens. Most food companies, for example, do some analytical work to confirm that their cleaning procedures are effective, for instance when they switch from a recipe that contains an allergen to one that doesn’t.

But when companies are unable to eliminate traces of unintended allergens, some say current guidelines make it difficult to respond. Looking for a way out of a regulatory gray zone, some even opt to include allergens in recipes so that they can follow clearer guidelines. After Congress declared sesame a major food allergen in 2021, for example, the seed became a listed ingredient in many foods people with sesame allergies previously enjoyed.

“This addition of sesame would likely not be needed if FDA would establish allergen thresholds or otherwise set forth clear guidance as to when advisory or precautionary labeling (i.e. “may contain” statements) may be used,” wrote Eric Dell, the president and CEO of the American Bakers Association, in a May 2023 letter to select US Congress members.

When it comes to precautionary allergen labels, “we recognize that the extensive use of these statements may be confusing to consumers, and we are considering conducting some consumer research in this area,” wrote FDA spokesperson Enrico Dinges in an email to Undark.

In January 2024, the FDA published draft guidance for the industry; in it, the agency acknowledged that there may be situations where food producers, even after following good allergen management practices, cannot assure consumers that food is safe and therefore should include labeling “that discloses the possible unintended allergen presence in the food.”

But the agency stopped short of recommending exactly how to determine whether an unintended allergen presents enough risk to warrant an advisory statement. There’s a need for clarity on the FDA’s expectations for precautionary allergen labels, said Baumert: “I think we've gotten further on an international basis than we have currently here in the US.”

Meanwhile, American families are left to interpret allergen advisory labels alone. Chung’s daughter is now 6 years old, and the family no longer follows precautionary peanut labels. The change came after Chung learned of a 2021 review paper suggesting that half of people with peanut allergies could eat about two-thirds of a peanut without reacting. Based on her daughter’s reaction history, Chung felt her then 5-year-old could likely handle trace amounts, too, since a severe allergic response seemed unlikely. So Chung took a chance and let her try a granola bar that her brother loved, despite the fact that the wrapper suggested it may contain peanuts. The response: no reaction. She really wanted it, Chung said, who recalled thinking, “If it's safe, how wonderful would that be?”

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We are now in the later stages of the first generation of life extension, which involves applying the current class of pharmaceutical and nutritional knowledge to overcoming health challenges. In the 2020s we are starting the second phase of life extension, which is the merger of biotechnology with AI. The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to far transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.

Only one person, Jeanne Calment—a French woman who survived to age 122—is documented to have lived longer than 120 years. So why is this such a hard limit to human longevity? One might guess that the reasons people don’t make it past this age are statistical—that elderly people face a certain risk of Alzheimer’s, stroke, heart attack, or cancer every year, and that after enough years being exposed to these risks, everyone eventually dies of something. But that’s not what’s happening. Actuarial data shows that from age 90 to 110, a person’s chances of dying in the following year increase by about 2 percentage points annually. For example, an American man at age 97 has about a 30 percent chance of dying before 98, and if he makes it that far he will have a 32 percent chance of dying before 99. But from age 110 onward, the risk of death rises by about 3.5 percentage points a year.

Doctors have offered an explanation: At around age 110, the bodies of the oldest people start breaking down in ways that are qualitatively different from the aging of younger senior citizens. Supercentenarian (110-plus) aging is not simply a continuation or worsening of the same kinds of statistical risks of late adulthood. While people at that age also have an annual risk from ordinary diseases (although the worsening of these risks may decelerate in the very old), they additionally face new challenges like kidney failure and respiratory failure. These often seem to happen spontaneously—not as a result of lifestyle factors or any disease onset. The body apparently just starts breaking down.

Over the past decade, scientists and investors have started giving much more serious attention to finding out why. One of the leading researchers in this field is biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, founder of the LEV (Longevity Escape Velocity) foundation. As de Grey explains, aging is like the wear on the engine of an automobile—it is damage that accumulates as a result of the system’s normal operation. In the human body’s case, that damage largely comes from a combination of cellular metabolism and cellular reproduction. Metabolism creates waste in and around cells and damages structures through oxidation (much like the rusting of a car!). When we’re young, our bodies are able to remove this waste and repair the damage efficiently. But as we get older, most of our cells reproduce over and over, and errors accumulate. Eventually the damage starts piling up faster than the body can fix it.

The only solution, longevity researchers argue, is to cure aging itself. In short, we need the ability to repair damage from aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues. There are a number of possibilities being explored for how to achieve this, but I believe the most promising ultimate solution is nanorobots.

And we don’t need to wait until these technologies are fully mature in order to benefit. If you can live long enough for anti-aging research to start adding at least one year to your remaining life expectancy annually, that will buy enough time for nanomedicine to cure any remaining facets of aging. This is longevity escape velocity. This is why there is sound logic behind Aubrey de Grey’s sensational declaration that the first person to live to 1,000 years has likely already been born. If the nanotechnology of 2050 solves enough issues of aging for 100-year-olds to start living to 150, we’ll then have until 2100 to solve whatever new problems may crop up at that age. With AI playing a key role in research by then, progress during that time will be exponential. So even though these projections are admittedly startling—and even sound absurd to our intuitive for linear thinking—we have solid reasons to see this as a likely future.

I’ve had many conversations over the years about life extension, and the idea often meets resistance. People become upset when they hear of an individual whose life has been cut short by a disease, yet when confronted with the possibility of generally extending all human life, they react negatively. “Life is too difficult to contemplate going on indefinitely” is a common response. But people generally do not want to end their lives at any point unless they are in enormous pain—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And if they were to absorb the ongoing improvements of life in all its dimensions, most such afflictions would be alleviated. That is, extending human life would also mean vastly improving it.

But how will nanotechnology actually make this possible? In my view, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made from diamondoid parts with onboard sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and possibly power supplies. It is intuitive to imagine nanobots as tiny metal robotic submarines chugging through the bloodstream, but physics at the nanoscale requires a substantially different approach. At this scale, water is a powerful solvent, and oxidant molecules are highly reactive, so strong materials like diamondoid will be needed.

And whereas macro-scale submarines can smoothly propel themselves through liquids, for nanoscale objects, fluid dynamics are dominated by sticky frictional forces. Imagine trying to swim through peanut butter! So nanobots will need to harness different principles of propulsion. Likewise, nanobots probably won’t be able to store enough onboard energy or computing power to accomplish all their tasks independently, so they will need to be designed to draw energy from their surroundings and either obey outside control signals or collaborate with one another to do computation.

To maintain our bodies and otherwise counteract health problems, we will all need a huge number of nanobots, each about the size of a cell. The best available estimates say that the human body is made of several tens of trillions of biological cells. If we augment ourselves with just 1 nanobot per 100 cells, this would amount to several hundred billion nanobots. It remains to be seen, though, what ratio is optimal. It might turn out, for example, that advanced nanobots could be effective even at a cell-to-nanobot ratio several orders of magnitude greater.

One of the main effects of aging is degrading organ performance, so a key role of these nanobots will be to repair and augment them. Other than expanding our neocortex, this will mainly involve helping our nonsensory organs to efficiently place substances into the blood supply (or lymph system) or remove them. By monitoring the supply of these vital substances, adjusting their levels as needed, and maintaining organ structures, nanobots can keep a person’s body in good health indefinitely. Ultimately, nanobots will be able to replace biological organs altogether, if needed or desired.

But nanobots won’t be limited to preserving the body’s normal function. They could also be used to adjust concentrations of various substances in our blood to levels more optimal than what would normally occur in the body. Hormones could be tweaked to give us more energy and focus, or speed up the body’s natural healing and repair. If optimizing hormones could make our sleep more efficient, it would in effect be “backdoor life extension.” If you just go from needing eight hours of sleep a night to seven hours, that adds as much waking existence to the average life as five more years of lifespan!

Eventually, using nanobots for body maintenance and optimization should prevent major diseases from even arising. Once nanobots can selectively repair or destroy individual cells, we will fully master our biology, and medicine will become the exact science it has long aspired to be.

Achieving this will also entail gaining complete control over our genes. In our natural state, cells reproduce by copying the DNA in each nucleus. If there is a problem with the DNA sequence in a group of cells, there is no way to address it without updating it in every individual cell. This is an advantage in unenhanced biological organisms, because random mutations within individual cells are unlikely to cause fatal damage to the whole body. If any mutation in any cell in our bodies were instantly copied to every other cell, we wouldn’t be able to survive. But the decentralized robustness of biology is a major challenge to a species (like ours) that can edit individual cells’ DNA fairly well but has not yet mastered the nanotechnology needed to edit DNA effectively throughout the whole body.

If instead each cell’s DNA code were controlled by a central server (as many electronic systems are), then we could change the DNA code by simply updating it once from that “central server.” To do this, we would augment each cell’s nucleus with a nanoengineered counterpart—a system that would receive the DNA code from the central server and then produce a sequence of amino acids from this code. I use “central server” here as a shorthand for a more centralized broadcast architecture, but this probably does not mean every nanobot getting direct instructions from literally one computer. The physical challenges of nanoscale engineering might ultimately dictate that a more localized broadcast system is preferable. But even if there are hundreds or thousands of micro-scale (as opposed to nanoscale) control units placed around our bodies (which would be large enough for more complex communications with an overall control computer), this would be orders of magnitude more centralization than the status quo: independent functioning by tens of trillions of cells.

The other parts of the protein synthesis system, such as the ribosome, could be augmented in the same fashion. In this way we could simply turn off activity from malfunctioning DNA, whether it is responsible for cancer or genetic disorders. The nanocomputer maintaining this process would also implement the biological algorithms that govern epigenetics—how genes are expressed and activated. As of the early 2020s, we still have a lot to learn about gene expression, but AI will allow us to simulate it in enough detail by the time nanotechnology is mature that nanobots will be able to precisely regulate it. With this technology we’ll also be able to prevent and reverse the accumulation of DNA transcription errors, which are a major cause of aging.

Nanobots will also be useful for neutralizing urgent threats to the body—destroying bacteria and viruses, halting autoimmune reactions, or drilling through clogged arteries. In fact, recent research by Stanford and Michigan State University has already created a nanoparticle that finds the monocytes and macrophages that cause atherosclerotic plaque and eliminates those cells. Smart nanobots will be vastly more effective. Initially such treatments would be initiated by humans, but ultimately they will be carried out autonomously; the nanobots will perform tasks on their own and report their activities (via a controlling AI interface) to humans monitoring them.

As AI gains greater ability to understand human biology, it will be possible to send nanobots to address problems at the cellular level long before they would be detectable by today’s doctors. In many cases this will allow prevention of conditions that remain unexplained in 2023. Today, for example, about 25 percent of ischemic strokes are “cryptogenic”—they have no detectable cause. But we know they must happen for some reason. Nanobots patrolling the bloodstream could detect small plaques or structural defects at risk of creating stroke-causing clots, break up forming clots, or raise the alarm if a stroke is silently unfolding.

Just as with hormone optimization, though, nanomaterials will allow us to not just restore normal body function but augment it beyond what our biology alone makes possible. Biological systems are limited in strength and speed because they must be constructed from protein. Although these proteins are three-dimensional, they have to be folded from a one-dimensional string of amino acids. Engineered nanomaterials won’t have this limitation. Nanobots built from diamondoid gears and rotors would be thousands of times faster and stronger than biological materials, and designed from scratch to perform optimally.

Thanks to these advantages, even our blood supply may be replaced by nanobots. A design by founding Singularity University nanotechnology cochair Robert A. Freitas called the respirocyte is an artificial red blood cell. According to Freitas’ calculations, someone with respirocytes in his bloodstream could hold his breath for about four hours. In addition to artificial blood cells, we’ll eventually be able to engineer artificial lungs to oxygenate them more efficiently than the respiratory system that biology has given us. Ultimately, even hearts made from nanomaterials will make people immune to heart attacks and make cardiac arrest due to trauma much rarer.

Yet the most important role of nanotech in our bodies will be augmenting the brain—which will eventually become more than 99.9 percent nonbiological. There are two distinct pathways by which this will happen. One is the gradual introduction of nanobots to the brain tissue itself. These may be used to repair damage or replace neurons that have stopped working. The other is connecting the brain to computers, which will both provide the ability to control machines directly with our thoughts and allow us to integrate digital layers of neocortex in the cloud. This will go far beyond just better memory or faster thinking.

A deeper virtual neocortex will give us the ability to think thoughts more complex and abstract than we can currently comprehend. As a dimly suggestive example, imagine being able to clearly and intuitively visualize and reason about 10-dimensional shapes. That sort of facility will be possible across many domains of cognition. For comparison, the cerebral cortex (which is mainly made up of the neocortex) has an average of 16 billion neurons, in a volume of roughly half a liter. Ralph Merkle’s design for a nanoscale mechanical computing system could theoretically pack more than 80 quintillion logic gates into the same amount of space. And the speed advantage would be enormous: The electrochemical switching speed of mammalian neuron firing probably averages within an order of magnitude of once per second, as compared with likely around 100 million to 1 billion cycles per second for nanoengineered computation. Even if only a minuscule fraction of these values are achievable in practice, it is clear that such technology will allow the digital parts of our brain (stored on nonbiological computing substrates) to vastly outnumber and outperform the biological ones.

My estimate is that the computations inside the human brain (at the level of neurons) is on the order of 1,014 per second. As of early 2023, $1,000 of computing power could perform up to 48 trillion computations per second. Based on the 2000–2022 trend, by 2053 about $1,000 of computing power (in 2023 dollars) will be enough to perform more than 1 million times as many computations per second as the unenhanced human brain. If it turns out, as I suspect, that only a fraction of the brain’s neurons are necessary to digitize the conscious mind (e.g., if we don’t have to simulate the actions of many cells that govern the actions of the body’s other organs), this point could be reached several years sooner. And even if it turns out that digitizing our conscious minds requires simulating every protein in every neuron (which I think is unlikely), it might take a few more decades to reach that level of affordability—but it’s still something that would happen within the lifetimes of many people living today. In other words, because this future depends on fundamental exponential trends, even if we greatly change our assumptions about how easy it will be to affordably digitize ourselves, that won’t vastly change the date by which this milestone will be reached.

In the 2040s and 2050s, we will rebuild our bodies and brains to go vastly beyond what our biological bodies are capable of, including their backup and survival. As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized body at will: We’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them. We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly, we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.

From The Singularity Is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil, to be published on June 25, 2024, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Ray Kurzweil.

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Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts