Thanks to being an incompressible medium, water transmits vibrations both farther and faster than the air. (Here's a good video explainer on the subject.) This fact helps to explain how a US government-owned "moored passive acoustic recorder" was able to hear and record the 2023 implosion of the doomed Titan submersibleβeven though the recorder was 900 miles away from the dive site.
That implosion, during an attempted dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, killed five people, including Stockton Rush, the CEO of the company that built and operated the Titan.
The implosion audio was just released publicly by the US Coast Guard's Titan Marine Board of Investigation, which has been investigating the disaster in enormous detail. As part of that investigation, the Coast Guard obtained the audio from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), part of the US Department of Commerce.
On Wednesday, a team of researchers announced that they got extremely lucky. The team is building a detector on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea that can identify those rare occasions when a neutrino happens to interact with the seawater nearby. And while the detector was only 10 percent of the size it will be on completion, it managed to pick up the most energetic neutrino ever detected.
For context, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider, accelerates protons to an energy of 7 Tera-electronVolts (TeV). The neutrino that was detected had an energy of at least 60 Peta-electronVolts, possibly hitting 230 PeV. That also blew away the previous records, which were in the neighborhood of 10 PeV.
Attempts to trace back the neutrino to a source make it clear that it originated outside our galaxy, although there are a number of candidate sources in the more distant Universe.
Biomedical research in the US is world class in part because of a longstanding partnership between universities and the federal government.
On Feb. 7, 2025, the US National Institutes of Health issued a policy that could weaken the position of the United States as a global leader in scientific innovation by slashing funds to the infrastructure that allows universities and other institutions to conduct research in the first place.
Universities across the nation carry out research on behalf of the federal government. Central to this partnership is federal grant funding, which is awarded through a rigorous review process. These grants are the lifeblood of biomedical research in the US.
The search for extraterrestrial life has always been a key motivator of space exploration. But if we were to search Mars, Titan, or the subsurface oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it seems like all we can reasonably hope to find is extremophile microbes. And microbes, just a few microns long and wide, will be difficult to identify if weβre relying on robots working with limited human supervision and without all the fancy life-detecting gear we have here on Earth.
To solve that problem, a team of German researchers at the Technical University in Berlin figured that, instead of having a robot looking for microbes, it would be easier and cheaper to make the microbes come to the robot. The only ingredient they were lacking was the right bait.
Looking for movement
Most ideas we have for life detection on space mission rely on looking for chemical traces of life, such as various metabolites. Most recent missions, the Perseverance rover included, werenβt equipped with any specialized life-detecting instruments. βOn Mars, the focus was on looking for signs of possible ancient lifeβfossils or other traces of microbes,β says Max Riekeles, an astrobiologist at the Technical University Berlin. βThe last real in-situ life detection missions were performed by Viking landers, which is quite a while back already,β
Last October, United Launch Alliance started stacking its third Vulcan rocket on a mobile launch platform in Florida in preparation for a mission for the US Space Force by the end of the year.
That didn't happen, and ULA is still awaiting the Space Force's formal certification of its new rocket, further pushing out delivery schedules for numerous military satellites booked to fly to orbit on the Vulcan launcher.
Now, several months after stacking the next Vulcan rocket, ULA has started taking it apart. First reported by Spaceflight Now, the "de-stacking" will clear ULA's vertical hangar for assembly of an Atlas V rocketβthe Vulcan's predecessorβto launch the first batch of operational satellites for Amazon's Kuiper Internet constellation.
On Friday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a sudden change to how it handles the indirect costs of researchβthe money that pays for things like support services and facilities maintenance. These costs help pay universities and research centers to provide the environment and resources all their researchers need to get research done. Previously, these had been set through negotiations with the university and audits of the spending. These averaged roughly 30 percent of the value of the grant itself and would frequently exceed 50 percent.
The NIH announcement set the rate at 15 percent for every campus. The new rate would start today and apply retroactively to existing grants, meaning most research universities are currently finding themselves facing catastrophic budget shortfalls.
Today, a coalition of 22 states filed a suit that seeks to block the new policy, alleging it violated both a long-standing law and a budget rider that Congress had passed in response to a 2017 attempt by Trump to drastically cut indirect costs. The suit seeks to prevent the new policy or its equivalent from being appliedβsomething that Judge Angel Kelley of the District of Massachusetts granted later in the day. While that injunction only applies to research centers located in the states that have joined the suit, a separate suit was filed in the same district by a group of medical organizations, some of them (such as the Association of American Medical Colleges), have members throughout the country. As a result, Judge Kelley issued a separate ruling that extended the injunction to the remaining states.
The first-ever National Nature Assessmentβwhich was based on significant public feedback and strove to reveal how nature loss influences climate change and impacts humanityβmay still see the light of day after the Trump administration abruptly ended the ambitious project.
Researchers involved told The New York Times that the nature report was "too important to die" and that an "amazingly broad consensus" remains among its mostly volunteer authors, so the expansive report must be completed and released to the public.
The first draft of the report was due on Tuesday, so the bulk of the initial work appears mostly done. Although the webpage for the project has been deleted, an archived version shows that researchers had expected to spend the rest of 2025 seeking external review and edits before releasing the final report in late 2026.
Grants paid by the federal government have two components. One covers the direct costs of performing the research, paying for salaries, equipment, and consumables like chemicals or enzymes. But the government also pays what are called indirect costs. These go to the universities and research institutes, covering the costs of providing and maintaining the lab space, heat and electricity, administrative and HR functions, and more.
These indirect costs are negotiated with each research institution and average close to 30 percent of the amount awarded for the research. Some institutions see indirect rates as high as half the value of the grant.
On Friday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that negotiated rates were ending. Every existing grant, and all those funded in the future, will see the indirect cost rate set to just 15 percent. With no warning and no time to adjust to the change in policy, this will prove catastrophic for the budget of nearly every biomedical research institution.
The spring morning is cool and bright in the Sierra de San Pedro MΓ‘rtir National Park in Baja California, Mexico, as a bird takes to the skies. Its 9.8-foot wingspan casts a looming silhouette against the sunlight; the sound of its flight is like that of a light aircraft cutting through the wind. In this forest thick with trees up to 600 years old lives the southernmost population of the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus), the only one outside the United States. Dozens of the scavenging birds have been reintroduced here, to live and breed once again in the wild.
Their return has been captained for more than 20 years by biologist Juan Vargas Velasco and his partner MarΓa Catalina Porras PeΓ±a, a couple who long ago moved away from the comforts of the city to endure extreme winters living in a tent or small trailer, to manage the lives of the 48 condors known to fly over Mexican territory. Togetherβshe as coordinator of the California Condor Conservation Program, and he as field managerβthey are the guardians of a project whose origins go back to condor recovery efforts that began in the 1980s in the United States, when populations were decimated, mainly from eating the meat of animals shot by huntersβ lead bullets.
In Mexico, the species disappeared even earlier, in the late 1930s. Its historic returnβthe first captive-bred condors were released into Mexican territory in 2002βis the result of close binational collaboration among zoos and other institutions in the United States and Mexico.
Welcome to Edition 7.30 of the Rocket Report! The US government relies on SpaceX for a lot of missions. These include launching national security satellites, putting astronauts on the Moon, and global broadband communications. But there are hurdlesβtechnical and, increasingly, politicalβon the road ahead. To put it generously, Elon Musk, without whom much of what SpaceX does wouldn't be possible, is one of the most divisive figures in American life today.
Now, a Democratic lawmaker in Congress has introduced a bill that would end federal contracts for special government employees (like Musk), citing conflict-of-interest concerns. The bill will go nowhere with Republicans in control of Congress, but it is enough to make me pause and think. When the Trump era passes and a new administration takes the White House, how will they view Musk? Will there be an appetite to reduce the government's reliance on SpaceX? To answer this question, you must first ask if the government will even have a choice. What if, as is the case in many areas today, there's no viable replacement for the services offered by SpaceX?
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Sometime during the next several weeks, the directors of federal agencies will receive a draft version of President Trump's budget request for the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1. This "passback review" is a standard part of the federal budgeting process which ends in Congress writing a budget and the president signing it into law.
The budget request will be the first of President Trump's second term, and it will offer a clear window into the priorities of his new administration. Although widespread cuts are expected for much of the government's discretionary spending, the outlook for the National Science Foundation appears to be especially grim.
During an emotional all-hands meeting on Tuesday, the agency's assistant director for engineering, Susan Margulies, told agency employees to expect between a quarter and a half of its staff to be laid off within the coming months, E&E News reported.
With the closure of its last coal-fired power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, on September 30, 2024, the United Kingdom has taken a significant step toward its net-zero goals. Itβs no small feat to end the 142-year era of coal-powered electricity in the country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution. Yet the UK's journey away from coal has been remarkably swift, with coal generation plummeting from 40 percent of the electricity mix in 2012 to just two percent in 2019, and finally to zero in 2024.
As of 2023, approximately half of UK electricity generation comes from zero-carbon sources, with natural gas serving as a transitional fuel. The UK aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent to 48 percent by 2027 and achieve net-zero by 2050. The government set a firm target to generate all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2040, emphasizing offshore wind and solar energy as the keys.
What will things look like in the intervening years, which will lead us from today to net-zero? Everyoneβs scenario, even when based in serious science, boils down to a guessing game. Yet some things are more certain than others, the most important of these factors being the ones that are on solid footing beneath all of the guesswork.
There have been many studies on the capability of non-human animals to mimic transitive actionsβactions that have a purpose. Hardly any studies have shown that animals are also capable of intransitive actions. Even though intransitive actions have no particular purpose, imitating these non-conscious movements is still thought to help with socialization and strengthen bonds for both animals and humans.
Zoologist Esha Haldar and colleagues from the Comparative Cognition Research group worked with blue-throated macaws, which are critically endangered, at the Loro Parque FundaciΓ³n in Tenerife. They trained the macaws to perform two intransitive actions, then set up a conflict: Two neighboring macaws were asked to do different actions.
What Haldar and her team found was that individual birds were more likely to perform the same intransitive action as a bird next to them, no matter what theyβd been asked to do. This could mean that macaws possess mirror neurons, the same neurons that, in humans, fire when we are watching intransitive movements and cause us to imitate them (at least if these neurons function the way some think they do).
Something in the sky captured the attention of astronomers in the final days of 2024. A telescope in Chile scanning the night sky detected a faint point of light, and it didn't correspond to any of the thousands of known stars, comets, and asteroids in astronomers' all-sky catalog.
The detection on December 27 came from one of a network of telescopes managed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a NASA-funded project to provide warning of asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
Within a few days, scientists gathered enough information on the asteroidβofficially designated 2024 YR4βto determine that its orbit will bring it quite close to Earth in 2028, and then again in 2032. Astronomers ruled out any chance of an impact with Earth in 2028, but there's a small chance the asteroid might hit our planet on December 22, 2032.
Performing complex algorithms on quantum computers will eventually require access to tens of thousands of hardware qubits. For most of the technologies being developed, this creates a problem: It's difficult to create hardware that can hold that many qubits. As a result, people are looking at various ideas of how we might link processors together in order to have them function as a single computational unit (a challenge that has obviously been solved for classical computers).
In today's issue of Nature, a team at Oxford University describes using quantum teleportation to link two pieces of quantum hardware that were located about 2 meters apart, meaning they could easily have been in different rooms entirely. Once linked, the two pieces of hardware could be treated as a single quantum computer, allowing simple algorithms to be performed that involved operations on both sides of the 2-meter gap.
Quantum teleportation is... different
Our idea of teleportation has been heavily shaped by Star Trek, where people disappear from one location while simultaneously appearing elsewhere. Quantum teleportation doesn't work like that. Instead, you need to pre-position quantum objects at both the source and receiving ends of the teleport and entangle them. Once that's done, it's possible to perform a series of actions that force the recipient to adopt the quantum state of the source. The process of performing this teleportation involves a measurement of the source object, which destroys its quantum state even as it appears at the distant site, so it does share that feature with the popular conception of teleportation.
Do you long for that tart fruity flavor of a sour beer but wish the complicated brewing process were faster? Norwegian scientists might have the answer: field peas, as well as beans and lentils. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, experimental beers made with the sugars found in these foods had similar flavor profiles to your average Belgian-style sour beer, yet the brewing process was shorter with simpler steps.
βSour beer is the beer enthusiastβs alternative to champagne," said co-author BjΓΈrge Westereng of the Norwegian University of Life Science. "By using sugars derived from peas that yeast cannot metabolize, we promote the growth of bacteria essential for producing sour beer.β
As previously reported, sour beer has been around for centuries and has become a favorite with craft brewers in recent years, although the brewing process can be both unpredictable and time-consuming. Brewers of standard beer carefully control the strains of yeast they use, taking care to ensure other microbes don't sneak into the mix, lest they alter the flavor during fermentation.
Gecko feet have inspired many intriguing applications, including a sticky tape, adhesives, a "stickybot" climbing robot, and even a strapless bra design. Now, scientists have developed a new kind of anti-slip polymer that sticks to ice, inspired by the humble gecko. Incorporating these polymers into shoe soles could reduce the number of human slip-and-fall injuries, according to a paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
As previously reported, geckos are known for being expert climbers; they're able to stick to any surface thanks to tiny hair-like structures on the bottoms of their feet. Those microscopic hairs are called setae, each of which splits off into hundreds of even smaller bristles called spatulae. It has long been known that at microscopic size scales, the so-called van der Waals forcesβthe attractive and repulsive forces between two dipole moleculesβbecome significant.
Essentially, the tufts of tiny hairs on gecko feet get so close to the contours in walls and ceilings that electrons from the gecko hair molecules and electrons from the wall molecules interact with each other and create an electromagnetic attraction. That's what enables geckos to climb smooth surfaces like glass effortlessly. Spiders, cockroaches, beetles, bats, tree frogs, and lizards all have varying-sized sticky footpads that use these same forces.
Boeing announced Monday it lost $523 million on the Starliner crew capsule program last year, putting the aerospace company $2 billion in the red on its NASA commercial crew contract since late 2019.
The updated numbers are included in a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods," Boeing wrote in the filing.
In 2014, NASA picked Boeing and SpaceX to develop and certify two commercial crew transporter vehicles. Like SpaceX, Boeing's contract, now worth up to $4.6 billion, is structured as a fixed-price deal, meaning the contractor is on the hook to pay for cost overruns that go over NASA's financial commitment.
A lot of human society requires what's called a "theory of mind"βthe ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We don't always get this rightβit's easy to get confused about what someone else might be thinkingβbut we still rely on it for everything from navigating complicated social situations to avoiding bumping into people on the street.
There's some mixed evidence that other animals have a limited theory of mind, but there are alternate interpretations for most of it. So two researchers at Johns Hopkins, Luke Townrow and Christopher Krupenye, came up with a way of testing whether some of our closest living relatives, the bonobos, could infer the state of mind of a human they were cooperating with. The work clearly showed that the bonobos could tell when their human partner was ignorant.
Now you see it...
The experimental approach is quite simple and involves a setup familiar to street hustlers: a set of three cups, with a treat placed under one of them. Except in this case, there's no sleight-of-hand in that the chimp can watch as one experimenter places the treat under a cup, and all of the cups remain stationary throughout the experiment.
According to Amazonian folklore, the area's male river dolphins are shapeshifters (encantade), transforming at night into handsome young men who seduce and impregnate human women. The legend's origins may lie in the fact that dolphins have rather human-like genitalia. A group of Canadian biologists didn't spot any suspicious shapeshifting behavior over the four years they spent monitoring a dolphin population in central Brazil, but they did document 36 cases of another human-like behavior: what appears to be some sort of cetacean pissing contest.
Specifically, the male dolphins rolled over onto their backs, displayed their male members, and launched a stream of urine as high as 3 feet into the air. This usually occurred when other males were around, who seemed fascinated in turn by the arching streams of pee, even chasing after them with their snouts. It's possibly a form of chemical sensory communication and not merely a need to relieve themselves, according to the biologists, who described their findings in a paper published in the journal Behavioral Processes. As co-author Claryana AraΓΊjo-Wang of CetAsia Research Group in Ontario, Canada, told New Scientist, βWe were really shocked, as it was something we had never seen before.β
Spraying urine is a common behavior in many animal species, used to mark territory, defend against predators, communicate with other members of one's species, or as a means of mate selection since it has been suggested that the chemicals in the urine carry useful information about physical health or social dominance.
A new large-scale study of crevasses on the Greenland Ice Sheet shows that those cracks are widening faster as the climate warms, which is likely to speed ice loss and global sea level rise.
Crevasses are wedge-shaped fractures and cracks that open in glaciers where the ice begins to flow faster. They can grow to more than 300 feet wide, thousands of feet long, and hundreds of feet deep. Water from melting snow on the surface can flow through crevasses all the way to the base of the ice, joining with other hidden streams to form a vast drainage system that affects how fast glaciers and ice sheets flow.
The study found that crevasses are expanding more quickly than previously detected, and somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of the water flowing through the Greenland Ice Sheet goes through crevasses, which can warm deeply submerged portions of the glacier and increase lubrication between the base of the ice sheet and the bedrock it flows over. Both those mechanisms can accelerate the flow of the ice itself, said Thomas Chudley, a glaciologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who is lead author of the new study.
The seventh test flight of SpaceX's gigantic Starship rocket came to a disappointing end a little more than two weeks ago. The in-flight failure of the rocket's upper stage, or ship, about eight minutes after launch on January 16 rained debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean.
Amateur videos recorded from land, sea, and air showed fiery debris trails streaming overhead at twilight, appearing like a fireworks display gone wrong. Within hours, posts on social media showed small pieces of debris recovered by residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos. Most of these items were modest in size, and many appeared to be chunks of tiles from Starship's heat shield.
Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Elon Musk's close relationship with Trump, coupled with the new administration's appetite for cutting regulations and reducing the size of government, led some industry watchers to question whether Musk's influence might change the FAA's stance on SpaceX.
Large language models like ChatGPT display conversational skills, but the problem is they donβt really understand the words they use. They are primarily systems that interact with data obtained from the real world but not the real world itself. Humans, on the other hand, associate language with experiences. We know what the word βhotβ means because weβve been burned at some point in our lives.
Is it possible to get an AI to achieve a human-like understanding of language? A team of researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology built a brain-inspired AI model comprising multiple neural networks. The AI was very limitedβit could learn a total of just five nouns and eight verbs. But their AI seems to have learned more than just those words; it learned the concepts behind them.
Babysitting robotic arms
βThe inspiration for our model came from developmental psychology. We tried to emulate how infants learn and develop language,β says Prasanna Vijayaraghavan, a researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and the lead author of the study.
Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale, and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.
It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulatingβpossibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images, and methodologies, only to find that they were made up.
Even when bogus papers are spottedβusually by amateur sleuths on their own timeβacademic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews, and other research and discusses findings.
It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. January's list includes papers on using lasers to reveal Peruvian mummy tattoos; the physics of wobbly spears and darts; how a black hole changes over time; and quantum "cat states" for error correction in quantum computers, among other fascinating research.
Tracking changes in a black hole over time
Left: EHT images of M87* from the 2018 and 2017 observation campaigns. Middle: Example images from a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulation at two different times. Right: Same simulation snapshots, blurred to match the EHT's observational resolution.
Credit:
EHT collaboration
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope announced the first direct image ever taken of a black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), located in the constellation of Virgo some 55 million light-years away. Astronomers have now combined earlier observational data to learn more about the turbulent dynamics of plasma near M87*'s event horizon over time, according to a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Co-author Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany likened the new analysis to comparing two photographs of Mount Everest, one year apart. While the mountain's basic structure is unlikely to change much in that time, one could observe changes in clouds near the peak and deduce from that properties like wind direction. For instance, in the case of M87*, the new analysis confirmed the presence of a luminous ring that is brightest at the bottom, which in turn confirmed that the rotational axis points away from Earth. "More of these observations will be made in the coming years and with increasing precision, with the ultimate goal of producing a movie of what happens near M87*," said Rezolla.
A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers, and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek into the birth of the solar system.
Nearly 60 years later, NASAβs OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to the one that rained rocks over Revelstoke. Our research team has published a chemical analysis of those samples, providing insight into how some of the ingredients for life may have first arrived on Earth.
Born in the years bracketing the Revelstoke meteoriteβs fall, the two of us have spent our careers in the meteorite collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Natural History Museum in London. Weβve dreamed of studying samples from a Revelstoke-like asteroid collected by a spacecraft.
When we developed the ability to convert various cells into a stem cell, it held the promise of an entirely new type of therapy. Rather than getting the body to try to fix itself with its cells or deal with the complications of organ transplants, we could convert a few adult cells to stem cells and induce them to form any tissue in the body. We could potentially repair or replace tissues with an effectively infinite supply of a patient's own cells.
Although the Nobel Prize for induced stem cells was handed out over a decade ago, the therapies have been slow to follow. In a new paper published in the journal Nature, however, a group of German researchers is now describing tests in primates of a method of repairing the heart using new muscle generated from stem cells. Although they're not yet providing everything that we might hope for, the results are promising. And they've been enough to start clinical trials, with similar results being seen in humans.
Heart problems
The heart contains a lot of specialized tissues, including those that form blood vessels or specialize in conducting electrical signals. But the key to the heart is a form of specialized muscle cell, called a cardiomyocyte. Once the heart matures, the cardiomyocytes stop dividing, meaning that you end up with a fixed population. Any damage to the heart due to injury or infection does not get repaired, meaning damage will be cumulative.
An egg-cracking beam relies on a hyperelastic torque reversal mechanism similar to that used by mantis shrimp and jumping fleas. Credit: Seoul National University.
We usually think of robots as being made out of hard, rigid materials, but soft robotics seeks to build robotic devices out of more flexible materials that mimic the properties of those found in living animals. Case in point: Korean engineers have built soft robots capable of rapid and powerful joint movements by employing the same mechanism that gives the mantis shrimp such a powerful punch, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Robotics.
As we've reported previously, mantis shrimp come in many different varieties; there are some 450 known species. But they can generally be grouped into two types: those that stab their prey with spear-like appendages ("spearers") and those that smash their prey ("smashers") with large, rounded, and hammer-like claws ("raptorial appendages"). Those strikes are so fast (as much as 23 meters per second, or 51 mph) and powerful, they often produce cavitation bubbles in the water, creating a shock wave that can serve as a follow-up strike, stunning and sometimes killing the prey. Sometimes a strike can even produce sonoluminescence, whereby the cavitation bubbles produce a brief flash of light as they collapse.
According to a 2018 study, the secret to that powerful punch seems to arise not from bulky muscles but from the spring-loaded anatomical structure of the shrimp's arms, akin to a bow and arrow or a mousetrap. The shrimp's muscles pull on a saddle-shaped structure in the arm, causing it to bend and store potential energy, which is released with the swinging of the club-like claw. It's essentially a latch-like mechanism (technically, Latch-mediated spring actuation, or LaMSA), with small structures in the muscle tendons called sclerites serving as the latch.
UPDATE: Numerous sources are reporting that the Office of Management and Budget has rescinded the memo that suspended federal grant funding.
Starting a few days after the Trump inauguration, word spread within the research community that some grant spending might be on hold. On Monday, confirmation came in the form of a memo sent by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): All grant money from every single agency would be on hold indefinitely. Each agency was given roughly two weeks to evaluate the grants they fund based on a list of ideological concerns; no new grants would be evaluated during this period.
While the freeze itself has been placed on hold, the research community has reacted with a mixture of shock, anger, and horror that might seem excessive to people who have never relied on grant money. To better understand the problems that this policy could create, we talked to a number of people who have had research supported by federal grants, providing them with anonymity to allow them to speak freely. The picture of this policy that they painted was one in which US research leadership could be irreparably harmed, with severe knock-on effects on industry.
Global warming caused mainly by burning of fossil fuels made the hot, dry, and windy conditions that drove the recent deadly fires around Los Angeles about 35 times more likely to occur, an international team of scientists concluded in a rapid attribution analysis released Tuesday.
Todayβs climate, heated 2.3Β° Fahrenheit (1.3Β° Celsius) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, based on a 10-year running average, also increased the overlap between flammable drought conditions and the strong Santa Ana winds that propelled the flames from vegetated open space into neighborhoods, killing at least 28 people and destroying or damaging more than 16,000 structures.
βClimate change is continuing to destroy lives and livelihoods in the US,β said Friederike Otto, senior climate science lecturer at Imperial College London and co-lead of World Weather Attribution, the research group that analyzed the link between global warming and the fires. Last October, a WWA analysis found global warming fingerprints on all 10 of the worldβs deadliest weather disasters since 2004.
One of the new Trump administration's first national security directives aims to defend against missile and drone attacks targeting the United States, and several elements of the plan require an expansion of the US military's presence in space, the White House announced Monday.
For more than 60 years, the military has launched reconnaissance, communications, and missile warning satellites into orbit. Trump's executive order calls for the Pentagon to come up with a design architecture, requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield within 60 days.
A key tenet of Trump's order is to develop and deploy space-based interceptors capable of destroying enemy missiles during their initial boost phase shortly after launch.
The Bayeux Tapestry famously depicts the events leading up to the 1066 Norman Conquest of England, in which William the Conqueror defeated Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, at the Battle of Hastings. Two scenes in particular show King Harold feasting in an extravagant hall in a village called Bosham. Archaeologists think they have now located the site of that feast, concluding that it was the king's own home, according to a new paper published in The Antiquaries Journal.
βThe Norman Conquest saw a new ruling class supplant an English aristocracy that has left little in the way of physical remains, which makes the discovery at Bosham hugely significant," said co-author Oliver Creighton of the University of Exeter. "We have found an Anglo-Saxon show-home.β The findings are part of an ongoing project called "Where Power Lies," intended to assess archaeological evidence for aristocratic centers across England from the pre-Norman period.
Scholars believe the Bayeux Tapestry dates back to the 11th century and was likely created just a few years after the Battle of Hastings, mostly likely commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux (although there is still considerable debate over alternative theories). It's technically not a tapestry, since it's not woven but embroidered on linen using wool yarn of various colors. There are 58 individual scenes spanning 230 feet (nearly 70 meters) in length and 20 inches (50 cm) in height. Latin text provides context for the imagery. Among the historical events depicted is the appearance of what is now known as Halley's Comet, used here as a harbinger of the coming Norman invasion.
The Energy Information Agency has now released data on the performance of the US's electric grid over the first 11 months of 2024 and will be adding the final month soon (and a month is very little time for anything to change significantly in the data). The biggest story in the data is the dramatic growth of solar energy, with a 30 percent increase in generation in a single year, which will allow solar and wind combined to overtake coal in 2024.
But the US energy demand saw an increase of nearly 3 percent, which is roughly double the amount of additional solar generation. Should electric use continue to grow at a similar pace, renewable production will have to continue to grow dramatically for a few years before it can simply cover the added demand.
Going for the Sun
In the first 11 months of 2024, the US saw its electrical use grow by 2.8 percent, or roughly 100 Terawatt-hours. While there's typically year-to-year variation in use due to weather-driven demand, the US's consumption has largely been flat since the early 2000s. There are plenty of reasons to expect increased demand, including the growth of data centers and the electrification of heating and transit, but so far, there's been no clear sign of it in the data.
The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies.
Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches.
In his paper, Barthelemy cites Richard Reti, an early 20th-century chess master who gave a series of lectures in the 1920s on developing a scientific understanding of chess. It was an ambitious program involving collecting empirical data, constructing typologies, and devising laws based on those typologies, but Reti's insights fell by the wayside as advances in computer science came to dominate the field. That's understandable. "With its simple rules yet vast strategic depth, chess provides an ideal platform for developing and testing algorithms in AI, machine learning, and decision theory," Barthelemy writes.
One of the most frequently asked questions about quantum computers is a simple one: When will they be useful?
If you talk to people in the field, you'll generally get a response in the form of another question: useful for what? Quantum computing can be applied to a large range of problems, some of them considerably more complex than others. Utility will come for some of the simpler problems first, but further hardware progress is needed before we can begin tackling some of the more complex ones.
One that should be easiest to solve involves modeling the behavior of some simple catalysts. The electrons of these catalysts, which are critical for their chemical activity, obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which makes it relatively easy to explore them with a quantum computer.
Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week's jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world's attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes the helm of the federal government. Some of the administration's policy changes will likely impact the launch industry, with commercial spaceflight poised to become a beneficiary of actions over the next four years. As for the specifics, Ars has reported that NASA is expected to review the future of the Space Launch System rocket. Investments in the military space program could bring in more business for launch companies. And regulatory changes may reduce government oversight of commercial spaceflight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
What happened to China's reusable rocket testbed? A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight on January 18 (US time) aimed at testing reusable launch vehicle technology without announcing the outcome, Space News reports. The Longxing-2 test article lifted off from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province. The methane-fueled rocket was expected to fly to an altitude of 75 kilometers (about 246,000 feet) before performing a reentry burn and a landing burn to guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea, replicating the maneuvers required to recover a reusable booster like the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9. This was China's most ambitious reusable rocket demonstration flight to date.
Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.
Wild Cards grew out of the Superworld RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game-mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several of the original sci-fi writers who contributed to the series participating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin a Wild Cards story involving a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman's idea became The Sandman.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but he then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had far too many sources of the many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have one single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.
The series is basically an alternate history of the US in the aftermath of World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, had been released over New York City in 1946 and spread globally, infecting tens of thousands worldwide. It's called the Wild Card virus because it affects every individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up with unpleasant conditionsβthese people are called Jokersβwhile 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces have "powers" that are so trivial and useless that they are known as "deuces."
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are puzzling phenomena because their details are so difficult to resolve, and observations to date have been inconsistent. Astronomers added another piece to the puzzle with the detection of an FRB that seems to originate in a dead galaxy that is no longer producing new stars, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a related paper on the event from scientists at Northwestern University.
As we've reported previously, FRBs involve a sudden blast of radio-frequency radiation that lasts just a few microseconds. Astronomers have observed over a thousand of them to date; some come from sources that repeatedly emit FRBs, while others seem to burst once and go silent. You can produce this sort of sudden surge of energy by destroying something. But the existence of repeating sources suggests that at least some of them are produced by an object that survives the event. That has led to a focus on compact objects, like neutron stars and black holesβespecially a class of neutron stars called magnetarsβas likely sources. Only about 3 percent of FRBs are of the repeating variety.
There have also been many detected FRBs that don't seem to repeat at all, suggesting that the conditions that produce them may destroy their source. That's consistent with a blitzarβa bizarre astronomical event caused by the sudden collapse of an overly massive neutron star. The event is driven by an earlier merger of two neutron stars; this creates an unstable intermediate neutron star, which is kept from collapsing immediately by its rapid spin.