Mike M. – Page 24

An exceedingly rare asteroid flyby will happen soon, but NASA may be left on the sidelines

Apophis, Features, osiris-apex, Ramses, Space, trump budget / Mike M. / June 27, 2025

“Nature is handing us an incredibly rare experiment.”

An illustration of the OSIRIS-Apex mission at Apophis. Credit: NASA

A little less than four years from now, a killer asteroid will narrowly fly past planet Earth. This will be a celestial event visible around the world—for a few weeks, Apophis will shine among the brightest objects in the night sky.

The near miss by the large Apophis asteroid in April 2029 offers NASA a golden—and exceedingly rare—opportunity to observe such an object like this up close. Critically, the interaction between Apophis and Earth’s gravitational pull will offer scientists an unprecedented chance to study the interior of an asteroid.

This is fascinating for planetary science, but it also has serious implications for planetary defense. In the future, were such an asteroid on course to strike Earth, an effective plan to deflect it would depend on knowing what the interior looks like.

“This is a remarkable opportunity,” said Bobby Braun, who leads space exploration for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an interview. “From a probability standpoint, there’s not going to be another chance to study a killer asteroid like this for thousands of years. Sooner or later, we’re going to need this knowledge.”

But we may not get it.

NASA has some options for tracking Apophis during its flyby. However, the most promising of these, a mission named OSIRIS-Apex that breathes new life into an old spacecraft that otherwise would drift into oblivion, is slated for cancellation by the Trump White House’s budget for fiscal year 2026.

Other choices, including dragging dual space probes out of storage, the Janus spacecraft, and other concepts that were submitted to NASA a year ago as part of a call for ideas, have already been rejected or simply left on the table. As a result, NASA currently has no plans to study what will be the most important asteroid encounter since the formation of the space agency.

“The world is watching,” said Richard Binzel, an asteroid expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “NASA needs to step up and do their job.”

But will they?

A short history of planetary defense

For decades, nearly every public survey asking what NASA should work on has rated planetary defense at or near the very top of the space agency’s priorities. Yet for a long time, no part of NASA actually focused on finding killer asteroids or developing the technology to deflect them.

In authorization bills dating back to 2005, Congress began mandating that NASA “detect, track, catalog, and characterize” near-Earth objects that were 140 meters in diameter or larger. Congress established a goal of finding 90 percent of these by the year 2020. (We’ve blown past that deadline, obviously.)

NASA had been informally studying asteroids and comets for decades but did not focus on planetary defense until 2016, when the space agency established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. In the decade since, NASA has made some progress, identifying more than 26,000 near-Earth objects, which are defined as asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of our planet’s orbit.

Moreover, NASA has finally funded a space mission designed specifically to look for near-Earth threats, NEO Surveyor, a space telescope with the goal of “finding asteroids before they find us.” The $1.2 billion mission is due to launch no earlier than September 2027.

NASA also funded the DART mission, which launched in 2021 and impacted a 160-meter asteroid named Dimorphous a year later to demonstrate the ability to make a minor deflection.

But in a report published this week, NASA’s Office of Inspector General found that despite these advances, the space agency’s approach to planetary defense still faces some significant challenges. These include a lack of resources, a need for better strategic planning, and competition with NASA’s more established science programs for limited funding.

A comprehensive plan to address planetary defense must include two elements, said Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut who co-founded the B612 Foundation to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.

The first of these is the finding and detection of asteroid threats. That is being addressed both by the forthcoming NEO Surveyor and the recently completed Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is likely to find thousands of new near-Earth threats. The challenge in the coming years will be processing all of this data, calculating orbits, and identifying threats. Lu said NASA must do a better job of being transparent in how it makes these calculations.

The second thing Lu urged NASA to do is develop a follow-up mission to DART. It was successful, he said, but DART was just an initial demonstration. Such a capability needs to be tested against a larger asteroid with different properties.

An asteroid that might look a lot like Apophis.

About Apophis

Astronomers using a telescope in Arizona found Apophis in 2004, and they were evidently fans of the television series Stargate SG-1, in which a primary villain who threatens civilization on Earth is named Apophis.

Because of its orbit, Apophis comes near Earth about every eight years. It is fairly large, about 370 meters across. This is not big enough to wipe out civilization on Earth, but it would cause devastating consequences across a large region, imparting about 300 times as much impact force on the planet as the Tunguska event in 1908, over Siberia. It will miss Earth by about 31,600 km (19,600 miles) on April 13, 2029.

“We like to say that’s because nature has a sense of humor,” said Binzel, the MIT asteroid scientist, of this date.

Astronomers estimate that an asteroid this large comes this close to Earth only about once every 7,500 years. It also appears to be a stony, non-metallic type of asteroid known as an ordinary chondrite. This is the most common type of asteroid in the Solar System.

Areas of the planet that will be able to see Apophis at its closest approach to Earth in April 2029. Credit: Rick Binzel

All of this is rather convenient for scientists hoping to understand more about potential asteroids that might pose a serious threat to the planet.

The real cherry on top with the forthcoming encounter is that Apophis will be perturbed by Earth’s gravitational pull.

“Nature is handing us an incredibly rare experiment where the Earth’s gravity is going to tug and stretch this asteroid,” Binzel said. “By seeing how the asteroid responds, we’ll know how it is put together, and knowing how an asteroid is put together is maybe the most important information we could have if humanity ever faces an asteroid threat.”

In nearly seven decades of spaceflight, humans have only ever probed the interior of three celestial bodies: the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. We’re now being offered the opportunity to probe a fourth, right on our doorstep.

But time is ticking.

Chasing Apophis

On paper, at least, NASA has a plan to rendezvous with Apophis. About three years ago, after a senior-level review, NASA extended the mission of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to rendezvous with Apophis.

As you may recall, this oddly named spacecraft collected a sample from another asteroid, Bennu, in October 2020. Afterward, a small return capsule departed from the main spacecraft and made its way back to Earth. Since then, an $800 million spacecraft specifically designed to fly near and touch an asteroid has been chilling in space.

So it made sense when NASA decided to fire up the mission, newly rechristened OSIRIS-Apex, and re-vector it toward Apophis. It has been happily flying toward such a rendezvous for a few years. The plan was for Apex to catch up to Apophis shortly after its encounter with Earth and study it for about 18 months.

“The most cost-efficient thing you can do in spaceflight is continue with a heathy spacecraft that is already operating in space,” Binzel said.

And that was the plan until the Trump administration released its budget proposal for fiscal year 2026. In its detailed budget information, the White House provided no real rationale for the cancellation, simply stating, “Operating missions that have completed their prime missions (New Horizons and Juno) and the follow-on mission to OSIRIX-REx, OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer, are eliminated.”

It’s unclear how much of a savings this resulted in. However, Apex is a pittance in NASA’s overall budget. The operating funds to keep the mission alive in 2024, for example, were $14.5 million. Annual costs would be similar through the end of the decade. This is less than one-thousandth of NASA’s budget, by the way.

“Apex is already on its way to reach Apophis, and to turn it off would be an incredible waste of resources,” Binzel said.

Congress, of course, ultimately sets the budget. It will have the final say. But it’s clear that NASA’s primary mission to study a once-in-a-lifetime asteroid is at serious risk.

So what are the alternatives?

Going international and into the private sector

NASA was not the only space agency targeting Apophis. Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, has been closely tracking other approaches.

The European Space Agency has proposed a mission named Ramses to rendezvous with the asteroid and accompany it as it flies by Earth. This mission would be valuable, conducting a thorough before-and-after survey of the asteroid’s shape, surface, orbit, rotation, and orientation.

It would need to launch by April 2028. Recognizing this short deadline, the space agency has directed European scientists and engineers to begin preliminary work on the mission. But a final decision to proceed and commit to the mission will not be made before the space agency’s ministerial meeting in November.

Artist’s impression of ESA’s Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses). Credit: ESA

This is no sure thing. For example, Chabot said, in 2016, the Asteroid Impact Mission was expected to advance before European ministers decided not to fund it. It is also not certain that the Ramses mission would be ready to fly in less than three years, a short timeline for planetary science missions.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is also planning an asteroid mission named Destiny+ that has as its primary goal flying to an asteroid named 3200 Phaeton. The mission has been delayed multiple times, so its launch is now being timed to permit a single flyby of Apophis in February 2029 on the way to its destination. While this mission is designed to deliver quality science, a flyby mission provides limited data. It is also unclear how close Destiny+ will actually get to Apophis, Chabot said.

There are also myriad other concepts, commercial and otherwise, to characterize Apophis before, during, and after its encounter with Earth. Ideally, scientists say, a mission would fly to the asteroid before April 2029 and scatter seismometers on the surface to collect data.

But all of this would require significant funding. If not from NASA, who? The uncertain future of NASA’s support for Apex has led some scientists to think about philanthropy.

For example, NASA’s Janus spacecraft have been mothballed for a couple of years, but they could be used for observational purposes if they had—say—a Falcon 9 to launch them at the appropriate time.

A new, private reconnaissance mission could probably be developed for $250 million or less, industry officials told Ars. There is still enough time, barely, for a private group to work with scientists to develop instrumentation that could be added to an off-the-shelf spacecraft bus to get out to Apophis before its Earth encounter.

Private astronaut Jared Isaacman, who has recently indicated a willingness to support robotic exploration in strategic circumstances, confirmed to Ars that several people have reached out about his interest in financially supporting an Apophis mission. “I would say that I’m in info-gathering mode and not really rushing into anything,” Isaacman said.

The problem is that, at this very moment, Apophis is rushing this way.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

An exceedingly rare asteroid flyby will happen soon, but NASA may be left on the sidelines Read More »

Actively exploited vulnerability gives extraordinary control over server fleets

AMI MegaRAC, baseboard management controllers, Biz & IT, bmcs, exploits, Security / Mike M. / June 27, 2025

On Wednesday, CISA added CVE-2024-54085 to its list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited in the wild. The notice provided no further details.

In an email on Thursday, Eclypsium researchers said the scope of the exploits has the potential to be broad:

Attackers could chain multiple BMC exploits to implant malicious code directly into the BMC’s firmware, making their presence extremely difficult to detect and allowing them to survive OS reinstalls or even disk replacements.

By operating below the OS, attackers can evade endpoint protection, logging, and most traditional security tools.

With BMC access, attackers can remotely power on or off, reboot, or reimage the server, regardless of the primary operating system’s state.

Attackers can scrape credentials stored on the system, including those used for remote management, and use the BMC as a launchpad to move laterally within the network

BMCs often have access to system memory and network interfaces, enabling attackers to sniff sensitive data or exfiltrate information without detection

Attackers with BMC access can intentionally corrupt firmware, rendering servers unbootable and causing significant operational disruption

With no publicly known details of the ongoing attacks, it’s unclear which groups may be behind them. Eclypsium said the most likely culprits would be espionage groups working on behalf of the Chinese government. All five of the specific APT groups Eclypsium named have a history of exploiting firmware vulnerabilities or gaining persistent access to high-value targets.

Eclypsium said the line of vulnerable AMI MegaRAC devices uses an interface known as Redfish. Server makers known to use these products include AMD, Ampere Computing, ASRock, ARM, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, Huawei, Nvidia, Supermicro, and Qualcomm. Some, but not all, of these vendors have released patches for their wares.

Given the damage possible from exploitation of this vulnerability, admins should examine all BMCs in their fleets to ensure they aren’t vulnerable. With products from so many different server makers affected, admins should consult with their manufacturer when unsure if their networks are exposed.

Actively exploited vulnerability gives extraordinary control over server fleets Read More »

Changing one gene can restore some tissue regeneration to mice

Biology, Mice, regeneration, retinoic acid, Science / Mike M. / June 27, 2025

Regeneration is a trick many animals, including lizards, starfish, and octopuses, have mastered. Axolotls, a salamander species originating in Mexico, can regrow pretty much everything from severed limbs, to eyes and parts of brain, to the spinal cord. Mammals, though, have mostly lost this ability somewhere along their evolutionary path. Regeneration persisted, in a limited number of tissues, in just a few mammalian species like rabbits or goats.

“We were trying to learn how certain animals lost their regeneration capacity during evolution and then put back the responsible gene or pathway to reactivate the regeneration program,” says Wei Wang, a researcher at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing. Wang’s team has found one of those inactive regeneration genes, activated it, and brought back a limited regeneration ability to mice that did not have it before.

Of mice and bunnies

The idea Wang and his colleagues had was a comparative study of how the wound healing process works in regenerating and non-regenerating mammalian species. They chose rabbits as their regenerating mammals and mice as the non-regenerating species. As the reference organ, the team picked the ear pinna. “We wanted a relatively simple structure that was easy to observe and yet composed of many different cell types,” Wang says. The test involved punching holes in the ear pinna of rabbits and mice and tracking the wound-repairing process.

The healing process began in the same way in rabbits and mice. Within the first few days after the injury, a blastema—a mass of heterogeneous cells—formed at the wound site. “Both rabbits and mice will heal the wounds after a few days,” Wang explains. “But between the 10th and 15th day, you will see the major difference.” In this timeframe, the earhole in rabbits started to become smaller. There were outgrowths above the blastema—the animals were producing more tissue. In mice, on the other hand, the healing process halted completely, leaving a hole in the ear.

Changing one gene can restore some tissue regeneration to mice Read More »

After a week, Trump Mobile drops claim that Trump phone is “made in the USA”

Policy, Tech, trump mobile, trump phone / Mike M. / June 26, 2025

The Trump phone was announced last week with a claim that the device would be made entirely in America, and people were rightly skeptical. Trump Mobile’s $500 T1 Phone “is a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier,” the Trump Organization said in a press release.

But with electronics supply chain experts casting doubt on the feasibility of designing and building an American-made phone in a short span of time, Trump Mobile’s website doesn’t currently promise an American-made phone. The website says the T1 is “designed with American values in mind,” that it is “brought to life right here in the USA,” and that there are “American hands behind every device.”

The Trump Mobile website previously said, “Our MADE IN THE USA ‘T1 Phone’ is available for pre-order now.” The phone was initially supposed to be available in August, but the date was changed to September, and now the website simply says it will be available “later this year.”

The Verge pointed out the website’s vague claims in an article today. “One of the phone’s main selling points was that it was to be made in America,” but “sometime in the last several days, the Trump Mobile site appears to have been scrubbed of all language indicating the phone is to be made in the USA,” the article said, adding that the website previously had a “huge banner on the homepage that says the T1 is ‘MADE IN THE USA.'”

When contacted by Ars today, a Trump Mobile spokesperson said, “The T1 phones are proudly being made in America. Speculation to the contrary is simply inaccurate. We’re excited to launch the phones later this year.” Trump Mobile did not explain why it removed the “made in the USA” claim from its website. We also contacted the Trump organization and will update this article if we get a response.

After a week, Trump Mobile drops claim that Trump phone is “made in the USA” Read More »

Apple’s push to take over the dashboard resisted by car makers

android auto, Apple, CarPlay, CarPlay Ultra, Cars, infotainment, syndication / Mike M. / June 25, 2025

Of the original 14 brands listed by Apple, Jaguar Land Rover said it was still evaluating the system, while Ford and Nissan along with its Infiniti brand said they had no information to share about future application.

According to a survey conducted by McKinsey in 2023, almost half the car buyers said they would not buy a vehicle that lacked Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, while 85 percent of car owners who have Apple CarPlay or a similar service preferred it over the auto group’s own built-in system.

Picture of infotainment system with CarPlay and Android Auto icons — Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Many carmakers, including Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi, have developed infotainment and operating systems, but they would continue to offer the option of using standard Apple CarPlay to meet consumer demand. Apple said customers were going to like CarPlay Ultra, and carmakers would ultimately respond to consumer demand.

BMW said it would integrate the existing Apple CarPlay with its new design, while Audi said its focus was to offer drivers “a customized and seamless digital experience,” so it would not use CarPlay Ultra, although the standard version was available on its vehicles.

While Volvo Cars said there were no plans to use CarPlay Ultra, its chief executive, Håkan Samuelsson, said carmakers should not try to compete on software with technology companies. “There are others who can do that better, and then we should offer that in our cars,” he said.

Aston Martin integrated Apple’s CarPlay Ultra with its newly developed infotainment system but stressed that the design inside the car remained “unmistakably” Aston Martin. The traditional physical dials were also available for those who do not want to use the touchscreen, it said.

People close to the carmaker said discussions with Apple in integrating CarPlay Ultra involved setting clear lines on data sharing from the start. The use of CarPlay Ultra did not entail additional sharing of vehicle data, which is stored inside Aston Martin’s own infotainment system and software. Apple also said vehicle data was not shared with the iPhone.

Graphic illustration by Ian Bott; additional reporting by Harry Dempsey in Tokyo.

Apple’s push to take over the dashboard resisted by car makers Read More »

Gemini CLI is a free, open source coding agent that brings AI to your terminal

AI, Gemini, Google, Google Gemini, Tech, Terminal, vibe coding / Mike M. / June 25, 2025

Some developers prefer to live in the command line interface (CLI), eschewing the flashy graphics and file management features of IDEs. Google’s latest AI tool is for those terminal lovers. It’s called Gemini CLI, and it shares a lot with Gemini Code Assist, but it works in your terminal environment instead of integrating with an IDE. And perhaps best of all, it’s free and open source.

Gemini CLI plugs into Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google’s most advanced model for coding and simulated reasoning. It can create and modify code for you right inside the terminal, but you can also call on other Google models to generate images or videos without leaving the security of your terminal cocoon. It’s essentially vibe coding from the command line.

This tool is fully open source, so developers can inspect the code and help to improve it. The openness extends to how you configure the AI agent. It supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) and bundled extensions, allowing you to customize your terminal as you see fit. You can even include your own system prompts—Gemini CLI relies on GEMINI.md files, which you can use to tweak the model for different tasks or teams.

Now that Gemini 2.5 Pro is generally available, Gemini Code Assist has been upgraded to use the same technology as Gemini CLI. Code Assist integrates with IDEs like VS Code for those times when you need a more feature-rich environment. The new agent mode in Code Assist allows you to give the AI more general instructions, like “Add support for dark mode to my application” or “Build my project and fix any errors.”

Gemini CLI is a free, open source coding agent that brings AI to your terminal Read More »

Apple releases new beta builds of all its flashy new Liquid Glass-ified OS updates

Apple, beta, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, macos developer beta, Tech / Mike M. / June 24, 2025

Should you install these betas?

Selecting from among several beta OS versions in the Settings app on iOS 18. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

We are not highlighting this second round of developer betas because we think you should go out and install them on the Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches that you use daily. These are still early versions, and they’re likely to have significant performance, battery, and stability problems relative to the current publicly available versions of the software.

But generally speaking, these second developer builds are the first ones I install on my secondary test devices—a collection of mostly older devices that have been replaced but are still considered current enough to run the new update. The initial builds are usually little more than a tech demo and can have major show-stopping bugs (an M1 iPad Air with the first developer beta on it simply stopped responding to any input, including a hard restart, and I needed to set it aside so its battery could drain all the way before I could do anything else with it), but the second betas tend to be somewhat more amenable to normal everyday use.

The new iOS and iPadOS betas will run on just about any hardware that can currently install and run iOS and iPadOS 18, with a couple of older exceptions. The macOS beta will run on any Apple Silicon Mac and on a handful of Intel Macs released in 2019 and 2020. The other betas will generally run on anything that supports the current versions, with some caveats (Liquid Glass effects only show up on newer Apple TV 4K boxes, for example, while the first-gen Apple TV 4K and the old 1080p Apple TV will run the update but without Liquid Glass).

If you don’t have spare devices you can dedicate to testing, we’d recommend waiting until the public beta in July before you even think about running any of these betas, and only after backing up all the important data on those devices. Rolling back to an older software version is doable, but a bit of a pain. Alternatively, those with Apple Silicon Macs who want to test the latest versions could try setting up a virtual machine using an app like VirtualBuddy or one of the others that leverages Apple’s built-in Virtualization framework.

Apple releases new beta builds of all its flashy new Liquid Glass-ified OS updates Read More »

Childhood and Education #10: Behaviors

Childhood / Mike M. / June 24, 2025

Edition #9, that School is Hell, turned out to hit quite the nerve.

Thus, I’m going to continue with the system of making the roundups have more focus in their themes, with this one being the opposite of school questions, except for the question of banning phones in schools which seemed to fit.

Henry Shevlin: I asked a high school teacher friend about the biggest change in teens over the past decade. His answer was interesting. He said whereas the ‘default state’ of teenage psychology used to be boredom, now it was anxiety.

Makes me wonder if in some deep psychosocial way there’s a trade off between the two emotions; eg, maybe boredom is essential for background anxiolytic mental processes (cf exposure to pathogens and allergies, the hygiene hypothesis).

Paul Graham: Does he have a guess about why this change occurred?

Henry Shevlin: I’ve just asked him and will let you know his response! Based our on previous conversations, I suspect he’ll say smartphones + social media as a uniquely toxic combination for teen mental health.

Reply from my friend. Basically – phones, social media, cultural doomerism, and decline of long-form literacy.

Friend: That’s about right. But also I think there’s a lot of gloom that bombards them without the social media stuff. Climate, politics, life opportunities, etc etc. Loss of literacy may be something too, reading long and in depth about things brings a degree of control.

If you are bored, you can now go on your phone until you are anxious instead. You could also make other choices, but that seems to be the default.

I’m not always with Žižek, but here I’m with Žižek.

Violeta: Žižek on authoritarian parenting:

Asking a child to visit his grandmother because it’s his duty – he has no choice but to fulfill it – is *morerespecting of his inner freedom, less authoritarian than telling him it’s his choice BUT “think about how much grandma loves you.”

This goes so much farther than children. You see it in so many other situations as well.

It’s one thing for someone to have to do [X]. And it’s good to explain it’s because [Y].

It’s another to have to want to do [X], and ‘prove’ to everyone that you ‘want’ to do [X].

Or even worse, to have to prove that you want to do [X] specifically because of [Y].

Or to have to do [X] and like it. Look, I’m enjoying this. I’m having a good time.

There is the version of asking for such a choice where the child, or the anyone else, is actually free to say no – you really are asking them to consider how much grandma loves them, but if they decide not to go, then that really is allowed and not punished.

Alas, this version is rare.

You do have to be able to tell the difference.

Julian: When I was a kid I used to get kinda sad whenever I’d hear younger children crying in public because I thought they were actually in distress, but now I’m realizing they’re kinda being dramatic most of the time.

Indeed. Most of the time that children are acting like they are in acute distress, and they are not rather obviously in actual acute distress, they are doing a strategic action to create the outcomes and incentives they want, or following through on their negotiating positions to establish credibility, and so on. I have mad respect for that. You must respond in kind as needed.

You are still the adult. You can tell, if you pay attention, which is which. If school really is hell, or there is otherwise something really wrong? It will rapidly become clear that this is the case.

I strongly endorse the principle that if you are exercising your authority as a parent, or have made your final decision, you need to own it. You should not pretend to be seeking consensus or manufacturing consent. It does not help anyone to pull a But Thou Must.

Mason: I get this perspective, but I think it’s a really bad idea to ask your kids permission for something when you know that you are not going to be accepting a “no.”

Zack: yeah, seems to optimize heavily for “kindness” at the expense of honesty.

Mason: I don’t know to what extent kids internalize this stuff, and I do think the idea that parental verbiage can ruin children is overplayed, BUT

I definitely do not want my kids getting the idea that “asking for permission” is a game that ultimately ends in a yes no matter what.

Kelsey Piper: If you’re exercising authority as the parent I think it is important to acknowledge that you’re doing that and do it. Out of profound discomfort with the exercise of authority people want to pretend everything is consensual but this can just amount to making consent fake.

There will of course be situations where you start out asking, and then at some point you are no longer asking, because time runs out or the situation otherwise changes. Again, one should be clear, and not give false choices.

Katherine Boyle: All I remember about my 90s summers is sleeping in until The Price is Right came on. By August, I knew all the characters on the Young and the Restless. I don’t remember a babysitter, an alarm clock, or anyone worried about screen time.

It’s OK for your kids to be bored.

Mason: While I’ve come around on some of the arguments against screentime, I do think a lot of the criticisms reflect the idea that childhood needs to be a continuous stream of educational and character enrichments, and that’s never been necessary to raise successful humans.

PoliMath: Kids need to be bored more, that’s when they come up with new things.

I too spent a lot of time with remarkably little ‘to do,’ and I too watched a remarkably large amount of The Price Is Right, which has its value but definitely isn’t an efficient educational option. At some points yes I think I watched Young and the Restless, I remember it being terrible. Not ideal, but It was, very obviously, fine.

As with many things, there’s a big difference between ‘this is a good idea’ and ‘this is not the best idea but it’s not a huge deal.’ I think lots of essentially wasted time in this sense falls into the second category. I don’t buy the full Garrion Keilor ‘the kids need to actively be bored,’ but they do need breaks without pressure, and if that time is mostly wasted that is fine, the optimal amount of that is not zero.

We have decided that existing while boy all but counts as having ADHD.

We put the ADHD diagnosis on 15.5% of American adolescents, 21% of 14-year-old boys and 23% of 17-year-old boys, for a total of seven million American children.

Yes, ADHD is very obviously a real thing. I’ve seen it. And yes, rates of actual ADHD are likely somewhat higher than they used to be, for various reasons.

This is still very obviously an epidemic of overdiagnosis. It is way of expressing a preference for being willing to sit still for long periods of time.

In the past, if not playing along? You’d force them to, or else. We now think that’s bad.

Nowadays, not playing along? Deploy the meth. That’s much better, you see.

Telling kids, in particular boys, what not to do is not a good strategy. Never works.

What does work is to give them positive things to do instead, and positive status hierarchies to climb by doing so.

Alexander: Boys don’t need “anti-misogyny” training in school. They need shop classes and sports teams. This is not a boomerism, but based on what actually works as an intervention.

…

Telling people “don’t do the bad thing” is a bad intervention across the board. What works is providing alternatives.

This is why we see anecdotes like, “Boxing saved me from gang life.” And also supporting data beyond anecdotes – sport participation has a causal effect.

So you end up with boys who go a bad way who tend to be:

Ostracized losers; especially low in status. They easily get sucked into radical ideologies. They have a lot of resentment for the world around them, or for target groups.

The low status / high aggression group. These are the boys who go on to commit crimes.

Effective interventions will target the esteem and status of boys: providing them a new dominance hierarchy to work within and reducing isolation, providing supportive peers and mentors. Sports teams will do this.

Effective interventions will also teach boys prosocial and creative skills: shop classes do this. Give them a focus and an interest and a skill that they can go forward with into society.

He cites the classic failure mode, the old DARE anti-drug problem, which warns you not to do drugs so kids respond by doing drugs more.

I found this take intriguing.

Kelsey Piper: My most bespoke parenting opinion is that big screens are perfectly fine for kids but small screens are bad. We have a projector in our living room with a huge 6’x10′ screen. When the kids watch things on it, they are in motion. They roll around giggling; they climb on the couch, they burrow in the blankets; they wander off, they talk to each other and to you. When something hilarious happens they’ll jump up and down with excitement; when something scary happens they’ll snuggle up. And if they’re bored they’ll walk away. After five minutes of My Little Pony on the big screen this morning, the baby declared “done!” and left.

This is not how they act with an iPad or phone playing the exact same content. They act way, way more glued to the screen. I don’t think the baby has ever told me “done!” when handed an iPhone playing Sesame Street. I think the tiny window means their focus is narrowed, and the screen ends up being kind of all-consuming, whereas a big screen is more like a window through which interesting things are happening; a feature of the room, but not the only thing in it. Also with an iPad or phone, a baby wants to interact, press buttons, shake it, move it, but all possible actions just interrupt their show and frustrate them.

We still sometimes resort to a phone as a distraction on long car trips, but my intuition here is that the form factor matters a lot.

Nicole Ruiz: I feel like big screen = social consumption

Small screen = isolated consumption

Consuming together is worlds better in my opinion!

Kelsey Piper yeah this is definitely a big part of it!

My experience is more ‘big screen is dangerous, small screen is way worse.’

The big screen is better, somehow providing a better experience and also a less zombifying or addictive one. However, at least in my experience, that doesn’t mean kids don’t threaten to go complete zombie if you aren’t careful. You absolutely have to watch screen time and content if you don’t want that to happen, no matter how big the screen might be.

Not all of it. But quite a lot of it. It is remarkably hard to avoid.

Discussing Film: First look still for Pixar’s ‘HOPPERS’

The film follows a girl who transfers her mind into a beaver to help the animals fight the construction plans from the local mayor.

Gary Winslett: I think people without kids underestimate how much children’s programming is inundated with propaganda that’s a combination of anti-capitalism, anti-development, and climate doom. It’s not good.

I think it contributes to unnecessary anxiety and also pushes some towards political radicalism. Again, not good.

I get the many reasons why this is the natural outcome of the types of people making kids TV making TV for kids. Similar forces also cause a lot of vegetarian advocacy. It’s all really, truly obnoxious and I think it does a lot of very real damage.

Content consumed by children used to be made by adults, whether or not it was aimed at children, and was generally not ephemeral or optimized too hard for short term engagement, which gave motivation and opportunity to learn references and cultural touchstones. Now much of the content is short form and optimized in hyper-competitive landscapes, so there’s no slack for Parental Bonus or being secretly high quality or otherwise providing extra value, and much of it becomes ephemeral and of-the-moment. A shame.

But also, if you miss a reference now – whether or not it is ‘The Odyssey’ – you can not only Google it, you can ask Claude (or another LLM). And most entertainment is easy to pause so you can ask, and this should get even easier and better over time – by the end of 2025 the AI should automatically see the content you’re watching, and understand the context of your questions, which you’ll ask in voice mode, and so on.

Movies are designed for everyone to be off their phones, so they’ll be the exception, but this should give us the opportunity to do much higher-level stuff once people get used to it, since no one need get lost. I can’t even with for example War and Peace, I don’t want to have to try and keep track of all that, but once I get a Daylight Computer I probably won’t have to?

(And if you ever don’t get what something I say is referencing, or it seems like there’s another level to it, and it’s very clearly not explained and you’re curious, asking Claude is probably a good idea. I’m often very intentionally not explaining, IYKYK, etc.)

The problem is if kids go the other way and don’t want to know the references.

This model seems very right:

Cartoons Hate Her: An unfair but nevertheless true reality of being a grandparent is that your adult children with a baby or toddler will not visit you nearly as often as you should visit them, provided you’re physically able.

This was an issue of conflict with my in-laws. They were like “we visit you all the time and you don’t visit us.” (One of our kids has extreme motion sickness btw.) eventually they were like “fuck it we’re moving to your town.” Lol

Mason: Depending on the children and their ages, there is a certain amount of time in the car that you can anticipate Everything Will Be Fine. For us, right now, that’s 35 minutes. After that, we’re operating purely on God’s mercy.

If you want to see your grandkids, or generally see someone with young kids, on the regular, you need to be willing to come to them more often than not. That’s life.

Alice Evans: What do a US 20 year old & a 60yo have in common?

They spend about 6 hours a day alone.

Is the rise of solitude hurting our mental health?

New graphs by the great @jburnmurdoch

Young US men are increasingly spending time alone.

“We are all free agents” – you may reply,

“STOP judging and let people embrace what makes them happy!”

Great point, but does spending time alone make people feel fulfilled?

But when asked to rate a range of activities,

People tend to say that gaming and social media are the LEAST meaningful.

Social activities are generally ranked as more meaningful.

That’s a hell of a graph. Walking is surprisingly ‘meaningful.’ As is watching TV or movies with others, that gets you almost to 4 on this scale. And I love my kids, but ‘bathing’ and ‘looking after’ are almost as meaningful as ‘playing with’ and better than anything else? And doing homework together is a 4.6 and alone it’s a 4.2? Homework?

I could go on. Yeah, I don’t know about this chart.

I do still buy the core premise, that the things we do with others tend to be more meaningful, and that we’re doing less of them.

People consistently report higher life satisfaction when they are being more social,

So using just the change in socialising (2010 vs 2023), his model predicts the observed age curves in life satisfaction.

All this coincides with advances in smart phones & personal online entertainment.

Social media & gaming are designed to be addictive.

Like gambling, drinking or nicotine, phones buzz with excitement, call us over & many people get sucked in.

Even if they later feel worse…

Let me share some related research from Pew:

A quarter of Black & Hispanic US teens say they use TikTok and YouTube “almost constantly”

It’s actually worse than that, if 25% use TikTok ‘almost constantly’ and 24% to it with YouTube, and 18% for Instagram, well, not that many are ‘constantly’ doing all three?

And indeed:

58% of Hispanic US teens say they use the internet “almost constantly”

I mean, I use the internet almost constantly, so maybe fair? But this is different.

Are kids with phones better off than kids without phones?

I mean, yeah, data says so, but that rather obviously is not entirely causal. To the extent it is causal it is largely a collective action problem.

If everyone else has a phone, then you not having a phone isolates you.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: Kids with smartphones are less depressed, less anxious, more social, get more exercise, & experience less cyberbullying than kids w/out smartphones Funny how this new study got a fraction of the coverage that fear-mongering “phones are ruining our kids!!!!” surveys & screeds do.

For the first part of this study, researchers surveyed 1,510 Florida kids ages 11 to 13. On almost every metric measuring well-being, smartphone-owning kids showed better results.

For instance, kids with smartphones were more likely to spend in-person time with friends. “Contrary to the position that smartphone use is associated with fewer in-person meetups with friends, on average, smartphone owners spend nearly three days a week in-person with a friend(s), while kids with no smartphone spend closer to two days a week in-person with friends,” write the researchers. “The same trend was seen for tablet ownership, daily video gaming, and daily social media use.”

…

This doesn’t mean that smartphone use was universally positive. Kids who slept with their phones in their rooms got less sleep on average, suggesting that parents might want to think about confiscating phones before bedtime.

Heavy video gamers were more likely than light gamers to report trouble stopping tech use once started, and heavy users of social media were more likely than lighter users to report sleep issues.

And respondents who reported posting publicly and often on social media were more likely to report sleep issues and symptoms of depression and anxiety, possibly related to the exposure to mean comments and other forms of cyberbullying that posting could bring. Unsurprisingly, kids who experienced online bullying were more likely to report negative effects from technology.

To be fair, further down, she does admit to the obvious big confounding issue.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: While we’re on caveats, there’s a big one on this study overall. The kinds of families that get smartphones for their 11- to 13-year-olds may be fundamentally different from those who don’t. And the kinds of kids in this age group whose parents deem them ready for a phone may also be different from the kids whose parents don’t think they’re ready. So some of the differences in well-being between phone-wielding kids and those without phones could come down to differences that have nothing to do with technology.

…

Among social platforms used by survey respondents, Facebook and Facebook Messenger ranked fifth, behind YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat.

This isn’t about socioeconomic status (SES). Indeed, that runs the opposite way.

Between 80 and 87 percent of kids in families with incomes of less than $100,000 had smartphones, while only 67 percent of kids in families making $150,000 or more did.

They did do statistical weighting (based on parent/guardian’s education, household income, household size, child’s age by gender, and child’s race/ethnicity) but given income runs the other way that is unlikely to catch the issues. They did not control for attributes of the children prior to getting the phones or in previous years.

Are the richer families making a gigantic mistake? What did they see?

Aella (note the difference was not this big): This would be cool if true but the numbers feel a lil sus. A difference of 2 to 3 days in a week spent with friends is quite a big effect, and seems weird for this to come from something as simple as smartphones.

Amal Dorai: All the kids in school have smartphones and are constantly texting each other, so if you don’t have one, you either 1) don’t care about texting them 2) your parents don’t care about you texting them or 3) you can’t afford a smartphone (rare). Deeply confounded.

There was clear miscommunication about the time with friends numbers, which were 2.7 days/week for kids with phones versus 2.2 days/week for those without. But what’s even weirder is the same gap applies to daily video gamers (2.8 vs. 2.3) and social media users (2.7 vs. 2.2).

And then, even weirder, to tablet owners? What? Again it’s 2.8 vs. 2.3.

Then kids say they spent an average of 3.2 hours per day (!) ‘hanging out with friends online.’ To which I say, really? That’s… quite a lot, especially since it’s all respondents including those without phones. Kids reported 4.4 hours on their smartphones and tablets per school day and 6.3 per non-school day, which means the majority of that was supposedly spent ‘with friends.’

We also have this meta study of social media abstinence interventions, which finds zero effect on mental health. This is unfortunate, but what it does not mean is that everyone having phones is good for mental health.

Indeed it says the opposite, because of the isolation effect. If previously you had a phone, and now everyone but you has a phone, you are going to have a hard time coordinating with your friends, meeting with them and talking to them. That’s going to be bad for your mental health. So the fact that there was zero impact suggests that the phones are net negative.

A reader offers this list of studies on tech in schools.

It’s happening. New York State is banning cell phones, from bell-to-bell.

Mike Bloomberg: Great to see the New York State legislature ban cell phones in schools, a step we took in NYC nearly 20 years ago. Unfortunately for students and teachers, the policy was ended by the next administration. Experience and studies both show that cell phones in school are harmful to student learning. All states should follow New York.

Momentum for banning phones in schools continues, from January 2025, and Colorado targets them next.

For those wondering what to do now, a school offers a guide.

Rob Wilbin: Ezra [Klein] today saying social science can’t settle whether kids on phones/social media is harmful reminded me of Tyler’s interview w Haidt.

Cowen pushed back hard but, unusually, his own audience wasn’t having a bar of it.

It thinks it sees its own kids being harmed and trusts its own eyes over any social science or argumentation.

Even if one concluded the peer reviewed study literature pointed in the direction in question, I refuse to be gaslit into not believing that things that are obviously happening are indeed happening, or that obviously bad for people things aren’t bad for people, purely because ‘the evidence is weak’ or any given statistic did not find an effect. Most other people are in the same boat at this point.

A new study tries out a ‘soft commitment’ app on phones they tried out at university. It successfully convinced students to reduce phone use in class, leading to improvements in classroom focus, attendance and overall academic satisfaction. However there was a substitution effect where students studied less, and only a small (statistically insignificant) increase in grades. So a soft nudge made things modestly better (but only modestly) in what seems like a Pareto improvement?

Natural Hazard: Person A: “I think all the most important people in my life are conspiring to hide important information about the world from me.”

Others: “That’s crazy, paranoid, schizo-type stuff.”

Person A: “Did I mention I’m 9?”

Others: “Oh, okay, yeah.”

Discussion about this post

Childhood and Education #10: Behaviors Read More »

Sailing the fjords like the Vikings yields unexpected insights

Archaeology, experimental archaeology, Science, viking ships, vikings / Mike M. / June 23, 2025

“On we sweep with threshing oar”

Greer Jarrett has identified four possible small ports, or “havens,” used by Vikings along the Norwegian coast.

Experimental archaeologist Greer Jarrett of Lund University in Sweden has been sailing in the footsteps of Vikings for the last three years.

If you want to learn more about how and where the Vikings sailed, making the journey through the fjords yourself in replica boats is a practical, hands-on approach to achieving that end. Greer Jarrett, an archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, has spent the last three years doing just that, sailing more than 5,000 kilometers along known Viking trade routes in open, spare-rigged clinker boats similar to those used by the Vikings.

Not only has Jarrett learned a great deal about the boats themselves, he also identified four possible havens along the Norwegian coast, part of what may have been a decentralized network that played a crucial role in trade and travel during that period. And those ports are located farther out to sea than other major ports and hubs known to date, according to a paper he published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

It’s just the latest intriguing discovery enabled by the growing field of experimental archaeology, whereby researchers seek to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies. Experimental archaeologists have, for instance, built their own versions of Early Upper Paleolithic adzes, axes, and chisels. The resulting fractures and wear enabled them to develop new criteria for identifying the likely functions of ancient tools. Others have tried to cook like the Neanderthals, concluding that flint flakes were surprisingly effective for butchering birds, and that roasting the birds damages the bones to such an extent that it’s unlikely they would be preserved in the archaeological record.

Kent State University’s Metin Eren has done practical experiments to study, for instance, the trajectories of atlatls attached to spears tipped with replica Clovis points, and how their performance compares to javelins used by Neanderthals. He even fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon—solely to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who purportedly did the same to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. (It did not work, so myth: busted. But it did snag Eren an Ig Nobel prize.)

Taking a hands-on, experimental archaeological approach to studying the Vikings makes sense in light of the dearth of contemporary written sources. “We have a few things written by outsiders, but there’s very, very few accounts written or delivered by people from Scandinavia during that period,” Jarrett told Ars. “We normally rely on indirect forms of evidence, be that genetics or archaeology or linguistics, which show strong, very frequent connections across maritime areas in the North Atlantic. But because traveling by boat is kind of an archaeologically invisible act, you don’t leave any footprints. So we have very little information about the voyages between these points.”

The sailing voyages made by Greer Jarrett during the research project. The image also shows the four possible Viking harbours identified by Jarrett. — The sailing voyages made by Greer Jarrett during the research project, as well as the four possible Viking harbors he identified. Credit: Greer Jarrett

Garrett and his crew used four or five different replica boats for their test voyages. Most were built by volunteers, enthusiasts, or students Jarrett had met during his considerable time in the field. They then sailed along the west coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula, a core area of Viking seafaring.

“These are reconstructions of traditional Norwegian boats from the 1800s and early 1900s,” said Jarrett. “My idea was, because of this really long-term continuity in traditional boat building practices, especially in Norway, it might be possible to use these later boats which have lots of similarities to try and work out the potentials of where people might have gotten out. It’s the idea of suggesting potentials based on practical experience to try and join those dots between the different evidence we have across the Viking world.”

That decision has led to some criticism from colleagues because of the enormous gap in time, but Jarrett defends his choice. “The Viking Age ends in the 11th century, and we’re talking about boats from 800 years later,” he said. “But the construction techniques and the way they are rigged and their general performance characteristics are similar enough. Because this is a project about voyages and not a project about boat building, it seemed like a defensible analogy.”

Seeking safe harbor

“On the long-range voyages, we worked in watches of four hours on and four hours off, and that is just about long enough to get some sleep on your off watch, but also just about short enough that you don’t get really, really, really cold, which is obviously a risk,” said Jarrett. “It was manageable, but we looked like penguins. I mean, we’re wearing six layers of wool at any time and sleeping all stacked together for warmth. But other times it’s really nice. The spring and the autumn in Scandinavia, there’s much more likelihood of high-pressure cycles, which means that it’s clearer and sunnier than in the summer itself.”

Nonetheless, there were some rough moments, such as when the mast spar holding up the mainsail snapped, forcing the crew to improvise and lash two oars together to hold the sail so they could continue their journey. It took several days to repair the boat so it could sail again. There was no safety boat following along in case the crew got into trouble, and no engine, although they did have a life raft, which the crew has yet to use.

Based on his sailing trials, Jarrett believes that the Vikings had no need for navigational tools like maps, a compass, or a sextant, relying instead on what he calls “mental maps”—or a “maritime cultural mindscape”—based on sailors’ memories and experiences passed down orally through generations. Those maps might also be informed by the myths linked to well-known coastal landmarks, such as skerries, small islets, or reefs.

“People had been moving by boat along the west coast of Scandinavia for a really, really, really long time, probably since the late Neolithic, if not earlier—thousands of years before the Viking age,” said Jarrett. “There are big trading networks in place beforehand, and that is reflected in the names, place names along the west coast. My primary argument is if you spend 3,000 years traveling up and down a coastline in which you can use the coast at all times for navigation, then it’s unnecessary to develop instrumentation.”

“Instruments are used when you are in a place out in the open sea that you don’t know,” Jarrett continued. “We definitely know they didn’t have compasses because those don’t arrive from China until the 1200s. There are these ideas about sunstones and sundials, or little sun compasses, which are entirely possible. But there’s no legitimate proof of either of them archaeologically yet. I may well be proved wrong if we find them at some point, but I don’t think they’re necessary for this at all.”

Based on the sailing trials, archaeological and documentary evidence of Viking Age maritime centers, and digital reconstructions of past sea levels. Jarrett was able develop a useful set of criteria for evaluating potential havens. For instance, the site should be reachable in low visibility, with land or sea marks that sailors could use as bearings; large enough to accommodate multiple vessels of at least the size of a fyring (which can house a crew of four to 10 people); provide good protection from sea swell and storm surges; and have access to fresh water, among other criteria. Four sites scored sufficiently high by those criteria to qualify as possible Viking havens.

The four sites are Smørhamn, located at the confluence of Oldersund and the Frøysjø, where an inn and trading post are known to have existed since at least the late 17th century; the archipelago of Sørøyane between Stad and Ålesund, near where the sea battle of Hjörungavágr was fought circa 986 CE; Bjørnsund, a number of small islands off the southwestern tip of Hustadvika; and the island of Storfosna, which appears on 16th and 17th century charts.

“I’m not saying, ‘This is where they went,'” said Jarrett. “I’m saying that, with these kinds of boats under these conditions, it would be possible to go to these places. And it’s much more difficult—not impossible, but much more difficult—to go to these other places or to sail in these other conditions.”

Pining for the fjords

The next step is for Jarrett and other archaeologists to hunt for evidence in support of his hypothesis. “Most of these sites have never been excavated,” said Jarrett. “There’s been a long assumption that these are landing places with the idea that you are dragging your boat ashore. I’m very opposed to that idea because these are two-and-a-half-ton boats, let alone the cargo. Unless you have a team of oxen and 20 people at your command, there is no way you’re getting them on the beach. I’m very convinced that these places have jetties and mooring posts likely preserved underwater. All of that organic material survives much better underwater than it does on land. So I think that’s very possible.”

They might also find smaller items suggestive of a thriving harbor community. “Whenever you go into land, you’ve got something that’s broken, so you need to do repairs,” said Jarrett. “So things like clink nails or piles of balustones or signs of smithing—the typical kind of things you’d use for repairing your ship, I think are possible to find.” Jarrett’s methodology might also prove useful for studying other seafaring communities.

The practical experience of sailing the same seas as the Vikings naturally led to some surprising insights. “You are able to ask very different questions the minute you walk away from your desk and get on a boat,” said Jarrett. “I think it’s essential to do that because you think in new ways. In terms of the results themselves, the boats are extremely seaworthy crafts. When you get in them for the first time, you don’t think that, because they’re very, very light. They feel very flimsy, and they’re very low in the water compared to a modern sailing boat. So you feel really in touch with the wave, which is kind of scary. But because they’re so flexible and because of the way they’re rigged, they’re actually really stable, even in big waves.”

“We kept going out thinking, ‘Oh, this is maybe the limit of what this boat can tolerate,’ and then it would be fine, and we’d be, ‘Okay, let’s go a little bit in slightly bigger waves with slightly stronger wind,'” Jarrett continued. “So I think our comfort zones definitely visibly expanded during that period. And I had the chance to work with the same crews over three years. By the end of those three years, we were doing stuff that we would never have been able to do at the beginning.”

Another big difference from modern boats, Jarrett discovered, is that one cannot sail a traditional Viking craft alone. “It has to be a collaborative effort because of how you need a person at the front and the back of the boat basically at all times,” he said. “So developing the crew together and gaining not only skills, but also trust between us meant that we could do things in 2024 that seemed completely insane just a couple of years earlier. I cannot imagine what that is like if you have an entire lifetime of Viking sailors working together for 30 years. It must be an incredible way of creating social bonds.”

DOI: Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2025. 10.1007/s10816-025-09708-6 (About DOIs).

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Sailing the fjords like the Vikings yields unexpected insights Read More »

New body size database for marine animals is a “library of life”

biodiversity, Biology, databases, Ecology, marine animals, marine ecology, Science, Taxonomy / Mike M. / June 22, 2025

The ocean runs on size

McClain officially launched MOBS as a passion project while on sabbatical in 2022 but he had been informally collecting data on body size for various marine groups for several years before that. So he had a small set of data already to kick off the project, incorporating it all into a single large database with a consistent set format and style.

Craig McClain holding a giant isopod (Bathynomus giganteus), one of the deep sea’s most iconic crustaceans — Craig McClain holding a giant isopod (*Bathynomus giganteus*), one of the deep sea’s most iconic crustaceans Credit: Craig McClain

“One of the things that had prevented me from doing this before was the taxonomy issue,” said McClain. “Say you wanted to get the body size for all [species] of octopuses. That was not something that was very well known unless some taxonomist happened to publish [that data]. And that data was likely not up-to-date because new species are [constantly] being described.”

However, in the last five to ten years, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) was established with the objective of cataloging all marine life, with taxonomy experts assigned to specific groups to determine valid new species, which are then added to the data set with a specific numerical code. McClain tied his own dataset to that same code, making it quite easy to update MOBS as new species are added to WoRMS. McClain and his team were also able to gather body size data from various museum collections.

The MOBS database focuses on body length (a linear measurement) as opposed to body mass. “Almost every taxonomic description of a new species has some sort of linear measurement,” said McClain. “For most organisms, it’s a length, maybe a width, and if you’re really lucky you might get a height. It’s very rare for anything to be weighed unless it’s an objective of the study. So that data simply doesn’t exist.”

While all mammals generally have similar density, “If you compare the density of a sea slug, a nudibranch, versus a jellyfish, even though they have the same masses, their carbon contents are much different,” he said. “And a one-meter worm that’s a cylinder and a one-meter sea urchin that’s a sphere are fundamentally different weights and different kinds of organisms.” One solution for the latter is to convert to volume to account for shape differences. Length-to-weight ratios can also differ substantially for different marine animal groups. That’s why McClain hopes to compile a separate database for length-to-weight conversions.

New body size database for marine animals is a “library of life” Read More »

MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours

AI, AI image generators, art restoration, computer vision, conservation technology, cultural preservation, digital art tools, image synthesis, machine learning, MIT, museums, polymer technology, Science / Mike M. / June 21, 2025

MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. Last week, MIT News announced his solution: a technique that uses AI-generated polymer films to physically restore damaged paintings in hours rather than months. The research appears in Nature.

Kachkine’s method works by printing a transparent “mask” containing thousands of precisely color-matched regions that conservators can apply directly to an original artwork. Unlike traditional restoration, which permanently alters the painting, these masks can reportedly be removed whenever needed. So it’s a reversible process that does not permanently change a painting.

“Because there’s a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they’ll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting,” Kachkine told MIT News. “And that’s never really been possible in conservation before.”

Nature reports that up to 70 percent of institutional art collections remain hidden from public view due to damage—a large amount of cultural heritage sitting unseen in storage. Traditional restoration methods, where conservators painstakingly fill damaged areas one at a time while mixing exact color matches for each region, can take weeks to decades for a single painting. It’s skilled work that requires both artistic talent and deep technical knowledge, but there simply aren’t enough conservators to tackle the backlog.

The mechanical engineering student conceived the idea during a 2021 cross-country drive to MIT, when gallery visits revealed how much art remains hidden due to damage and restoration backlogs. As someone who restores paintings as a hobby, he understood both the problem and the potential for a technological solution.

To demonstrate his method, Kachkine chose a challenging test case: a 15th-century oil painting requiring repairs in 5,612 separate regions. An AI model identified damage patterns and generated 57,314 different colors to match the original work. The entire restoration process reportedly took 3.5 hours—about 66 times faster than traditional hand-painting methods.

A handout photo of Alex Kachkine, who developed the AI printed film technique. — Alex Kachkine, who developed the AI-printed film technique. Credit: MIT

Notably, Kachkine avoided using generative AI models like Stable Diffusion or the “full-area application” of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for the digital restoration step. According to the Nature paper, these models cause “spatial distortion” that would prevent proper alignment between the restored image and the damaged original.

MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours Read More »

YouTube is hiding an excellent, official high-speed Pac-Man mod in plain sight

arcade, Classic, gaming, Google, Namco, Pac-Man, youtube / Mike M. / June 21, 2025

Those who’ve played the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition series will be familiar with the high-speed vibe here, but Pac-Man Superfast remains focused on the game’s original maze and selection of just four ghosts. That means old-school strategies for grouping ghosts together and running successful patterns through the narrow corridors work in similar ways here. Successfully executing those patterns becomes a tense battle of nerves here, though, requiring multiple direction changes every second at the highest speeds. While the game will technically work with swipe controls on a smartphone or tablet, high-level play really requires the precision of a keyboard via a desktop/laptop web browser (we couldn’t get the game to recognize a USB controller, unfortunately).

Collecting those high-value items at the bottom is your ticket to a lot of extra lives. Credit: Youtube Playables

As exciting as the high-speed maze gameplay gets, though, Pac-Man Superfast is hampered by a few odd design decisions. The game ends abruptly after just 13 levels, for instance, making it impossible to even attempt the high-endurance 256-level runs that Pac-Man is known for. The game also throws an extra life at you every 5,000 points, making it relatively easy to brute force your way to the end as long as you focus on the three increasingly high-point-value items that appear periodically on each stage.

Despite this, the game doesn’t give any point reward for unused extra lives or long-term survival at high speeds, limiting the rewards for high-level play. And the lack of a built-in leaderboard makes it hard to directly compare your performance to friends and/or strangers anyway.

A large part of the reason I wrote about this game was to see if someone could beat my high score. Credit: Youtube Playables

Those issues aside, I’ve had a blast coming back to Pac-Man Supefast over and over again in the past few days, slowly raising my high score above the 162,000 point mark during coffee breaks (consider the gauntlet thrown, Ars readers). If you’re a fan of classic arcade games, Pac-Man Superfast is worth a try before the “YouTube Playables” initiative inevitably joins the growing graveyard of discontinued Google products.

YouTube is hiding an excellent, official high-speed Pac-Man mod in plain sight Read More »

Author name: Mike M.