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Some AI tools don’t understand biology yet

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A collection of new studies on gene activity shows that AI tools aren’t very good.

Gene activity appears to remain beyond the abilities of AI at the moment. Credit: BSIP

Biology is an area of science where AI and machine-learning approaches have seen some spectacular successes, such as designing enzymes to digest plastics and proteins to block snake venom. But in an era of seemingly endless AI hype, it might be easy to think that we could just set AI loose on the mounds of data we’ve already generated and end up with a good understanding of most areas of biology, allowing us to skip a lot of messy experiments and the unpleasantness of research on animals.

But biology involves a whole lot more than just protein structures. And it’s extremely premature to suggest that AI can be equally effective at handling all aspects of biology. So we were intrigued to see a study comparing a set of AI software packages designed to predict how active genes will be in cells exposed to different conditions. As it turns out, the AI systems couldn’t manage to do any better than a deliberately simplified method of predicting.

The results serve as a useful caution that biology is incredibly complex, and developing AI systems that work for one aspect of it is not an indication that they can work for biology generally.

AI and gene activity

The study was conducted by a trio of researchers based in Heidelberg: Constantin Ahlmann-Eltze, Wolfgang Huber, and Simon Anders. They note that a handful of additional studies have been released while their work was on a pre-print server, all of them coming to roughly the same conclusions. But these authors’ approach is pretty easy to understand, so we’ll use it as an example.

The AI software they examined attempts to predict changes in gene activity. While every cell carries copies of the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome, not all of them are active in a given cell—”active” in this case meaning they are producing messenger RNAs. Some provide an essential function and are active at high levels at all times. Others are only active in specific cell types, like nerves or skin. Still others are activated under specific conditions, like low oxygen or high temperatures.

Over the years, we’ve done many studies examining the activity of every gene in a given cell type under different conditions. These studies can range from using gene chips to determine which messenger RNAs are present in a population of cells to sequencing the RNAs isolated from single cells and using that data to identify which genes are active. But collectively, they can provide a broad, if incomplete, picture that links the activity of genes with different biological circumstances. It’s a picture you could potentially use to train an AI that would make predictions about gene activity under conditions that haven’t been tested.

Ahlmann-Eltze, Huber, and Anders tested a set of what are called single-cell foundation models that have been trained on this sort of gene activity data. The “single cell” portion indicates that these models have been trained on gene activity obtained from individual cells rather than a population average of a cell type. Foundation models mean that they have been trained on a broad range of data but will require additional training before they’re deployed for a specific task.

Underwhelming performance

The task in this case is predicting how gene activity might change when genes are altered. When an individual gene is lost or activated, it’s possible that the only messenger RNA that is altered is the one made by that gene. But some genes encode proteins that regulate a collection of other genes, in which case you might see changes in the activity of dozens of genes. In other cases, the loss or activation of a gene could affect a cell’s metabolism, resulting in widespread alterations of gene activity.

Things get even more complicated when two genes are involved. In many cases, the genes will do unrelated things, and you get a simple additive effect: the changes caused by the loss of one, plus the changes caused by the loss of others. But if there’s some overlap between the functions, you can get an enhancement of some changes, suppression of others, and other unexpected changes.

To start exploring these effects, researchers have intentionally altered the activity of one or more genes using the CRISPR DNA editing technology, then sequenced every RNA in the cell afterward to see what sorts of changes took place. This approach (termed Perturb-seq) is useful because it can give us a sense of what the altered gene does in a cell. But for Ahlmann-Eltze, Huber, and Anders, it provides the data they need to determine if these foundation models can be trained to predict the ensuing changes in the activity of other genes.

Starting with the foundation models, the researchers conducted additional training using data from an experiment where either one or two genes were activated using CRISPR. This training used the data from 100 individual gene activations and another 62 where two genes were activated. Then, the AI packages were asked to predict the results for another 62 pairs of genes that were activated. For comparison, the researchers also made predictions using two extremely simple models: one that always predicted that nothing would change and a second that always predicted an additive effect (meaning that activating genes A and B would produce the changes caused by activating A plus the changes caused by activating B).

They didn’t work. “All models had a prediction error substantially higher than the additive baseline,” the researchers concluded. The result held when the researchers used alternative measurements of the accuracy of the AI’s predictions.

The gist of the problem seemed to be that the trained foundation models weren’t very good at predicting when the alterations of pairs of genes would produce complex patterns of changes—when the alteration of one gene synergized with the alteration of a second. “The deep learning models rarely predicted synergistic interactions, and it was even rarer that those predictions were correct,” the researchers concluded. In a separate test that looked specifically at these synergies between genes, it turned out that none of the models were better than the simplified system that always predicted no changes.

Not there yet

The overall conclusions from the work are pretty clear. “As our deliberately simple baselines are incapable of representing realistic biological complexity yet were not outperformed by the foundation models,” the researchers write, “we conclude that the latter’s goal of providing a generalizable representation of cellular states and predicting the outcome of not-yet-performed experiments is still elusive.”

It’s important to emphasize that “still elusive” doesn’t mean we’re incapable of ever developing an AI that can help with this problem. It also doesn’t mean that this applies to all cellular states (the results are specific to gene activity), much less all of biology. At the same time, the work provides a valuable caution at a time when there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the idea that AI’s success in a couple of areas means we’re on the cusp of a world where it can be applied to anything.

Nature Methods, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41592-025-02772-6  (About DOIs).

Photo of John Timmer

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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Titan sub implosion caused by absolutely bonkers “toxic workplace environment”

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In a 300-plus page final report released today, the US Coast Guard analyzed the 2023 Titan sub implosion from every conceivable angle and came to a clear conclusion: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was a dangerous and deeply unpleasant boss.

His company used “intimidation tactics” to sidestep regulatory scrutiny, it was a “toxic” workplace, and its safety culture was “critically flawed.” The Titan itself was “undocumented, unregistered, non-certificated, [and] unclassed.” As for Rush, he managed to “completely ignore vital inspections, data analyses, and preventative maintenance procedures.” The result was a “catastrophic event” that occurred when 4,930 pounds per square inch of water pressure cracked the sub open and crushed its five occupants during a dive to the Titanic wreckage site.

Had Rush somehow survived, the report says, he would have been referred for prosecution.

Stockton Rush shows David Pogue the game controller that pilots the OceanGate Titan sub during a CBS Sunday Morning segment broadcast in November 2022.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush shows David Pogue the 2010-era game controller used to pilot the Titan sub during a CBS Sunday Morning segment broadcast in November 2022. Credit: CBS Sunday Morning

Throwing the controller

One small story about a video game controller shows what Rush was like to work for. You may remember Rush from an infamous 2022 CBS Sunday Morning segment, where Rush showed journalist David Pogue around the Titan sub. “We run the whole thing with this game controller,” Rush said, holding up a Logitech F710 controller with 3D-printed thumbstick extensions. Pogue chuckled, saying, “Come on!” as he covered his face with his hand.

The game controller had been used in OceanGate subs for years by that point; a 2014 video showed one being used to control the company’s earlier Cyclops I submersible. In 2016, OceanGate took the Cyclops I to dive the wreck of the Andrea Doria outside of Nantucket, Massachusetts. (Seinfeld fans will remember that an entire episode is taken up with George’s quest to get an apartment that was about to go to an Andrea Doria survivor.)

The OceanGate team spent two days at the site, running 2D and 3D scans of the sunken ship, until Rush got the Cyclops I “stuck under the bow of the Andrea Doria wreckage”—and he couldn’t get the sub free. According to the report, Rush then “experienced a ‘meltdown’ and refused to let [the assistant pilot] assist in resolving the situation. When a mission specialist suggested that Mr. Rush hand over the controller to the assistant pilot, the assistant pilot reported that the controller was thrown at him. Upon obtaining the controller, the assistant pilot was able to free the Cyclops I from the wreckage.”

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Analysis: The Trump administration’s assault on climate action

clean air act, climate change, Earth science, EPA, global warming, misinformation, Policy, Science, Supreme Court / /

Official actions don’t challenge science, while unofficial docs muddy the waters.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency made lots of headlines by rejecting the document that establishes its ability to regulate the greenhouse gases that are warming our climate. While the legal assault on regulations grabbed most of the attention, it was paired with two other actions that targeted other aspects of climate change: the science underlying our current understanding of the dramatic warming the Earth is experiencing, and the renewable energy that represents our best chance of limiting this warming.

Collectively, these actions illuminate the administration’s strategy for dealing with a problem that it would prefer to believe doesn’t exist, despite our extensive documentation of its reality. They also show how the administration is tailoring its approach to different audiences, including the audience of one who is demanding inaction.

When in doubt, make something up

The simplest thing to understand is an action by the Department of the Interior, which handles permitting for energy projects on federal land—including wind and solar, both onshore and off. That has placed the Interior in an awkward position. Wind and solar are now generally the cheapest ways to generate electricity and are currently in the process of a spectacular boom, with solar now accounting for over 80 percent of the newly installed capacity in the US.

Yet, when Trump issued an executive order declaring an energy emergency, wind and solar were notably excluded as potential solutions. Language from Trump and other administration officials has also made it clear that renewable energy is viewed as an impediment to the administration’s pro-fossil fuel agenda.

But shutting down federal permitting for renewable energy with little more than “we don’t like it” as justification could run afoul of rules that forbid government decisions from being “arbitrary and capricious.” This may explain why the government gave up on its attempts to block the ongoing construction of an offshore wind farm in New York waters.

On Friday, the Interior announced that it had settled on a less arbitrary justification for blocking renewable energy on public land: energy density. Given a metric of land use per megawatt, wind and solar are less efficient than nuclear plants we can’t manage to build on time or budget, and therefore “environmentally damaging” and an inefficient use of federal land, according to the new logic. “The Department will now consider proposed energy project’s capacity density when assessing the project’s potential energy benefits to the nation and impacts to the environment and wildlife,” Interior declared.

This is only marginally more reasonable than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s apparent inability to recognize that solar power can be stored in batteries. But it has three features that will be recurring themes. There’s at least a token attempt to provide a justification that might survive the inevitable lawsuits, while at the same time providing fodder for the culture war that many in the administration demand. And it avoids directly attacking the science that initially motivated the push toward renewables.

Energy vs. the climate

That’s not to say that climate change isn’t in for attack. It’s just that the attacks are being strategically separated from the decisions that might produce a lawsuit. Last week, the burden of taking on extremely well-understood and supported science fell to the Department of Energy, which released a report on climate “science” to coincide with the EPA’s decision to give up on attempts to regulate greenhouse gases.

For those who have followed public debates over climate change, looking at the author list—John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer—will give you a very clear picture of what to expect. Spencer is a creationist, raising questions about his ability to evaluate any science free from his personal biases. (He has also said, “My job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism,” so it’s not just biology where he’s got these issues.) McKitrick is an economist who engaged in a multi-year attempt to raise doubt about the prominent “hockey stick” reconstruction of past climates, even as scientists were replicating the results. Etc.

The report is a master class in arbitrary and capricious decision-making applied to science. Sometimes the authors rely on the peer-reviewed literature. Other times they perform their own analysis for this document, in some cases coming up with almost comically random metrics for data. (Example: “We examine occurrences of 5-day deluges as follows. Taking the Pacific coast as an example, a 130-year span contains 26 5-year intervals. At each location we computed the 5-day precipitation totals throughout the year and selected the 26 highest values across the sample.” Why five days? Five-year intervals? Who knows.)

This is especially striking in a few cases where the authors choose references that were published a few years ago, and thus neatly avoid the dramatic temperature records that have been set over the past couple of years. Similarly, they sometimes use regional measures and sometimes use global ones. They demand long-term data in some contexts, while getting excited about two years of coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef. The authors highlight the fact that US tide gauges don’t show any indication of an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise while ignoring the fact that global satellite measures clearly do.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other problems. There’s some blatant misinformation, like claims that urbanization could be distorting the warming, which has already been tested extensively. (Notably, warming is most intense in the sparsely populated Arctic.) There’s also some creative use of language, like referring to the ocean acidification caused by CO2 as “neutralizing ocean alkalinity.”

But the biggest bit of misinformation comes in the introduction, where the secretary of energy, Chris Wright, said of the authors, “I chose them for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” There is no reason to choose this group of marginal contrarians except the knowledge that they’d produce a report like this, thus providing a justification for those in the administration who want to believe it’s all a scam.

No science needed

The critical feature of the Department of Energy report is that it contains no policy actions; it’s purely about trying to undercut well-understood climate science. This means the questionable analyses in the report shouldn’t ever end up being tested in court.

That’s in contrast to the decision to withdraw the EPA’s endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases. There’s quite an extensive history to the endangerment finding, but briefly, it’s the product of a Supreme Court decision (Massachusetts v. EPA), which compelled the EPA to evaluate whether greenhouse gases posed a threat to the US population as defined in the Clean Air Act. Both the Bush and Obama EPAs did so, thus enabling the regulation of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.

Despite the claims in the Department of Energy report, there is comprehensive evidence that greenhouse gases are causing problems in the US, ranging from extreme weather to sea level rise. So while the EPA mentions the Department of Energy’s work a number of times, the actual action being taken skips over the science and focuses on legal issues. In doing so, it creates a false history where the endangerment finding had no legal foundation.

To re-recap, the Supreme Court determined that this evaluation was required by the Clean Air Act. George W. Bush’s administration performed the analysis and reached the exact same conclusion as the Obama administration (though the former chose to ignore those conclusions). Yet Trump’s EPA is calling the endangerment finding “an unprecedented move” by the Obama administration that involved “mental leaps” and “ignored Congress’ clear intent.” And the EPA presents the findings as strategic, “the only way the Obama-Biden Administration could access EPA’s authority to regulate,” rather than compelled by scientific evidence.

Fundamentally, it’s an ahistorical presentation; the EPA is counting on nobody remembering what actually happened.

The announcement doesn’t get much better when it comes to the future. The only immediate change will be an end to any attempts to regulate carbon emissions from motor vehicles, since regulations for power plants had been on hold due to court challenges. Yet somehow, the EPA’s statement claims that this absence of regulation imposed costs on people. “The Endangerment Finding has also played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks, resulting in additional costly burdens on American families and businesses,” it said.

We’re still endangered

Overall, the announcements made last week provide a clear picture of how the administration intends to avoid addressing climate change and cripple the responses started by previous administrations. Outside of the policy arena, it will question the science and use partisan misinformation to rally its supporters for the fight. But it recognizes that these approaches aren’t flying when it comes to the courts.

So it will separately pursue a legal approach that seeks to undercut the ability of anyone, including private businesses, to address climate change, crafting “reasons” for its decisions in a way that might survive legal challenge—because these actions are almost certain to be challenged in court. And that may be the ultimate goal. The current court has shown a near-complete disinterest in respecting precedent and has issued a string of decisions that severely limit the EPA. It’s quite possible that the court will simply throw out the prior decision that compelled the government to issue an endangerment finding in the first place.

If that’s left in place, then any ensuing administrations can simply issue a new endangerment finding. If anything, the effects of climate change on the US population have become more obvious, and the scientific understanding of human-driven warming has solidified since the Bush administration first acknowledged them.

Photo of John Timmer

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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Four radioactive wasp nests found on South Carolina nuclear facility

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According to the DOE, the site produced 165 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, which has been evaporated to 34 million gallons. The site has 51 waste tanks, eight of which have been operationally closed, with the remaining 43 in various states of the closure process.

Outside experts have been quick to point out critical information missing from the DOE’s nest report, including the absolute level of radioactivity found in the nest, the specific isotopes that were found, and the type of wasps that built the nest. Some wasps build their nests from mud, while others might use chewed-up pulp from wood.

Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina who studies organisms and ecosystems in radioactive regions, told the Times that the DOE’s explanation that the wasps gathered legacy contamination for their homes is not unreasonable. “There’s some legacy radioactive contamination sitting around in the mud in the bottom of the lakes, or, you know, here and there,” he said.

“The main concern relates to whether or not there are large areas of significant contamination that have escaped surveillance in the past,” Mousseau said. “Alternatively, this could indicate that there is some new or old radioactive contamination that is coming to the surface that was unexpected.”

The DOE report of the first wasp nest said that the nest was sprayed to kill wasps, then bagged as radioactive waste. The ground and area around where the nest had been did not have any further contamination.

In a statement to the Aiken Standard, officials working at the DOE site noted that the wasps themselves pose little risk to the community—they likely have lower contamination on them and generally don’t stray more than a few hundred yards from their nests.

However, the Times pointed out a report from 2017, when officials at SRS found radioactive bird droppings on the roof of a building at the site. Birds can carry radioactive material long distances, Mousseau said.

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With Trump’s cutbacks, crew heads for ISS unsure of when they’ll come back

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“We are looking at the potential to extend this current flight, Crew-11.”

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman departs crew quarters at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for the ride to SpaceX’s launch pad. Credit: Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images

The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight months.

Spacecraft commander Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, that lifted off from Florida’s Space Coast at 11: 43 am EDT (15: 43 UTC) on Friday. Sitting to her right inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule was veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, serving as the vehicle pilot. Flanking the commander and pilot were two mission specialists: Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia.

Cardman and her crewmates rode a Falcon 9 rocket off the launch pad and headed northeast over the Atlantic Ocean, lining up with the space station’s orbit to set the stage for an automated docking at the complex early Saturday.

Goodbye LZ-1

The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage booster detached and returned to a propulsive touchdown at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of the launch site. This was the 53rd and final rocket landing at LZ-1 since SpaceX aced the first intact recovery of a Falcon 9 booster there on December 21, 2015.

On most of SpaceX’s missions, Falcon 9 boosters land on the company’s offshore drone ships hundreds of miles downrange from the launch site. For launches with enough fuel margin, the first stage can return to an onshore landing. But the Space Force, which leases out the landing zones to SpaceX, wants to convert the site of LZ-1 into a launch site for another rocket company.

SpaceX will move onshore rocket landings to new landing zones to be constructed next to the two Falcon 9 launch pads at the Florida spaceport. Landing Zone 2, located adjacent to Landing Zone 1, will also be decommissioned and handed back over to the Space Force once SpaceX activates the new landing sites.

“We’re working with the Cape and with the Kennedy Space Center folks to figure out the right time to make that transition from Landing Zone 2 in the future,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability. “But I think we’ll stay with Landing Zone 2 at least near-term, for a little while, and then look at the right time to move to the other areas.”

The Falcon 9 booster returns to Landing Zone 1 after the launch of the Crew-11 mission on Friday, August 1, 2025. Credit: SpaceX

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9’s second stage fired its single engine to accelerate the Crew Dragon spacecraft into low-Earth orbit. Less than 10 minutes after liftoff, the capsule separated from the second stage to wrap up the 159th consecutive successful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket.

“I have no emotions but joy right now,” Cardman said moments after arriving in orbit. “That was absolutely transcendent, the ride of a lifetime.”

This is the first trip to space for Cardman, a 37-year-old geobiologist and Antarctic explorer selected as a NASA astronaut in 2017. She was assigned to command a Dragon flight to the ISS last year, but NASA bumped her and another astronaut from the mission to make room for the spacecraft to return the two astronauts left behind on the station by Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule.

Mike Fincke, 58, is beginning his fourth spaceflight after previous launches on Russian Soyuz spacecraft and NASA’s space shuttle. He was previously training to fly on the Starliner spacecraft’s first long-duration mission, but NASA moved him to Dragon as the Boeing program faced more delays.

“Boy, it’s great to be back in orbit!” Fincke said. “Thank you to SpaceX and NASA for getting us here. What a ride!”

Yui is on his second flight to orbit. The 55-year-old former fighter pilot in the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force spent 141 days in space in 2015. Platonov, a 39-year-old spaceflight rookie, was a fighter pilot in the Russian Air Force before training to become a cosmonaut.

A matter of money

There’s some unexpected uncertainty going into this mission about how long the foursome will be in space. Missions sometimes get extended for technical reasons, or because of poor weather in recovery zones on Earth, but there’s something different in play with Crew-11. For the first time, there’s a decent chance that NASA will stretch out this expedition due to money issues.

The Trump administration has proposed across-the-board cuts to most NASA programs, including the International Space Station. The White House’s budget request for NASA in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1, calls for an overall cut in agency funding of nearly 25 percent.

The White House proposes a slightly higher reduction by percentage for the International Space Station and crew and cargo transportation to and from the research outpost. The cuts to the ISS would keep the station going through 2030, but with a smaller crew and a reduced capacity for research. Effectively, the ISS would limp toward retirement after more than 30 years in orbit.

Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the agency’s engineers are working with SpaceX to ensure the Dragon spacecraft can stay in orbit for at least eight months. The current certification limit is seven months, although officials waived the limit for one Dragon mission that lasted longer.

“When we launch, we have a mission duration that’s baseline,” Stich said in a July 10 press conference. “And then we can extend [the] mission in real-time, as needed, as we better understand… the reconciliation bill and the appropriations process and what that means relative to the overall station manifest.”

An update this week provided by Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program manager, indicated that officials are still planning for Crew-11 to stay in space a little longer than usual.

“We are looking at the potential to extend this current flight, Crew-11,” Weigel said Wednesday. “There are a few more months worth of work to do first.”

This photo of the International Space Station was captured by a crew member on a Soyuz spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Roscosmos

Budget bills advanced in the Senate and House of Representatives in July would maintain funding for most NASA programs, including the ISS and transportation, close to this year’s levels. But it’s no guarantee that Congress will pass an appropriations bill for NASA before the deadline of midnight on October 1. It’s also unknown whether President Donald Trump would sign a budget bill into law that rejects his administration’s cuts.

If Congress doesn’t act, lawmakers must pass a continuing resolution as a temporary stopgap measure or accept a government shutdown. Some members of Congress are also concerned that the Trump administration might simply refuse to spend money allotted to NASA and other federal agencies in any budget bill. This move, called impoundment, would be controversial, and its legality would likely have to be adjudicated in the courts.

A separate amendment added in Congress to a so-called reconciliation bill and signed into law by Trump on July 4 also adds $1.25 billion for ISS operations through 2029. “We’re still evaluating how that’s going to affect operations going forward, but it’s a positive step,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations.

Suffice it to say that while Congress has signaled its intention to keep funding the ISS and many other NASA programs, the amount of money the space agency will actually receive remains uncertain. Trump appointees have directed NASA managers to prepare to operate as if the White House’s proposed cuts will become reality.

For officials in charge of the International Space Station, this means planning for fewer astronauts, reductions in research output, and longer-duration missions to minimize the number of crew rotation flights NASA must pay for. SpaceX is NASA’s primary contractor for crew rotation missions, using its Dragon spacecraft. NASA has a similar contract with Boeing, but that company’s Starliner spacecraft has not been certified for any operational flights to the station.

SpaceX’s next crew mission to the space station, Crew-12, is scheduled to launch early next year. Weigel said NASA is looking at the “entire spectrum” of options to cut back on the space station’s operations and transportation costs. One of those options would be to launch three crew members on Crew-12 instead of the regular four-person complement.

“We don’t have to answer that right now,” Weigel said. “We can actually wait pretty late to make the crew size smaller if we need to. In terms of cargo vehicles, we’re well-supplied through this fall, so in the short term, I’d say, through the end of this year and the beginning of ’26, things look pretty normal in terms of what we have planned for the program.

“But we’re evaluating things, and we’ll be ready to adjust when the budget is passed and when we figure out where we really land.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Research roundup: 7 cool science stories we almost missed

Archaeology, biomimicry, forensics, medieval medicine, Physics, Science, Taxonomy / /

Other July stories: Solving a 150-year-old fossil mystery and the physics of tacking a sailboat.

150-year-old fossil of Palaeocampa anthrax isn’t a sea worm after all. Credit: Christian McCall

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. July’s list includes the discovery of the tomb of the first Maya king of Caracol in Belize, the fluid dynamics of tacking a sailboat, how to determine how fast blood was traveling when it stained cotton fabric, and how the structure of elephant ears could lead to more efficient indoor temperature control in future building designs, among other fun stories.

Tomb of first king of Caracol found

University of Houston provost and archeologist Diane Chase in newly discovered tomb of the first ruler of the ancient Maya city Caracol and the founder of its royal dynasty.

Credit: Caracol Archeological Project/University of Houston

Archaeologists Arlen and Diane Chase are the foremost experts on the ancient Maya city of Caracol in Belize and are helping to pioneer the use of airborne LiDAR to locate hidden structures in dense jungle, including a web of interconnected roadways and a cremation site in the center of the city’s Northeast Acropolis plaza. They have been painstakingly excavating the site since the mid-1980s. Their latest discovery is the tomb of Te K’ab Chaak, Caracol’s first ruler, who took the throne in 331 CE and founded a dynasty that lasted more than 460 years.

This is the first royal tomb the husband-and-wife team has found in their 40+ years of excavating the Caracol site. Te K’ab Chaak’s tomb (containing his skeleton) was found at the base of a royal family shrine, along with pottery vessels, carved bone artifacts, jadeite jewelry, and a mosaic jadeite death mask. The Chases estimate that the ruler likely stood about 5’7″ tall and was probably quite old when he died, given his lack of teeth. The Chases are in the process of reconstructing the death mask and conducting DNA and stable isotope analysis of the skeleton.

How blood splatters on clothing

Cast-off blood stain pattern

Credit: Jimmy Brown/CC BY 2.0

Analyzing blood splatter patterns is a key focus in forensic science, and physicists have been offering their expertise for several years now, including in two 2019 studies on splatter patterns from gunshot wounds. The latest insights gleaned from physics concern the distinct ways in which blood stains cotton fabrics, according to a paper published in Forensic Science International.

Blood is a surprisingly complicated fluid, in part because the red blood cells in human blood can form long chains, giving it the consistency of sludge. And blood starts to coagulate immediately once it leaves the body. Blood is also viscoelastic: not only does it deform slowly when exposed to an external force, but once that force has been removed, it will return to its original configuration. Add in coagulation and the type of surface on which it lands, and correctly interpreting the resulting spatter patterns becomes incredibly difficult.

The co-authors of the July study splashed five different fabric surfaces with pig’s blood at varying velocities, capturing the action with high-speed cameras. They found that when a blood stain has “fingers” spreading out from the center, the more fingers there are, the faster the blood was traveling when it struck the fabric. And the faster the blood was moving, the more “satellite droplets” there will be—tiny stains surrounding the central stain. Finally, it’s much easier to estimate the velocity of blood splatter on plain-woven cotton than on other fabrics like twill. The researchers plan to extend future work to include a wider variety of fabrics, weaves, and yarns.

DOI: Forensic Science International, 2025. 10.1016/j.forsciint.2025.112543  (About DOIs).

Offshore asset practices of the uber-rich

The uber-rich aren’t like the rest of us in so many ways, including their canny exploitation of highly secretive offshore financial systems to conceal their assets and/or identities. Researchers at Dartmouth have used machine learning to analyze two public databases and identified distinct patterns in the strategies oligarchs and billionaires in 65 different countries employ when squirreling away offshore assets, according to a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

One database tracks offshore finance, while the other rates different countries on their “rule of law.” This enabled the team to study key metrics like how much of their assets elites move offshore, how much they diversify, and how much they make use of “blacklisted” offshore centers that are not part of the mainstream financial system. The researchers found three distinct patterns, all tied to where an oligarch comes from.

Billionaires from authoritarian countries are more likely to diversify their hidden assets across many different centers—a “confetti strategy”—perhaps because these are countries likely to exact political retribution. Others, from countries with effective government regulations—or where there is a pronounced lack of civil rights—are more likely to employ a “concealment strategy” that includes more blacklisted jurisdictions, relying more on bearer shares that protect their anonymity. Those elites most concerned about corruption and/or having their assets seized typically employ a hybrid strategy.

The work builds on an earlier 2023 study concluding that issuing sanctions on individual oligarchs in Russia, China, the US, and Hong Kong is less effective than targeting the small, secretive network of financial experts who manage that wealth on behalf of the oligarchs. That’s because sanctioning just one wealth manager effectively takes out several oligarchs at once, per the authors.

DOI: PLoS ONE, 2025. 10.1371/journal.pone.0326228  (About DOIs).

Medieval remedies similar to TikTok trends

Medieval manuscripts like the Cotton MS Vitellius C III highlight uses for herbs that reflect modern-day wellness trends.

Credit: The British Library

The Middle Ages are stereotypically described as the “Dark Ages,” with a culture driven by superstition—including its medical practices. But a perusal of the hundreds of medical manuscripts collected in the online Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine (CEMLM) reveals that in many respects, medical practices were much more sophisticated; some of the remedies are not much different from alternative medicine remedies touted by TikTok influencers today. That certainly doesn’t make them medically sound, but it does suggest we should perhaps not be too hasty in who we choose to call backward and superstitious.

Per Binghamton University historian Meg Leja, medievalists were not “anti-science.” In fact, they were often quite keen on learning from the natural world. And their health practices, however dubious they might appear to us—lizard shampoo, anyone?—were largely based on the best knowledge available at the time. There are detox cleanses and topical ointments, such as crushing the stone of a peach, mixing it with rose oil, and smearing it on one’s forehead to relieve migraine pain. (Rose oil may actually be an effective migraine pain reliever.) The collection is well worth perusing; pair it with the Wellcome-funded Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries to learn even more about medieval medical recipes.

Physics of tacking a sailboat

The Courant Institute's Christiana Mavroyiakoumou, above at Central Park's Conservatory Water with model sailboats

Credit: Jonathan King/NYU

Possibly the most challenging basic move for beginner sailors is learning how to tack to sail upwind. Done correctly, the sail will flip around into a mirror image of its previous shape. And in competitive sailboat racing, a bad tack can lose the race. So physicists at the University of Michigan decided to investigate the complex fluid dynamics at play to shed more light on the tricky maneuver, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

After modeling the maneuver and conducting numerical simulations, the physicists concluded that there are three primary factors that determine a successful tack: the stiffness of the sail, its tension before the wind hits, and the final sail angle in relation to the direction of the wind. Ideally, one wants a less flexible, less curved sail with high tension prior to hitting the wind and to end up with a 20-degree final sail angle. Other findings: It’s harder to flip a slack sail when tacking, and how fast one manages to flip the sail depends on the sail’s mass and the speed and acceleration of the turn.

DOI: Physical Review Fluids, 2025. 10.1103/37xg-vcff  (About DOIs).

Elephant ears inspire building design

African bush elephant with ears spread in a threat or attentive position and visible blood vessels

Maintaining a comfortable indoor temperature constitutes the largest fraction of energy usage for most buildings, with the surfaces of walls, windows, and ceilings contributing to roughly 63 percent of energy loss. Engineers at Drexel University have figured out how to make surfaces that help rather than hamper efforts to maintain indoor temperatures: using so-called phase-change materials that can absorb and release thermal energy as needed as they shift between liquid and solid states. They described the breakthrough in a paper published in the Journal of Building Engineering.

The Drexel group previously developed a self-warming concrete using a paraffin-based material, similar to the stuff used to make candles. The trick this time around, they found, was to create the equivalent of a vascular network within cement-based building materials. They used a printed polymer matrix to create a grid of channels in the surface of concrete and filled those channels with the same paraffin-based material. When temperatures drop, the material turns into a solid and releases heat energy; as temperatures rise, it shifts its phase to a liquid and absorbs heat energy.

The group tested several different configurations and found that the most effective combination of strength and thermal regulation was realized with a diamond-shaped grid, which boasted the most vasculature surface area. This configuration successfully slowed the cooling and heating of its surface to between 1 and 1.2 degrees Celsius per hour, while holding up against stretching and compression tests. The structure is similar to that of jackrabbit and elephant ears, which have extensive vascular networks to help regulate body temperature.

DOI: Journal of Building Engineering, 2025. 10.1016/j.jobe.2025.112878  (About DOIs).

ID-ing a century-old museum specimen

Neotype of Palaeocampa anthrax from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte and rediscovered in the Invertebrate Paleontology collection of the MCZ.

Credit: Richard J. Knecht

Natural history museums have lots of old specimens in storage, and revisiting those specimens can sometimes lead to new discoveries. That’s what happened to University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Richard J. Knecht as he was poring over a collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology while a grad student there. One of the fossils, originally discovered in 1865, was labeled a millipede. But Knecht immediately recognized it as a type of lobopod, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Biology. It’s the earliest lobopod yet found, and this particular species also marks an evolutionary leap since it’s the first known lobopod to be non-marine.

Lobopods are the evolutionary ancestors to arthropods (insects, spiders, and crustaceans), and their fossils are common along Paleozoic sea beds. Apart from tardigrades and velvet worms, however, they were thought to be confined to oceans. But Palaeocampa anthrax has legs on every trunk, as well as almost 1,000 bristly spines covering its body with orange halos at their tips. Infrared spectroscopy revealed traces of fossilized molecules—likely a chemical that emanated from the spinal tips. Since any chemical defense would just disperse in water, limiting its effectiveness, Knecht concluded that Palaeocampa anthrax was most likely amphibious rather than being solely aquatic.

DOI: Communications Biology, 2025. 10.1038/s42003-025-08483-0  (About DOIs).

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

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.

Research roundup: 7 cool science stories we almost missed Read More »

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The military’s squad of satellite trackers is now routinely going on alert

Features, military space, raj agrawal, Science, Space, space debris, space operations command, US Space Force / /

“I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind.”

A Long March 3B rocket carrying a new Chinese Beidou navigation satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on May 17, 2023. Credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force’s Space Mission Delta 2.

If it seems like there’s a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force’s Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

Dozens of satellites are being launched each week, primarily by SpaceX to continue deploying the Starlink broadband network. The US military has advance notice of these launches—most of them originate from Space Force property—and knows exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.

That’s usually not the case when China or Russia (and occasionally Iran or North Korea) launches something into orbit. With rare exceptions, like human spaceflight missions, Chinese and Russian officials don’t publish any specifics about what their rockets are carrying or what altitude they’re going to.

That creates a problem for military operators tasked with monitoring traffic in orbit and breeds anxiety among US forces responsible for making sure potential adversaries don’t gain an edge in space. Will this launch deploy something that can destroy or disable a US satellite? Will this new satellite have a new capability to surveil allied forces on the ground or at sea?

Of course, this is precisely the point of keeping launch details under wraps. The US government doesn’t publish orbital data on its most sensitive satellites, such as spy craft collecting intelligence on foreign governments.

But you can’t hide in low-Earth orbit, a region extending hundreds of miles into space. Col. Raj Agrawal, who commanded Mission Delta 2 until earlier this month, knows this all too well. Agrawal handed over command to Col. Barry Croker as planned after a two-year tour of duty at Mission Delta 2.

Col. Raj Agrawal, then-Mission Delta 2 commander, delivers remarks to audience members during the Mission Delta 2 redesignation ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on October 31, 2024. Credit: US Space Force

Some space enthusiasts have made a hobby of tracking US and foreign military satellites as they fly overhead, stringing together a series of observations over time to create fairly precise estimates of an object’s altitude and inclination.

Commercial companies are also getting in on the game of space domain awareness. But most are based in the United States or allied nations and have close partnerships with the US government. Therefore, they only release information on satellites owned by China and Russia. This is how Ars learned of interesting maneuvers underway with a Chinese refueling satellite and suspected Russian satellite killers.

Theoretically, there’s nothing to stop a Chinese company, for example, from taking a similar tack on revealing classified maneuvers conducted by US military satellites.

The Space Force has an array of sensors scattered around the world to detect and track satellites and space debris. The 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons, which were both under Agrawal’s command at Mission Delta 2, are the units responsible for this work.

Preparing for the worst

One of the most dynamic times in the life of a Space Force satellite tracker is when China or Russia launches something new, according to Agrawal. His command pulls together open source information, such as airspace and maritime warning notices, to know when a launch might be scheduled.

This is not unlike how outside observers, like hobbyist trackers and space reporters, get a heads-up that something is about to happen. These notices tell you when a launch might occur, where it will take off from, and which direction it will go. What’s different for the Space Force is access to top-secret intelligence that might clue military officials in on what the rocket is actually carrying. China, in particular, often declares that its satellites are experimental, when Western analysts believe they are designed to support military activities.

That’s when US forces swing into action. Sometimes, military forces go on alert. Commanders develop plans to detect, track, and target the objects associated with a new launch, just in case they are “hostile,” Agrawal said.

We asked Agrawal to take us through the process his team uses to prepare for and respond to one of these unannounced, or “non-cooperative,” launches. This portion of our interview is published below, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: Let’s say there’s a Russian or Chinese launch. How do you find out there’s a launch coming? Do you watch for NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen), like I do, and try to go from there?

Agrawal: I think the conversation starts the same way that it probably starts with you and any other technology-interested American. We begin with what’s available. We certainly have insight through intelligence means to be able to get ahead of some of that, but we’re using a lot of the same sources to refine our understanding of what may happen, and then we have access to other intel.

The good thing is that the Space Force is a part of the Intelligence Community. We’re plugged into an entire Intelligence Community focused on anything that might be of national security interest. So we’re able to get ahead. Maybe we can narrow down NOTAMs; maybe we can anticipate behavior. Maybe we have other activities going on in other domains or on the Internet, the cyber domain, and so on, that begin to tip off activity.

Certainly, we’ve begun to understand patterns of behavior. But no matter what, it’s not the same level of understanding as those who just cooperate and work together as allies and friends. And if there’s a launch that does occur, we’re not communicating with that launch control center. We’re certainly not communicating with the folks that are determining whether or not the launch will be safe, if it’ll be nominal, how many payloads are going to deploy, where they’re going to deploy to.

I certainly understand why a nation might feel that they want to protect that. But when you’re fielding into LEO [low-Earth orbit] in particular, you’re not really going to hide there. You’re really just creating uncertainty, and now we’re having to deal with that uncertainty. We eventually know where everything is, but in that meantime, you’re creating a lot of risk for all the other nations and organizations that have fielded capability in LEO as well.

Find, fix, track, target

Ars: Can you take me through what it’s like for you and your team during one of these launches? When one comes to your attention, through a NOTAM or something else, how do you prepare for it? What are you looking for as you get ready for it? How often are you surprised by something with one of these launches?

Agrawal: Those are good questions. Some of it, I’ll be more philosophical on, and others I can be specific on. But on a routine basis, our formation is briefed on all of the launches we’re aware of, to varying degrees, with the varying levels of confidence, and at what classifications have we derived that information.

In fact, we also have a weekly briefing where we go into depth on how we have planned against some of what we believe to be potentially higher threats. How many organizations are involved in that mission plan? Those mission plans are done at a very tactical level by captains and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] that are part of the combat squadrons that are most often presented to US Space Command…

That integrated mission planning involves not just Mission Delta 2 forces but also presented forces by our intelligence delta [Space Force units are called deltas], by our missile warning and missile tracking delta, by our SATCOM [satellite communications] delta, and so on—from what we think is on the launch pad, what we think might be deployed, what those capabilities are. But also what might be held at risk as a result of those deployments, not just in terms of maneuver but also what might these even experimental—advertised “experimental”—capabilities be capable of, and what harm might be caused, and how do we mission-plan against those potential unprofessional or hostile behaviors?

As you can imagine, that’s a very sophisticated mission plan for some of these launches based on what we know about them. Certainly, I can’t, in this environment, confirm or deny any of the specific launches… because I get access to more fidelity and more confidence on those launches, the timing and what’s on them, but the precursor for the vast majority of all these launches is that mission plan.

That happens at a very tactical level. That is now posturing the force. And it’s a joint force. It’s not just us, Space Force forces, but it’s other services’ capabilities as well that are posturing to respond to that. And the truth is that we even have partners, other nations, other agencies, intel agencies, that have capability that have now postured against some of these launches to now be committed to understanding, did we anticipate this properly? Did we not?

And then, what are our branch plans in case it behaves in a way that we didn’t anticipate? How do we react to it? What do we need to task, posture, notify, and so on to then get observations, find, fix, track, target? So we’re fulfilling the preponderance of what we call the kill chain, for what we consider to be a non-cooperative launch, with a hope that it behaves peacefully but anticipating that it’ll behave in a way that’s unprofessional or hostile… We have multiple chat rooms at multiple classifications that are communicating in terms of “All right, is it launching the way we expected it to, or did it deviate? If it deviated, whose forces are now at risk as a result of that?”

A spectator takes photos before the launch of the Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat 3B satellite from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China on May 20, 2025. Credit: Meng Zhongde/VCG via Getty Images

Now, we even have down to the fidelity of what forces on the ground or on the ocean may not have capability… because of maneuvers or protective measures that the US Space Force has to take in order to deviate from its mission because of that behavior. The conversation, the way it was five years ago and the way it is today, is very, very different in terms of just a launch because now that launch, in many cases, is presenting a risk to the joint force.

We’re acting like a joint force. So that Marine, that sailor, that special operator on the ground who was expecting that capability now is notified in advance of losing that capability, and we have measures in place to mitigate those outages. And if not, then we let them know that “Hey, you’re not going to have the space capability for some period of time. We’ll let you know when we’re back. You have to go back to legacy operations for some period of time until we’re back into nominal configuration.”

I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind in the way that we now do even just launch processing. It’s very different than what we used to do.

Ars: So you’re communicating as a team in advance of a launch and communicating down to the tactical level, saying that this launch is happening, this is what it may be doing, so watch out?

Agrawal: Yeah. It’s not as simple as a ballistic missile warning attack, where it’s duck and cover. Now, it’s “Hey, we’ve anticipated the things that could occur that could affect your ability to do your mission as a result of this particular launch with its expected payload, and what we believe it may do.” So it’s not just a general warning. It’s a very scoped warning.

As that launch continues, we’re able to then communicate more specifically on which forces may lose what, at what time, and for how long. And it’s getting better and better as the rest of the US Space Force, as they present capability trained to that level of understanding as well… We train this together. We operate together and we communicate together so that the tactical user—sometimes it’s us at US Space Force, but many times it’s somebody on the surface of the Earth that has to understand how their environment, their capability, has changed as a result of what’s happening in, to, and from space.

Ars: The types of launches where you don’t know exactly what’s coming are getting more common now. Is it normal for you to be on this alert posture for all of the launches out of China or Russia?

Agrawal: Yeah. You see it now. The launch manifest is just ridiculous, never mind the ones we know about. The ones that we have to reach out into the intelligence world and learn about, that’s getting ridiculous, too. We don’t have to have this whole machine postured this way for cooperative launches. So the amount of energy we’re expending for a non-cooperative launch is immense. We can do it. We can keep doing it, but you’re just putting us on alert… and you’re putting us in a position where we’re getting ready for bad behavior with the entire general force, as opposed to a cooperative launch, where we can anticipate. If there’s an anomaly, we can anticipate those and work through them. But we’re working through it with friends, and we’re communicating.

We’re not having to put tactical warfighters on alert every time … but for those payloads that we have more concern about. But still, it’s a very different approach, and that’s why we are actively working with as many nations as possible in Mission Delta 2 to get folks to sign on with Space Command’s space situational awareness sharing agreements, to go at space operations as friends, as allies, as partners, working together. So that way, we’re not posturing for something higher-end as a result of the launch, but we’re doing this together. So, with every nation we can, we’re getting out there—South America, Africa, every nation that will meet with us, we want to meet with them and help them get on the path with US Space Command to share data, to work as friends, and use space responsibly.”

A Long March 3B carrier rocket carrying the Shijian 21 satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on October 24, 2021. Credit: Li Jieyi/VCG via Getty Images

Ars: How long does it take you to sort out and get a track on all of the objects for an uncooperative launch?

Agrawal: That question is a tough one to answer. We can move very, very quickly, but there are times when we have made a determination of what we think something is, what it is and where it’s going, and intent; there might be some lag to get it into a public catalog due to a number of factors, to include decisions being made by combatant commanders, because, again, our primary objective is not the public-facing catalog. The primary objective is, do we have a risk or not?

If we have a risk, let’s understand, let’s figure out to what degree do we think we have to manage this within the Department of Defense. And to what degree do we believe, “Oh, no, this can go in the public catalog. This is a predictable elset (element set)”? What we focus on with (the public catalog) are things that help with predictability, with spaceflight safety, with security, spaceflight security. So you sometimes might see a lag there, but that’s because we’re wrestling with the security aspect of the degree to which we need to manage this internally before we believe it’s predictable. But once we believe it’s predictable, we put it in the catalog, and we put it on space-track.org. There’s some nuance in there that isn’t relative to technology or process but more on national security.

On the flip side, what used to take hours and days is now getting down to seconds and minutes. We’ve overhauled—not 100 percent, but to a large degree—and got high-speed satellite communications from sensors to the centers of SDA (Space Domain Awareness) processing. We’re getting higher-end processing. We’re now duplicating the ability to process, duplicating that capability across multiple units. So what used to just be human labor intensive, and also kind of dial-up speed of transmission, we’ve now gone to high-speed transport. You’re seeing a lot of innovation occur, and a lot of data fusion occur, that’s getting us to seconds and minutes.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

The military’s squad of satellite trackers is now routinely going on alert Read More »

vast-majority-of-new-us-power-plants-generate-solar-or-wind-power

Vast majority of new US power plants generate solar or wind power

Science / /

But Victor views this as more of a slowdown than a reversal of momentum. One reason is that demand for electricity continues to rise to serve data centers and other large power users. The main beneficiaries are energy technologies that are the easiest to build and most cost effective, including solar, batteries, and gas.

In the first half of this year, the United States added 341 new power plants or utility-scale battery systems, with a total of 22,332 megawatts of summer generating capacity, according to EIA.

Chart showing how solar and wind have dominated new power generation capability.

Credit: Inside Climate News

More than half the total was utility-scale solar, with 12,034 megawatts, followed by battery systems, with 5,900 megawatts, onshore wind, with 2,697 megawatts, and natural gas, with 1,691 megawatts, which includes several types of natural gas plants.

The largest new plant by capacity was the 600-megawatt Hornet Solar in Swisher County, Texas, which went online in April.

“Hornet Solar is a testament to how large-scale energy projects can deliver reliable, domestic power to American homes and businesses,” said Juan Suarez, co-CEO of the developer, Vesper Energy of the Dallas area, in a statement from the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The plants being completed now are special in part because of what they have endured, said Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a nonprofit that does technical analysis for regulators and renewable power advocates. Power plants take years to plan and build, and current projects likely began development during the COVID-19 pandemic. They stayed on track despite high inflation, parts shortages, and challenges in getting approval for grid connections, he said.

“It’s been a rocky road for a lot of these projects, so it’s exciting to see them online,” O’Connell said.

Chart showing mix of planned new power plants in the US

Credit: Inside Climate News

Looking ahead to the rest of this year and through 2030, the country has 254,126 megawatts of planned power plants, according to EIA. (To appear on this list, a project must meet three of four benchmarks: land acquisition, permits obtained, financing received, and a contract completed for selling electricity.)

Solar is the leader with 120,269 megawatts, followed by batteries, with 65,051 megawatts, and natural gas, with 35,081 megawatts.

Vast majority of new US power plants generate solar or wind power Read More »

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Peacock feathers can emit laser beams

biolasers, biomimicry, lasers, photonic crystals, photonics, Physics, Science, structural color / /

Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it’s the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don’t come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) in butterfly wings, for example, are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

In the case of peacock feathers, it’s the regular, periodic nanostructures of the barbules—fiber-like components composed of ordered melanin rods coated in keratin—that produce the iridescent colors. Different colors correspond to different spacing of the barbules.

Both are naturally occurring examples of what physicists call photonic crystals. Also known as photonic bandgap materials, photonic crystals are “tunable,” which means they are precisely ordered in such a way as to block certain wavelengths of light while letting others through. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength. (In fact, the rainbow weevil can control both the size of its scales and how much chitin is used to fine-tune those colors as needed.)

Even better (from an applications standpoint), the perception of color doesn’t depend on the viewing angle. And the scales are not just for aesthetics; they help shield the insect from the elements. There are several types of manmade photonic crystals, but gaining a better and more detailed understanding of how these structures grow in nature could help scientists design new materials with similar qualities, such as iridescent windows, self-cleaning surfaces for cars and buildings, or even waterproof textiles. Paper currency could incorporate encrypted iridescent patterns to foil counterfeiters.

Peacock feathers can emit laser beams Read More »

epa-plans-to-ignore-science,-stop-regulating-greenhouse-gases

EPA plans to ignore science, stop regulating greenhouse gases

clean air act, CO2, EPA, greenhouse gases, Policy, Science, syndication / /

It derives from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that named greenhouse gases as “air pollutants,” giving the EPA the mandate to regulate them under the Clean Air Act.

Critics of the rule say that the Clean Air Act was fashioned to manage localized emissions, not those responsible for global climate change.

A rollback would automatically weaken the greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and heavy-duty vehicles. Manufacturers such as Daimler and Volvo Cars have previously opposed the EPA’s efforts to tighten emission standards, while organized labour groups such as the American Trucking Association said they “put the trucking industry on a path to economic ruin.”

However, Katherine García, director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All Campaign, said that the ruling would be “disastrous for curbing toxic truck pollution, especially in frontline communities disproportionately burdened by diesel exhaust.”

Energy experts said the move could also stall progress on developing clean energy sources such as nuclear power.

“Bipartisan support for nuclear largely rests on the fact that it doesn’t have carbon emissions,” said Ken Irvin, a partner in Sidley Austin’s global energy and infrastructure practice. “If carbon stops being considered to endanger human welfare, that might take away momentum from nuclear.”

The proposed rule from the EPA will go through a public comment period and inter-agency review. It is likely to face legal challenges from environmental activists.

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the-case-for-memes-as-a-new-form-of-comics

The case for memes as a new form of comics

culture, Internet memes, memes, Science, sequential art / /

Both comics and memes rely on the same interplay of visual and verbal elements for their humor.

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

It’s undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

“One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics,” Abate told Ars. “I’ve published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I’ve been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now.”

Her most recent book is 2024’s Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. “I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too,” Abate said. “It occurred to me one day that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I’m sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there’s more continuity than there is difference.”

So Abate decided to approach the question more systematically. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 popular science book, The Selfish Gene, well before the advent of the Internet age. For Dawkins, it described a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of information”: ideas, catchphrases, catchy tunes, fashions, even arch building.

distraught woman pointing a finger and yelling, facing an image of a confused cat in front of a salad

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

In a 21st century context, “meme” refers to a piece of online content that spikes in popularity and gets passed from user to user, i.e., going viral. These can be single images remixed with tailored text, such as “Distracted Boyfriend,” “This Is Fine,” or “Batman Slapping Robin.” Or they can feature multiple panels, like “American Chopper.” Furthermore, “Memes can also be a gesture, they can be an activity, they can be a video like the Wednesday dance or the ice bucket challenge,” said Abate. “It’s become such a part of our lexicon that it’s hard to imagine a world without memes at this point.”

For Abate, Internet memes are clearly related to sequential art like comics, representing a new stage of evolution in the genre. In both cases, the visual and verbal elements work in tandem to produce the humor.

Granted, comic artists usually create both the image and the text, whereas memes adapt preexisting visuals with new text. Some might consider this poaching, but Abate points out that cartoonists like Charles Schulz have long used stencil templates (a static prefabricated element) to replicate images, a practice that is also used effectively in, say, Dinosaur Comics. And meme humor depends on people connecting the image to its origin rather than obscuring it. She compares the practice to sampling in music; the end result is still an original piece of art.

In fact, The New Yorker’s hugely popular cartoon caption contest—in which the magazine prints a single-panel drawing with no speech balloons or dialogue boxes and asks readers to supply their own verbal jokes—is basically a meme generator. “It’s seen more as a highbrow thing, crowdsourcing everybody’s wit,” said Abate. “But [the magazine supplies] the template image and then everybody puts in their own text or captions. They’re making memes. If they only published the winner, folks would be disappointed because the fun is seeing all the clever, funny things that people come up with.”

Memes both mirror and modify the comic genre. For instance, the online nature of memes can affect formatting. If there are multiple panels, those panels are usually arranged vertically rather than horizontally since memes are typically read by scrolling down one’s phone—like the “American Chopper” meme:

American Chopper meme with each frame representing a stage in the debate

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

Per Abate, this has the added advantage of forcing the reader to pause briefly to consider the argument and counter-argument, emphasizing that it’s an actual debate rather than two men simply yelling at one another. “If the panels were arranged horizontally and the guys were side by side in each other’s face, installments of ‘American Chopper’ would come across very differently,” she said.

A pad with infinite sheets

Scott McCloud is widely considered the leading theorist when it comes to the art of comics, and his hugely influential 2000 book, Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form, explores the boundless potential for digital comics, freed from the constraints of a printed page. He calls this aspect the “infinite canvas,” because cartoonists can now create works of any size or shape, even as tall as a mountain. Memes have endless possibilities of a different kind, per Abate.

“[McCloud] thinks of it very expansively: a single panel could be the size of a city block,” said Abate. “You could never do that with a book because how could you print the book? How could you hold the book? How could you read the book? How could you download the book on your Kindle? But when you’ve got a digital world, it could be a city block and you can explore it with your mouse and your cursor and your track pad and, oh, all the possibilities for storytelling and for the medium that will open up with this infinite canvas. There have been many places and titles where this has played out with digital comics.

“Obviously with a meme, they’re not the size of a city block,” she continued. “So it occurred to me that they are infinite, but almost like you’re peeling sheets off a pad and the pad just has an endless number of sheets. You can just keep redoing it, redo, redo, redo. That’s memes. They get revised and repurposed and re-imagined and redone and recirculated over and over and over again. The template gets used inexhaustibly, which is what makes them fun, what makes them go viral.”

comic frame showing batman slapping robin

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

Just what makes a good meme image? Abate has some thoughts about that, too. “It has to be not just the image, but the ability for the image to be paired with a caption, a text,” she said. “It has to lend itself to some kind of verbal element as well. And it also has to have some elasticity of being specific enough that it’s recognizable, but also being malleable enough that it can be adapted to different forms.”

In other words, a really good meme must be generalizable if it is to last longer than a few weeks. The recent kiss-cam incident at a Coldplay concert is a case in point. When a married tech CEO was caught embracing his company’s “chief people officer,” they quickly realized they were on the Jumbotron, panicked, and hid their faces—which only made it worse. The moment went viral and spawned myriad memes. Even the Phillies mascots got into the spirit, re-enacting the moment at a recent baseball game. But that particular meme might not have long-term staying power.

“It became a meme very quickly and went viral very fast,” said Abate. “I may be proved wrong, but I don’t think the Coldplay moment will be a meme that will be around a year from now. It’s commenting on a particular incident in the culture, and then the clock will tick, and folks will move on. Whereas something like ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ or ‘This is Fine’ has more staying power because it’s not tied to a particular incident or a particular scandal but can be applied to all kinds of political topics, pop culture events, and cultural experiences.”

black man stroking his chin, mouth partly open in surprise

Credit: Sean Carroll via imgflp

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

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.

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Trump promised a drilling boom, but US energy industry hasn’t been interested

Energy, fossil fuels, Science, syndication / /

Exec: “Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry.”

“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.

Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.

The White House is discovering, perhaps the hard way, that energy markets aren’t easily managed from the Oval Office—even as it moves to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, offers up more public lands for drilling at reduced royalty rates, and axes Biden-era incentives for wind and solar.

“The industry is going to do what the industry is going to do,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, director for public lands at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank.

That’s because the price of oil, the world’s most-traded commodity, is more responsive to global demand and supply dynamics than to domestic policy and posturing.

The market is flush with supplies at the moment, as the Saudi Arabia-led cartel of oil-producing nations known as OPEC+ allows more barrels to flow while China, the world’s top oil consumer, curbs its consumption. Within the US, a boom in energy demand driven by rapid electrification and AI-serving data centers is boosting power costs for homes and businesses, yet fossil fuel producers are not rushing to ramp up drilling.

There is one key indicator of drilling levels that the industry has watched closely for more than 80 years: a weekly census of active oil and gas rigs published by Baker Hughes. When Trump came into office January 20, the US rig count was 580. Last week, the most recent figure, it was down to 542—hovering just above a four-year low reached earlier in the month.

The most glaring factor behind this stagnant rig count is the current level of crude oil prices. Take the US benchmark grade: West Texas Intermediate crude. Its prices were near $66 a barrel on July 28, after hitting a four-year low of $62 in May. The break-even level for drilling new wells is somewhere close to $60 per barrel, according to oil and gas experts.

That’s before you account for the fallout of elevated tariffs on steel and other imports for the many companies that get their pipes and drilling equipment from overseas, said Robert Rapier, editor-in-chief of Shale Magazine, who has two decades of experience as a chemical engineer.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ quarterly survey of over 130 oil and gas producers based in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, conducted in June, suggests the industry’s outlook is pessimistic. Nearly half of the 38 firms that responded to this question saw their firms drilling fewer wells this year than they had earlier expected.

Survey participants could also submit comments. One executive from an exploration and production (E&P) company said, “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and DC rhetoric could have been for US E&P companies.” Another executive said, “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”

Roughly one in three survey respondents chalked up the expectations for fewer wells to higher tariffs on steel imports. And three in four said tariffs raised the cost of drilling and completing new wells.

“They’re getting more places to drill and they’re getting some lower royalties, but they’re also getting these tariffs that they don’t want,” Rapier said. “And the bottom line is their profits are going to suffer.”

Earlier this month, ExxonMobil estimated that its profit in the April-June quarter will be roughly $1.5 billion lower than in the previous three months because of weaker oil and gas prices. And over in Europe, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies issued similar warnings to investors about hits to their respective profits.

These warnings come even as Trump has installed friendly faces to regulate the oil and gas sector, including at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior, the latter of which manages federal lands and is gearing up to auction more oil and gas leases on those lands.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for a window of opportunity to make investments. But there’s also a lot of caution about wanting to make sure that if there’s regulatory reforms, they’re going to stick,” said Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, which produces analyses for energy companies and investors.

The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains provisions requiring four onshore and two offshore lease sales every year, lowering the minimum royalty rate to 12.5 percent from 16.67 percent, and bringing back speculative leasing—when lands that don’t invite enough bids are leased for less money—that was stopped in 2022.

“Pro-energy policies play a critical role in strengthening domestic production,” said a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil and gas industry group. “The new tax legislation unlocks opportunities for safe, responsible development in critical resource basins to deliver the affordable, reliable fuel Americans rely on.”

Because about half of the federal royalties end up with the states and localities where the drilling occurs, “budgets in these oil and gas communities are going to be hit hard,” Rowland-Shea of American Progress said. Meanwhile, she said, drilling on public lands can pollute the air, raise noise levels, cause spills or leaks, and restrict movement for both people and wildlife.

Earlier this year, Congress killed an EPA rule finalized in November that would have charged oil and gas companies for flaring excess methane from their operations.

“Folks in the Trump camp have long said that the Biden administration was killing drilling by enforcing these regulations on speculative leasing and reining in methane pollution,” said Rowland-Shea. “And yet under Biden, we saw the highest production of oil and gas in history.”

In fact, the top three fossil fuel producers collectively earned less during Trump’s first term than they did in either of President Barack Obama’s terms or under President Joe Biden. “It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry,” said Rapier.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Trump administration’s actions won’t have long-lasting climate implications. Even though six months may be a significant amount of time in political accounting, investment decisions in the energy sector are made over longer horizons, ClearView’s Book said. As long as the planned lease sales take place, oil companies can snap up and sit on public lands until they see more favorable conditions for drilling.

It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry.

What could pad the demand for oil and gas is how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will withdraw or dilute the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives and subsidies for renewable energy sources. “With the kneecapping of wind and solar, that’s going to put a lot more pressure on fossil fuels to fill that gap,” Rowland-Shea said.

However, the economics of solar and wind are increasingly too attractive to ignore. With electricity demand exceeding expectations, Book said, “any president looking ahead at end-user prices and power supply might revisit or take a flexible position if they find themselves facing shortage.”

A recent United Nations report found that “solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive—and the fastest—option for new electricity generation.” That is why Texas, deemed the oil capital of the world, produces more wind power than any other state and also led the nation in new solar capacity in the last two years.

Renewables like wind and solar, said Rowland-Shea, are “a truly abundant and American source of energy.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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