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why-incels-take-the-“blackpill”—and-why-we-should-care

Why incels take the “Blackpill”—and why we should care

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“Don’t work for Soyciety”

A growing number of incels are NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). That should concern us all.

The Netlix series Adolescence explores the roots of misogynistic subcultures. Credit: Netflix

The online incel (“involuntary celibate”) subculture is mostly known for its extreme rhetoric, primarily against women, sometimes erupting into violence. But a growing number of self-identified incels are using their ideology as an excuse for not working or studying. This could constitute a kind of coping mechanism to make sense of their failures—not just in romantic relationships but also in education and employment, according to a paper published in the journal Gender, Work, & Organization.

Contrary to how it’s often portrayed, the “manosphere,” as it is often called, is not a monolith. Those who embrace the “Redpill” ideology, for example, might insist that women control the “sexual marketplace” and are only interested in ultramasculine “Chads.” They champion self-improvement as a means to make themselves more masculine and successful, and hence (they believe) more attractive to women—or at least better able to manipulate women.

By contrast, the “Blackpilled” incel contingent is generally more nihilistic. These individuals reject the Redpill notion of alpha-male masculinity and the accompanying focus on self-improvement. They believe that dating and social success are entirely determined by one’s looks and/or genetics. Since there is nothing they can do to improve their chances with women or their lot in life, why even bother?

“People have a tendency to lump all these different groups together as the manosphere,” co-author AnnaRose Beckett-Herbert of McGill University told Ars. “One critique I have of the recent Netflix show Adolescence—which was well done overall—is they lump incels in with figures like Andrew Tate, as though it’s all interchangeable. There’s areas of overlap, like extreme misogyny, but there are really important distinctions. We have to be careful to make those distinctions because the kind of intervention or prevention efforts that we might direct towards the Redpill community versus the Blackpill community might be very different.”

Incels constitute a fairly small fraction of the manosphere, but the vast majority of incels appear to embrace the Blackpill ideology, per Beckett-Herbert. That nihilistic attitude can extend to any kind of participation in what incels term “Soyciety”—including educational attainment and employment. When that happens, such individuals are best described by the acronym NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training).

“It’s not that we have large swaths of young men that are falling into this rabbit hole,” said Beckett-Herbert. “Their ideology is pretty fringe, but we’re seeing the community grow, and we’re seeing the ideology spread. It used to be contained to romantic relationships and sex. Now we’re seeing this broader disengagement from society as a whole. We should all be concerned about that trend.”

The NEET trend is also tied to the broader cultural discourse on how boys and young men are struggling in contemporary society. While prior studies tended to focus on the misogynistic rhetoric and propensity for violence among incels, “I thought that the unemployment lens was interesting because it’s indicative of larger problems,” said Beckett-Herbert. “It’s important to remember that it’s not zero-sum. We can care about the well-being of women and girls and also acknowledge that young men are struggling, too. Those don’t have to be at odds.”

“Lie down and rot”

Beckett-Herbert and her advisor/co-author, McGill University sociologist Eran Shor, chose the incels.is platform as a data source for their study due to its ease of public access and relatively high traffic, with nearly 20,000 members. The pair used Python code to scrape 100 pages, amounting to around 10,000 discussion threads between October and December 2022. A pilot study revealed 10 keywords that appeared most frequently in those threads: “study,” “school,” “NEET,” “job,” “work,” “money,” “career,” “wage,” “employ,” and “rot.” (“They use the phrase ‘lie down and rot’ a lot,” said Beckett-Herbert.)

This allowed Beckett-Herbert and Shor to narrow their sample down to 516 threads with titles containing those keywords. They randomly selected a subset of 171 discussion threads for further study. That analysis yielded four main themes that dominated the discussion threads: political/ideological arguments about being NEET; boundary policing; perceived discrimination; and bullying and marginalization.

Roughly one-quarter of the total comments consisted of political or ideological arguments promoting being NEET, with most commenters advocating minimizing one’s contributions to society as much as possible. They suggested going on welfare, for instance, to “take back” from society, or declared they should be exempt from paying any taxes, as “compensation for our suffering.” About 25 percent—a vocal minority—pushed back on glorifying the NEET lifestyle and offered concrete suggestions for self-improvement. (“Go outside and try at least,” one user commented.)

Such pushback often led to boundary policing. Those who do pursue jobs or education run the risk of being dubbed “fakecels” and becoming alienated from the rest of the incel community. (“Don’t work for a society that hates you,” one user commented.) “There’s a lot of social psychological research on groupthink and group polarization that is relevant here,” said Beckett-Herbert. “A lot of these young men may not have friends in their real life. This community is often their one source of social connection. So the incel ideology becomes core to their identity: ‘I’m part of this community, and we don’t work. We are subhumans.'”

There were also frequent laments about being discriminated against for not being attractive (“lookism”), both romantically and professionally, as well as deep resentment of women’s increased presence in the workplace, deemed a threat to men’s own success. “They love to cherry-pick all these findings from psychology research [to support their position],” said Beckett-Herbert. For instance, “There is evidence that men who are short or not conventionally attractive are discriminated against in hiring. But there’s also a lot of evidence suggesting that this actually affects women more. Women who are overweight face a greater bias against them in hiring than men do, for example.”

Beckett-Herbert and Shor also found that about 15 percent of the comments in their sample concerned users’ experiences being harassed or bullied (usually by other men), their mental health challenges (anxiety, depression), and feeling estranged or ostracized at school or work—experiences that cemented their reluctance to work or engage in education or vocational training.

Many of these users also mentioned being autistic, in keeping with prior research showing a relatively high share of people with autism in incel communities. The authors were careful to clarify, however, that most people with autism “are not violent or hateful, nor do they identify as incels or hold explicitly misogynistic views,” they wrote. “Rather, autism, when combined with other mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and hopelessness, may make young men more vulnerable to incel ideologies.”

There are always caveats. In this case, the study was limited to a single incel forum, which might not be broadly representative of similar discussions on other platforms. And there could be a bit of selection bias at play. Not every incel member may actively participate in discussion threads (lurkers) and non-NEET incels might be less likely to do so either because they have less free time or don’t wish to be dismissed as “fakecels.”However, Beckett-Herbert and Shor note that their findings are consistent with previous studies that suggest there are a disproportionately large number of NEETs within the incel community.

A pound of prevention

Is effective intervention even possible for members of the incel community, given their online echo chamber? Beckett-Herbert acknowledges that it is very difficult to break through to such people. “De-radicalization is a noble, worthy line of research,” she said. “But the existing evidence from that field of study suggests that prevention is easier and more effective than trying to pull these people out once they’re already in.” Potential strategies might include fostering better digital and media literacy, i.e., teaching kids to be cognizant of the content they’re consuming online. Exposure time is another key issue.

“A lot of these young people don’t have healthy outlets that are not in the digital world,” said Beckett-Herbert “They come home from school and spend hours and hours online. They’re lonely and isolated from real-world communities and structures. Some of these harmful ideologies might be downstream of these larger root causes. How can we help boys do better in school, feel better prepared for the labor market? How can we help them make more friends? How can we get them involved in real-world activities that will diminish their time spent online? I think that that can go a long way. Just condemning them or banning their spaces—that’s not a good long-term solution.”

While there are multiple well-publicized instances of self-identified incels committing violent acts—most notably Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in 2014—Beckett-Herbert emphasizes not losing sight of incels’ fundamental humanity. “We focus a lot on the misogyny, the potential for violence against women, and that is so important,” she said. “You will not hear me saying we should not focus on that. But we also should note that statistically, an incel is much more likely to commit suicide or be violent towards themselves than they are toward someone else. You can both condemn their ideology and find it abhorrent and also remember that we need to have empathy for these people.”

Many people—women especially—might find that a tall order, and Beckett-Herbert understands that reluctance. “I do understand people’s hesitancy to empathize with them, because it feels like you’re giving credence to their rhetoric,” she said. “But at the end of the day, they are human, and a lot of them are really struggling, marginalized people coming from pretty sad backgrounds. When you peruse their online world, it’s the most horrifying, angering misogyny right next to some of the saddest mental health, suicidal, low self-esteem stuff you’ve ever seen. I think humanizing them and having empathy is going to be foundational to any intervention efforts to reintegrate them. But it’s something I wrestle with a lot.”

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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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Testing a robot that could drill into Europa and Enceladus

astronomy, Enceladus, Europa, exobiology, icy moon, planetary science, Science, Space / /

We don’t currently have a mission to put it on, but NASA is making sure it’s ready.

Geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus Credit: NASA

Europa and Enceladus are two ocean moons that scientists have concluded have liquid water oceans underneath their outer icy shells. The Europa Clipper mission should reach Europa around April of 2030. If it collects data hinting at the moon’s potential habitability, robotic lander missions could be the only way to confirm if there’s really life in there or not.

To make these lander missions happen, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team has been working on a robot that could handle the search for life and already tested it on the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. “At this point this is a pretty mature concept,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at JPL who led this effort.

Into the unknown

There are only a few things we know for sure about conditions on the surface of Europa, and nearly all of them don’t bode well for lander missions. First, Europa is exposed to very harsh radiation, which is a problem for electronics. The window of visibility—when a potential robotic lander could contact Earth—lasts less than half of the 85 hours it takes for the moon to complete its day-night cycle due to the Europa-Jupiter orbit. So, for more than half the mission, the robot would need to fend for itself, with no human ground teams to get it out of trouble. The lander would also need to run on non-rechargeable batteries, because the vast distance to the Sun would make solar panels prohibitively massive.

And that’s just the beginning. Unlike on Mars, we don’t have any permanent orbiters around Europa that could provide a communication infrastructure, and we don’t have high-resolution imagery of the surface, which would make the landing particularly tricky. “We don’t know what Europa’s surface looks like at the centimeter to meter scale. Even with the Europa Clipper imagery, the highest resolution will be about half a meter per pixel across a few select regions,” Hand explains.

Because Europa has an extremely thin atmosphere that doesn’t provide any insulation, the temperatures on top of its ice shell are estimated to vary between minus-160° Celsius during the daytime maximum and minus-220° C during the night, which means the ice the lander would be there to sample is most likely hard as concrete. Hand’s team, building their robot, had to figure out a design that could deal with all these issues.

The work on the robotic system for the Europa lander mission began more than 10 years ago. Back then, the 2013–2022 decadal strategy for planetary science cited the Europa Clipper as the second-highest priority large-scale planetary mission, so a lander seemed like a natural follow-up.

Autonomy and ice drilling

The robot developed by Hand’s team has legs that enable it to stabilize itself on various types of surfaces, from rock-hard ice to loose, soft snow. To orient itself in the environment, it uses a stereoscopic camera with an LED light source for illumination hooked to computer-vision algorithms—a system similar to the one currently used by the Perseverance rover on Mars. “Stereoscopic cameras can triangulate points in an image and build a digital surface topography model,” explains Joseph Bowkett, a JPL researcher and engineer who worked on the robot’s design.

The team built an entirely new robotic arm with seven degrees of freedom. Force torque sensors installed in most of its joints act a bit like a nervous system, informing the robot when key components sustain excessive loads to prevent it from damaging the arm or the drill. “As we press down on the surface [and] conduct drilling and sampling, we can measure the forces and react accordingly,” Bowkett says. The finishing touch was the ICEPICK, a drilling and sampling tool the robot uses to excavate samples from the ice up to 20 centimeters deep.

Because of long periods the lander would need operate without any human supervision, the team also gave it a wide range of autonomous systems, which operate at two different levels. High-level autonomy is responsible for scheduling and prioritizing tasks within a limited energy budget. The robot can drill into a sampling site, analyze samples with onboard instruments, and decide whether it makes sense to keep drilling at the same spot or choose a different sampling site. The high-level system is also tasked with choosing the most important results for downlink back to Earth.

Low-level autonomy breaks all these high-level tasks down into step-by-step decisions on how to operate the drill and how to move the arm in the safest and most energy-efficient way.

The robot was tested in simulation software first, then indoors at JPL’s facilities, and finally at the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska, where it was lowered from a helicopter that acted as a proxy for a landing vehicle. It was tested at three different sites, ranked from the easiest to the most challenging. It completed all the baseline activities as well as all of the extras. The latter included a task like drilling 27 centimeters deep into ice at the most difficult site, where it was awkwardly positioned on an eight-to-12-degree slope. The robot passed all the tests with flying colors.

And then it got shelved.

Switching the ocean worlds

Hand’s team put their Europa landing robot through the Alaskan field test campaign between July and August 2022. But when the new decadal strategy for planetary science came out in 2023, it turned out that the Europa lander was not among the missions selected. The National Academies committee responsible for formulating these decadal strategies did not recommend giving it a go, mainly because they believed harsh radiation in the Jovian system would make detecting biosignatures “challenging” for a lander.

An Enceladus lander, on the other hand, remained firmly on the table. “I was also on the team developing EELS, a robot intended for a potential Enceladus mission, so thankfully I can speak about both. The radiation challenges are indeed far greater for Europa,” Bowkett says.

Another argument for changing our go-to ocean world is that water plumes containing salts along with carbon- and nitrogen-bearing molecules have already been observed on Enceladus, which means there is a slight chance biosignatures could be detected by a flyby mission. The surface of Enceladus, according to the decadal strategy document, should be capable of preserving biogenic evidence for a long time and seems more conducive to a lander mission. “Luckily, many of the lessons on how to conduct autonomous sampling on Europa, we believe, will transfer to Enceladus, with the benefit of a less damaging radiation environment,” Bowkett told Ars.

The dream of a Europa landing is not completely dead, though. “I would love to get into the Europa’s ocean with a submersible and further down to the seafloor. I would love for that to happen,” Hand says. “But technologically it’s quite a big leap, and you always have to balance your dream missions with the number of technological miracles that need to be solved to make these missions possible.”

Science Robotics, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adi5582

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Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions

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“There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans.”

In this long exposure photograph, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket pierces a cloud deck over Florida’s Space Coast on its inaugural flight January 16. Credit: Blue Origin

Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together.

Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos’ space company in December 2023. He started his career as a computer scientist at Apple, took a stint at a venture capital firm, and joined Amazon in 2010, where he managed development of consumer devices like Alexa, Kindle, and the Fire TV.

“I had no thoughts of ever running a space company,” Limp said Thursday at a space conference in Washington, DC. “I’ve done consumer electronics my whole life. Started at Apple and did a bunch of other things, and so when I decided to retire from Amazon, I was looking for something that I could give back a little bit, be a little bit more philanthropic in the sort of second half of my career. I didn’t want to stop working, just wanted to do something different. And about that same time, Jeff was looking for a CEO.”

While he’s still a relative newcomer to the space business, Limp’s views align with those of many policy wonks and industry leaders who have the ears of senior officials in the Trump administration, including Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee to become the next NASA administrator. Limp’s long tenure at Amazon and his selection as Blue Origin’s new CEO demonstrate that he also has the trust of Bezos, who was dissatisfied with his company’s slow progress in spaceflight.

“I think Jeff convinced me, and he’s very persuasive, that Blue didn’t need another rocket scientist,” Limp said. “We have thousands of the world’s best rocket scientists. What we needed was a little bit more decisiveness, a little bit more ability to think about: How do we manufacture at scale? And those are things I’ve done in the past, and so I’ve never looked back.”

David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, speaks during the 2025 Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit at George Washington University in Washington, DC, on May 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images

Leave it to us

In remarks Thursday at the Humans to the Moon & Mars Summit, Limp advocated for commercial companies, like his own, taking a larger role in developing the transportation and infrastructure to meet lofty national objectives established by government leaders.

In some ways, NASA has long been moving in this direction, beginning with initiatives ceding most launch services to private industry in the 1990s. More recently, NASA has turned to commercial companies for crew and cargo deliveries to the International Space Station and cargo and human-rated Moon landers.

However, NASA, with the backing of key congressional leaders, has held an iron grip on having its own heavy-lift launcher and crew capsule to ferry astronauts between Earth and destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. Now, these vehicles—the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft—may be canceled if Congress agrees with Trump’s proposed NASA budget.

Commercial rockets close to matching or exceeding the Space Launch System’s lift capability are available for purchase or likely will be soon. These include SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. Both are already key elements of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land US astronauts on the Moon as a stepping stone toward human expeditions to Mars.

But NASA still plans to use its government-owned Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts out to the Moon, where they will rendezvous with a Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander to fly to and from the lunar surface.

SLS and Orion are expensive vehicles, costing more than $4 billion per launch for the initial set of four Artemis missions, according to a report by NASA’s inspector general. While commercial companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build elements of SLS and Orion, NASA acts as the prime integrator. The agency signed cost-plus contracts with the companies building SLS and Orion, meaning the government is on the hook for cost overruns. And there have been many.

Artist’s concept of Blue Ring, a propulsive spacecraft platform Blue Origin says it is developing to carry payloads to different orbits, and possibly all the way to Mars, at lower costs than feasible today. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA’s robotic science probes are also getting more expensive, even when accounting for inflation. Given the way NASA procures science probes, it would cost NASA more today to send an orbiter to Mars than it did for a similarly sized spacecraft a quarter-century ago.

This has to change in order for NASA and private companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX to make their ambitions a reality, Limp said Thursday.

“I think commercial folks can worry about the infrastructure,” he said. “We can do the launch. We can build the satellite buses that can get you to Mars much more frequently, that don’t cost billions of dollars. We can take a zero, and over time, maybe two zeros off of that. And if the governments around the world leave that to the commercial side, then there are a lot more resources that are freed up for the science side, for the national prestige side, and those types of things.”

The bottom line

Limp followed these comments with a dose of realism you don’t often hear from space industry executives. While there’s a growing list of commercially viable markets in space (things like Starlink and satellite servicing wouldn’t have been money-makers 20 years ago), the market for human spaceflight still requires some level of government commitment.

“I think the thing about bringing commercial aspects to exploration, to science, to the Moon, to Mars, is that we have to see a business prospect for it,” Limp said. “We have to turn it into a business, and that benefits American taxpayers because we will use that capital as efficiently as we can to get to the Moon, to get to Mars in a safe way, but in a way that’s the most efficient.

“We’re committed to that, no matter what the architecture looks like, but it does take the US government and international governments to have the motivation to do it,” he continued. “There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans. There are lots of commercial reasons to put robotics on the Moon and other types of things. So, we do need to have conviction that the Moon is important and Mars is important as well.”

Trump and Musk, an ally and advisor to the president, rekindled the question of Moon or Mars in a series of remarks during the early weeks of the new Trump administration. The Artemis Moon program began during the first Trump administration, with the goal of returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972. NASA would establish a sustained presence at the Moon, using our nearest planetary body as a proving ground for the next destination for humans in Solar System exploration: Mars.

Space industry rivals Jeff Bezos, second from left, and Elon Musk, second from right, inside the US Capitol for President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

SpaceX’s Starship, while capable of one day landing on the Moon, was designed for long-duration cruises to Mars. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is tailored for lunar landings.

“As an American, I don’t want another Sputnik moment,” Limp said. “From my standpoint, getting boots on the Moon and setting the groundwork for permanence on the Moon is of national importance and urgency. Rest assured, Blue will do everything in its power to try to make that happen, but in a cost-effective way.”

NASA, please don’t leave us

Since retaking office in January, Trump has mentioned human missions to Mars multiple times, but not the Moon. Isaacman, who may be confirmed as NASA administrator by the Senate as soon as next week, told lawmakers in April that the agency should pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars simultaneously. The details of how that might work haven’t been released but could come out in the White House’s detailed budget proposal for fiscal-year 2026.

A blueprint of Trump’s spending proposal released May 2 includes a 25 percent cut to NASA’s overall budget, but the plan would provide additional money for human space exploration at the Moon and Mars. “The budget funds a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” the White House budget office wrote.

This part of the budget request is not controversial for industry leaders like Limp. On the other hand, the budget blueprint proposes slashing NASA’s space science budget by nearly $2.3 billion, Earth science by almost $1.2 billion, and space technology by $531 million.

While Limp didn’t directly address these budget proposals, these parts of NASA are largely focused on research projects that lack a commercial business case. Who else but a government space agency, or perhaps an especially generous type of philanthropic multi-billionaire, would pay to send a probe to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa? Or a robot to zip by Pluto? Or how about a mission like Landsat, which documents everything from water resources to farms and urban sprawl and makes its data freely available to anyone with an Internet connection?

Most experts agree there are better ways to do these things. Reusable rockets, mass-produced satellite platforms, and improved contracting practices can bring down the costs of these missions. Bezos’ long-term goal for Blue Origin, which is to move all polluting factories off the Earth and into space, will be easier to achieve with government support, not just funding, Limp said.

“Getting up there, building factories on the Moon is a great step, and the government can really help with research dollars around that,” he said. “But it still does need the labs. The science missions need the JPLs [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] of the world. To make the human experience right, we need the Johnson Space Centers of the world to be able to kind of use that gold mine of institutional knowledge.

“I would say, and it might be a little provocative, let’s have those smart brains look on the forward-thinking types of things, the really edge of science, planning the really exotic missions, figuring out how to get to planetary bodies we haven’t gotten to before, and staying there,” Limp said.

Mark it down

For the first decade after Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, the company operated under the radar and seemed to move at a glacial pace. It launched its first small rocket in 2006 to an altitude of less than 300 feet and reached space with the suborbital New Shepard booster in 2015. Blue Origin finally reached orbit in January of this year on the debut test flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. Meanwhile, Blue Origin inked a deal with United Launch Alliance to supply a version of its New Glenn main engine to power that company’s Vulcan rocket.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lander, seen in the center, is taller than NASA’s Apollo lunar lander, currently the largest spacecraft to have landed on the Moon. Blue Moon MK2 is even larger, but all three landers are dwarfed in size by SpaceX’s Starship, NASA’s other Artemis lunar lander. Credit: Blue Origin

The next big mission for Blue Origin will be the first flight of its Blue Moon lander. The first version of Blue Moon, called MK1, will launch on a New Glenn rocket later this year and attempt to become the largest spacecraft to ever land on the Moon. This demonstration, without anyone onboard, is fully funded by Blue Origin, Limp said.

A future human-rated version, called MK2, is under development with the assistance of NASA. It will be larger and will require refueling to reach the lunar surface. Blue Moon MK1 can make a landing on one tank.

These are tangible achievements that would be the envy of any space industry startup not named SpaceX. But Musk’s rocket company left Blue Origin in the dust as it broke launch industry records repeatedly and began delivering NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020. My colleague, Eric Berger, wrote a story in January describing Blue Origin’s culture. For much of its existence, one former employee said, Blue Origin had “zero incentive” to operate like SpaceX.

To ensure he would be in lock-step with his boss, Limp felt he had to ask a question that was on the minds of many industry insiders. He got the answer he wanted.

“The only question I really asked Jeff when I was talking about taking this job was, ‘What do you want Blue to be? Is it a hobby, or is it a business?'” Limp said. “And he had the right answer, which is, it’s a business, because I don’t know how to run a hobby, and I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

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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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Your next gaming dice could be shaped like a dragon or armadillo

3D printing, computational science, Computer simulations, geometry, probability, Science, shape analysis / /

“Let it roll, baby, roll”

Statistically, “the real behavior of a rolling object is largely a function of its geometry.”

What if you could make your dice any shape at all—not just boxes and polyhedra, but dragons or other game-relevant shapes?

Most people are familiar with conventional cubical six-sided dice, but there are also polyhedral versions like the 20-sided dice used in ancient Rome and to play Dungeons and Dragons. Researchers have figured out how to design dice with even more exotic shapes, like a kitten, a dragon, or an armadillo. And they are “fair” dice: Experiments with 3D-printed versions produced results that closely matched predicted random outcomes, according to a forthcoming paper currently in press at the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.

Dice are examples of so-called “rigid bodies,” broadly defined as shapes that move as one solid piece, with no need for bending or twisting. Such shapes “are of scientific interest because they model so many of the phenomena we encounter in our daily lives: anything from the way your dishes roll around on the floor when you drop them, to how the gears in your watch push on each other, to how a satellite tumbles around under the pull of gravity,” co-author Keenan Crane of Carnegie-Mellon University told Ars. “So there’s an intense focus on developing computational methods for understanding and predicting how rigid bodies are going to behave.”

Crane and his co-authors—including lead author and CMU graduate student Hossein Baktash, as well as co-authors from Nvidia Research and Adobe Research—wanted to explore where and how a rigid body will land when tossed. They chose dice as the best (and most fun) context in which to explore that question.

“But it’s also helpful to understand, for instance, if you load up a 3D model on your computer, how should it be displayed on screen—which direction is ‘up’?” said Crane. “Or if you drop a rigid object in the ocean, can you design it so that it lands with the proper orientation, with high probability?”

Conducting trial throws of each of seven unusually shaped dice

Conducting trial throws of each of seven unusually shaped dice. Credit: Keenan Crane

The group began with the assumption that when it comes to the rest behavior of a rolling irregularly shaped rigid body—such as the pig-shaped “dice” from the commercial game Pass the Pigs—the effects of momentum would be negligible. They wanted to approach the problem from the perspective of analytical geometry rather than dynamical simulations, so they essentially mapped the corners, edges, and faces onto a sphere and simulated how gravity would act upon such objects as they fell and came to rest.

The ultimate objective was to estimate the probability distribution over the possible range of resting configurations using just geometry. They ran multiple computer simulations of seven weirdly shaped designs for dice and then created physical 3D-printed versions to test them experimentally, tossing each die between 100 and 1,000 times.

They tweaked each shape until the experimental resting positions were within 3 or 4 percent of the predicted probability outcomes. These designs included a single die simulating two rolling six-sided dice (D6+D6); two binomial dice simulating flipping two and three fair coins, respectively; and three versions of a single die with three equally likely outcomes, shaped like a kitten, an armadillo, and a dragon. They also analyzed a talus-shaped model, similar to the sheep’s knuckles or “astragali” used as dice in antiquity for gambling or divination. Baktash recalled playing with such objects as a child growing up in Iran.

“These irregular dice were in a way similar to the ones we’ve designed, in that they don’t have even probabilities—like 1/4, 1/4, 1/4, 1/4—but rather depend on the very particular shape of the knuckles,” said Crane. “People bet on different outcomes, using past experience to build up their intuition about which sides are most likely. Hossein’s tool can do this much more directly: By just looking at the shape, it can directly give you some pretty accurate probabilities. If we were able to time travel back and gamble in ancient Greece, we might be able to make a lot of money (in BC-adjusted dollar).”

The algorithm efficiently and robustly computed the probability of all resting configurations (in 3 ms) of the pig model from the popular game Pass the Pigs. Keenan Crane

So one day soon, gamers might be able to choose from a wide selection of exotically shaped dice for future play—and even 3D print their own designs. (You can already 3D print the team’s designs since Baktash posted the STL files.) The new tool might also prove useful for creating natural-looking arrangements of geometry or adjusting a design so that an object is better able to stand upright, akin to the “Daruma doll,” a traditional Japanese toy that is hollow and weighted at the bottom so that it always returns to an upright position when tilted over. “Our approach makes it possible to bake this property into the geometry of the shape itself,” said Crane.

As for more “serious” applications, Crane points to underwater construction, “where the low-momentum assumption is very realistic and it’s important for things to land in the proper orientation,” he said. “Alternatively, if you imagine each little grain of sand or soil is a rigid particle, the statistics of how they land might help understand things like how soil settles and compacts. The exciting thing about putting research like this out in the world is that, a few years later, other folks inevitably find use cases for it that we never could have imagined.”

There are some inevitable tradeoffs. Oklahoma State University mathematician Henry Segerman told New Scientist that the method isn’t “necessarily a silver-bullet solution to designing weird dice, because it ignores friction, bouncing, and other real-world momentum effects. It’s more like they are—very efficiently—predicting where a die ends up if you put it down with a random orientation on a non-slip surface in low gravity. It slowly falls over and rolls down to land, without slipping or bouncing.”

Crane and his co-authors acknowledge as much in their paper. “On the one hand, [critics] are absolutely correct that our model does not make perfect predictions from the perspective of idealized geometry and physics,” said Crane. “On the other hand, if your goal is to literally make dice for tabletop games, it’s perfectly reasonable to make these kinds of approximations.”

still of one of the STL files used to 3D print the dice.

You can 3D print these unusually shaped dice using the STL files. Credit: Hossein Baktash

That’s partly because of the nature of statistics. “If you flip a coin or roll a die only a few times, it can be very hard to tell whether it’s fair or not,” said Crane. “Suppose I roll a 6-sided die just once, and it comes up with a ‘5.’ Is it fair, or not? Impossible to say. Likewise, if I play Settlers of Catan, I might roll the dice only about 100 times in the whole game. Even if the dice are actually fair, the distribution of rolls I see throughout this short game might vary quite a bit from the idealized distribution—I might just happen to roll a lot more nines that game than usual. So, in a real game, there may not be a huge practical difference between using fair dice and dice that have a small bias. The signal-to-noise ratio is so low that the practical effect over a short game is pretty small.”

Then there is the human factor: Even assuming perfect dice, how people handle them is imperfect and unpredictable; even fair coins don’t yield 50/50 odds because of that. “There will always be some kind of ‘dice handling bias’ due to the way that people pick up, shake (or not shake!), and toss dice,” said Crane. “If you wanted to make dice that exhibit perfect statistics in practice, rather than just in theory, you might need to take an interdisciplinary approach that incorporated not just geometry and physics, but also ideas from psychology, design, and so on.”

“I think the reality is that if we wanted more perfect statistics, we would just ask a computer to generate a random number,” Crane concluded. “The reason people use dice for tabletop games is because it’s tactile and fun. I think Hossein’s approach does a great job of making dice rolling even more fun—while still remaining grounded on some solid mathematical principles.”

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.

Your next gaming dice could be shaped like a dragon or armadillo Read More »

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Enigmatic hominin species studied using 2 million-year-old proteins

ancient proteins, Biology, evolution, human evolution, mass spec, paleontology, proteins, Science / /

The absence of AMELY suggests that a sample is female, but it isn’t definitive. That’s both because it’s impossible to rule out some problem with identifying the protein in samples this old, and in part because some rare males (including at least one Neanderthal) carry deletions that eliminate the gene entirely.

Another key aspect is that some of the 425 amino acid locations differ between hominin species, and even individual members of Paranthropus. Thus, they can potentially serve as a diagnostic of the relationships between and within species and help address some of the confusion about how many species of Paranthropus there were and their relationship with other hominins. While it’s difficult to say too much with only four samples, the researchers found some suggestive evidence.

For example, they tested whether you might see the sort of amino acid variation found among these samples if they all belonged to the same species. This was done by randomly choosing four human genomes and examining whether they had a similar level of variation. They concluded that it was “plausible” that you’d see this level of variation among any four individuals that were chosen at random, but the population of modern humans is likely to be larger than that of Paranthropus, so the test wasn’t definitive.

Among the 425 different amino acids were 16 that had species-specific variations among hominins. Somewhat surprisingly, Paranthropus robustus is the most closely related species to our own genus, Homo, based on a tree built from these variations. Again, however, they conclude that there simply isn’t enough data available to feel confident in this conclusion.

But that should really be an “isn’t enough data yet.” We heard about this paper from regular Ars reader Enrico Cappellini, who happens to be its senior author and faculty at the University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute. And a quick look over his faculty profile indicates that developing the techniques used here is his major research focus, so hopefully we’ll be able to expand the data available on extinct hominin species with time. The challenge, as noted in the paper, is that the technique destroys a small part of the sample, and these samples are one-of-a-kind pieces of the collective history of all of humanity.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt9539  (About DOIs).

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China extends its reach into the Solar System with launch of asteroid mission

asteroids, china, launch, long march 3b, sample return, Science, solar system, Space, tianwen, tianwen 2 / /

Comet 311P/PanSTARRS was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013 with a set of six comet-like tails radiating from its main body. This object, also called P/2013 P5, is known as an active asteroid. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

Tianwen-2’s mothership, with 11 scientific instruments, will commence the second phase of its mission after dropping off the asteroid specimens at Earth. The probe’s next journey will bring it near an enigma in the asteroid belt, named 311P/PanSTARRS, in the mid-2030s. This object is one in a rare class of objects known as active asteroids or main-belt comets, small worlds that have tails and comas like comets but loiter in orbits most commonly associated with asteroids. Tianwen-2 will be the first mission to see such an object up close.

Stepping into the Solar System

Until the last few years, China’s space program has primarily centered on the Moon as a destination for scientific exploration. The Moon remains the main target for China’s ambitions in space, with the goal of accomplishing a human lunar landing by 2030. But the country is looking farther afield, too.

With the Tianwen-1 mission in 2021, China became the second country to achieve a soft landing on Mars. After Tianwen-2, China will again go to Mars with the Tianwen-3 sample return mission, slated for launch in 2028.

Tianwen, which means “questions to heaven,” is the name given to China’s program of robotic Solar System exploration. Tianwen-3 has a chance to become the first mission to return pristine samples from Mars to Earth. At the same time, NASA’s plans for a Mars Sample Return mission are faltering.

China is looking at launching Tianwen-4 around 2029 to travel to Jupiter and enter orbit around Callisto, one of its four largest moons. In the 2030s, China’s roadmap includes a mission to return atmospheric samples from Venus to Earth, a Mars research station, and a probe to Neptune.

Meanwhile, NASA has sent spacecraft to study every planet in the Solar System and currently has spacecraft at or on the way to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, a metal asteroid, and to interstellar space. Another US science mission, Dragonfly, is scheduled for launch in 2028 on a daring expedition to Saturn’s moon Titan.

But NASA’s science division is bracing for severe budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump. In planetary science, the White House’s budget blueprint calls for canceling a joint US-European Mars Sample Return mission and several other projects, including the DAVINCI mission to Venus.

China extends its reach into the Solar System with launch of asteroid mission Read More »

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We now have a good idea about the makeup of Uranus’ atmosphere

Science / /

Uranus, the seventh planet in the Solar System, located between Saturn and Neptune, has long been a mystery. But by analyzing observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope over a 20-year period, a research team from the University of Arizona and other institutions has provided new insights into the composition and dynamics of the planet’s atmosphere.

Information about Uranus is limited. What we know is that the planet is composed mainly of water and ammonia ice, its diameter is about 51,000 kilometers, about four times that of the Earth, and its mass is about 15 times greater than Earth’s. Uranus also has 13 rings and 28 satellites.

In January 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe successfully completed what has been, to date, the only exploration of the planet, conducting a flyby as part of its mission to study the outer planets of the Solar System.

Uranus in 1986

This image of Uranus was taken by NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe in January 1986.

This image of Uranus was taken by NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe in January 1986. Credit: NASA/JPL

But thanks to this new research, we now know a little more about this icy giant. According to the research, which assessed Hubble images taken between 2002 and 2022, the main components of Uranus’ atmosphere are hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane and very small amounts of water and ammonia. Uranus appears pale blue-green because methane absorbs the red component of sunlight.

This image of Uranus, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows nine of the planet’s 28 satellites and its rings.

This image of Uranus, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows nine of the planet’s 28 satellites and its rings. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI

The research has also shed light on the planet’s seasons.

Unlike all of the other planets in the Solar System, Uranus’ axis of rotation is almost parallel to its orbital plane. For this reason, Uranus is said to be orbiting in an “overturned” position, as shown in the picture below. It is hypothesized that this may be due to a collision with an Earth-sized object in the past.

Uranus orbiting the Sun. It can be seen that Uranus’ axis of rotation is almost parallel to its orbital plane.

Uranus orbiting the Sun. It can be seen that Uranus’ axis of rotation is almost parallel to its orbital plane. Credit: NASA/ESA/J. Feild (STSCI)

The planet’s orbital period is about 84 years, which means that, for a specific point on the surface, the period when the sun shines (some of spring, summer, and some of fall) lasts about 42 years, and the period when the sun does not shine (some of fall, winter, and some of spring) lasts for about 42 years as well. In this study, the research team spent 20 years observing the seasons.

We now have a good idea about the makeup of Uranus’ atmosphere Read More »

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SpaceX may have solved one problem only to find more on latest Starship flight

Commercial space, elon musk, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship flight 9, texas / /

SpaceX’s ninth Starship survived launch, but engineers now have more problems to overcome.

An onboard camera shows the six Raptor engines on SpaceX’s Starship upper stage, roughly three minutes after launching from South Texas on Tuesday. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program’s two previous launches.

But minutes into the mission, SpaceX’s Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company’s privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX’s next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.

During the rocket’s two previous test flights—each using an upgraded “Block 2” Starship design—problems in the ship’s propulsion system led to leaks during launch, eventually triggering an early shutdown of the rocket’s main engines. On both flights, the vehicle spun out of control and broke apart, spreading debris over an area near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The good news is that that didn’t happen Tuesday. The ship’s main engines fired for their full duration, putting the vehicle on its expected trajectory toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. For a short time, it appeared the ship was on track for a successful flight.

“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent,” wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, on X.

The bad news is that Tuesday’s test flight revealed more problems, preventing SpaceX from achieving the most important goals Musk outlined going into the launch.

“Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and reentry phase,” Musk posted on X. “Lot of good data to review.”

With the loss of tank pressure, the rocket started slowly spinning as it coasted through the blackness of space more than 100 miles above the Earth. This loss of control spelled another premature end to a Starship test flight. Most notable among the flight’s unmet objectives was SpaceX’s desire to study the performance of the ship’s heat shield, which includes improved heat-absorbing tiles to better withstand the scorching temperatures of reentry back into the atmosphere.

“The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design, so it’s basically data during the high heating, reentry phase in order to improve the tiles for the next iteration,” Musk told Ars Technica before Tuesday’s flight. “So we’ve got like a dozen or more tile experiments. We’re trying different coatings on tiles. We’re trying different fabrication techniques, different attachment techniques. We’re varying the gap filler for the tiles.”

Engineers are hungry for data on the changes to the heat shield, which can’t be fully tested on the ground. SpaceX officials hope the new tiles will be more robust than the ones flown on the first-generation, or Block 1, version of Starship, allowing future ships to land and quickly launch again, without the need for time-consuming inspections, refurbishment, and in some cases, tile replacements. This is a core tenet of SpaceX’s plans for Starship, which include delivering astronauts to the surface of the Moon, proliferating low-Earth orbit with refueling tankers, and eventually helping establish a settlement on Mars, all of which are predicated on rapid reusability of Starship and its Super Heavy booster.

Last year, SpaceX successfully landed three Starships in the Indian Ocean after they survived hellish reentries, but they came down with damaged heat shields. After an early end to Tuesday’s test flight, SpaceX’s heat shield engineers will have to wait a while longer to satiate their appetites. And the longer they have to wait, the longer the wait for other important Starship developmental tests, such as a full orbital flight, in-space refueling, and recovery and reuse of the ship itself, replicating what SpaceX has now accomplished with the Super Heavy booster.

Failing forward or falling short?

The ninth flight of Starship began with a booming departure from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at 6: 35 pm CDT (7: 35 pm EDT; 23: 35 UTC) Tuesday.

After a brief hold to resolve last-minute technical glitches, SpaceX resumed the countdown clock to tick away the final seconds before liftoff. A gush of water poured over the deck of the launch pad just before 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines ignited on the rocket’s massive Super Heavy first stage booster. Once all 33 engines lit, the enormous stainless steel rocket—towering more than 400 feet (123 meters)—began to climb away from Starbase.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket, flying with a reused first-stage booster for the first time, climbs away from Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

Heading east, the Super Heavy booster produced more than twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V rocket, an icon of the Apollo Moon program, as it soared over the Gulf of Mexico. After two-and-a-half minutes, the Raptor engines switched off and the Super Heavy booster separated from Starship’s upper stage.

Six Raptor engines fired on the ship to continue pushing it into space. As the booster started maneuvering for an attempt to target an intact splashdown in the sea, the ship burned its engines more than six minutes, reaching a top speed of 16,462 mph (26,493 kilometers per hour), right in line with preflight predictions.

A member of SpaceX’s launch team declared “nominal orbit insertion” a little more than nine minutes into the flight, indicating the rocket reached its planned trajectory, just shy of the velocity required to enter a stable orbit around the Earth.

The flight profile was supposed to take Starship halfway around the world, with the mission culminating in a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. But a few minutes after engine shutdown, the ship started to diverge from SpaceX’s flight plan.

First, SpaceX aborted an attempt to release eight simulated Starlink Internet satellites in the first test of the Starship’s payload deployer. The cargo bay door would not fully open, and engineers called off the demonstration, according to Dan Huot, a member of SpaceX’s communications team who hosted the company’s live launch broadcast Tuesday.

That, alone, would not have been a big deal. However, a few minutes later, Huot made a more troubling announcement.

“We are in a little bit of a spin,” he said. “We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside of Starship, which a lot of those are used for attitude control. So, at this point, we’ve essentially lost our attitude control with Starship.”

This eliminated any chance for a controlled reentry and an opportunity to thoroughly scrutinize the performance of Starship’s heat shield. The spin also prevented a brief restart of one of the ship’s Raptor engines in space.

“Not looking great for a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” Huot said.

SpaceX continued streaming live video from Starship as it soared over the Atlantic Ocean and Africa. Then, a blanket of super-heated plasma enveloped the vehicle as it plunged into the atmosphere. Still in a slow tumble, the ship started shedding scorched chunks of its skin before the screen went black. SpaceX lost contact with the vehicle around 46 minutes into the flight. The ship likely broke apart over the Indian Ocean, dropping debris into a remote swath of sea within its expected flight corridor.

Victories where you find them

Although the flight did not end as well as SpaceX officials hoped, the company made some tangible progress Tuesday. Most importantly, it broke the streak of back-to-back launch failures on Starship’s two most recent test flights in January and March.

SpaceX’s investigation earlier this year into a January 16 launch failure concluded vibrations likely triggered fuel leaks and fires in the ship’s engine compartment, causing an early shutdown of the rocket’s engines. Engineers said the vibrations were likely in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency, intensifying the shaking beyond the levels SpaceX predicted.

Engineers made fixes and launched the next Starship test flight March 6, but it again encountered trouble midway through the ship’s main engine burn. SpaceX said earlier this month that the inquiry into the March 6 failure found its most probable root cause was a hardware failure in one of the upper stage’s center engines, resulting in “inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition.”

In its official statement, the company was silent on the nature of the hardware failure but said engines for future test flights will receive additional preload on key joints, a new nitrogen purge system, and improvements to the propellant drain system. A new generation of Raptor engines, known as Raptor 3, should begin flying around the end of this year with additional improvements to address the failure mechanism, SpaceX said.

Another bright spot in Tuesday’s test flight was that it marked the first time SpaceX reused a Super Heavy booster from a prior launch. The booster used Tuesday previously launched on Starship’s seventh test flight in January before it was caught back at the launch pad and refurbished for another space shot.

Booster 14 comes in for the catch after flying to the edge of space on January 16. SpaceX flew this booster again Tuesday but did not attempt a catch. Credit: SpaceX

After releasing the Starship upper stage to continue its journey into space, the Super Heavy booster flipped around to fly tail-first and reignited 13 of its engines to begin boosting itself back toward the South Texas coast. On this test flight, SpaceX aimed the booster for a hard splashdown in the ocean just offshore from Starbase, rather than a mid-air catch back at the launch pad, which SpaceX accomplished on three of its four most recent test flights.

SpaceX made the change for a few reasons. First, engineers programmed the booster to fly at a higher angle of attack during its descent, increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the vehicle compared to past flights. This change should reduce propellant usage on the booster’s landing burn, which occurs just before the rocket is caught by the launch pad’s mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” on a recovery flight.

During the landing burn itself, engineers wanted to demonstrate the booster’s ability to respond to an engine failure on descent by using just two of the rocket’s 33 engines for the end of the burn, rather than the usual three. Instead, the rocket appeared to explode around the beginning of the landing burn before it could complete the final landing maneuver.

Before the explosion at the end of its flight, the booster appeared to fly as designed. Data displayed on SpaceX’s live broadcast of the launch showed all 33 of the rocket’s engines fired normally during its initial ascent from Texas, a reassuring sign for the reliability of the Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX kicked off the year with the ambition to launch as many as 25 Starship test flights in 2025, a goal that now seems to be unattainable. However, an X post by Musk on Tuesday night suggested a faster cadence of launches in the coming months. He said the next three Starships could launch at intervals of about once every three to four weeks. After that, SpaceX is expected to transition to a third-generation, or Block 3, Starship design with more changes.

It wasn’t immediately clear how long it might take SpaceX to correct whatever problems caused Tuesday’s test flight woes. The Starship vehicle for the next flight is already built and completed cryogenic prooftesting April 27. For the last few ships, SpaceX has completed this cryogenic testing milestone around one-and-a-half to three months prior to launch.

A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the agency is “actively working” with SpaceX in the aftermath of Tuesday’s test flight but did not say if the FAA will require SpaceX to conduct a formal mishap investigation.

Shana Diez, director of Starship engineering at SpaceX, chimed in with her own post on X. Based on preliminary data from Tuesday’s flight, she is optimistic the next test flight will fly soon. She said engineers still need to examine data to confirm none of the problems from Starship’s previous flight recurred on this launch but added that “all evidence points to a new failure mode” on Tuesday’s test flight.

SpaceX will also study what caused the Super Heavy booster to explode on descent before moving forward with another booster catch attempt at Starbase, she said.

“Feeling both relieved and a bit disappointed,” Diez wrote. “Could have gone better today but also could have gone much worse.”

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.

SpaceX may have solved one problem only to find more on latest Starship flight Read More »

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Trump signs executive orders meant to resurrect US nuclear power

Energy, nuclear power, nuclear reactors, nuclear regulatory commission, Policy, Science / /

Plan calls for three new reactors to reach criticality in about a year.

Currently, there are no nuclear power plants scheduled for construction in the US. Everybody with plans to build one hasn’t had a reactor design approved, while nobody is planning to use any of the approved designs. This follows a period in which only three new reactors have entered service since 1990. Despite its extremely low carbon footprint, nuclear power appears to be dead in the water.

On Friday, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders intended to revive the US nuclear industry. These include plans to streamline the reactor approval process and boost the construction of experimental reactors by the Department of Energy. But they also contain language that’s inconsistent with other administration priorities and fundamentally misunderstands the use of nuclear power. Plus, some timelines might be, shall we say, unrealistic: three new experimental reactors reaching criticality in just over a year.

Slow nukes

The heyday of nuclear plant construction in the US was in the 1970s and 80s. But the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant soured public sentiment toward nuclear power. This also came at a time when nuclear plants typically generated only half of their rated capacity, making them an expensive long-term bet. As a result, plans for many plants, including some that were partially constructed, were canceled.

In this century, only four new reactors on existing plant sites have started construction, and two of those have since been cancelled due to delays and spiralling costs. The two reactors that have entered service also suffered considerable delays and cost overruns.

While safety regulations are often blamed for the construction costs, researchers who studied construction records found that many delays simply arose from workers being idled while they awaited equipment or the completion of other work on the site. This may indicate that the lack of a well-developed supply chain for reactor parts is a significant contributor. And the last major changes in safety regulations came in response to the Fukushima meltdown and explosions, which identified key vulnerabilities in traditional designs.

A large number of startups have proposed designs that should be far less prone to failure. Many of these are SMRs, or small modular reactors, which promise economies of scale by building the reactor at a central facility and then shipping it to the site of installation. But, as of yet, only a single reactor of this type has been approved in the US, and the only planned installation of that design was canceled as the projected cost of its electricity became uncompetitive.

That environment makes investing in nuclear power extremely risky on its own. However, we’re also at a time when the prices of natural gas, wind, and especially solar are incredibly low, making it challenging to justify the large up-front costs of nuclear power, along with the long lead time before it starts generating returns on those costs.

A new hope?

That’s the situation the Trump administration hopes to change, though you can question the sincerity of that effort. To start, the executive orders were issued on the Friday before a holiday weekend, typically the time reserved for news that you hope nobody pays attention to. One of the announcements also refers to nuclear power as dispatchable (meaning it can be ramped up and down quickly), which it most certainly isn’t. Finally, it touts nuclear power as avoiding the risks associated with other forms of power, “such as pollution with potentially deleterious health effects.” Elsewhere, however, the administration is eliminating pollution regulations and promoting the use of high-pollution fuels, such as coal.

Overall, the actions proposed in the new executive orders range from the fanciful to the potentially reasonable. For example, the “Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base” order calls for the development of the capacity to reprocess spent nuclear fuel to obtain useful fuel from it, a process that’s extremely expensive compared to simply mining new fuel, and would only make nuclear power less economically viable. It also calls for recommendations regarding permanent storage of any remaining waste, an issue that has remained unresolved for decades.

Mixed in with that are more sensible recommendations about ensuring the capacity to enrich isotopes to the purities needed to fuel power plants.

The order also calls for the Department of Energy (DOE) to provide financial support for the industry to boost construction of new plants, something the agency already does through a loan guarantee program. Even though those guarantees have not resulted in new construction plans in over a decade, the EO calls for the effort to result in “10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.” While the Biden administration had approved payments to keep nuclear plants open, Trump is calling for funding to be used to reopen some plants that had been unable to operate economically—something that has not been done in the US previously. It also calls for money to go to restart construction at sites where reactors were canceled, although only two of those are less than decades old.

Similar unrealistic time scales are present in the “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies” order. This is intended to encourage some of the proposed designs for SMRs and inherently safe reactors that are currently on the drawing board. It directs the Army to install one of these at a military base that will be operating within the next three years. And it directs the secretary of energy to contract with companies to build three test reactors that will sustain a nuclear reaction by July 4, 2026.

The accelerated schedule is expected to come from enabling the secretary of energy to simply ignore any aspect of the environmental review that the companies building the reactor complain about: “The Secretary shall, consistent with applicable law, use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite the Department’s environmental reviews for authorizations, permits, approvals, leases, and any other activity requested by an applicant or potential applicant.”

Regulatory reform

The other big executive order targets the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which approves license designs. The order blames this on how the NRC is structured: “The NRC charges applicants by the hour to process license applications, with prolonged timelines that maximize fees while throttling nuclear power development.”

It also criticizes the commission’s regulations as being based on the idea that there is no safe level of exposure to radiation, though it provides no evidence that the idea is wrong. This is said to result in regulations that attempt to lower exposures below those caused by a natural environment.

The order attempts to accelerate the approval process enough to ensure that the US goes from 100 GW of generating capacity to 400 GW by 2050. This is largely done by setting hard time limits on the approval process through consultations with DOGE, including a limit of 18 months for approval of new nuclear plants. It also calls for the adoption of “science-based radiation limits,” claiming that flaws with existing limits had been discussed earlier—even though the earlier discussion made no mention of scientific flaws.

In keeping with plans for mass production of modular reactors, the order also calls for a single certification process for these designs, focusing solely on site differences once the general reactor design is accepted as safe.

Overall, there are some reasonable ideas scattered throughout the executive orders (though whether their implementation ends up being reasonable is questionable, especially given DOGE’s involvement). But the majority of them are based on the idea that regulation is the primary reason for nuclear energy’s atrophy in the US.

The reality is that an underdeveloped supply chain and unfavorable economics are far larger factors. It’s difficult to justify investing in a plant that might take a decade to start selling power when the up-front costs of solar are far smaller, and it can start producing power while still under construction. The most likely way to see a nuclear resurgence in the US is for the government to pay for the plants itself. There’s a small bit of that here, in the call for the DOE to fund the construction of experimental reactors at third-party sites. But it’s not enough to significantly shift the trajectory of US nuclear power.

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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The key to a successful egg drop experiment? Drop it on its side.

egg drop challenge, Physics, Science, structural mechanics / /

There was a key difference, however, between how vertically and horizontally squeezed eggs deformed in the compression experiments—namely, the former deformed less than the latter. The shell’s greater rigidity along its long axis was an advantage because the heavy load was distributed over the surface. (It’s why the one-handed egg-cracking technique targets the center of a horizontally held egg.)

But the authors found that this advantage when under static compression proved to be a disadvantage when dropping eggs from a height, with the horizontal position emerging as the optimal orientation.  It comes down to the difference between stiffness—how much force is needed to deform the egg—and toughness, i.e., how much energy the egg can absorb before it cracks.

Cohen et al.’s experiments showed that eggs are tougher when loaded horizontally along their equator, and stiffer when compressed vertically, suggesting that “an egg dropped on its equator can likely sustain greater drop heights without cracking,” they wrote. “Even if eggs could sustain a higher force when loaded in the vertical direction, it does not necessarily imply that they are less likely to break when dropped in that orientation. In contrast to static loading, to remain intact following a dynamic impact, a body must be able to absorb all of its kinetic energy by transferring it into reversible deformation.”

“Eggs need to be tough, not stiff, in order to survive a fall,” Cohen et al. concluded, pointing to our intuitive understanding that we should bend our knees rather than lock them into a straightened position when landing after a jump, for example. “Our results and analysis serve as a cautionary tale about how language can affect our understanding of a system, and improper framing of a problem can lead to misunderstanding and miseducation.”

DOI: Communications Physics, 2025. 10.1038/s42005-025-02087-0  (About DOIs).

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How farmers can help rescue water-loving birds

birds, Science, syndication, wetlands / /

Not every farmer is thrilled to host birds. Some worry about the spread of avian flu, others are concerned that the birds will eat too much of their valuable crops. But as an unstable climate delivers too little water, careening temperatures and chaotic storms, the fates of human food production and birds are ever more linked—with the same climate anomalies that harm birds hurting agriculture too.

In some places, farmer cooperation is critical to the continued existence of whooping cranes and other wetland-dependent waterbird species, close to one-third of which are experiencing declines. Numbers of waterfowl (think ducks and geese) have crashed by 20 percent since 2014, and long-legged wading shorebirds like sandpipers have suffered steep population losses. Conservation-minded biologists, nonprofits, government agencies, and farmers themselves are amping up efforts to ensure that each species survives and thrives. With federal support in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, their work is more important (and threatened) than ever.

Their collaborations, be they domestic or international, are highly specific, because different regions support different kinds of agriculture—grasslands, or deep or shallow wetlands, for example, favored by different kinds of birds. Key to the efforts is making it financially worthwhile for farmers to keep—or tweak—practices to meet bird forage and habitat needs.

Traditional crawfish-and-rice farms in Louisiana, as well as in Gentz’s corner of Texas, mimic natural freshwater wetlands that are being lost to saltwater intrusion from sea level rise. Rice grows in fields that are flooded to keep weeds down; fields are drained for harvest by fall. They are then re-flooded to cover crawfish burrowed in the mud; these are harvested in early spring—and the cycle begins again.

That second flooding coincides with fall migration—a genetic and learned behavior that determines where birds fly and when—and it lures massive numbers of egrets, herons, bitterns, and storks that dine on the crustaceans as well as on tadpoles, fish, and insects in the water.

On a biodiverse crawfish-and-rice farm, “you can see 30, 40, 50 species of birds, amphibians, reptiles, everything,” says Elijah Wojohn, a shorebird conservation biologist at nonprofit Manomet Conservation Sciences in Massachusetts. In contrast, if farmers switch to less water-intensive corn and soybean production in response to climate pressures, “you’ll see raccoons, deer, crows, that’s about it.” Wojohn often relies on word-of-mouth to hook farmers on conservation; one learned to spot whimbrel, with their large, curved bills, got “fired up” about them and told all his farmer friends. Such farmer-to-farmer dialogue is how you change things among this sometimes change-averse group, Wojohn says.

In the Mississippi Delta and in California, where rice is generally grown without crustaceans, conservation organizations like Ducks Unlimited have long boosted farmers’ income and staying power by helping them get paid to flood fields in winter for hunters. This attracts overwintering ducks and geese—considered an extra “crop”—that gobble leftover rice and pond plants; the birds also help to decompose rice stalks so farmers don’t have to remove them. Ducks Unlimited’s goal is simple, says director of conservation innovation Scott Manley: Keep rice farmers farming rice. This is especially important as a changing climate makes that harder. 2024 saw a huge push, with the organization conserving 1 million acres for waterfowl.

Some strategies can backfire. In Central New York, where dwindling winter ice has seen waterfowl lingering past their habitual migration times, wildlife managers and land trusts are buying less productive farmland to plant with native grasses; these give migratory fuel to ducks when not much else is growing. But there’s potential for this to produce too many birds for the land available back in their breeding areas, says Andrew Dixon, director of science and conservation at the Mohamed Bin Zayed Raptor Conservation Fund in Abu Dhabi, and coauthor of an article about the genetics of bird migration in the 2024 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences. This can damage ecosystems meant to serve them.

Recently, conservation efforts spanning continents and thousands of miles have sprung up. One seeks to protect buff-breasted sandpipers. As they migrate 18,000 miles to and from the High Arctic where they nest, the birds experience extreme hunger—hyperphagia—that compels them to voraciously devour insects in short grasses where the bugs proliferate. But many stops along the birds’ round-trip route are threatened. There are water shortages affecting agriculture in Texas, where the birds forage at turf grass farms; grassland loss and degradation in Paraguay; and in Colombia, conversion of forage lands to exotic grasses and rice paddies these birds cannot use.

Conservationists say it’s critical to protect habitat for “buffies” all along their route, and to ensure that the winters these small shorebirds spend around Uruguay’s coastal lagoons are a food fiesta. To that end, Manomet conservation specialist Joaquín Aldabe, in partnership with Uruguay’s agriculture ministry, has so far taught 40 local ranchers how to improve their cattle grazing practices. Rotationally moving the animals from pasture to pasture means grasses stay the right length for insects to flourish.

There are no easy fixes in the North American northwest, where bird conservation is in crisis. Extreme drought is causing breeding grounds, molting spots, and migration stopover sites to vanish. It is also endangering the livelihoods of farmers, who feel the push to sell land to developers. From Southern Oregon to Central California, conservation allies have provided monetary incentives for water-strapped grain farmers to leave behind harvest debris to improve survivability for the 1 billion birds that pass through every year, and for ranchers to flood-irrigate unused pastures.

One treacherous leg of the northwest migration route is the parched Klamath Basin of Oregon and California. For three recent years, “we saw no migrating birds. I mean, the peak count was zero,” says John Vradenburg, supervisory biologist of the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex. He and myriad private, public, and Indigenous partners are working to conjure more water for the basin’s human and avian denizens, as perennial wetlands become seasonal wetlands, seasonal wetlands transition to temporary wetlands, and temporary wetlands turn to arid lands.

Taking down four power dams and one levee has stretched the Klamath River’s water across the landscape, creating new streams and connecting farm fields to long-separated wetlands. But making the most of this requires expansive thinking. Wetland restoration—now endangered by loss of funding from the current administration—would help drought-afflicted farmers by keeping water tables high. But what if farmers could also receive extra money for their businesses via eco-credits, akin to carbon credits, for the work those wetlands do to filter-clean farm runoff? And what if wetlands could function as aquaculture incubators for juvenile fish, before stocking rivers? Klamath tribes are invested in restoring endangered c’waam and koptu sucker fish, and this could help them achieve that goal.

As birds’ traditional resting and nesting spots become inhospitable, a more sobering question is whether improvements can happen rapidly enough. The blistering pace of climate change gives little chance for species to genetically adapt, although some are changing their behaviors. That means that the work of conservationists to find and secure adequate, supportive farmland and rangeland as the birds seek out new routes has become a sprint against time.

This story originally appeared at Knowable Magazine.

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Penguin poop may help preserve Antarctic climate

Antarctica, Arctic, Penguins, poop, poop talk, Science, syndication / /

Ammonia aerosols from penguin guano likely play a part in the formation of heat-shielding clouds.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

New research shows that penguin guano in Antarctica is an important source of ammonia aerosol particles that help drive the formation and persistence of low clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting some incoming sunlight back to space.

The findings reinforce the growing awareness that Earth’s intricate web of life plays a significant role in shaping the planetary climate. Even at the small levels measured, the ammonia particles from the guano interact with sulfur-based aerosols from ocean algae to start a chemical chain reaction that forms billions of tiny particles that serve as nuclei for water vapor droplets.

The low marine clouds that often cover big tracts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica are a wild card in the climate system because scientists don’t fully understand how they will react to human-caused heating of the atmosphere and oceans. One recent study suggested that the big increase in the annual global temperature during 2023 and 2024 that has continued into this year was caused in part by a reduction of that cloud cover.

“I’m constantly surprised at the depth of how one small change affects everything else,” said Matthew Boyer, a coauthor of the new study and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research. “This really does show that there is a deep connection between ecosystem processes and the climate. And really, it’s the synergy between what’s coming from the oceans, from the sulfur-producing species, and then the ammonia coming from the penguins.”

Climate survivors

Aquatic penguins evolved from flying birds about 60 million years ago, shortly after the age of dinosaurs, and have persisted through multiple, slow, natural cycles of ice ages and warmer interglacial eras, surviving climate extremes by migrating to and from pockets of suitable habitat, called climate refugia, said Rose Foster-Dyer, a marine and polar ecologist with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

A 2018 study that analyzed the remains of an ancient “super colony” of the birds suggests there may have been a “penguin optimum” climate window between about 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, at least for some species in some parts of Antarctica, she said. Various penguin species have adapted to different habitat niches and this will face different impacts caused by human-caused warming, she said.

Foster-Dyer has recently done penguin research around the Ross Sea, and said that climate change could open more areas for land-breeding Adélie penguins, which don’t breed on ice like some other species.

“There’s evidence that this whole area used to have many more colonies … which could possibly be repopulated in the future,” she said. She is also more optimistic than some scientists about the future for emperor penguins, the largest species of the group, she added.

“They breed on fast ice, and there’s a lot of publications coming out about how the populations might be declining and their habitat is hugely threatened,” she said. “But they’ve lived through so many different cycles of the climate, so I think they’re more adaptable than people currently give them credit for.”

In total, about 20 million breeding pairs of penguins nest in vast colonies all around the frozen continent. Some of the largest colonies, with up to 1 million breeding pairs, can cover several square miles.There aren’t any solid estimates for the total amount of guano produced by the flightless birds annually, but some studies have found that individual colonies can produce several hundred tons. Several new penguin colonies were discovered recently when their droppings were spotted in detailed satellite images.

A few penguin colonies have grown recently while others appear to be shrinking, but in general, their habitat is considered threatened by warming and changing ice conditions, which affects their food supplies. The speed of human-caused warming, for which there is no precedent in paleoclimate records, may exacerbate the threat to penguins, which evolve slowly compared to many other species, Foster-Dyer said.

“Everything’s changing at such a fast rate, it’s really hard to say much about anything,” she said.

Recent research has shown how other types of marine life are also important to the global climate system. Nutrients from bird droppings help fertilize blooms of oxygen-producing plankton, and huge swarms of fish that live in the middle layers of the ocean cycle carbon vertically through the water, ultimately depositing it in a generally stable sediment layer on the seafloor.

Tricky measurements

Boyer said the new research started as a follow-up project to other studies of atmospheric chemistry in the same area, near the Argentine Marambio Base on an island along the Antarctic Peninsula. Observations by other teams suggested it could be worth specifically trying to look at ammonia, he said.

Boyer and the other scientists set up specialized equipment to measure the concentration of ammonia in the air from January to March 2023. They found that, when the wind blew from the direction of a colony of about 60,000 Adélie penguins about 5 miles away, the ammonia concentration increased to as high as 13.5 parts per billion—more than 1,000 times higher than the background reading. Even after the penguins migrated from the area toward the end of February, the ammonia concentration was still more than 100 times as high as the background level.

“We have one instrument that we use in the study to give us the chemistry of gases as they’re actually clustering together,” he said.

“In general, ammonia in the atmosphere is not well-measured because it’s really difficult to measure, especially if you want to measure at a very high sensitivity, if you have low concentrations like in Antarctica,” he said.

Penguin-scented winds

The goal was to determine where the ammonia is coming from, including testing a previous hypothesis that the ocean surface could be the source, he said.

But the size of the penguin colonies made them the most likely source.

“It’s well known that sea birds give off ammonia. You can smell them. The birds stink,” he said. “But we didn’t know how much there was. So what we did with this study was to quantify ammonia and to quantify its impact on the cloud formation process.”

The scientists had to wait until the wind blew from the penguin colony toward the research station.

“If we’re lucky, the wind blows from that direction and not from the direction of the power generator,” he said. “And we were lucky enough that we had one specific event where the winds from the penguin colony persisted long enough that we were actually able to track the growth of the particles. You could be there for a year, and it might not happen.”

The ammonia from the guano does not form the particles but supercharges the process that does, Boyer said.

“It’s really the dimethyl sulfide from phytoplankton that gives off the sulfur,” he said. “The ammonia enhances the formation rate of particles. Without ammonia, sulfuric acid can form new particles, but with ammonia, it’s 1,000 times faster, and sometimes even more, so we’re talking up to four orders of magnitude faster because of the guano.”

This is important in Antarctica specifically because there are not many other sources of particles, such as pollution or emissions from trees, he added.

“So the strength of the source matters in terms of its climate effect over time,” he said. “And if the source changes, it’s going to change the climate effect.”

It will take more research to determine if penguin guano has a net cooling effect on the climate. But in general, he said, if the particles transport out to sea and contribute to cloud formation, they will have a cooling effect.

“What’s also interesting,” he said, “is if the clouds are over ice surfaces, it could actually lead to warming because the clouds are less reflective than the ice beneath.” In that case, the clouds could actually reduce the amount of heat that brighter ice would otherwise reflect away from the planet. The study did not try to measure that effect, but it could be an important subject for future research, he added.

The guano effect lingers even after the birds leave the breeding areas. A month after they were gone, Boyer said ammonia levels in the air were still 1,000 times higher than the baseline.

“The emission of ammonia is a temperature-dependent process, so it’s likely that once wintertime comes, the ammonia gets frozen in,” he said. “But even before the penguins come back, I would hypothesize that as the temperature warms, the guano starts to emit ammonia again. And the penguins move all around the coast, so it’s possible they’re just fertilizing an entire coast with ammonia.”

Photo of Inside Climate News

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