Science – Page 4

D-Wave quantum annealers solve problems classical algorithms struggle with

algorithm, Computer science, D-Wave, ising model, Physics, quantum annealing, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Science / Paul Patrick / March 13, 2025

The latest claim of a clear quantum supremacy solves a useful problem.

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they’ll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can perform in ways that are impossible to match with classical computation (one of the more recent examples coming just last year). In most cases to date, however, those claims were quickly followed by some tuning and optimization of classical algorithms that boosted their performance, making them competitive once again.

Today, we have a new entry into the claims department—or rather a new claim by an old entry. D-Wave is a company that makes quantum annealers, specialized hardware that is most effective when applied to a class of optimization problems. The new work shows that the hardware can track the behavior of a quantum system called an Ising model far more efficiently than any of the current state-of-the-art classical algorithms.

Knowing what will likely come next, however, the team behind the work writes, “We hope and expect that our results will inspire novel numerical techniques for quantum simulation.”

Real physics vs. simulation

Most of the claims regarding quantum computing superiority have come from general-purpose quantum hardware, like that of IBM and Google. These can solve a wide range of algorithms, but have been limited by the frequency of errors in their qubits. Those errors also turned out to be the reason classical algorithms have often been able to catch up with the claims from the quantum side. They limit the size of the collection of qubits that can be entangled at once, allowing algorithms that focus on interactions among neighboring qubits to perform reasonable simulations of the hardware’s behavior.

In any case, most of these claims have involved quantum computers that weren’t solving any particular algorithm, but rather simply behaving like a quantum computer. Google’s claims, for example, are based around what are called “random quantum circuits,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

Off in its own corner is a company called D-Wave, which makes hardware that relies on quantum effects to perform calculations, but isn’t a general-purpose quantum computer. Instead, its collections of qubits, once configured and initialized, are left to find their way to a ground energy state, which will correspond to a solution to a problem. This approach, called quantum annealing, is best suited to solving problems that involve finding optimal solutions to complex scheduling problems.

D-Wave was likely to have been the first company to experience the “we can outperform classical” followed by an “oh no you can’t” from algorithm developers, and since then it has typically been far more circumspect. In the meantime, a number of companies have put D-Wave’s computers to use on problems that align with where the hardware is most effective.

But on Thursday, D-Wave will release a paper that will once again claim, as its title indicates, “beyond classical computation.” And it will be doing it on a problem that doesn’t involve random circuits.

You sing, Ising

The new paper describes using D-Wave’s hardware to compute the evolution over time of something called an Ising model. A simple version of this model is a two-dimensional grid of objects, each of which can be in two possible states. The state that any one of these objects occupies is influenced by the state of its neighbors. So, it’s easy to put an Ising model into an unstable state, after which values of the objects within it will flip until it reaches a low-energy, stable state. Since this is also a quantum system, however, random noise can sometimes flip bits, so the system will continue to evolve over time. You can also connect the objects into geometries that are far more complicated than a grid, allowing more complex behaviors.

Someone took great notes from a physics lecture on Ising models that explains their behavior and role in physics in more detail. But there are two things you need to know to understand this news. One is that Ising models don’t involve a quantum computer merely acting like an array of qubits—it’s a problem that people have actually tried to find solutions to. The second is that D-Wave’s hardware, which provides a well-connected collection of quantum devices that can flip between two values, is a great match for Ising models.

Back in 2023, D-Wave used its 5,000-qubit annealer to demonstrate that its output when performing Ising model evolution was best described using Schrödinger’s equation, a central way of describing the behavior of quantum systems. And, as quantum systems become increasingly complex, Schrödinger’s equation gets much, much harder to solve using classical hardware—the implication being that modeling the behavior of 5,000 of these qubits could quite possibly be beyond the capacity of classical algorithms.

Still, having been burned before by improvements to classical algorithms, the D-Wave team was very cautious about voicing that implication. As they write in their latest paper, “It remains important to establish that within the parametric range studied, despite the limited correlation length and finite experimental precision, approximate classical methods cannot match the solution quality of the [D-Wave hardware] in a reasonable amount of time.”

So it’s important that they now have a new paper that indicates that classical methods in fact cannot do that in a reasonable amount of time.

Testing alternatives

The team, which is primarily based at D-Wave but includes researchers from a handful of high-level physics institutions from around the world, focused on three different methods of simulating quantum systems on classical hardware. They were put up against a smaller version of what will be D-Wave’s Advantage 2 system, designed to have a higher qubit connectivity and longer coherence times than its current Advantage. The work essentially involved finding where the classical simulators bogged down as either the simulation went on for too long, or the complexity of the Ising model’s geometry got too high (all while showing that D-Wave’s hardware could perform the same calculation).

Three different classical approaches were tested. Two of them involved a tensor network, one called MPS, for matrix product of states, and the second called projected entangled-pair states (PEPS). They also tried a neural network, as a number of these have been trained successfully to predict the output of Schrödinger’s equation for different systems.

These approaches were first tested on a simple 8×8 grid of objects rolled up into a cylinder, which increases the connectivity by eliminating two of the edges. And, for this simple system that evolved over a short period, the classical methods and the quantum hardware produced answers that were effectively indistinguishable.

Two of the classical algorithms, however, were relatively easy to eliminate from serious consideration. The neural network provided good results for short simulations but began to diverge rapidly once the system was allowed to evolve for longer times. And PEPS works by focusing on local entanglement and failed as entanglement was spread to ever-larger systems. That left MPS as the classical representative as more complex geometries were run for longer times.

By identifying where MPS started to fail, the researchers could estimate the amount of classical hardware that would be needed to allow the algorithm to keep pace with the Advantage 2 hardware on the most complex systems. And, well, it’s not going to be realistic any time soon. “On the largest problems, MPS would take millions of years on the Frontier supercomputer per input to match [quantum hardware] quality,” they conclude. “Memory requirements would exceed its 700PB storage, and electricity requirements would exceed annual global consumption.” By contrast, it took a few minutes on D-Wave’s hardware.

Again, in the paper, the researchers acknowledge that this may lead to another round of optimizations that bring classical algorithms back into competition. And, apparently those have already started once a draft of this upcoming paper was placed on the arXiv. At a press conference happening as this report was being prepared, one of D-Wave’s scientists, Andrew King, noted that two pre-prints have already appeared on the arXiv that described improvements to classical algorithms.

While these allow classical simulations to perform more of the results demonstrated in the new paper, they don’t involve simulating the most complicated geometries, and require shorter times and fewer total qubits. Nature talked to one of the people behind these algorithm improvements, who was optimistic that they could eventually replicate all of D-Wave’s results using non-quantum algorithms. D-Wave, obviously, is skeptical. And King said that a new, larger Advantage 2 test chip with over 4,000 qubits available had recently been calibrated, and he had already tested even larger versions of these same Ising models on it—ones that would be considerably harder for classical methods to catch up to.

In any case, the company is acting like things are settled. During the press conference describing the new results, people frequently referred to D-Wave having achieved quantum supremacy, and its CEO, Alan Baratz, in responding to skepticism sparked by the two draft manuscripts, said, “Our work should be celebrated as a significant milestone.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.ado6285 (About DOIs).

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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How whale urine benefits the ocean ecosystem

Biology, Ecology, marine animals, marine ecology, Science, whales / Kris Guyer / March 12, 2025

A “great whale conveyor belt”

illustration showing how whale urine spreads throughout the ocean ecosystem — Credit: A. Boersma

Migrating whales typically gorge in summers at higher latitudes to build up energy reserves to make the long migration to lower latitudes. It’s still unclear exactly why the whales migrate, but it’s likely that pregnant females in particular find it more beneficial to give birth and nurse their young in warm, shallow, sheltered areas—perhaps to protect their offspring from predators like killer whales. Warmer waters also keep the whale calves warm as they gradually develop their insulating layers of blubber. Some scientists think that whales might also migrate to molt their skin in those same warm, shallow waters.

Roman et al. examined publicly available spatial data for whale feeding and breeding grounds, augmented with sightings from airplane and ship surveys to fill in gaps in the data, then fed that data into their models for calculating nutrient transport. They focused on six species known to migrate seasonally over long distances from higher latitudes to lower latitudes: blue whales, fin whales, gray whales, humpback whales, and North Atlantic and southern right whales.

They found that whales can transport some 4,000 tons of nitrogen each year during their migrations, along with 45,000 tons of biomass—and those numbers could have been three times larger in earlier eras before industrial whaling depleted populations. “We call it the ‘great whale conveyor belt,’” Roman said. “It can also be thought of as a funnel, because whales feed over large areas, but they need to be in a relatively confined space to find a mate, breed, and give birth. At first, the calves don’t have the energy to travel long distances like the moms can.” The study did not include any effects from whales releasing feces or sloughing their skin, which would also contribute to the overall nutrient flux.

“Because of their size, whales are able to do things that no other animal does. They’re living life on a different scale,” said co-author Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the nonprofit organization Climate Central. “Nutrients are coming in from outside—and not from a river, but by these migrating animals. It’s super-cool, and changes how we think about ecosystems in the ocean. We don’t think of animals other than humans having an impact on a planetary scale, but the whales really do.”

Nature Communications, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56123-2 (About DOIs).

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NCI employees can’t publish information on these topics without special approval

Department of Health and Human Services, health, National Cancer Institute, rfk jr, Science, syndication, trump administration / Rejus Almole / March 11, 2025

The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with—like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.”

A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.)

Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities.

“This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.”

During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process.

Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles.

The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

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What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged

climate change, Earth science, EPA, greenhouse gasses, Policy, Science, trump administration / Kris Guyer / March 11, 2025

Getting rid of the justification for greenhouse gas regulations won’t be easy.

Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A document that was first issued in 2009 would seem an unlikely candidate for making news in 2025. Yet the past few weeks have seen a steady stream of articles about an analysis first issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early years of Obama’s first term: the endangerment finding on greenhouse gasses.

The basics of the document are almost mundane: greenhouse gases are warming the climate, and this will have negative consequences for US citizens. But it took a Supreme Court decision to get written in the first place, and it has played a role in every attempt by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across multiple administrations. And, while the first Trump administration left it in place, the press reports we’re seeing suggest that an attempt will be made to eliminate it in the near future.

The only problem: The science in which the endangerment finding is based on is so solid that any ensuing court case will likely leave its opponents worse off in the long run, which is likely why the earlier Trump administration didn’t challenge it.

Get comfortable, because the story dates all the way back to the first Bush administration.

A bit of history

One of the goals of the US’s Clean Air Act, first passed in 1963, is to “address the public health and welfare risks posed by certain widespread air pollutants.” By the end of the last century, it was becoming increasingly clear that greenhouse gases fit that definition. While they weren’t necessarily directly harmful to the people inhaling them—our lungs are constantly being filled with carbon dioxide, after all—the downstream effects of the warming they caused could certainly impact human health and welfare. But, with the federal government taking no actions during George W. Bush’s time in office, a group of states and cities sued to force the EPA’s hand.

That suit eventually reached the Supreme Court in the form of Massachusetts v. EPA, which led to a ruling in 2007 determining that the Clean Air Act required the EPA perform an analysis of the dangers posed by greenhouse gasses. That analysis was done by late 2007, but the Bush administration simply ignored it for the remaining year it had in office. (It was eventually released after Bush left office.)

That left the Obama-era EPA to reach essentially the same conclusions that the Bush administration had: greenhouse gasses are warming the planet. And that will have various impacts—sea level rise, dangerous heat, damage to agriculture and forestry, and more.

That conclusion compelled the EPA to formulate regulations to limit the emission of greenhouse gasses from power plants. Obama’s EPA did just that, but came late enough to still be tied up in courts by the time his term ended. They were also formulated before the plunge in the cost of renewable power sources, which have since led to a drop in carbon emissions that have far outpaced what the EPA’s rules intended to accomplish.

The first Trump administration formulated alternative rules that also ended up in court for being an insufficient response to the conclusions of the endangerment finding. Which ultimately led the Biden administration to start formulating a new set of rules. And at that point, the Supreme Court decided to step in and rule on the Obama rules, even though everyone knew they would never go into effect.

The court indicated that the EPA needed to regulate each power plant individually, rather than regulating the wider grid, which sent the Biden administration back to the drawing board. Its attempts at crafting regulations were also in court when Trump returned to office.

There were a couple of notable aspects to that last case, West Virginia v. EPA, which hinged on the fact that Congress had never explicitly indicated that it wanted to see greenhouse gasses regulated. Congress responded by ensuring that the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy-focused components specifically mentioned that these were intended to limit carbon emissions, eliminating one potential roadblock. The other thing is that, in this and other court cases, the Supreme Court could have simply overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the case that put greenhouse gasses within the regulatory framework of the Clean Air Act. Yet a court that has shown a great enthusiasm for overturning precedent didn’t do so.

Nothing dangerous?

So, in the 15 years since the EPA initially released its endangerment findings, they’ve resulted in no regulations whatsoever. But, as long as they existed, the EPA is required to at least attempt to regulate them. So, getting rid of the endangerment findings would seem like the obvious thing for an administration led by a president who repeatedly calls climate change a hoax. And there were figures within the first Trump administration who argued in favor of that.

So why didn’t it happen?

That was never clear, but I’d suggest at least some members of the first Trump administration were realistic about the likely results. The effort to contest the endangerment finding was pushed by people who largely reject the vast body of scientific evidence that indicates that greenhouse gases are warming the climate. And, if anything, the evidence had gotten more decisive in the years between the initial endangerment finding and Trump’s inauguration. I expect that their effort was blocked by people who knew that it would fail in the courts, and likely leave behind precedents that made future regulatory efforts easier.

This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Trump-era EPA received a number of formal petitions to revisit the endangerment finding. Having read a few (something you should not do), they are uniformly awful. References to supposed peer-reviewed “papers” turn out to be little more than PDFs hosted on a WordPress site. Other arguments are based on information contained in the proceedings of a conference organized by an anti-science think tank. The Trump administration rejected them all with minimal comment the day before Biden’s inauguration.

Biden’s EPA went back and made detailed criticisms of each of them if you want to see just how laughable the arguments against mainstream science were at the time. And, since then, we’ve experienced a few years of temperatures that are so high they’ve surprised many climate scientists.

Unrealistic

But the new head of the EPA is apparently anything but a realist, and multiple reports have indicated he’s asking to be given the opportunity to go ahead and redo the endangerment finding. A more recent report suggests two possibilities. One is to recruit scientists from the fringes to produce a misleading report and roll the dice on getting a sympathetic judge who will overlook the obvious flaws. The other would be to argue that any climate change that happens will have net benefits to the US.

That latter approach would run into the problem that we’ve gotten increasingly sophisticated at doing analyses that attribute the impact of climate change on the individual weather disasters that do harm the welfare of citizens of the US. While it might have been possible to make a case for uncertainty here a decade ago, that window has been largely closed by the scientific community.

Even if all of these efforts fail, it will be entirely possible for the EPA to construct greenhouse gas regulations that accomplish nothing and get tied up in court for the remainder of Trump’s term. But a court case could show just how laughably bad the positions staked out by climate contrarians are (and, by extension, the position of the president himself). There’s a small chance that the resulting court cases will result in a legal record that will make it that much harder to accept the sorts of minimalist regulations that Trump proposed in his first term.

Which is probably why this approach was rejected the first time around.

What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged Read More »

Study: Megalodon’s body shape was closer to a lemon shark

aquatic animals, megalogon, paleontology, Science / Paul Patrick / March 10, 2025

the mighty, mighty megalodon

Also: Baby megalodons were likely the size of great white sharks and capable of hunting marine mammals

The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon’s size, body shape and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark, others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon’s body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we’re not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

Thanks to research published in 2023 on its fossilized teeth, we’re now fairly confident that megalodon shared something else with these relatives: it wasn’t entirely cold-blooded and kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean. Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, are endothermic: They have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings.

Of particular relevance to this latest paper is a 2022 study by Jack Cooper of Swansea University in the UK and his co-authors. In 2020, the team reconstructed a 2D model of the megalodon, basing the dimensions on similar existing shark species. The researchers followed up in 2022 with a reconstructed 3D model, extrapolating the dimensions from a megalodon specimen (a vertebral column) in Belgium. Cooper concluded that a megalodon would have been a stocky, powerful shark—measuring some 52 feet (16 meters) in length with a body mass of 67.86 tons—able to execute bursts of high speed to attack prey, much like the significantly smaller great white shark.

(H) One of the largest vertebrae of Otodus meg- alodon; (I and J) CT scans showing cross-sectional views. — (H) One of the largest vertebrae of *Otodus megalodon*; (I and J) CT scans showing cross-sectional views. Credit: Shimada et al., 2025

Not everyone agreed, however, Last year, a team of 26 shark experts led by Kesnshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University, further challenged the great white shark comparison, arguing that the super-sized creature’s body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought. The team concluded that based on the spinal column, the combination of a great white build with the megalodon’s much longer length would have simply proved too cumbersome.

A fresh approach

Now Shimada is back with a fresh analysis, employing a new method that he says provides independent lines of evidence for the megalodon’s slender build. “Our new study does not use the modern great white shark as a model, but rather simply asks, ‘How long were the head and tail based on the trunk [length] represented by the fossil vertebral column?’ using the general body plan seen collectively in living and fossil sharks,” Shimada told Ars.

Shimada and his co-authors measured the proportions of 145 modern and 20 extinct species of shark, particularly the head, trunk, and tail relative to total body length. Megalodon was represented by a Belgian vertebral specimen. The largest vertebra in that specimen measured 15.5 centimeters (6 inches) in diameter, although there are other megalodon vertebrae in Denmark, for example, with diameters as much as 23 centimeters (9 inches).

Based on their analysis, Shimada et al, concluded that, because the trunk section of the Belgian specimen measured 11 meters, the head and tail were probably about 1.8 meters (6 feet) and 3.6 meters (12 feet) long, respectively, with a total body length of 16.4 meters (54 feet) for this particularly specimen. That means the Danish megalodon specimens could have been as long as 24.3 meters (80 feet). As for body shape, taking the new length estimates into account, the lemon shark appears to be closest modern analogue. “However, the exact position and shape of practically all the fins remain uncertain,” Shimada cautioned. “We are only talking about the main part of the body.”

Revised tentative body outline of 24.3 meters (80 feet) extinct megatooth shark, Otodus megalodon. — Credit: DePaul University/Kenshu Shimada

The team also found that a 24.3-meter-long megalodon would have weighed a good 94 tons with an estimated swimming speed of 2.1-3.5 KPM (1.3-2.2 MPH). They also studied growth patterns evident in the Belgian vertebrae, concluding that the megalodon would give live birth and that the newborns would be between 3.6 to 3.9 meters (12-13 feet) long—i.e., roughly the size of a great white shark. The authors see this as a refutation of the hypothesis that megalodons relied on nursery areas to rear their young, since a baby megalodon would be quite capable of hunting and killing marine mammals based on size alone.

In addition, “We unexpectedly unlocked the mystery of why certain aquatic vertebrates can attain gigantic sizes while others cannot,” Shimada said. “Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming.”

That’s in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. “It can be ‘large’ but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be ‘gigantic’ because of hydrodynamic constraints,” said Shimada. “We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark.”

Shimada emphasized that their interpretations remain tentative but they are based on hard data and make for useful reference points for future research.

An “exciting working hypothesis”

For his part, Cooper found a lot to like in Shimada et al.’s latest analysis. “I’d say everything presented here is interesting and presents an exciting working hypothesis but that these should also be taken with a grain of salt until they can either be empirically tested, or a complete skeleton of megalodon is found to confirm one way or the other,” Cooper told Ars. “Generally, I appreciate the paper’s approach to its body size calculation in that it uses a lot of different shark species and doesn’t make any assumptions as to which species are the best analogues to megalodon.”

Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon's body than the great white shark. — Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon’s body than the great white shark. Credit: Albert Kok

Cooper acknowledged that it makes sense that a megalodon would be slightly slower than a great white given its sheer size, “though it does indicate we’ve got a shark capable of surprisingly fast speeds for its size,” he said. As for Shimada’s new growth model, he pronounced it “really solid” and concurred with the findings on birthing with one caveat. “I think the refutation of nursery sites is a bit of a leap, though I understand the temptation given the remarkably large size of the baby sharks,” he said. “We have geological evidence of multiple nurseries—not just small teeth, but also geological evidence of the right environmental conditions.”

He particularly liked Shinada et al.’s final paragraph. “[They] call out ‘popular questions’ along the lines of, ‘Was megalodon stronger than Livyatan?'” said Cooper. “I agree with the authors that these sorts of questions—ones we all often get asked by ‘fans’ on social media—are really not productive, as these unscientific questions disregard the rather amazing biology we’ve learned about this iconic, real species that existed, and reduce it to what I can only describe as a video game character.”

Regardless of how this friendly ongoing debate plays out, our collective fascination with megalodon is likely to persist. “It’s the imagining of such a magnificently enormous shark swimming around our oceans munching on whales, and considering that geologically speaking this happened in the very recent past,” said Cooper of the creature’s appeal. “It really captures what evolution can achieve, and even the huge size of their teeth alone really put it into perspective.”

DOI: Palaeontologia Electronica, 2025. 10.26879/1502 (About DOIs).

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

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Huh? The valuable role of interjections

history of language, language, Science, syndication / Paul Patrick / March 10, 2025

Utterances like um, wow, and mm-hmm aren’t garbage—they keep conversations flowing.

Interjections—one-word utterances that aren’t part of a larger sentence—used to be dismissed as irrelevant linguistic detritus. But some linguists now think they play an essential role in regulating conversations. Credit: Daniel Garcia/Knowable Magazine

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that’s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing.

When they did, they observed that interjections—that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence—were ubiquitous in everyday speech. “One in every seven utterances are one of these things,” says Dingemanse, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. “You’re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.”

Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. “Think of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,” says Dingemanse. “If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.” An um or uh from the speaker, for example, signals that they’re about to pause, but aren’t finished speaking. A quick huh? or what? from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

That need seems to be universal: In a survey of 31 languages around the world, Dingemanse and his colleagues found that all of them used a short, neutral syllable similar to huh? as a repair signal, probably because it’s quick to produce. “In that moment of difficulty, you’re going to need the simplest possible question word, and that’s what huh? is,” says Dingemanse. “We think all societies will stumble on this, for the same reason.”

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call “continuers,” such as mm-hmm — signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. Once again, the form of the word is well suited to its function: Because mm-hmm is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

Sign languages often handle continuers differently, but then again, two people signing at the same time can be less disruptive than two people speaking, says Carl Börstell, a linguist at the University of Bergen in Norway. In Swedish Sign Language, for example, listeners often sign yes as a continuer for long stretches, but to keep this continuer unobtrusive, the sender tends to hold their hands lower than usual.

Different interjections can send slightly different signals. Consider, for example, one person describing to another how to build a piece of Ikea furniture, says Allison Nguyen, a psycholinguist at Illinois State University. In such a conversation, mm-hmm might indicate that the speaker should continue explaining the current step, while yeah or OK would imply that the listener is done with that step and it’s time to move on to the next.

Wow! There’s more

Continuers aren’t merely for politeness—they really matter to a conversation, says Dingemanse. In one classic experiment from more than two decades ago, 34 undergraduate students listened as another volunteer told them a story. Some of the listeners gave the usual “I’m listening” signals, while others—who had been instructed to count the number of words beginning with the letter t—were too distracted to do so. The lack of normal signals from the listeners led to stories that were less well crafted, the researchers found. “That shows that these little words are quite consequential,” says Dingemanse.

Nguyen agrees that such words are far from meaningless. “They really do a lot for mutual understanding and mutual conversation,” she says. She’s now working to see if emojis serve similar functions in text conversations.

Storytellers depend on feedback such as mm-hmm and other interjections from their listeners. In this experiment, some listeners were told to count the number of times the storyteller used a word starting with t—a challenging task that prevented them from giving normal feedback. The quality of storytelling declined significantly, with problems like abrupt endings, rambling on, uneven or choppy pacing and overexplaining or justifying the point. Credit: Knowable Magazine

The role of interjections goes even deeper than regulating the flow of conversation. Interjections also help in negotiating the ground rules of a conversation. Every time two people converse, they need to establish an understanding of where each is coming from: what each participant knows to begin with, what they think the other person knows and how much detail they want to hear. Much of this work—what linguists call “grounding”—is carried out by interjections.

“If I’m telling you a story and you say something like ‘Wow!’ I might find that encouraging and add more detail,” says Nguyen. “But if you do something like, ‘Uh-huh,’ I’m going to assume you aren’t interested in more detail.”

A key part of grounding is working out what each participant thinks about the other’s knowledge, says Martina Wiltschko, a theoretical linguist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain. Some languages, like Mandarin, explicitly differentiate between “I’m telling you something you didn’t know” and “I’m telling you something that I think you knew already.” In English, that task falls largely on interjections.

One of Wiltschko’s favorite examples is the Canadian eh? “If I tell you you have a new dog, I’m usually not telling you stuff you don’t know, so it’s weird for me to tell you,” she says. But ‘You have a new dog, eh?’ eliminates the weirdness by flagging the statement as news to the speaker, not the listener.

Other interjections can indicate that the speaker knows they’re not giving the other participant what they sought. “If you ask me what’s the weather like in Barcelona, I can say ‘Well, I haven’t been outside yet,’” says Wiltschko. The well is an acknowledgement that she’s not quite answering the question.

Wiltschko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. “I haven’t found a language that doesn’t do these three general things: what I know, what I think you know and turn-taking,” she says. They are key to regulating conversations, she adds: “We are building common ground, and we are taking turns.”

Details like these aren’t just arcana for linguists to obsess over. Using interjections properly is a key part of sounding fluent in speaking a second language, notes Wiltschko, but language teachers often ignore them. “When it comes to language teaching, you get points deducted for using ums and uhs, because you’re ‘not fluent,’” she says. “But native speakers use them, because it helps! They should be taught.” Artificial intelligence, too, can struggle to use interjections well, she notes, making them the best way to distinguish between a computer and a real human.

And interjections also provide a window into interpersonal relationships. “These little markers say so much about what you think,” she says—and they’re harder to control than the actual content. Maybe couples therapists, for example, would find that interjections afford useful insights into how their clients regard one another and how they negotiate power in a conversation. The interjection oh often signals confrontation, she says, as in the difference between “Do you want to go out for dinner?” and “Oh, so now you want to go out for dinner?”

Indeed, these little words go right to the heart of language and what it is for. “Language exists because we need to interact with one another,” says Börstell. “For me, that’s the main reason for language being so successful.”

Dingemanse goes one step further. Interjections, he says, don’t just facilitate our conversations. In negotiating points of view and grounding, they’re also how language talks about talking.

“With huh? you say not just ‘I didn’t understand,’” says Dingemanse. “It’s ‘I understand you’re trying to tell me something, but I didn’t get it.’” That reflexivity enables more sophisticated speech and thought. Indeed, he says, “I don’t think we would have complex language if it were not for these simple words.”

Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

Huh? The valuable role of interjections Read More »

New research shows bigger animals get more cancer, defying decades-old belief

animal research, cancer, cancer research, Science, syndication / Tim Belzer / March 9, 2025

The answer lies in how quickly body size evolves. We found that birds and mammals that reached large sizes more rapidly have reduced cancer prevalence. For example, the common dolphin, Delphinus delphis evolved to reach its large body size—along with most other whales and dolphins (referred to as cetaceans) about three times faster than other mammals. However, cetaceans tend to have less cancer than expected.

Larger species face higher cancer risks but those that reached that size rapidly evolved mechanisms for mitigating it, such as lower mutation rates or enhanced DNA repair mechanisms. So rather than contradicting Cope’s rule, our findings refine it.

Larger bodies often evolve, but not as quickly in groups where the burden of cancer is higher. This means that the threat of cancer may have shaped the pace of evolution.

Humans evolved to our current body size relatively rapidly. Based on this, we would expect humans and bats to have similar cancer prevalence, because we evolved at a much, much faster rate. However, it is important to note that our results can’t explain the actual prevalence of cancer in humans. Nor is that an easy statistic to estimate.

Human cancer is a complicated story to unravel, with a plethora of types and many factors affecting its prevalence. For example, many humans not only have access to modern medicine but also varied lifestyles that affect cancer risk. For this reason, we did not include humans in our analysis.

Fighting cancer

Understanding how species naturally evolve cancer defences has important implications for human medicine. The naked mole rat, for example, is studied for its exceptionally low cancer prevalence in the hopes of uncovering new ways to prevent or treat cancer in humans. Only a few cancer cases have ever been observed in captive mole rats, so the exact mechanisms of their cancer resistance remain mostly a mystery.

At the same time, our findings raise new questions. Although birds and mammals that evolved quickly seem to have stronger anti-cancer mechanisms, amphibians and reptiles didn’t show the same pattern. Larger species had higher cancer prevalence regardless of how quickly they evolved. This could be due to differences in their regenerative abilities. Some amphibians, like salamanders, can regenerate entire limbs—a process that involves lots of cell division, which cancer could exploit.

Putting cancer into an evolutionary context allowed us to reveal that its prevalence does increase with body size. Studying this evolutionary arms race may unlock new insights into how nature fights cancer—and how we might do the same.

Joanna Baker, Postdoctoral Researcher in Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading and George Butler, Career Development Fellow in Cancer Evolution, UCL. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

nasa budget, Science, Space / Tim Belzer / March 9, 2025

In many ways, NASA’s science directorate is the crown jewel of the space agency. Nearly all of the most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs: Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, the return of samples from asteroids and comets, Cassini’s discovery of water plumes on Enceladus, a continuous robotic presence on Mars, and so much more. Even the recent lunar landings by Firefly and Intuitive Machines were funded by NASA’s science directorate.

Of NASA’s roughly $25 billion budget, however, only about 30 percent is allocated to science. For fiscal year 2024, this amounted to $7.4 billion. This spending was broken down into approximately $2.7 billion for planetary science, $2.2 billion for Earth science, $1.5 billion for astrophysics, and $800 million for heliophysics.

NASA science funding since 1980. Credit: Casey Dreier/The Planetary Society

The proposed cuts are being driven by Russell Vought, the recently confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, which sets budget and policy priorities for a presidential administration. In some sense, the budgetary decisions should not come as a surprise, as they are consistent with what Vought proposed in a “shadow” budget for fiscal-year 2023 as part of his Center for Renewing America.

“The budget also proposes a 50 percent reduction in NASA Science programs and spending, reducing their misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs,” Vought’s organization wrote in its report published in December 2022.

Zeroing out Earth science?

Despite Vought’s desire, however, NASA is expressly charged with studying our planet.

The congressional act that created NASA in 1958 calls for the space agency to expand human knowledge about Earth’s atmosphere and space, and the agency’s Earth observation satellites have substantially increased our understanding of this planet’s weather, changing climate, and land use.

Even if NASA’s Earth science budget were taken to zero, cutting the overall science budget in half would still dramatically reduce funding in planetary science as well as other research areas. Scientists told Ars that NASA would be forced to make difficult decisions, likely including shutting off extended missions such as the Voyager and Curiosity probes on Mars, and possibly even the Hubble Space Telescope. It might be possible to save missions in later stages of development, such as the Dragonfly probe to Saturn’s moon Titan, and the NEO Surveyor mission to search for hazardous asteroids. But it would be impossible to start meaningful new missions to explore the Solar System, potentially setting back planetary exploration a decade.

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent Read More »

The Starship program hits another speed bump with second consecutive failure

Commercial space, elon musk, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, starship, starship flight 8 / Kris Guyer / March 9, 2025

The flight plan going into Thursday’s mission called for sending Starship on a journey halfway around the world from Texas, culminating in a controlled reentry over the Indian Ocean before splashing down northwest of Australia.

The test flight was supposed to be a do-over of the previous Starship flight on January 16, when the rocket’s upper stage—itself known as Starship, or ship—succumbed to fires fueled by leaking propellants in its engine bay. Engineers determined the most likely cause of the propellant leak was a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected.

The Super Heavy booster returned to Starbase in Texas to be caught back at the launch pad. Credit: SpaceX

Engineers test-fired the Starship vehicle earlier this month for this week’s test flight, validating changes to propellant temperatures, operating thrust, and the ship’s fuel feed lines leading to its six Raptor engines.

But engineers missed something. On Thursday, the Raptor engines began shutting down on Starship about eight minutes into the flight, and the rocket started tumbling 90 miles (146 kilometers) over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX ground controllers lost all contact with the rocket about nine-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.

“Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines,” SpaceX wrote on X. “This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship.”

Just like in January, residents and tourists across the Florida peninsula, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands shared videos of fiery debris trails appearing in the twilight sky. Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint, just as they did in response to the January incident.

There were no immediate reports Thursday of any Starship wreckage falling over populated areas. In January, residents in the Turks and Caicos Islands recovered small debris fragments, including one piece that caused minor damage when it struck a car. The debris field from Thursday’s failed flight appeared to fall west of the areas where debris fell after Starship Flight 7.

A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the regulatory agency will require SpaceX to perform an investigation into Thursday’s Starship failure.

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The X-37B spaceplane lands after helping pave the way for “maneuver warfare”

Boeing, military space, Science, Space, Vandenberg space force base, x-37b spaceplane / Mike M. / March 8, 2025

On this mission, military officials said the X-37B tested “space domain awareness technology experiments” that aim to improve the Space Force’s knowledge of the space environment. Defense officials consider the space domain—like land, sea, and air—a contested environment that could become a battlefield in future conflicts.

Last month, the Space Force released the first image of Earth from an X-37B in space. This image was captured in 2024 as the spacecraft flew in its high-altitude orbit, and shows a portion of the X-37B’s power-generating solar array. Credit: US Space Force

The Space Force hasn’t announced plans for the next X-37B mission. Typically, the next X-37B flight has launched within a year of the prior mission’s landing. So far, all of the X-37B flights have launched from Florida, with landings at Vandenberg and at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where Boeing and the Space Force refurbish the spaceplanes between missions.

The aerobraking maneuvers demonstrated by the X-37B could find applications on future operational military satellites, according to Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command.

“The X-37 is a test and experimentation platform, but that aerobraking maneuver allowed it to bridge multiple orbital regimes, and we think this is exactly the kind of maneuverability we’d like to see in future systems, which will unlock a whole new series of operational concepts,” Whiting said in December at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference.

Space Command’s “astrographic” area of responsibility (AOR) starts at the top of Earth’s atmosphere and extends to the Moon and beyond.

“An irony of the space domain is that everything in our AOR is in motion, but rarely do we use maneuver as a way to gain positional advantage,” Whiting said. “We believe at US Space Command it is vital, given the threats we now see in novel orbits that are hard for us to get to, as well as the fact that the Chinese have been testing on-orbit refueling capability, that we need some kind of sustained space maneuver.”

Improvements in maneuverability would have benefits in surveilling an adversary’s satellites, as well as in defensive and offensive combat operations in orbit.

The Space Force could attain the capability for sustained maneuvers—known in some quarters as dynamic space operations—in several ways. One is to utilize in-orbit refueling that allows satellites to “maneuver without regret,” and another is to pursue more fuel-efficient means of changing orbits, such as aerobraking or solar-electric propulsion.

Then, Whiting said Space Command could transform how it operates by employing “maneuver warfare” as the Army, Navy and Air Force do. “We think we need to move toward a joint function of true maneuver advantage in space.”

The X-37B spaceplane lands after helping pave the way for “maneuver warfare” Read More »

Measles outbreak hits 208 cases as federal response goes off the rails

autism, health, Infectious disease, measles, MMR, New Mexico, Science, texas, vaccination / Mike M. / March 8, 2025

Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin that stays in the body. Taking too much over longer periods can cause vomiting, headache, fatigue, joint and bone pain, blurry vision, and skin and hair problems. Further, it can lead to dangerously high pressure inside the skull that pushes on the brain, as well as liver damage, confusion, coma, and other problems, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Nevertheless, in an interview with Fox News this week, Kennedy endorsed an unconventional regimen of a steroid, an antibiotic and cod liver oil, praising two Texas doctors for giving it to patients. One of the doctors Kennedy championed was disciplined by the state medical board in 2003 for “unusual use of risk-filled medications,” according to a report by CNN.

In a yet more worrying sign, Reuters reported Friday afternoon that the CDC is planning to conduct a large study on whether the MMR vaccine is linked to autism. This taxpayer-funded effort would occur despite the fact that decades of research and numerous high-quality studies have already been conducted—and they have consistently disproven or found no connection between the vaccine and autism.

The agency’s move is exactly what Democratic senators feared when Kennedy was confirmed as the country’s top health official. In Senate hearings, Kennedy refused to say that vaccines do not cause autism. Democratic senators quickly warned that his anti-vaccine stance could not only move the country backward in the fight against vaccine-preventable diseases, but also hold back autism research aimed at finding the real cause(s) as well as better treatments.

“When you continue to sow doubt about settled science it makes it impossible for us to move forward,” Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) said in a Senate hearing. “It’s the relitigating and rehashing … it freezes us in place.”

Measles outbreak hits 208 cases as federal response goes off the rails Read More »

When Europe needed it most, the Ariane 6 rocket finally delivered

ariane 6, Arianespace, Europe, france, launch, military space, Science, Space / Paul Patrick / March 7, 2025

“For this sovereignty, we must yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX.”

Europe’s second Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center on Thursday with a French military spy satellite. Credit: ESA-CNES-Arianespace-P. Piron

Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight.

The 184-foot-tall (56-meter) rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 11: 24 am EST (16: 24 UTC). Twin solid-fueled boosters and a hydrogen-fueled core stage engine powered the Ariane 6 through thick clouds on an arcing trajectory north from the spaceport on South America’s northeastern coast.

The rocket shed its strap-on boosters a little more than two minutes into the flight, then jettisoned its core stage nearly eight minutes after liftoff. The spent rocket parts fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The upper stage’s Vinci engine ignited two times to reach a nearly circular polar orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above the Earth. A little more than an hour after launch, the Ariane 6 upper stage deployed CSO-3, a sharp-eyed French military spy satellite, to begin a mission providing optical surveillance imagery to French intelligence agencies and military forces.

“This is an absolute pleasure for me today to announce that Ariane 6 has successfully placed into orbit the CSO-3 satellite,” said David Cavaillolès, who took over in January as CEO of Arianespace, the Ariane 6’s commercial operator. “Today, here in Kourou, we can say that thanks to Ariane 6, Europe and France have their own autonomous access to space back, and this is great news.”

This was the second flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, following a mostly successful debut launch last July. The first test flight of the unproven Ariane 6 carried a batch of small, relatively inexpensive satellites. An Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU)—essentially a miniature second engine—on the upper stage shut down in the latter portion of the inaugural Ariane 6 flight, after the rocket reached orbit and released some of its payloads. But the unit malfunctioned before a third burn of the upper stage’s main engine, preventing the Ariane 6 from targeting a controlled reentry into the atmosphere.

The APU has several jobs on an Ariane 6 flight, including maintaining pressure inside the upper stage’s cryogenic propellant tanks, settling propellants before each main engine firing, and making fine adjustments to the rocket’s position in space. The APU appeared to work as designed Thursday, although this launch flew a less demanding profile than the test flight last year.

Is Ariane 6 the solution?

Ariane 6 has been exorbitantly costly and years late, but its first operational success comes at an opportune time for Europe.

Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for research and higher education, says Ariane 6 is “proof of our space sovereignty,” as many European officials feel they can no longer rely on the United States. Baptiste, an engineer and former head of the French space agency, mentioned “sovereignty” so many times, turning his statement into a drinking game crossed my mind.

“The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences on our research partnerships, on our commercial partnerships,” Baptiste said. “Should I mention the uncertainties weighing today on our cooperation with NASA and NOAA, when emblematic programs like the ISS (International Space Station) are being unilaterally questioned by Elon Musk?

“If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security, and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential part of this,” he continued.

Philippe Baptiste arrives at a government question session at the Senate in Paris on March 5, 2025. Credit: Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

Baptiste’s comments echo remarks from a range of European leaders in recent weeks.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address Wednesday night that the French were “legitimately worried” about European security after Trump reversed US policy on Ukraine. America’s NATO allies are largely united in their desire to continue supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, while the Trump administration seeks a ceasefire that would require significant Ukrainian concessions.

“I want to believe that the United States will stay by our side, but we have to be prepared for that not to be the case,” Macron said. “The future of Europe does not have to be decided in Washington or Moscow.”

Friedrich Merz, set to become Germany’s next chancellor, said last month that Europe should strive to “achieve independence” from the United States. “It is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Merz also suggested Germany, France, and the United Kingdom should explore cooperation on a European nuclear deterrent to replace that of the United States, which has committed to protecting European territory from Russian attack for more than 75 years. Macron said the French military, which runs the only nuclear forces in Europe fully independent of the United States, could be used to protect allies elsewhere on the continent.

Access to space is also a strategic imperative for Europe, and it hasn’t come cheap. ESA paid more than $4 billion to develop the Ariane 6 rocket as a cheaper, more capable replacement for the Ariane 5, which retired in 2023. There are still pressing questions about Ariane 6’s cost per launch and whether the rocket will ever be able to meet its price target and compete with SpaceX and other companies in the commercial market.

But European officials have freely admitted the commercial market is secondary on their list of Ariane 6 goals.

European satellite operators stopped launching their payloads on Russian rockets after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, with Elon Musk inserting himself into European politics, there’s little appetite among European government officials to launch their satellites on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The second Ariane 6 rocket on the launch pad in French Guiana. Credit: ESA–S. Corvaja

The Falcon 9 was the go-to choice for the European Space Agency, the European Union, and several national governments in Europe after they lost access to Russia’s Soyuz rocket and when Europe’s homemade Ariane 6 and Vega rockets faced lengthy delays. ESA launched a $1.5 billion space telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket in 2023, then returned to SpaceX to launch a climate research satellite and an asteroid explorer last year. The European Union paid SpaceX to launch four satellites for its flagship Galileo navigation network.

European space officials weren’t thrilled to do this. ESA was somewhat more accepting of the situation, with the agency’s director general recognizing Europe was suffering from an “acute launcher crisis” two years ago. On the other hand, the EU refused to even acknowledge SpaceX’s role in delivering Galileo satellites to orbit in the text of a post-launch press release.

“For this sovereignty, we must yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX or another competitor that may seem trendier, more reliable, or cheaper,” Baptiste said. “We did not yield for CSO-3, and we will not yield in the future. We cannot yield because doing so would mean closing the door to space for good, and there would be no turning back. This is why the first commercial launch of Ariane 6 is not just a technical and one-off success. It marks a new milestone, essential in the choice of European space independence and sovereignty.”

Two flights into its career, Ariane 6 seems to offer a technical solution for Europe’s needs. But at what cost? Arianespace hasn’t publicly disclosed the cost for an Ariane 6 launch, although it’s likely somewhere in the range of 80 million to 100 million euros, about 40 percent lower than the cost of an Ariane 5. This is about 50 percent more than SpaceX’s list price for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch.

A new wave of European startups should soon begin launching small rockets to gain a foothold in the continent’s launch industry. These include Isar Aerospace, which could launch its first Spectrum rocket in a matter of weeks. These companies have the potential to offer Europe an option for cheaper rides to space, but the startups won’t have a rocket in the class of Ariane 6 until at least the 2030s.

Until then, at least, European governments will have to pay more to guarantee autonomous access to space.

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.

When Europe needed it most, the Ariane 6 rocket finally delivered Read More »