Beth Washington

Questions swirl after Trump’s GLP-1 pricing deal announcement

drug, eli lilly, GLP-1, health, mounjaro, Novo Nordisk, Ozempic, pricing, Trump, wegovy, zepbound / Beth Washington / November 7, 2025

While some may stand to gain access to the drugs under these categories, another factor in assessing the deal’s impact is that millions are expected to lose federal health coverage under the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Unmatched prices

In addition to the deals for federal programs, the administration also announced new direct-to-consumer prices. Currently, people with a prescription can buy the most popular drugs, Wegovy and Zepbound, directly from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, respectively, for $499 each. Under the new deal, Wegovy will be available for $350, as will Ozempic. And Zepbound will be available at “an average” of $346. While the prices are lower, the out-of-pocket costs are still likely to be more than most people would pay if they went through an insurance plan, and paying outside their insurance policies means that the payments won’t be counted toward out-of-pocket maximums and other tallies. Generally, experts expect that direct-to-consumer sales won’t play a significant role in lowering overall drug costs.

It remains unclear if Trump’s deal will have any effect on GLP-1 prices for those on commercial insurance plans.

Trump hailed the deals, calling them “most favored-nation pricing.” But even with the lower prices for some, Americans are still paying more than foreign counterparts. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted last year, while Novo Nordisk set Ozempic’s list price at nearly $1,000 in the US and the new deal is as low as $245, the drug costs just $155 in Canada, $122 in Italy, $71 in France, and $59 in Germany. Wegovy, similarly, is $186 in Denmark, $137 in Germany, and $92 in the United Kingdom. Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro is $94 in Japan.

A study published last year in JAMA Network Open led by researchers at Yale University estimated that the manufacturing cost for this class of drugs is under $5 for a month’s supply.

The announcement also said that future GLP-1 drugs in pill form (rather than injections) from the two companies will be priced at $150. That price will be for federal programs and direct-to-consumer sales. While such pills are nearing the market, none are currently available or approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Given that they are not yet for sale, the cost savings from this deal are unknown.

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With Skigill, the classic RPG skill tree becomes a crowded battlefield

achromi, gaming, roguelike, skill tree, survivors / Beth Washington / November 7, 2025

The stark presentation can threaten to be overwhelming at times, especially when nearly the entire screen descends into a mass of yellow pixels. But the simplicity of the colors also makes it easy to unfocus your eyes and instinctually plan a path away from the red and yellow threats and through to the safety of the inky black void.

Skigill also benefits from allowing players to speed up or slow down time with a quick tap of the shoulder buttons. This is a lifesaver for the tedium of the early parts of runs, when the enemies are coming in at a relative trickle and you don’t want to stand around waiting for the actual challenging part of the run.

Thankfully, you can fast-forward through the early-run doldrums… Credit: Achromi

Where Skigill suffers most, for the moment, is in an overall lack of variety. The recent Early Access release only has three playable characters and four skill-tree maps. While they differ in some important ways, the options fall far short of the dozens of arcane unlockable options that can keep players coming back to a game like Vampire Survivors for dozens of hours.

For replayability, Skigill currently relies on a difficulty system that simply scales up the quantity and health of enemies alongside a secondary skill tree that lets you purchase more permanent upgrades from the main menu. Unfortunately, even at the higher difficulty levels, you’ll see the same four yellow-on-black enemies filling your immediate vicinity, with little in the way of interesting movement or attack patterns to mix things up.

The developers promise on Steam that Skigill will see at least three new characters “along with more weapons and build possibilities” as it goes from Early Access to a Version 1.0 launch. We’re happy to hear that, because even this limited, somewhat repetitive taste of the game has had us coming back for the fun take on an old RPG staple.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s illegal school drove his neighbors crazy

Features, mark zuckerberg, Meta, Policy, syndication, ZOning / Beth Washington / November 7, 2025

Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic.

An entrance to Mark Zuckerberg’s compound in Palo Alto, California. Credit: Loren Elliott/Redux

The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line.

The Zuckerberg compound’s expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbors as early as 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area’s residential zoning code without a permit. They began a crusade to shut it down that did not end until summer 2025.

WIRED obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute—including 311 records, legal filings, construction plans, and emails—through a public record request filed to the Palo Alto Department of Planning and Development Services. (Mentions of “Zuckerberg” or “the Zuckerbergs” appear to have been redacted. However, neighbors and separate public records confirm that the property in question belongs to the family. The names of the neighbors who were in touch with the city were also redacted.)

The documents reveal that the school may have been operating as early as 2021 without a permit to operate in the city of Palo Alto. As many as 30 students might have enrolled, according to observations from neighbors. These documents also reveal a wider problem: For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking.

Over time, neighbors became fed up with what they argued was the city’s lack of action, particularly with respect to the school. Some believed that the delay was because of preferential treatment to the Zuckerbergs. “We find it quite remarkable that you are working so hard to meet the needs of a single billionaire family while keeping the rest of the neighborhood in the dark,” reads one email sent to the city’s Planning and Development Services Department in February. “Just as you have not earned our trust, this property owner has broken many promises over the years, and any solution which depends on good faith behavioral changes from them is a failure from the beginning.”

Palo Alto spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor told WIRED that the city “enforces zoning, building, and life safety rules consistently, without regard to who owns a property.” She also refuted the claim that neighbors were kept in the dark, claiming that the city’s approval of construction projects at the Zuckerberg properties “were processed the same way they are for any property owner.” She added that, though some neighbors told the city they believe the Zuckerbergs received “special treatment,” that is not accurate.

“Staff met with residents, conducted site visits, and provided updates by phone and email while engaging the owner’s representative to address concerns,” Horrigan-Taylor said. “These actions were measured and appropriate to abate the unpermitted use and responsive to neighborhood issues within the limits of local and state law.”

According to The New York Times, which first reported on the school’s existence, it was called “Bicken Ben School” and shared a name with one of the Zuckerbergs’ chickens. The listing for Bicken Ben School, or BBS for short, in a California Department of Education directory claims the school opened on October 5, 2022. This, however, is the year after neighbors claim to have first seen it operating. It’s also two and a half years after Sara Berge—the school’s point of contact, per documents WIRED obtained from the state via public record request—claims to have started her role as “head of school” for a “Montessori pod” at a “private family office” according to her LinkedIn profile, which WIRED viewed in September and October. Berge did not respond to a request to comment.

Between 2022 and 2025, according to the documents Bicken Ben filed to the state, the school grew from nine to 14 students ranging from 5 to 10 years old. Neighbors, however, estimated that they observed 15 to 30 students. Berge similarly claimed on her LinkedIn profile to have overseen “25 children” in her job. In a June 2025 job listing for “BBS,” the school had a “current enrollment of 35–40 students and plans for continued growth,” which the listing says includes a middle school.

In order for the Zuckerbergs to run a private school on their land, which is in a residential zone, they need a “conditional use” permit from the city. However, based on the documents WIRED obtained, and Palo Alto’s public database of planning applications, the Zuckerbergs do not appear to have ever applied for or received this permit.

Per emails obtained by WIRED, Palo Alto authorities told a lawyer working with the Zuckerbergs in March 2025 that the family had to shut down the school on its compound by June 30. A state directory lists BBS, the abbreviation for Bicken Ben School, as having operated until August 18, and three of Zuckerberg’s neighbors—who all requested anonymity due to the high-profile nature of the family—confirmed to WIRED in late September that they had not seen or heard students being dropped off and picked up on weekdays in recent weeks.

However, Zuckerberg family spokesperson Brian Baker tells WIRED that the school didn’t close, per se. It simply moved. It’s not clear where it is now located, or whether the school is operating under a different name.

In response to a detailed request for comment, Baker provided WIRED with an emailed statement on behalf of the Zuckerbergs. “Mark, Priscilla and their children have made Palo Alto their home for more than a decade,” he said. “They value being members of the community and have taken a number of steps above and beyond any local requirements to avoid disruption in the neighborhood.”

“Serious and untenable”

By the fall of 2024, Zuckerberg’s neighbors were at their breaking point. At some point in mid-2024, according to an email from then mayor Greer Stone, a group of neighbors had met with Stone to air their grievances about the Zuckerberg compound and the illegal school they claimed it was operating. They didn’t arrive at an immediate resolution.

In the years prior, the city had received several rounds of complaints about the Zuckerberg compound. Complaints for the address of the school were filed to 311, the nationwide number for reporting local non-emergency issues, in February 2019, September 2021, January 2022, and April 2023. They all alleged that the property was operating illegally under city code. Both were closed by the planning department, which found no rule violations. An unknown number of additional complaints, mentioned in emails among city workers, were also made between 2020 and 2024—presumably delivered via phone calls, in person, or to city departments not included in WIRED’s public record request.

In December 2020, building inspection manager Korwyn Peck wrote to code enforcement officer Brian Reynolds about an inspection he attempted to conduct around the Zuckerberg compound, in response to several noise and traffic complaints from neighbors. He described that several men in SUVs had gathered to watch him, and a tense conversation with one of them had ensued. “This appears to be a site that we will need to pay attention to,” Peck wrote to Reynolds.

“We have all been accused of ‘not caring,’ which of course is not true,” Peck added. “It does appear, however, with the activity I observed tonight, that we are dealing with more than four simple dwellings. This appears to be more than a homeowner with a security fetish.”

In a September 11, 2024, email to Jonathan Lait, Palo Alto’s director of planning and development services and Palo Alto city attorney Molly Stump, one of Zuckerberg’s neighbors alleged that since 2021, “despite numerous neighborhood complaints” to the city of Palo Alto, including “multiple code violation reports,” the school had continued to grow. They claimed that a garage at the property had been converted into another classroom, and that an increasing number of children were arriving each day. Lait and Stump did not respond to a request to comment.

“The addition of daily traffic from the teachers and parents at the school has only exacerbated an already difficult situation,” they said in the email, noting that the neighborhood has been dealing with an “untenable traffic” situation for more than eight years.

They asked the city to conduct a formal investigation into the school on Zuckerberg’s property, adding that their neighbors are also “extremely concerned” about the school, and “are willing to provide eyewitness accounts in support of this complaint.”

Over the next week, another neighbor forwarded this note to all six Palo Alto city council members, as well as then mayor Stone. One of these emails described the situation as “serious” and “untenable.”

“We believe the investigation should be swift and should yield a cease and desist order,” the neighbor wrote.

Lait responded to the neighbor who sent the original complaint on October 15, claiming that he’d had an “initial call” with a “representative” of the property owners and that he was directing the city’s code enforcement staff to reexamine the property.

On December 11, 2024, the neighbor claimed that since one of their fellow neighbors had spoken to a Zuckerberg representative, and the representative had allegedly admitted that there was a school on the property, “it seems like an open and shut case.”

“Our hope is that there is an equal process in place for all residents of Palo Alto regardless of wealth or stature,” the neighbor wrote. “It is hard to imagine that this kind of behavior would be ignored in any other circumstance.”

That same day, Lait told Christine Wade, a partner at SSL Law Firm—who, in an August 2024 email thread, said she was “still working with” the Zuckerberg family—that the Zuckerbergs lacked the required permit to run a school in a residential zone.

“Based on our review of local and state law, we believe this use constitutes a private school use in a residential zone requiring a conditional use permit,” Lait wrote in an email to Wade. “We also have not found any state preemptions that would exclude a use like this from local zoning requirements.” Lait added that a “next step,” if a permit was not obtained, would be sending a cease and desist to the property owner.

According to several emails, Wade, Lait, and Mark Legaspi, CEO of the Zuckerberg family office called West 10, went on to arrange an in-person meeting at City Hall on January 9. (This is the first time that the current name of the Zuckerberg family office, West 10, has been publicly disclosed. The office was previously called West Street.) Although WIRED did not obtain notes from the meeting, Lait informed the neighbor on January 10 that he had told the Zuckerbergs’ “representative” that the school would need to shut down if it didn’t get a conditional use permit or apply for that specific permit.

Lait added that the representative would clarify what the family planned to do in about a week; however, he noted that if the school were to close, the city may give the school a “transition period” to wind things down. Wade did not respond to a request for comment.

“At a minimum, give us extended breaks”

There was another increasingly heated conversation happening behind the scenes. On February 3 of this year, at least one neighbor met with Jordan Fox, an employee of West 10.

It’s unclear exactly what happened at this meeting, or if the neighbor who sent the September 11 complaint was in attendance. But a day after the meeting with Fox, two additional neighbors added their names to the September 11 complaint, per an email to Lait.

On February 12, a neighbor began an email chain with Fox. This email was forwarded to Planning Department officials two months later. The neighbor, who seemingly attended the meeting, said they had “connected” with fellow neighbors “to review and revise” an earlier list of 14 requests that had been reportedly submitted to the Zuckerbergs at some previous point. The note does not specify the contents of this original list of requests, but of the 19 neighbors who originally contributed to it, they claimed that 15 had contributed to the revised list.

The email notes that the Zuckerbergs had been “a part of our neighborhood for many years,” and that they “hope that this message will start an open and respectful dialogue,” built upon the “premise of how we all wish to be treated as neighbors.”

“Our top requests are to minimize future disruption to the neighborhood and proactively manage the impact of the many people who are affiliated with you,” the email says. This includes restricting parking by “security guards, contractors, staff, teachers, landscapers, visitors, etc.” In the event of major demolitions, concrete pours, or large parties, the email asks for advance notice, and for dedicated efforts to “monitor and mitigate noise.”

The email also asks the Zuckerbergs to, “ideally stop—but at a minimum give us extended breaks from—the acquisition, demolition and construction cycle to let the neighborhood recover from the last eight years of disruption.”

At this point, the email requests that the family “abide by both the letter and the spirit of Palo Alto” by complying with city code about residential buildings.

Specifically, it asks the Zuckerbergs to get a use permit for the compound’s school and to hold “a public hearing for transparency.” It also asks the family to not expand its compound any further. “We hope this will help us get back the quiet, attractive residential neighborhood that we all loved so much when we chose to move here.”

In a follow-up on March 4, Fox acknowledged the “unusual” effects that come with being neighbors with Mark Zuckerberg and his family.

“I recognize and understand that the nature of our residence is unique given the profile and visibility of the family,” she wrote. “I hope that as we continue to grow our relationship with you over time, you will increasingly enjoy the benefits of our proximity—e.g., enhanced safety and security, shared improvements, and increased property values.”

Fox said that the Zuckerbergs instituted “a revised parking policy late last year” that should address their concerns, and promised to double down on efforts to give advanced notice about construction, parties, and other potential disruptions.

However, Fox did not directly address the unpermitted school and other nonresidential activities happening at the compound. She acknowledged that the compound has “residential support staff” including “childcare, culinary, personal assistants, property management, and security,” but said that they have “policies in place to minimize their impact on the neighborhood.”

It’s unclear if the neighbor responded to Fox.

“You have not earned our trust”

While these conversations were happening between Fox and Zuckerberg’s neighbors, Lait and others at the city Planning Department were scrambling to find a solution for the neighbor who complained on September 11, and a few other neighbors who endorsed the complaint in September and February.

Starting in February, one of these neighbors took the lead on following up with Lait. They asked him for an update on February 11, and heard back a few days later. He didn’t have any major updates, “but after conversations with the family’s representatives, he said he was exploring whether a “subset of children” could continue to come to the school sometimes for “ancillary” uses.

“I also believe a more nuanced solution is warranted in this case,” Lait added. Ideally, such a solution would respond to the neighbors’ complaints, but allow the Zuckerbergs to “reasonably be authorized by the zoning code.”

The neighbor wasn’t thrilled. The next day, they replied and called the city’s plan “unsatisfactory.”

“The city’s ‘nuanced solution’ in dealing with this serial violator has led to the current predicament,” they said (referring to the nuanced solution Lait mentioned in his last email.)

Horrigan-Taylor, the Palo Alto spokesperson, told WIRED that Lait’s mention of a “nuanced” solution referred to “resolving, to the extent permissible by law, neighborhood impacts and otherwise permitted use established by state law and local zoning.”

“Would I, or any other homeowner, be given the courtesy of a ‘nuanced solution’ if we were in violation of city code for over four years?” they added.

“Please know that you have not earned our trust and that we will take every opportunity to hold the city accountable if your solution satisfies a single [redacted] property owner over the interests of an entire neighborhood,” they continued.

“If you somehow craft a ‘nuanced solution’ based on promises,” the neighbor said, “the city will no doubt once again simply disappear and the damage to the neighborhood will continue.”

Lait did not respond right away. The neighbor followed up on March 13, asking if he had “reconsidered” his plan to offer a “‘nuanced solution’ for resolution of these ongoing issues by a serial code violator.” They asked when the neighborhood could “expect relief from the almost decade long disruptions.”

Behind the scenes, Zuckerberg’s lawyers were fighting to make sure the school could continue to operate. In a document dated March 14, Wade argues that she believed the activities at “the Property” “represent an appropriate residential use based on established state law as well as constitutional principles.”

Wade said that “the Family” was in the process of obtaining a “Large Family Daycare” license for the property, which is legal for a cohort of 14 or fewer children all under the age of 10.

“We consistently remind our vendors, guests, etc. to minimize noise, not loiter anywhere other than within the Family properties, and to keep areas clean,” Wade added in the letter. Wade also attached an adjusted lease corresponding with the address of the illicit school, which promises that the property will be used for only one purpose. The exact purpose is redacted.

On March 25, Lait told the neighbor that the city’s June 30 deadline for the Zuckerbergs to shut down the school had not changed. However, the family’s representative said that they were pursuing a daycare license. These licenses are granted by the state, not the city of Palo Alto.

The subtext of this email was that if the state gave them a daycare licence, there wasn’t much the city could do. Horrigan-Taylor confirmed with WIRED that “state licensed large family day care homes” do not require city approval, adding that the city also “does not regulate homeschooling.”

“Thanks for this rather surprising information,” the neighbor replied about a week later. “We have repeatedly presented ideas to the family over the past 8 years with very little to show for it, so from our perspective, we need to understand the city’s willingness to act or not to act.”

Baker told WIRED that the Zuckerbergs never ended up applying for a daycare license, a claim that corresponds with California’s public registry of daycare centers. (There are only two registered daycare centers in Palo Alto, and neither belongs to the Zuckerbergs. The Zuckerbergs’ oldest child, Maxima, will also turn 10 in December and consequently age out of any daycare legally operating in California.)

Horrigan-Taylor said that a representative for the Zuckerbergs told the city that the family wanted to move the school to “another location where private schools are permitted by right.”

In a school administrator job listing posted to the Association Montessori International website in July 2022 for “BBS,” Bicken Ben head of school Berge claims that the school had four distinct locations, and that applicants must be prepared to travel six to eight weeks per year. The June 2025 job listing also says that the “year-round” school spans “across multiple campuses,” but the main location of the job is listed as Palo Alto. It’s unclear where the other sites are located.

Most of the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. However, the ones that did clearly indicated that they would not be forgetting the Bicken Ben saga, or the past decade of disruption, anytime soon.

“Frankly I’m not sure what’s going on,” one neighbor said, when reached by WIRED via landline. “Except for noise and construction debris.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Google plans secret AI military outpost on tiny island overrun by crabs

AI, AI and work, AI infrastructure, australia, Biz & IT, Christmas Island, Cloud Computing, crabs, datacenters, defense, Google, machine learning, Military, red crabs, SubCom, subsea cables / Beth Washington / November 6, 2025

Christmas Island Shire President Steve Pereira told Reuters that the council is examining community impacts before approving construction. “There is support for it, providing this data center actually does put back into the community with infrastructure, employment, and adding economic value to the island,” Pereira said.

That’s great, but what about the crabs?

Christmas Island’s annual crab migration is a natural phenomenon that Sir David Attenborough reportedly once described as one of his greatest TV moments when he visited the site in 1990.

Every year, millions of crabs emerge from the forest and swarm across roads, streams, rocks, and beaches to reach the ocean, where each female can produce up to 100,000 eggs. The tiny baby crabs that survive take about nine days to march back inland to the safety of the plateau.

While Google is seeking environmental approvals for its subsea cables, the timing could prove delicate for Christmas Island’s most famous residents. According to Parks Australia, the island’s annual red crab migration has already begun for 2025, with a major spawning event expected in just a few weeks, around November 15–16.

During peak migration times, sections of roads close at short notice as crabs move between forest and sea, and the island has built special crab bridges over roads to protect the migrating masses.

Parks Australia notes that while the migration happens annually, few baby crabs survive the journey from sea to forest most years, as they’re often eaten by fish, manta rays, and whale sharks. The successful migrations that occur only once or twice per decade (when large numbers of babies actually survive) are critical for maintaining the island’s red crab population.

How Google’s facility might coexist with 100 million marching crustaceans remains to be seen. But judging by the size of the event, it seems clear that it’s the crab’s world, and we’re just living in it.

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Space junk may have struck a Chinese crew ship in low-Earth orbit

china, chinese space program, human spaceflight, Science, shenzhou, shenzhou 20, shenzhou 21, Space, tiangong / Beth Washington / November 5, 2025

Three Chinese astronauts were due to depart the Tiangong space station, reenter the atmosphere, and land in the remote desert of Inner Mongolia on Wednesday. Instead, officials ordered the crew to remain at the station while engineers investigate a potential problem with their landing craft.

The China Manned Space Agency, run by the country’s military, announced the change late Tuesday in a brief statement posted to Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.

“The Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft is suspected of being impacted by small space debris,” the statement said. “Impact analysis and risk assessment are underway. To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou 20 return mission, originally scheduled for November 5, will be postponed.”

What we know

The Shenzhou 20 astronauts arrived at the Tiangong station in April. Their replacements on the Shenzhou 21 mission docked with Tiangong on Friday, temporarily raising the station’s crew size to six people. After several days of joint operations, the six astronauts held a handover ceremony early Tuesday to formally transfer command of the outpost to the new crew.

Less than 24 hours later, Chinese officials decided to call off Shenzhou 20’s departure from Tiangong. The statement from the China Manned Space Agency did not say what part of the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft may have been damaged, what evidence led engineers to suspect space debris was the culprit, or how long Shenzhou 20’s departure might be postponed.

This view shows a Shenzhou spacecraft departing the Tiangong space station in 2023. Credit: China Manned Space Agency

The ship has three sections, with a landing capsule positioned between the crew living quarters and a power and propulsion module. The modules separate from one another before reentry, and the return craft heads for a parachute-assisted landing while the other elements burn up during atmospheric reentry.

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Some stinkbugs’ legs carry a mobile fungal garden

agriculture, Biology, bugs, entomology, fungus, insects, Science / Beth Washington / November 4, 2025

Many insect species hear using tympanal organs, membranes roughly resembling our eardrums but located on their legs. Grasshoppers, mantises, and moths all have them, and for decades, we thought that female stinkbugs of the Dinidoridae family have them, too, although located a bit unusually on their hind rather than front legs.

Suspecting that they use their hind leg tympanal organs to listen to male courtship songs, a team of Japanese researchers took a closer look at the organs in Megymenum gracilicorne, a Dinidoridae stinkbug species native to Japan. They discovered that these “tympanal organs” were not what they seemed. They’re actually mobile fungal nurseries of a kind we’ve never seen before.

Portable gardens

Dinidoridae is a small stinkbug family that lives exclusively in Asia. The bug did attract some scientific attention, but not nearly as much as its larger relatives like Pentatomidae. Prior work looking specifically into organs growing on the hind legs of Dinidoridae females was thus somewhat limited. “Most research relied on taxonomic and morphological approaches. Some taxonomists did describe that female Dinidoridae stinkbugs have an enlarged part on the hind legs that looks like the tympanal organ you can find, for example, in crickets,” said Takema Fukatsu, an evolutionary biologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tokyo.

Based on that appearance, these parts were classified as tympanal organs—the case was closed, and it stayed closed until Fukatsu’s team started examining them more closely. Most insects have tympanal organs on their front legs, not hind legs, or on abdominal segments. The initial goal of Fukatsu’s study was to figure out what impact this unusual position has on Dinidoridae females’ ability to hear sounds.

Early on in the study, it turned out that whatever Dinidoridae females have on their hind legs, they are not tympanal organs. “We found no tympanal membrane and no sensory neurons, so the enlarged parts on the hind legs had nothing to do with hearing,” Fukatsu explained. Instead, the organ had thousands of small pores filled with benign filamentous fungi. The pores were connected to secretory cells that released substances that Fukatsu’s team hypothesized were nutrients enabling the fungi to grow.

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Disruption to science will last longer than the US government shutdown

government shutdown, Science, Science policy, syndication / Beth Washington / November 3, 2025

President Donald Trump alongside Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

However, the full impact of the shutdown and the Trump administration’s broader assaults on science to US international competitiveness, economic security, and electoral politics could take years to materialize.

In parallel, the dramatic drop in international student enrollment, the financial squeeze facing research institutions, and research security measures to curb foreign interference spell an uncertain future for American higher education.

With neither the White House nor Congress showing signs of reaching a budget deal, Trump continues to test the limits of executive authority, reinterpreting the law—or simply ignoring it.

Earlier in October, Trump redirected unspent research funding to pay furloughed service members before they missed their Oct. 15 paycheck. Changing appropriated funds directly challenges the power vested in Congress—not the president—to control federal spending.

The White House’s promise to fire an additional 10,000 civil servants during the shutdown, its threat to withhold back pay from furloughed workers, and its push to end any programs with lapsed funding “not consistent with the President’s priorities” similarly move to broaden presidential power.

Here, the damage to science could snowball. If Trump and Vought chip enough authority away from Congress by making funding decisions or shuttering statutory agencies, the next three years will see an untold amount of impounded, rescinded, or repurposed research funds.

photo of empty science lab — The government shutdown has emptied many laboratories staffed by federal scientists. Combined with other actions by the Trump administration, more scientists could continue to lose funding. Credit: Monty Rakusen/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Science, democracy, and global competition

While technology has long served as a core pillar of national and economic security, science has only recently reemerged as a key driver of greater geopolitical and cultural change.

China’s extraordinary rise in science over the past three decades and its arrival as the United States’ chief technological competitor has upended conventional wisdom that innovation can thrive only in liberal democracies.

The White House’s efforts to centralize federal grantmaking, restrict free speech, erase public data, and expand surveillance mirror China’s successful playbook for building scientific capacity while suppressing dissent.

As the shape of the Trump administration’s vision for American science has come into focus, what remains unclear is whether, after the shutdown, it can outcompete China by following its lead.

Kenneth M. Evans is a Fellow in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

copyright act, copyright law, digital library, Features, Internet Archive, online archive, online library, Policy, wayback machine / Beth Washington / November 3, 2025

“We survived, but it wiped out the library,” Internet Archive’s founder says.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle celebrates 1 trillion web pages on stage with staff. Credit: via the Internet Archive

This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

History of the Internet Archive

Kahle has been striving since 1996 to transform the Internet Archive into a digital Library of Alexandria—but “with a better fire protection plan,” joked Kyle Courtney, a copyright lawyer and librarian who leads the nonprofit eBook Study Group, which helps states update laws to protect libraries.

When the Wayback Machine was born in 2001 as a way to take snapshots of the web, Kahle told The New York Times that building free archives was “worth it.” He was also excited that the Wayback Machine had drawn renewed media attention to libraries.

At the time, law professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the Internet Archive would face copyright battles, but he also believed that the Wayback Machine would change the way the public understood copyright fights.

”We finally have a clear and tangible example of what’s at stake,” Lessig told the Times. He insisted that Kahle was “defining the public domain” online, which would allow Internet users to see ”how easy and important” the Wayback Machine “would be in keeping us sane and honest about where we’ve been and where we’re going.”

Kahle suggested that IA’s legal battles weren’t with creators or publishers so much as with large media companies that he thinks aren’t “satisfied with the restriction you get from copyright.”

“They want that and more,” Kahle said, pointing to e-book licenses that expire as proof that libraries increasingly aren’t allowed to own their collections. He also suspects that such companies wanted the Wayback Machine dead—but the Wayback Machine has survived and proved itself to be a unique and useful resource.

The Internet Archive also began archiving—and then lending—e-books. For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project to create a “National Emergency Library” as libraries across the world shut down during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project eventually grew to 1.4 million titles.

But lifting the lending restrictions also brought more scrutiny from copyright holders, who eventually sued the Archive. Litigation went on for years. In 2024, IA lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over the Archive’s Open Library project, which used a novel e-book lending model to bypass publishers’ licensing fees and checkout limitations. Damages could have topped $400 million, but publishers ultimately announced a “confidential agreement on a monetary payment” that did not bankrupt the Archive.

Litigation has continued, though. More recently, the Archive settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. A settlement in that case, reached last month, was similarly confidential. In both cases, IA’s experts challenged publishers’ estimates of their losses as massively inflated.

For Internet Archive fans, a group that includes longtime Internet users, researchers, students, historians, lawyers, and the US government, the end of the lawsuits brought a sigh of relief. The Archive can continue—but it can’t run one of its major programs in the same way.

What the Internet Archive lost

To Kahle, the suits have been an immense setback to IA’s mission.

Publishers had argued that the Open Library’s lending harmed the e-book market, but IA says its vision for the project was not to frustrate e-book sales (which it denied its library does) but to make it easier for researchers to reference e-books by allowing Wikipedia to link to book scans. Wikipedia has long been one of the most visited websites in the world, and the Archive wanted to deepen its authority as a research tool.

“One of the real purposes of libraries is not just access to information by borrowing a book that you might buy in a bookstore,” Kahle said. “In fact, that’s actually the minority. Usually, you’re comparing and contrasting things. You’re quoting. You’re checking. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel for Public Knowledge, told Ars that the Internet Archive’s Wikipedia enhancements could have served to surface information that’s often buried in books, giving researchers a streamlined path to source accurate information online.

But Kahle said the lawsuits against IA showed that “massive multibillion-dollar media conglomerates” have their own interests in controlling the flow of information. “That’s what they really succeeded at—to make sure that Wikipedia readers don’t get access to books,” Kahle said.

At the heart of the Open Library lawsuit was publishers’ market for e-book licenses, which libraries complain provide only temporary access for a limited number of patrons and cost substantially more than the acquisition of physical books. Some states are crafting laws to restrict e-book licensing, with the aim of preserving library functions.

“We don’t want libraries to become Hulu or Netflix,” said Courtney of the eBook Study Group, posting warnings to patrons like “last day to check out this book, August 31st, then it goes away forever.”

He, like Kahle, is concerned that libraries will become unable to fulfill their longtime role—preserving culture and providing equal access to knowledge. Remote access, Courtney noted, benefits people who can’t easily get to libraries, like the elderly, people with disabilities, rural communities, and foreign-deployed troops.

Before the Internet Archive cases, libraries had won some important legal fights, according to Brandon Butler, a copyright lawyer and executive director of Re:Create, a coalition of “libraries, civil libertarians, online rights advocates, start-ups, consumers, and technology companies” that is “dedicated to balanced copyright and a free and open Internet.”

But the Internet Archive’s e-book fight didn’t set back libraries, Butler said, because the loss didn’t reverse any prior court wins. Instead, IA had been “exploring another frontier” beyond the Google Books ruling, which deemed Google’s searchable book excerpts a transformative fair use, hoping that linking to books from Wikipedia would also be deemed fair use. But IA “hit the edge” of what courts would allow, Butler said.

IA basically asked, “Could fair use go this much farther?” Butler said. “And the courts said, ‘No, this is as far as you go.’”

To Kahle, the cards feel stacked against the Internet Archive, with courts, lawmakers, and lobbyists backing corporations seeking “hyper levels of control.” He said IA has always served as a research library—an online destination where people can cross-reference texts and verify facts, just like perusing books at a local library.

“We’re just trying to be a library,” Kahle said. “A library in a traditional sense. And it’s getting hard.”

Fears of big fines may delay digitization projects

President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services have put America’s public libraries at risk, and reduced funding will continue to challenge libraries in the coming years, ALA has warned. Butler has also suggested that under-resourced libraries may delay digitization efforts for preservation purposes if they worry that publishers may threaten costly litigation.

He told Ars he thinks courts are getting it right on recent fair use rulings. But he noted that libraries have fewer resources for legal fights because copyright law “has this provision that says, well, if you’re a copyright holder, you really don’t have to prove that you suffered any harm at all.”

“You can just elect [to receive] a massive payout based purely on the fact that you hold a copyright and somebody infringed,” Butler said. “And that’s really unique. Almost no other country in the world has that sort of a system.”

So while companies like AI firms may be able to afford legal fights with rights holders, libraries must be careful, even when they launch projects that seem “completely harmless and innocuous,” Butler said. Consider the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which digitized 400,000 old shellac records, known as 78s, that were originally pressed from 1898 to the 1950s.

“The idea that somebody’s going to stream a 78 of an Elvis song instead of firing it up on their $10-a-month Spotify subscription is silly, right?” Butler said. “It doesn’t pass the laugh test, but given the scale of the project—and multiply that by the statutory damages—and that makes this an extremely dangerous project all of a sudden.”

Butler suggested that statutory damages could disrupt the balance that ensures the public has access to knowledge, creators get paid, and human creativity thrives, as AI advances and libraries’ growth potentially stalls.

“It sets the risk so high that it may force deals in situations where it would be better if people relied on fair use. Or it may scare people from trying new things because of the stakes of a copyright lawsuit,” Butler said.

Courtney, who co-wrote a whitepaper detailing the legal basis for different forms of “controlled digital lending” like the Open Library project uses, suggested that Kahle may be the person who’s best prepared to push the envelope on copyright.

When asked how the Internet Archive managed to avoid financial ruin, Courtney said it survived “only because their leader” is “very smart and capable.” Of all the “flavors” of controlled digital lending (CDL) that his paper outlined, Kahle’s methodology for the Open Library Project was the most “revolutionary,” Courtney said.

Importantly, IA’s loss did not doom other kinds of CDL that other archives use, he noted, nor did it prevent libraries from trying new things.

“Fair use is a case-by-case determination” that will be made as urgent preservation needs arise, Courtney told Ars, and “libraries have a ton of stuff that aren’t going to make the jump to digital unless we digitize them. No one will have access to them.”

What’s next for the Internet Archive?

The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library, which is “a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world” that will be conveniently linked in Wikipedia articles to help researchers discover them.

The Archive is also collecting as many physical materials as possible to help preserve knowledge, even as “the library system is largely contracting,” Kahle said. He noted that libraries historically tend to grow in societies that prioritize education and decline in societies where power is being concentrated, and he’s worried about where the US is headed. That makes it hard to predict if IA—or any library project—will be supported in the long term.

With governments globally partnering with the biggest tech companies to try to win the artificial intelligence race, critics have warned of threats to US democracy, while the White House has escalated its attack on libraries, universities, and science over the past year.

Meanwhile, AI firms face dozens of lawsuits from creators and publishers, which Kahle thinks only the biggest tech companies can likely afford to outlast. The momentum behind AI risks giving corporations even more control over information, Kahle said, and it’s uncertain if archives dedicated to preserving the public memory will survive attacks from multiple fronts.

“Societies that are [growing] are the ones that need to educate people” and therefore promote libraries, Kahle said. But when societies are “going down,” such as in times of war, conflict, and social upheaval, libraries “tend to get destroyed by the powerful. It used to be king and church, and it’s now corporations and governments.” (He recommended The Library: A Fragile History as a must-read to understand the challenges libraries have always faced.)

Kahle told Ars he’s not “black and white” on AI, and he even sees some potential for AI to enhance library services.

He’s more concerned that libraries in the US are losing support and may soon cease to perform classic functions that have always benefited civilizations—like buying books from small publishers and local authors, supporting intellectual endeavors, and partnering with other libraries to expand access to diverse collections.

To prevent these cultural and intellectual losses, he plans to position IA as a refuge for displaced collections, with hopes to digitize as much as possible while defending the early dream that the Internet could equalize access to information and supercharge progress.

“We want everyone [to be] a reader,” Kahle said, and that means “we want lots of publishers, we want lots of vendors, booksellers, lots of libraries.”

But, he asked, “Are we going that way? No.”

To turn things around, Kahle suggested that copyright laws be “re-architected” to ensure “we have a game with many winners”—where authors, publishers, and booksellers get paid, library missions are respected, and progress thrives. Then society can figure out “what do we do with this new set of AI tools” to keep the engine of human creativity humming.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost Read More »

Neural network finds an enzyme that can break down polyurethane

AI, biochemistry, Biology, chemistry, enzymes, neural networks, polymers, polyurethane, protein design, proteins, Science / Beth Washington / November 1, 2025

You’ll often hear plastic pollution referred to as a problem. But the reality is that it’s multiple problems. Depending on the properties we need, we form plastics out of different polymers, each of which is held together by a distinct type of chemical bond. So the method we use to break down one type of polymer may be incompatible with the chemistry of another.

That problem is why, even though we’ve had success finding enzymes that break down common plastics like polyesters and PET, they’re only partial solutions to plastic waste. However, researchers aren’t sitting back and basking in the triumph of partial solutions, and they’ve now got very sophisticated protein design tools to help them out.

That’s the story behind a completely new enzyme that researchers developed to break down polyurethane, the polymer commonly used to make foam cushioning, among other things. The new enzyme is compatible with an industrial-style recycling process that breaks the polymer down into its basic building blocks, which can be used to form fresh polyurethane.

Breaking down polyurethane

Image of a set of chemical bonds. From left to right there is an X, then a single bond to an oxygen, then a single bond to an oxygen that's double-bonded to carbon, then a single bond to a nitrogen, then a single bond to another X. — The basics of the chemical bonds that link polyurethanes. The rest of the polymer is represented by X’s here.

The new paper that describes the development of this enzyme lays out the scale of the problem: In 2024, we made 22 million metric tons of polyurethane. The urethane bond that defines these involves a nitrogen bonded to a carbon that in turn is bonded to two oxygens, one of which links into the rest of the polymer. The rest of the polymer, linked by these bonds, can be fairly complex and often contains ringed structures related to benzene.

Digesting polyurethanes is challenging. Individual polymer chains are often extensively cross-linked, and the bulky structures can make it difficult for enzymes to get at the bonds they can digest. A chemical called diethylene glycol can partially break these molecules down, but only at elevated temperatures. And it leaves behind a complicated mess of chemicals that can’t be fed back into any useful reactions. Instead, it’s typically incinerated as hazardous waste.

Neural network finds an enzyme that can break down polyurethane Read More »

New Glenn rocket has clear path to launch after test-firing at Cape Canaveral

blue origin, Commercial space, escapade, launch, Mars, NASA, new glenn, Space / Beth Washington / November 1, 2025

The road to the second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifting New Glenn rocket got a lot clearer Thursday night with a success test-firing of the launcher’s seven main engines on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Standing on a seaside launch pad, the New Glenn rocket ignited its seven BE-4 main engines at 9: 59 pm EDT Thursday (01: 59 UTC Friday). The engines burned for 38 seconds while the rocket remained firmly on the ground, according to a social media post by Blue Origin.

The hold-down firing of the first stage engines was the final major test of the New Glenn rocket before launch day. Blue Origin previously test-fired the rocket’s second-stage engines. Officials have not announced a target launch date, but sources tell Ars the rocket could be ready for liftoff as soon as November 9.

“Love seeing New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines come alive! Congratulations to Team Blue on today’s hotfire,” the company’s CEO, Dave Limp, posted on X.

Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, said the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust. Limp said engineers extended this test-firing and shut down some of the BE-4 engines to simulate the booster’s landing burn sequence, which Blue Origin hopes will culminate in a successful touchdown on a barge floating downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

“This helps us understand fluid interactions between active and inactive engine feedlines during landing,” Limp wrote.

Blue Origin is counting on recovering the New Glenn first stage on the next flight after missing the landing on the rocket’s inaugural mission in January. Officials plan to reuse this booster on the third New Glenn launch early next year, slated to propel Blue Origin’s first unpiloted Blue Moon lander toward the Moon. If Blue Origin fails to land this rocket, it’s unlikely a new first stage booster will be ready to launch until sometime later in 2026.

A few more things to do

With the test-firing complete, Blue Origin’s ground crew will lower the more than 320-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket and roll it back to a nearby hangar. There, technicians will inspect the vehicle and swap its payload fairing for another clamshell containing two NASA-owned spacecraft set to begin their journey to Mars.

New Glenn rocket has clear path to launch after test-firing at Cape Canaveral Read More »

Wear marks suggest Neanderthals made ocher crayons

ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, Neanderthals, paleoarchaeology, Science, stone tools / Beth Washington / October 31, 2025

“The combination of shaping, wear, and resharpening indicates they were used to draw or mark on soft surfaces,” D’Errico told Ars in an email. “Although the material is too fragile to reveal the specific material on which they were used, such as hide, human skin, or stone, an experimental approach may, in the future, allow us at least to rule out their use on some materials.”

A 73,000-year-old drawing from Blombo Cave in South Africa looks like it was made with tools much like the ocher crayons from Crimea, which means that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens both invented crayons in their own little corners of the world at around the same time.

Image of a reddish-brown rock with a series of lines carved in its surface — The surface of this flat piece of orange ocher was carved over 47,000 years ago, then worn smooth, perhaps by carrying in a bag. Credit: D’Errico et al. 2025

Sometimes you’re the crayon, sometimes you’re the canvas

A third item from Zaskalnaya V is a flat piece of orange ocher. One side is covered with a thin layer of hard, dark rock. But more than 47,000 years ago, someone carefully cut several deep lines, regularly spaced and almost parallel, into its surface. The area of stone between the lines has been worn and polished smooth, suggesting that someone carried it and handled it for years.

“The polish smoothing the engraved lines suggest that the piece was curated, perhaps transported in a bag,” D’Errico told Ars. Whoever carved the lines into the piece of ocher also appears to have been right-handed, based on the angle of the incisions’ walls.

The finds join a host of other evidence of Neanderthal artwork and jewelry, from 57,000-year-old finger marks on a cave wall in France to 114,000-year-old ocher-painted shells in Spain.

“Traditionally viewed as lacking the cognitive flexibility and symbolic capacity of humans, the Neanderthals of Crimea demonstrate the opposite: They engaged in cultural practices that were not merely adaptive but deeply meaningful,” wrote D’Errico and his colleagues. “Their sophisticated use of ocher is one facet of their complex cultural life.”

photo of a reddish-brown pointed rock from four angles — The tip of this red ocher crayon was broken off. Credit: D’Errico et al. 2025

Coloring in some details of Neanderthal culture

It’s hard to say whether the rest of the ocher from the Zaskalnaya sites and other nearby rock shelters meant anything to the Neanderthals beyond the purely pragmatic. However, it’s unlikely that humans (of any stripe) could spend 70,000 years working with vividly colored pigment without developing a sense of aesthetics, assigning some meaning to the colors, or maybe doing both.

Wear marks suggest Neanderthals made ocher crayons Read More »

Falling panel prices lead to global solar boom, except for the US

climate change, renewable energy, Science, solar power, syndication / Beth Washington / October 30, 2025

The economic case for solar power is stronger than ever.

White clouds drift over a combined wind-solar installation in Shandong province, China. Beijing’s support for a rapid rollout of solar and wind power forms a stark contrast with the growing antipathy of the Trump administration towards renewables. Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

To the south of the Monte Cristo mountain range and west of Paymaster Canyon, a vast stretch of the Nevada desert has attracted modern-day prospectors chasing one of 21st-century America’s greatest investment booms.

Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses.

But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar,” he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress.

Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through.

The Talatan Solar Park is part of China’s push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. “Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time,” President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month.

China’s vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has “become very difficult to make any other choice in some places,” according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency.

In 2010, the IEA estimated that there would be 410 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels installed around the world by 2035. There is already more than four times that capacity, with about half of it in China.

Many countries in Africa and the Middle East, even in petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, are rapidly developing solar power. “It’s a very cheap way to harness the sun,” says Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at think-tank Ember.

chart showing global renewables growth — Credit: FT

Its analysis suggests that, helped by rapid growth in solar and wind energy, renewables generated more electricity than coal-fired power plants during the first half of this year.

Progress in energy and other areas has damped some of the pessimism around global warming. In 2015, the UN predicted temperatures would rise by 4° C compared to pre-industrial levels by 2100. It now projects a rise of 2.6° C, if climate policies are followed through.

But for delegates set to gather in Belém, Brazil, next month for the COP30 climate summit, any jubilation will be tempered by the knowledge that the renewables revolution is a long way from being fulfilled. Emissions from the energy sector rose for the fourth straight year in 2024 to a record high, while the slower growth in US renewables means an ambitious target to triple global capacity by 2030 will probably be missed.

“It’s not job done, [IEA analysis] does throw some genuine caution out there,” says Mike Hemsley, deputy director at the Energy Transitions Commission think-tank.

Renewable energy has lowered wholesale power costs, but that has not necessarily fed through into the prices that consumers pay, while users in many countries have not yet switched to electricity for things like transport and domestic heating in the numbers required to reduce fossil fuel usage.

Calculations by the Energy Institute, the sector’s global body, show that the supply of oil, gas, and coal for energy—electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, and transport—in 2024 rose by more than the supply of energy from low-carbon sources, which also includes nuclear and hydropower. That has led some to argue that renewables are merely helping to meet climbing energy demand, rather than replacing fossil fuels.

“The world remains in an energy addition mode, rather than a clear transition,” said Andy Brown, president of the institute, as it launched its report in August.

“Renewables is the place to be”

At a solar farm operated by ReNew, one of India’s biggest green energy companies, hundreds of panels glint in the sharp desert sun of surrounding Rajasthan.

India, the world’s third largest carbon emitter, wants to develop 500 gigawatts of clean-energy capacity by 2030, and earlier this year reached 243 GW—meaning more than half of its current installed power capacity is now from renewables.

“Every group in India is now saying: ‘You know what, renewables is the place to be,” says Sumant Sinha, chair and chief executive of ReNew.

Saudi Arabia, blessed with both oil and sun, has developed around 4.34 GW of solar capacity as it tries to free up more oil for export, rather than burning it in its own power stations. It wants to build up to 130 GW by the end of the decade.

“It’s massive, what’s going on,” Marco Arcelli, chief executive of utility ACWA Power, which is part-owned by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, told the FT earlier this year. The company is developing 30 GW of renewables in Saudi Arabia.

South Africa has authorized at least 6 GW of renewable energy capacity since President Cyril Ramaphosa removed the capacity limit on private electricity providers in 2022, breaking years of reluctance among the ruling African National Congress to challenge the dominance of state monopoly utility Eskom.

factory workers — Workers at the Ener-G-Africa factory in Cape Town test LED lights on solar panels. South Africans are increasingly installing such panels because of the unreliability of normal power supplies. Credit: Esa Alexander/Reuters

Middle-class households in the country have also rapidly installed solar panels on their roofs to cope with years of planned rolling blackouts due to power shortages. It is part of a worldwide trend for smaller installations as homes and businesses tire of waiting for governments or big utilities to fix power shortages.

Solar panel installations of less than 1MW accounted for about 42 percent of global installations last year, according to BloombergNEF, almost double the 22 percent recorded in 2015. Factories, mosques, and farms in Pakistan have covered their roofs in Chinese-made solar panels to try to avoid surging tariffs for state-provided power.

“We’ve displaced tens of thousands of diesel generators,” says William Brent, chief marketing officer at Husk Power Systems, which has installed about 400 “mini-grids” of solar and batteries across Nigeria and India. These are helping pharmacies store medicines and shopkeepers keep drinks cool at around half the cost of power from the grid.

The construction of vast solar arrays in deserts and small installations on rooftops have largely been driven by the same underlying trend: falling costs. The huge surfeit of production capacity in China, which produced about eight out of 10 of the world’s solar modules in 2024, has pushed the cost of panels down by almost 90 percent over the past decade and dragged overall capital expenditure costs down 70 percent, according to analysts.

Yet even in places like India, fossil fuels still hold sway. Coal still generates more than 70 percent of the country’s power output and remains politically protected, employing hundreds of thousands directly and many more indirectly in some of India’s poorest regions. “India still has a massive way to go,” says Hemsley at the ETC.

PM Prasad, chair of state-owned Coal India, told the FT earlier this year that it was reopening more than 30 mines and launching up to five new sites, arguing that renewables were not yet capable of meeting fast-growing energy demand.

The painful process of acquiring large tracts of land for solar arrays in a country with millions of smallholder farmers has also led to delays across the renewables sector, many Indian developers grumble. More than 50 GW of renewable power projects are waiting to connect to an overstretched transmission network, estimates the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think-tank, and cleantech consultancy JMK Research.

Chart showing relative amount of small solar installations — Credit: FT

Even as solar panels become more popular in Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of homes and businesses still rely on expensive and polluting diesel generators, and roughly 600 million people lack access to power.

Many people also lack the means to pay commercial rates for electricity, even before factoring in the extra levies needed to finance the cost of new transmission lines, a key enabler of renewables projects around the world.

Electricity storage capabilities also need to dramatically improve if countries want to rely more heavily on intermittent wind and solar farms and phase out backup fossil-fuel capacity.

Large-scale batteries are being deployed rapidly—spurred again by China’s prolific manufacturing output. James Mittell, director at developer Actis Energy, says costs have fallen so much that it is already possible in many markets to build large-scale battery and solar systems, which can deliver power with similar consistency to gas-fired power plants, but at lower cost. “It’s a complete game-changer,” he says.

But progress is also mixed on the second phase of any “transition” to renewable power: persuading consumers and industries to switch to equipment that runs on electricity rather than combustion processes using fossil fuels.

The share of electricity in final energy demand has flatlined in the US and the EU over the past few years, with the growth of electric cars offset by the difficulty of getting people to switch away from gas or oil heating systems to low-carbon electric ones such as heat pumps.

“For electricity [generation] we have a success story,” says Bahar, at the IEA. “For other sectors, it’s way more complicated.”

Massive growth in China

China and some parts of Southeast Asia stand out in terms of the portion of energy supplied by electricity increasing—in China’s case, from about 12 percent in 2000 to about 30 percent in 2023—as millions of citizens start driving electric cars and factories switch away from fossil-fueled boilers.

Ember points to data showing that renewables met 84 percent of China’s new electricity demand last year as evidence that coal-powered generation in the country is nearing its peak. “We’re confident renewables can meet all China’s [power] demand growth,” adds Hemsley at the ETC.

But even here, challenges loom. Major electricity market reforms introduced by Beijing in July mean renewable energy developers no longer get a fixed price akin to that received by coal-fired generators and are instead more exposed to market forces.

“They clearly don’t want to harm the build out of renewables, but they just want it to be done on a more commercial basis,” says Neil Beveridge, who leads Bernstein’s energy analysis in Hong Kong.

But the IEA warns it will lower returns and cut the growth of renewables. “That [impact of the reform] is the biggest uncertainty in our outlook,” adds Bahar at the IEA.

A far sharper slowdown is already underway in the US, where incentives introduced as part of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 are rolled back by the second Trump administration. Tax credits have been cut and major projects blocked—spooking investors and leaving existing developers trying to stay afloat.

workers carrying solar panels — Workers carry solar panels for a project in Lingwu, China. The country accounts for half the world’s installed solar capacity, but its fossil fuel usage also continues to grow. Credit: Sara Hussein/AFP/Getty Images

“It’s very difficult to make big capital decisions based on this,” says Reagan Farr, chief executive of Silicon Ranch, a solar developer. “We don’t have a bipartisan energy policy in the US, which is very bad for the industry and our economy.”

Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind company, has had to raise an extra $9 billion from investors after Trump’s hostility to the offshore wind sector prevented it from selling a stake in one of its major US projects.

His tariffs on products from China mean higher costs for solar projects. Analysts say more large-scale solar projects are likely to have their permits revoked or reviewed.

Developers are currently rushing to build, as they have until July 2026 to start construction to capture the tail-end of the tax credits. But some projects and companies are bound to fail. “We’re likely facing several more years of uphill battles for many large-scale projects,” says Abby Watson, president at Groundwire Group, a consultancy.

The IEA has halved its forecast for renewables growth by 2030 in the US to around 250 GW as a result of Trump’s policies. Analysts at Carbon Brief estimate the country will emit 7 billion tonnes more CO₂ equivalent by 2030 under Trump’s policies than if the country had met its obligations under the 2015 Paris agreement, which he is withdrawing from.

The reduction in renewables growth comes as the country’s electricity demand is rising due to the growth of data centers, many of which are looking to gas-fired or nuclear power stations because they need constant, steady power.

Gas turbine makers are struggling to keep up with demand, while new nuclear power plants are often delayed.

chart showing continued growth of fossil fuels — Credit: FT

Retail electricity prices have already risen by 5 percent since July, according to the Energy Information Administration, and some experts caution they could rise further if supplies are constrained. “The writing is on the wall,” says Pol Lezcano, director of energy and renewables at the CBRE real estate group.

Supporters of renewable electricity argue that the US is missing out on a revolution in cleaner, cheaper technology sweeping the world, with some likening it to the aging cars on Cuba’s roads.

But the relationship between renewable generation and consumer energy bills is complicated. The free energy from the sun or the wind means that the wholesale price of renewable-generated power is lower, but developers still need to make a return on their investment, and grid operators may need to step in to ensure continuity of supply when the wind and the sun are low.

“Even as the cost of producing electricity from renewables falls, consumers may not see immediate or proportional reductions in their bills, raising questions over the impact of renewables on power affordability,” the IEA said in its latest report.

More broadly, the US’s focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China.

The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology.

But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US’s attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump’s.

“China has run far away in terms of competitiveness,” says Antonio Cammisecra, chief executive of ContourGlobal, an independent power producer.

“The US is capable of rebuilding, but it will take time.”

Additional reporting by Ahmed Al Omran and David Pilling. Data visualization by Jana Tauschinski.

Falling panel prices lead to global solar boom, except for the US Read More »

Author name: Beth Washington