Science – Page 12

Quantum hardware may be a good match for AI

AI, Computer science, image classification, Physics, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Science / Kelly Newman / April 11, 2025

Quantum computers don’t have that sort of separation. While they could include some quantum memory, the data is generally housed directly in the qubits, while computation involves performing operations, called gates, directly on the qubits themselves. In fact, there has been a demonstration that, for supervised machine learning, where a system can learn to classify items after training on pre-classified data, a quantum system can outperform classical ones, even when the data being processed is housed on classical hardware.

This form of machine learning relies on what are called variational quantum circuits. This is a two-qubit gate operation that takes an additional factor that can be held on the classical side of the hardware and imparted to the qubits via the control signals that trigger the gate operation. You can think of this as analogous to the communications involved in a neural network, with the two-qubit gate operation equivalent to the passing of information between two artificial neurons and the factor analogous to the weight given to the signal.

That’s exactly the system that a team from the Honda Research Institute worked on in collaboration with a quantum software company called Blue Qubit.

Pixels to qubits

The focus of the new work was mostly on how to get data from the classical world into the quantum system for characterization. But the researchers ended up testing the results on two different quantum processors.

The problem they were testing is one of image classification. The raw material was from the Honda Scenes dataset, which has images taken from roughly 80 hours of driving in Northern California; the images are tagged with information about what’s in the scene. And the question the researchers wanted the machine learning to handle was a simple one: Is it snowing in the scene?

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Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA

NASA, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / April 11, 2025

This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.

This initial version of the administration’s budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency’s budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.

According to the “passback” documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency’s science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.

Detailing the cuts

Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.

Although the budget would continue support for ongoing missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, it would kill the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory seen as on par with those two world-class instruments that is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years.

“Passback supports continued operation of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and assumes no funding is provided for other telescopes,” the document states.

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Rocket Report: “No man’s land” in rocket wars; Isaacman lukewarm on SLS

blue origin, falcon 9, falcon heavy, human spaceflight, international space station, launch, new glenn, rocket lab, rocket report, russia, Science, soyuz, Space, space launch system, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / Beth Washington / April 11, 2025

China’s approach to space junk is worrisome as it begins launching its own megaconstellations.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket rolls to its launch pad in Florida in preparation for liftoff with 27 satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper broadband network. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We’re on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX’s blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations in this week’s Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls “kinetic launch.” But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company’s CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.

Traditional versus kinetic … The planned constellation, named Meridian, is an opportunity for SpinLaunch to diversify away from being solely a launch company, according to David Wrenn, the company’s CEO. We’ve observed this in a number of companies that started out as rocket developers before branching out to satellite manufacturing or space services. Wrenn said SpinLaunch could loft all of the Meridian satellites on a single large conventional rocket, or perhaps two medium-lift rockets, and then maintain the constellation with its own kinetic launch system. A satellite communications network presents a better opportunity for profit, Wrenn said. “The launch market is relatively small compared to the economic potential of satellite communication,” he said. “Launch has generally been more of a cost center than a profit center. Satcom will be a much larger piece of the overall industry.”

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Peter Beck suggests Electron is here to stay. The conventional wisdom is that the small launch vehicle business isn’t a big moneymaker. There is really only one company, Rocket Lab, that has gained traction in selling dedicated rides to orbit for small satellites. Rocket Lab’s launcher, Electron, can place payloads of up to a few hundred pounds into orbit. As soon as Rocket Lab had some success, SpaceX began launching rideshare missions on its much larger Falcon 9 rocket, cobbling together dozens of satellites on a single vehicle to spread the cost of the mission among many customers. This offers customers a lower price point than buying a dedicated launch on Electron. But Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, says his company has found a successful market providing dedicated launches for small satellites, despite price pressure from SpaceX, Space News reports. “Dedicated small launch is a real market, and it should not be confused with rideshare,” he argued. “It’s totally different.”

No man’s land … Some small satellite companies that can afford the extra cost of a dedicated launch realize the value of controlling their schedule and orbit, traits that a dedicated launch offers over a rideshare, Beck said. It’s easy to blame SpaceX for undercutting the prices of Rocket Lab and other players in this segment of the launch business, but Beck said companies that have failed or withdrawn from the small launch market didn’t have a good business plan, a good product, or good engineering. He added that the capacity of the Electron vehicle is well-suited for dedicated launch, whereas slightly larger rockets in the one-ton-to-orbit class—a category that includes Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha and Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rockets—are an ill fit. The one-ton performance range is “no man’s land” in the market, Beck said. “It’s too small to be a useful rideshare mission, and it’s too big to be a useful dedicated rocket” for smallsats. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ULA scrubs first full-on Kuiper launch. A band of offshore thunderstorms near Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday night forced United Launch Alliance to scrub a launch attempt of the first of dozens of missions on behalf of its largest commercial customer, Amazon, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission will use an Atlas V rocket to deploy 27 satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper network. It’s the first launch of what will eventually be more than 3,200 operational Kuiper satellites beaming broadband connectivity from space, a market currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink. As of Thursday, ULA hadn’t confirmed a new launch date, but airspace warning notices released by the FAA suggest the next attempt might occur Monday, April 14.

What’s a few more days? … This mission has been a long time coming. Amazon announced the Kuiper megaconstellation in 2019, and the company says it’s investing at least $10 billion in the project (the real number may be double that). Problems in manufacturing the Kuiper satellites, which Amazon is building in-house, delayed the program’s first full-on launch by a couple of years. Amazon launched a pair of prototype satellites in 2023, but the operational versions are different, and this mission fills the capacity of ULA’s Atlas V rocket. Amazon has booked more than 80 launches with ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin, and SpaceX to populate the Kuiper network. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Space Force swaps ULA for SpaceX. For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance’s launch schedule, Ars reports. Space Systems Command, which oversees the military’s launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force’s fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world. The move allows the GPS satellite to launch as soon as the end of May, the Space Force said. The military executed a similar rocket swap for a GPS mission that launched on a Falcon 9 in December.

Making ULA whole … The Space Force formally certified ULA’s Vulcan rocket for national security missions last month, so Vulcan may finally be on the cusp of delivering for the military. But there are several military payloads in the queue to launch on Vulcan before GPS III SV-08, which was already completed and in storage at its Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado. Meanwhile, SpaceX is regularly launching Falcon 9 rockets with ample capacity to add the GPS mission to the manifest. In exchange for losing the contract to launch this particular GPS satellite, the Space Force swapped a future GPS mission that was assigned to SpaceX to fly on ULA’s Vulcan instead.

Russia launches a former Navy SEAL to space. Jonny Kim, a former Navy SEAL, Harvard Medical School graduate, and now a NASA astronaut, blasted off with two cosmonaut crewmates aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket early Tuesday, CBS News reports. Three hours later, Kim and his Russian crewmates—Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky—chased down the International Space Station and moved in for a picture-perfect docking aboard their Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft. “It was the trip of a lifetime and an honor to be here,” Kim told flight controllers during a traditional post-docking video conference.

Rotating back to Earth … Ryzhikov, Zubritsky, and Kim joined a crew of seven living aboard the International Space Station, temporarily raising the lab’s crew complement to 10 people. The new station residents are replacing an outgoing Soyuz crew—Alexey Ovchinin, Ivan Wagner, and Don Pettit—who launched to the ISS last September and who plan to return to Earth aboard their own spacecraft April 19 to wrap up a 219-day stay in space. This flight continues the practice of launching US astronauts on Russian Soyuz missions, part of a barter agreement between NASA and the Russian space agency that also reserves a seat on SpaceX Dragon missions for Russian cosmonauts.

China is littering in LEO. China’s construction of a pair of communications megaconstellations could cloud low Earth orbit with large spent rocket stages for decades or beyond, Space News reports. Launches for the government’s Guowang and Shanghai-backed but more commercially oriented Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation began in the second half of 2024, with each planned to consist of over 10,000 satellites, demanding more than a thousand launches in the coming years. Placing this number of satellites is enough to cause concern about space debris because China hasn’t disclosed its plans for removing the spacecraft from orbit at the end of their missions. It turns out there’s another big worry: upper stages.

An orbital time bomb … While Western launch providers typically deorbit their upper stages after dropping off megaconstellation satellites in space, China does not. This means China is leaving rockets in orbits high enough to persist in space for more than a century, according to Jim Shell, a space domain awareness and orbital debris expert at Novarum Tech. Space News reported on Shell’s commentary in a social media post, where he wrote that orbital debris mass in low-Earth orbit “will be dominated by PRC [People’s Republic of China] upper stages in short order unless something changes (sigh).” So far, China has launched five dedicated missions to deliver 90 Qianfan satellites into orbit. Four of these missions used China’s Long March 6A rocket, with an upper stage that has a history of breaking up in orbit, exacerbating the space debris problem. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX wins another lunar lander launch deal. Intuitive Machines has selected a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch a lunar delivery mission scheduled for 2027, the Houston Chronicle reports. The upcoming IM-4 mission will carry six NASA payloads, including a European Space Agency-led drill suite designed to search for water at the lunar south pole. It will also include the launch of two lunar data relay satellites that support NASA’s so-called Near Space Network Services program. This will be the fourth lunar lander mission for Houston-based Intuitive Machines under the auspices of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Falcon 9 has the inside track … SpaceX almost certainly offered Intuitive Machines the best deal for this launch. The flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket is reliable and inexpensive compared to competitors and has already launched two Intuitive Machines missions, with a third one set to fly late this year. However, there’s another factor that made SpaceX a shoe-in for this contract. SpaceX has outfitted one of its launch pads in Florida with a unique cryogenic loading system to pump liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the Intuitive Machines lunar lander as it sits on top of its rocket just before liftoff. The lander from Intuitive Machines uses these super-cold propellants to feed its main engine, and SpaceX’s infrastructure for loading it makes the Falcon 9 rocket the clear choice for launching it.

Time may finally be running out for SLS. Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, said Wednesday in a Senate confirmation hearing that he wants the space agency to pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars at the same time, an effort that will undoubtedly require major changes to how NASA spends its money. My colleague Eric Berger was in Washington for the hearing and reported on it for Ars. Senators repeatedly sought Isaacman’s opinion on the Space Launch System, the NASA heavy-lifter designed to send astronauts to the Moon. The next SLS mission, Artemis II, is slated to launch a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon next year. NASA’s official plans call for the Artemis III mission to launch on an SLS rocket later this decade and attempt a landing at the Moon’s south pole.

Limited runway … Isaacman sounded as if he were on board with flying the Artemis II mission as envisioned—no surprise, then, that the four Artemis II astronauts were in the audience—and said he wanted to get a crew of Artemis III to the lunar surface as quickly as possible. But he questioned why it has taken NASA so long, and at such great expense, to get its deep space human exploration plans moving. In one notable exchange, Isaacman said NASA’s current architecture for the Artemis lunar plans, based on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, is probably not the ideal “long-term” solution to NASA’s deep space transportation plans. The smart reading of this is that Isaacman may be willing to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions as conceived, given that much of the hardware is already built. But everything that comes after this, including SLS rocket upgrades and the Lunar Gateway, could be on the chopping block.

Welcome to the club, Blue Origin. Finally, the Space Force has signaled it’s ready to trust Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, for launching the military’s most precious satellites, Ars reports. Blue Origin received a contract April 4 to launch seven national security missions for the Space Force between 2027 and 2032, an opening that could pave the way for more launch deals in the future. These missions will launch on Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which had a successful debut test flight in January. The Space Force hasn’t certified New Glenn for national security launches, but military officials expect to do so sometime next year. Blue Origin joins SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the Space Force’s mix of most-trusted launch providers.

A different class … The contract Blue Origin received last week covers launch services for the Space Force’s most critical space missions, requiring rocket certification and a heavy dose of military oversight to ensure reliability. Blue Origin was already eligible to launch a separate batch of missions the Space Force set aside to fly on newer rockets. The military is more tolerant of risk on these lower-priority missions, which include launches of “cookie cutter” satellites for the Pentagon’s large fleet of missile-tracking satellites and a range of experimental payloads.

Why is SpaceX winning so many Space Force contracts? In less than a week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk’s space company the Pentagon’s leading launch provider, replacing United Launch Alliance in top position. Then, the Space Force assigned the vast majority of this year’s most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX. As we mention earlier in the Rocket Report, the military also swapped a ULA rocket for a SpaceX launch vehicle for an upcoming GPS mission. So, is SpaceX’s main competitor worried Elon Musk is tipping the playing field for lucrative government contracts by cozying up to President Trump?

It’s all good, man … Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, doesn’t seem too worried in his public statements, Ars reports. In a roundtable with reporters this week at the annual Space Symposium conference in Colorado, Bruno was asked about Musk’s ties with Trump. “We have not been impacted by our competitor’s position advising the president, certainly not yet,” Bruno said. “I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we’re behaving that way.” The reason Bruno can say Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration so far hasn’t affected ULA is simple. SpaceX is cheaper and has a ready-made line of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets available to launch the Pentagon’s satellites. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is now certified to launch military payloads, but it reached this important milestone years behind schedule.

Two Texas lawmakers are still fighting the last war. NASA has a lot to figure out in the next couple of years. Moon or Mars? Should, or when should, the Space Launch System be canceled? Can the agency absorb a potential 50 percent cut to its science budget? If Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz get their way, NASA can add moving a space shuttle to its list. The Lone Star State’s two Republican senators introduced the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” on Thursday, CollectSpace reports. If passed by Congress and signed into law, the bill would direct NASA to take the space shuttle Discovery from the national collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and transport it to Space Center Houston, a museum and visitor attraction next to Johnson Space Center, home to mission control and NASA’s astronaut training base. Discovery has been on display at the Smithsonian since 2012. NASA awarded museums in California, Florida, and New York the other three surviving shuttle orbiters.

Dollars and nonsense … Moving a space shuttle from Virginia to Texas would be a logistical nightmare, cost an untold amount of money, and would create a distraction for NASA when its focus should be on future space exploration. In a statement, Cruz said Houston deserves one of NASA’s space shuttles because of the city’s “unique relationship” to the program. Cornyn alleged in a statement that the Obama administration blocked Houston from receiving a space shuttle for political reasons. NASA’s inspector general found no evidence of this. On the contrary, transferring a space shuttle to Texas now would be an unequivocal example of political influence. The Boeing 747s that NASA used to move space shuttles across the country are no longer flightworthy, and NASA scrapped the handling equipment needed to prepare a shuttle for transport. Moving the shuttle by land or sea would come with its own challenges. “I can easily see this costing a billion dollars,” Dennis Jenkins, a former shuttle engineer who directed NASA’s shuttle transition and retirement program more than a decade ago, told CollectSpace in an interview. On a personal note, the presentation of Discovery at the Smithsonian is remarkable to see in person, with aerospace icons like the Concorde and the SR-71 spy plane under the same roof. Space Center Houston can’t match that.

Next three launches

April 12: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-17 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 01: 15 UTC

April 12: Falcon 9 | NROL-192 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 12: 17 UTC

April 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-73 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 01: 59 UTC

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.

Rocket Report: “No man’s land” in rocket wars; Isaacman lukewarm on SLS Read More »

Painted altar in Maya city of Tikal reveals aftermath of ancient coup

ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, indigenous americans, Maya, Mesoamerica, Pre-Columbian civilizations, Science, teotihuacan, tikal / Shannon Garcia / April 10, 2025

It’s always about colonialism

The altar marks the presence of an enclave of foreign elites from Teotihuacan.

This rendering shows what the altar might have looked like in its heyday. Credit: Heather Hurst

A family altar in the Maya city of Tikal offers a glimpse into events in an enclave of the city’s foreign overlords in the wake of a local coup.

Archaeologists recently unearthed the altar in a quarter of the Maya city of Tikal that had lain buried under dirt and rubble for about the last 1,500 years. The altar—and the wealthy household behind the courtyard it once adorned—stands just a few blocks from the center of Tikal, one of the most powerful cities of Maya civilization. But the altar and the courtyard around it aren’t even remotely Maya-looking; their architecture and decoration look like they belong 1,000 kilometers to the west in the city of Teotihuacan, in central Mexico.

The altar reveals the presence of powerful rulers from Teotihuacan who were there at a time when a coup ousted Tikal’s Maya rulers and replaced them with a Teotihuacan puppet government. It also reveals how hard those foreign rulers fell from favor when Teotihuacan’s power finally waned centuries later.

image of a rectangular limestone structure with recessed panels underground — Archaeologists don’t know what’s inside the altar, because they can’t excavate it without damaging the fragile painted panels. Credit: Ramirez et al. 2025

The painted altar

The altar stands in the courtyard of what was once a wealthy, influential person’s home in Tikal. At just over 1 meter tall, spanning nearly 2 meters in length and 1.3 meters wide, the altar is clearly the centerpiece of the limestone patio space.

It’s made of carved stone and earthen layers, covered with several smooth, fine plaster coatings. Murals adorn recessed panels on all four sides. In red, orange, yellow, and black, the paintings all depict the face of a person in an elaborate feathered headdress, but each is slightly different. All four versions of the face stare straight at the viewer through almond-shaped eyes. The figure wears the kind of facial piercings that would have marked a person of very high rank in Teotihuacan: a nose bar and spool-shaped ear jewelry (picture a fancy ancient version of modern earlobe plugs).

Proyecto Arqueológico del Sur de Tikal archaeologist Edwin Ramirez and his colleagues say the faces on the altar look uncannily like a deity who often shows up in artwork from central Mexico, in the area around Teotihuacan. Archaeologists have nicknamed this deity the Storm God, since they haven’t yet found any trace of its name. It’s a distinctly Teotihuacan-style piece of art, from the architecture of the altar to the style and color of the images and even the techniques used in painting them. Yet it sits in the heart of Tikal, a Maya city.

A pre-Columbian coup d’etat

Tikal was one of the biggest and most important cities of the Maya civilization. Founded in 850 BCE, it chugged along for centuries as a small backwater until its sudden rise to wealth and prominence around 100 CE. Lidar surveys of Guatemala have revealed Tikal’s links with other Maya cities, like Homul. And Tikal also traded with the city of Teotihuacan, more than 1,000 kilometers to the west, in what’s now Mexico.

“These powers of central Mexico reached into the Maya world because they saw it as a place of extraordinary wealth, of special feathers from tropical birds, jade, and chocolate,” says Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, a co-author of the recent study, in a statement. “As far as Teotihuacan was concerned, it was the land of milk and honey.”

Trade with Teotihuacan brought wealth to Tikal, but the Maya city seems to have attracted too much attention from its more powerful neighbor. A carved stone unearthed in Tikal in the 1960s describes how Teotihuacan swooped in around 378 CE to oust Tikal’s king and replace him with a puppet ruler. Spanish-language sources call this coup d’etat the Entrada.

The stone is carved in the style of Teotihuacan, but it’s also covered with Maya hieroglyphs, which tell the tale of the conquest. After the Entrada, there are traces of Teotihuacan’s presence all over Tikal, from royal burials in a necropolis to distinctly Mexican architecture mixed with Maya elements in a complex of residential and ceremonial buildings near the heart of the city.

And the newly unearthed altar seems to have been built shortly after the Entrada, based on radiocarbon dates from nearby graves in the courtyard and from material used to ritually bury the altar after its abandonment (more on that below).

Ramirez and his colleagues write that the altar is “likely evidence of the direct presence of Teotihuacan at Tikal as part of a foreign enclave that coincided with the historic Entrada.”

orthographic map of Tikal — This map shows the courtyard in relation to other major structures in Tikal. Credit: T.G. Garrison and H. Hurst

A wealthy household’s ritual courtyard

The buildings surrounding the courtyard would have been a residential compound for wealthy elites in the city; it’s not far from the city’s center with its temples and huge public plazas. Residents had used the courtyard as a private family ceremonial space for decades or even a couple of centuries before its owners installed the altar. And Ramirez and his colleagues say it’s no coincidence that archaeologists have found many such courtyards in Teotihuacan, which people also used as a space for household ceremonies like burials and offerings to the gods.

“What the altar confirms is that wealthy leaders from Teotihuacan came to Tikal and created replicas of ritual facilities that would have existed in their home city. It shows Teotihuacan left a heavy imprint there,” says Houston.

And in the Maya world, as in the world of Teotihuacan, ceremonial spaces usually come with skeletons included.

Ramirez and his colleagues unearthed the grave of an adult buried beneath the patio, in a tomb with limestone walls and a stucco floor. Nearby, a child had been buried in a seated position—something rare in Tikal but very common in Teotihuacan. The child’s burial radiocarbon-dated to decades before the Entrada, between 205 and 350 CE. It looks like someone buried both of these people beneath the floor of the courtyard of their residential compound not long after they moved in; it’s a good bet that they were members of the family who once lived here, but archaeologists don’t know for sure. These kinds of burials would have been exactly the sort of household ritual the courtyard was meant for.

Teotihuacan’s enclave in Maya Tikal

Sometime later—between 380 and 540 CE, based on radiocarbon dating—the people living in the compound buried the courtyard beneath a layer of dirt and rubble, laid a new floor over it, and essentially started over. This is when Ramirez and his colleagues say someone built and painted the altar.

It’s also when someone buried three babies in the courtyard, each near a corner of the altar (the fourth corner has a jar that probably once contained an offering, but no bones). Each burial required breaking the stone floor, placing the tiny remains underneath, and then filling in the hole with crushed limestone. That’s not the way most people in Tikal would have buried an infant, but it’s exactly how archaeologists have found several buried in very similar courtyards in faraway Teotihuacan.

In other words, the people who lived in this compound and used this courtyard and painted altar were probably from Teotihuacan or raised in a Teotihuacan enclave in the southern sector of Tikal. The compound is practically in the shadow of a replica of Teotihuacan’s Feathered Serpent Pyramid and its walled plaza, where archaeologists unearthed Teotihuacan-style incense burners made from local materials.

sketch of a rectangular altar with painted sides — This rendering shows what the altar might have looked like in its heyday. Credit: Heather Hurst

The end of an era

Sometime between 550 CE and 654 CE, based on radiocarbon dating, the foreign enclave in Tikal closed up shop. That’s around the time distant Teotihuacan’s power was starting to collapse. But it wasn’t enough to just leave; important buildings had to be ritually “killed” and buried. That meant burning the area around the altar, but it also meant that people buried the altar, the courtyard, the compound, and most of southern Tikal’s Teotihuacan enclave beneath several meters of dirt and rubble.

Whoever did the burying went to the trouble of making the whole thing look like a natural hill. Ramirez and his colleagues say that’s unusual, because typically once a building had been ritually killed and abandoned, something new would be built atop the remains.

“The Maya regularly buried buildings and rebuilt on top of them,” Brown University archaeologist Andrew Scherer, a co-author of the recent study, said in a statement. “But here, they buried the altar and surrounding buildings and just left them, even though this would have been prime real estate centuries later. They treated it almost like a memorial or a radioactive zone. It probably spoke to the complicated feelings they had about Teotihuacan.”

Antiquity, 2017. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.3 (About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

Painted altar in Maya city of Tikal reveals aftermath of ancient coup Read More »

Trump administration’s attack on university research accelerates

research, research funding, Science, Trump / Kelly Newman / April 10, 2025

Shortly after its inauguration, the Trump administration has made no secret that it isn’t especially interested in funding research. Before January’s end, major science agencies had instituted pauses on research funding, and grant funding has not been restored to previous levels since. Many individual grants have been targeted on ideological grounds, and agencies like the National Science Foundation are expected to see significant cuts. Since then, individual universities have been targeted, starting with an ongoing fight with Columbia University over $400 million in research funding.

This week, however, it appears that the targeting of university research has entered overdrive, with multiple announcements of funding freezes targeting several universities. Should these last for any considerable amount of time, they will likely cripple research at the targeted universities.

On Wednesday, Science learned that the National Institutes of Health has frozen all of its research funding to Columbia, despite the university agreeing to steps previously demanded by the administration and the resignation of its acting president. In 2024, Columbia had received nearly $700 million in grants from the NIH, with the money largely going to the university’s prestigious medical and public health schools.

But the attack goes well beyond a single university. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced a hold on all research funding to Northwestern University (nearly $800 million) and Cornell University ($1 billion). These involved money granted by multiple government agencies, including a significant amount from the Department of Defense in Cornell’s case. Ostensibly, all of these actions were taken because of the university administrators’ approach to protests about the conflict in Gaza, which the administration has characterized as allowing antisemitism.

Trump administration’s attack on university research accelerates Read More »

Trump throws coal a lifeline, but the energy industry has moved on

climate change, coal, Energy, Science, syndication, Trump / DJ Henderson / April 9, 2025

As President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders Tuesday aimed at keeping coal power alive in the United States, he repeatedly blamed his predecessor, Democrats, and environmental regulations for the industry’s dramatic contraction over the past two decades.

But across the country, state and local officials and electric grid operators have been confronting a factor in coal’s demise that is not easily addressed with the stroke of a pen: its cost.

For example, Maryland’s only remaining coal generating station, Talen Energy’s 1.3-gigawatt Brandon Shores plant, will be staying open beyond its previously planned June 1 shutdown, under a deal that regional grid operator PJM brokered earlier this year with the company, state officials, and the Sierra Club.

Talen had decided to close the plant two years ago because it determined that running the plant was uneconomical. But PJM said the plant was necessary to maintain the reliability of the grid. To keep Brandon Shores open while extra transmission is built to bolster the grid, Maryland ratepayers will be forced to pay close to $1 billion.

“There’s some people who say that Brandon Shores was retiring because of Maryland’s climate policy,” says David Lapp, who leads the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, which fought the deal on behalf of ratepayers. “But it was purely a decision made by a generation company that’s operating in a free market.”

Cheaper power from natural gas and renewable energy has been driving down use of coal across the United States for roughly 20 years. Coal plants now provide about 15 percent of the nation’s electricity, down from more than 50 percent in 2000.

In some cases, state and local officials have raised concerns over whether the loss of coal plants will make the grid more vulnerable to blackouts. In Utah, for example, the Intermountain Power Agency’s 1,800-megawatt coal power facility in Utah’s West Desert is the largest US coal plant that was scheduled to shut down this year, according to the US Energy Information Administration. IPA is going forward with its plan to switch to natural gas plants that can be made cleaner-operating by using hydrogen fuel. But under a new law, IPA will shut down the coal plants in a state where it can be easily restarted, said IPA spokesman John Ward. The Utah legislature voted last month in favor of a new process in which the state of Utah will look for new customers and possibly a new operator to keep the coal plant running.

Trump throws coal a lifeline, but the energy industry has moved on Read More »

Fewer beans = great coffee if you get the pour height right

coffee brewing, fluid dynamics, Food science, granular media, Physics, Science / Kelly Newman / April 9, 2025

Based on their findings, the authors recommend pouring hot water over your coffee grounds slowly to give the beans more time immersed in the water. But pour the water too slowly and the resulting jet will stick to the spout (the “teapot effect”) and there won’t be sufficient mixing of the grounds; they’ll just settle to the bottom instead, decreasing extraction yield. “If you have a thin jet, then it tends to break up into droplets,” said co-author Margot Young. “That’s what you want to avoid in these pour-overs, because that means the jet cannot mix the coffee grounds effectively.”

Smaller jet diameter impact on dynamics. Credit: E. Park et al., 2025

That’s where increasing the height from which you pour comes in. This imparts more energy from gravity, per the authors, increasing the mixing of the granular coffee grounds. But again, there’s such a thing as pouring from too great a height, causing the water jet to break apart. The ideal height is no more than 50 centimeters (about 20 inches) above the filter. The classic goosenecked tea kettle turns out to be ideal for achieving that optimal height. Future research might explore the effects of varying the grain size of the coffee grounds.

Increasing extraction yields and, by extension, reducing how much coffee grounds one uses matters because it is becoming increasingly difficult to cultivate the most common species of coffee because of ongoing climate change. “Coffee is getting harder to grow, and so, because of that, prices for coffee will likely increase in coming years,” co-author Arnold Mathijssen told New Scientist. “The idea for this research was really to see if we could help do something by reducing the amount of coffee beans that are needed while still keeping the same amount of extraction, so that you get the same strength of coffee.”

But the potential applications aren’t limited to brewing coffee. The authors note that this same liquid jet/submerged granular bed interplay is also involved in soil erosion from waterfalls, for example, as well as wastewater treatment—using liquid jets to aerate wastewater to enhance biodegradation of organic matter—and dam scouring, where the solid ground behind a dam is slowly worn away by water jets. “Although dams operate on a much larger scale, they may undergo similar dynamics, and finding ways to decrease the jet height in dams may decrease erosion and elongate dam health,” they wrote.

Physics of Fluids, 2025. DOI: 10.1063/5.0257924 (About DOIs).

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De-extinction company announces that the dire wolf is back

Biology, colossal, de-extinction, dire wolf, Science, wolves / Kelly Newman / April 8, 2025

On Monday, biotech company Colossal announced what it views as its first successful de-extinction: the dire wolf. These large predators were lost during the Late Pleistocene extinctions that eliminated many large land mammals from the Americas near the end of the most recent glaciation. Now, in a coordinated PR blitz, the company is claiming that clones of gray wolves with lightly edited genomes have essentially brought the dire wolf back. (Both Time and The New Yorker were given exclusive access to the animals ahead of the announcement.)

The dire wolf is a relative of the now-common gray wolf, with clear differences apparent between the two species’ skeletons. Based on the sequence of two new dire wolf genomes, the researchers at Colossal conclude that dire wolves formed a distinct branch within the canids over 2.5 million years ago. For context, that’s over twice as long as brown and polar bears are estimated to have been distinct species. Dire wolves are also large, typically the size of the largest gray wolf populations. Comparisons between the new genomes and those of other canids show that the dire wolf also had a light-colored coat.

That large of an evolutionary separation means there are likely a lot of genetic differences between the gray and dire wolves. Colossal’s internal and unpublished analysis suggested that key differences could be made by editing 14 different areas of the genome, with 20 total edits required. The new animals are reported to have had 15 variants engineered in. It’s unclear what accounts for the difference, and a Colossal spokesperson told Ars: “We are not revealing all of the edits that we made at this point.”

Nevertheless, the information that the company has released indicates that it was focused on recapitulating the appearance of a dire wolf, with an emphasis on large size and a white coat. For example, the researchers edited in a gene variant that’s found in gray wolf populations that are physically large, rather than the variant found in the dire wolf genome. A similar thing was done to achieve the light coat color. This is a cautious approach, as these changes are already known to be compatible with the rest of the gray wolf’s genome.

De-extinction company announces that the dire wolf is back Read More »

How did eastern North America form?

crust, plate tectonics, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / April 6, 2025

Collisions hold lessons for how the edges of continents are built and change over time.

When Maureen Long talks to the public about her work, she likes to ask her audience to close their eyes and think of a landscape with incredible geology. She hears a lot of the same suggestions: Iceland, the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas. “Nobody ever says Connecticut,” says Long, a geologist at Yale University in New Haven in that state.

And yet Connecticut—along with much of the rest of eastern North America—holds important clues about Earth’s history. This region, which geologists call the eastern North American margin, essentially spans the US eastern seaboard and a little farther north into Atlantic Canada. It was created over hundreds of millions of years as slivers of Earth’s crust collided and merged. Mountains rose, volcanoes erupted and the Atlantic Ocean was born.

Much of this geological history has become apparent only in the past decade or so, after scientists blanketed the United States with seismometers and other instruments to illuminate geological structures hidden deep in Earth’s crust. The resulting findings include many surprises—from why there are volcanoes in Virginia to how the crust beneath New England is weirdly crumpled.

The work could help scientists better understand the edges of continents in other parts of the world; many say that eastern North America is a sort of natural laboratory for studying similar regions. And that’s important. “The story that it tells about Earth history and about this set of Earth processes … [is] really fundamental to how the Earth system works,” says Long, who wrote an in-depth look at the geology of eastern North America for the 2024 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Born of continental collisions

The bulk of North America today is made of several different parts. To the west are relatively young and mighty mountain ranges like the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. In the middle is the ancient heart of the continent, the oldest and stablest rocks around. And in the east is the long coastal stretch of the eastern North American margin. Each of these has its own geological history, but it is the story of the eastern bit that has recently come into sharper focus.

For decades, geologists have understood the broad picture of how eastern North America came to be. It begins with plate tectonics, the process in which pieces of Earth’s crust shuffle around over time, driven by churning motions in the underlying mantle. Plate tectonics created and then broke apart an ancient supercontinent known as Rodinia. By around 550 million years ago, a fragment of Rodinia had shuffled south of the equator, where it lay quietly for tens of millions of years. That fragment is the heart of what we know today as eastern North America.

Then, around 500 million years ago, tectonic forces started bringing fragments of other landmasses toward the future eastern North America. Carried along like parts on an assembly line, these continental slivers crashed into it, one after another. The slivers glommed together and built up the continental margin.

During that process, as more and more continental collisions crumpled eastern North America and thrust its agglomerated slivers into the sky, the Appalachian Mountains were born. To the west, the eastern North American margin had merged with ancient rocks that today make up the heart of the continent, west of the Appalachians and through the Midwest and into the Great Plains.

When one tectonic plate slides beneath another, slivers of Earth’s crust, known as terranes, can build up and stick together, forming a larger landmass. Such a process was key to the formation of eastern North America. Credit: Knowable Magazine

By around 270 million years ago, that action was done, and all the world’s landmasses had merged into a second single supercontinent, Pangaea. Then, around 200 million years ago, Pangaea began splitting apart, a geological breakup that formed the Atlantic Ocean, and eastern North America shuffled toward its current position on the globe.

Since then, erosion has worn down the peaks of the once-mighty Appalachians, and eastern North America has settled into a mostly quiet existence. It is what geologists call a “passive margin,” because although it is the edge of a continent, it is not the edge of a tectonic plate anymore: That lies thousands of miles out to the east, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

In many parts of the world, passive continental margins are just that—passive, and pretty geologically boring. Think of the eastern edge of South America or the coastline around the United Kingdom; these aren’t places with active volcanoes, large earthquakes, or other major planetary activity.

But eastern North America is different. There’s so much going on there that some geologists have humorously dubbed it a “passive-aggressive margin.”

The eastern edge of North America, running along the US seaboard, contains fragments of different landscapes that attest to its complex birth. They include slivers of Earth’s crust that glommed together along what is now the east coast, with a more ancient mountain belt to their west and a chunk of even more ancient crust to the west of that. Credit: Knowable Magazine

That action includes relatively high mountains—for some reason, the Appalachians haven’t been entirely eroded away even after tens to hundreds of millions of years—as well as small volcanoes and earthquakes. Recent east-coast quakes include the magnitude-5.8 tremor near Mineral, Virginia, in 2011, and a magnitude-3.8 blip off the coast of Maine in January 2025. So geological activity exists in eastern North America. “It’s just not following your typical tectonic activity,” says Sarah Mazza, a petrologist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Crunching data on the crust

Over decades, geologists had built up a history of eastern North America by mapping rocks on Earth’s surface. But they got a much better look, and many fresh insights, starting around 2010. That’s after a federally funded research project known as EarthScope blanketed the continental United States with seismometers. One aim was to gather data on how seismic energy from earthquakes reverberated through the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. Like a CT scan of the planet, that information highlights structures that lie beneath the surface and would not otherwise be detected.

With EarthScope, researchers could suddenly see what parts of the crust were warm or cold, or strong or weak—information that told them what was happening underground. Having the new view was like astronomers going from looking at the stars with binoculars to using a telescope, Long says. “You can see more detail, and you can see finer structure,” she says. “A lot of features that we now know are present in the upper mantle beneath eastern North America, we really just did not know about.”

And then scientists got even better optics. Long and other researchers began putting out additional seismometers, packing them in dense lines and arrays over the ground in places where they wanted even better views into what was going on beneath the surface, including Georgia and West Virginia. Team members would find themselves driving around the countryside to carefully set up seismometer stations, hoping these would survive the snowfall and spiders of a year or two until someone could return to retrieve the data.

The approach worked—and geophysicists now have a much better sense of what the crust and upper mantle are doing under eastern North America. For one thing, they found that the thickness of the crust varies from place to place. Parts that are the remains of the original eastern North America landmass have a much thicker crust, around 45 kilometers. The crust beneath the continental slivers that attached later on to the eastern edge is much thinner, more like 25 to 30 kilometers thick. That difference probably traces back to the formation of the continent, Long says.

Seismic studies have revealed in recent years that Earth’s crust varies dramatically in thickness along the eastern seaboard—a legacy of how this region was pieced together from various landmasses over time. Credit: Knowable Magazine

But there’s something even weirder going on. Seismic images show that beneath parts of New England, it’s as if parts of the crust and upper mantle have slid atop one another. A 2022 study led by geoscientist Yantao Luo, a colleague of Long, found that the boundary that marks the bottom of Earth’s crust—often referred to as the Moho, after the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić—was stacked double, like two overlapping pancakes, under southern New England.

The result was so surprising that at first Long didn’t think it could be right. But Luo double-checked and triple-checked, and the answer held. “It’s this super-unusual geometry,” Long says. “I’m not sure I’ve seen it anywhere else.”

It’s particularly odd because the Moho in this region apparently has managed to maintain its double-stacking for hundreds of millions of years, says Long. How that happened is a bit of a mystery. One idea is that the original landmass of eastern North America had an extremely strong and thick crust. When weaker continental slivers began arriving and glomming on to it, they squeezed up and over it in places.

How the Moho is working

The force of that collision could have carried the Moho of the incoming pieces up and over the older landmass, resulting in a doubling of the Moho there, says Paul Karabinos, a geologist at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Something similar might be happening in Tibet today as the tectonic plate carrying India rams into that of Asia and crumples the crust against the Tibetan plateau. Long and her colleagues are still trying to work out how widespread the stacked-Moho phenomenon is across New England; already, they have found more signs of it beneath northwestern Massachusetts.

A second surprising discovery that emerged from the seismic surveys is why 47-million-year-old volcanoes along the border of Virginia and West Virginia might have erupted. The volcanoes are the youngest eruptions that have happened in eastern North America. They are also a bit of a mystery, since there is no obvious source of molten rock in the passive continental margin that could be fueling them.

The answer, once again, came from detailed seismic scans of the Earth. These showed that a chunk was missing from the bottom of Earth’s crust beneath the volcanoes: For some reason, the bottom of the crust became heavy and dripped downward from the top part, leaving a gap. “That now needs to be filled,” says Mazza. Mantle rocks obligingly flowed into the gap, experiencing a drop in pressure as they moved upward. That change in pressure triggered the mantle rocks to melt—and created the molten reservoir that fueled the Virginia eruptions.

The same process could be happening in other passive continental margins, Mazza says. Finding it beneath Virginia is important because it shows that there are more and different ways to fuel volcanoes in these areas than scientists had previously thought possible: “It goes into these ideas that you have more ways to create melt than your standard tectonic process,” she says.

Long and her colleagues are looking to see whether other parts of the eastern North American margin also have this crustal drip. One clue is emerging from how seismic energy travels through the upper mantle throughout the region. The rocks beneath the Virginia volcanoes show a strange slowdown, or anomaly, as seismic energy passes through them. That could be related to the crustal dripping that is going on there.

Seismic surveys have revealed a similar anomaly in northern New England. To try to unravel what might be happening at this second anomaly, Long’s team currently has one string of seismometers across Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and a second dense array in eastern Massachusetts. “Maybe something like what went on in Virginia might be in process … elsewhere in eastern North America,” Long says. “This might be a process, not just something that happened one time.”

Long even has her eyes on pushing farther north, to do seismic surveys along the continental margin in Newfoundland, and even across to Ireland—which once lay next to the North American continental margin, until the Atlantic Ocean opened and separated them. Early results suggest there may be significant differences in how the passive margin behaved on the North American side and on the Irish side, Long’s collaborator Roberto Masis Arce of Rutgers University reported at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2024.

All these discoveries go to show that the eastern North American margin, once deemed a bit of a snooze, has far more going for it than one might think. “Passive doesn’t mean geologically inactive,” Mazza says. “We live on an active planet.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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

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We have the first video of a plant cell wall being built

Biology, cell wall, imaging, microscopy, plants, Science / Shannon Garcia / April 6, 2025

Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like without their walls, and we know what they look like when the walls are fully assembled, but we’ve never seen the wall-building process in action. “We knew the starting point and the finishing point, but had no idea what happens in between,” says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers University. He’s a co-author of the study that caught wall-building plant cells in action for the first time. And once we saw how the cell wall building worked, it looked nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.

Camera-shy builders

Plant cells without walls, known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been difficult to keep them alive under a microscope for the several hours needed for them to build walls. Plant cells are also very light-sensitive, and most microscopy techniques require pointing a strong light source at them to get good imagery.

Then there was the issue of tracking their progress. “Cellulose is not fluorescent, so you can’t see it with traditional microscopy,” says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. “That was one of the biggest issues in the past.” The only way you can see it is if you attach a fluorescent marker to it. Unfortunately, the markers typically used to label cellulose were either bound to other compounds or were toxic to the plant cells. Given their fragility and light sensitivity, the cells simply couldn’t survive very long with toxic markers as well.

We have the first video of a plant cell wall being built Read More »

Newly hatched hummingbird looks, acts like a toxic caterpillar

Biology, evolution, hummingbirds, mimicry, Science / DJ Henderson / April 6, 2025

Further observation of the nest revealed that the female hummingbird had added to its hatchling’s caterpillar camouflage by lining the nest with hairy-looking material from the seeds of balsa trees. The researchers also noticed that, whenever they approached the nest to film, the chick would move its head upward and start shaking it sideways while its feathers stood on end. It was trying to make itself look threatening.

When the research team backed off, the hummingbird chick went back to laying low in its nest. They wondered whether it behaved this way with actual predators, but eventually saw a wasp known to prey on young hummingbirds creep close to the nest. The chick displayed the same behavior it had with humans, which succeeded in scaring the wasp off.

Falk determined that the feathers, color, and head-shaking were eerily similar to the larvae of moths in the Megalopygidae and Saturniidae families, which are also endemic to the region. They might not be the mirror image of a particular species, but they appear close enough that predators would consider themselves warned.

“The behavior of the white-necked jacobin, when approached by humans and a predatory wasp, resembles the sudden ‘thrashing’ or ‘jerking’ behavior exhibited by many caterpillars in response to disturbance, including in the habitat where this bird was found,” he said regarding the same study.

…now you don’t

Could there be an alternate explanation for this hummingbird cosplaying as a caterpillar? Maybe. The researchers think it’s possible that the long feathers that appear to mimic spines may have evolved as a form of crypsis, or camouflage that helps an organism blend in with its background. The balsa tree material that’s similar to the feathers obviously helped with this.

Newly hatched hummingbird looks, acts like a toxic caterpillar Read More »

Editorial: Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation

Biology, colossal, conservation, elephants, mammoths, Science / Beth Washington / April 5, 2025

Anti-extinction vs. de-extinction

Ecosystems are inconveniently complex, and elephants won’t make good surrogates.

Are we ready for mammoths when we can’t handle existing human-pachyderm conflicts? Credit: chuchart duangdaw

The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats. According to the company’s founders, including Harvard and MIT professor George Church, these advances take Colossal a big step closer to their goal of using mammoths to combat climate change by restoring Arctic grassland ecosystems. Church also claims that Colossal’s woolly mammoth program will help protect endangered species like the Asian elephant, saying “we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

In other words, the scientific advances Colossal makes in their lab will result in positive changes from the tropics to the Arctic, from the soil to the atmosphere.

Colossal’s Jurassic Park-like ambitions have captured the imagination of the public and investors, bringing its latest valuation to $10 billion. And the company’s research does seem to be resulting in some technical advances. But I’d argue that the broader effort to de-extinct the mammoth is—as far as conservation efforts go—incredibly misguided. Ultimately, Colossal’s efforts won’t end up being about helping wild elephants or saving the climate. They’ll be about creating creatures for human spectacle, with insufficient attention to the costs and opportunity costs to human and animal life.

Shaky evidence

The Colossal website explains how they believe resurrected mammoths could help fight climate change: “cold-tolerant elephant mammoth hybrids grazing the grasslands… [will] scrape away layers of snow, so that the cold air can reach the soil.” This will reportedly help prevent permafrost from melting, blocking the release of greenhouse gasses currently trapped in the soil. Furthermore, by knocking down trees and maintaining grasslands, Colossal says, mammoths will help slow snowmelt, ensuring Arctic ecosystems absorb less sunlight.

Conservationists often claim that the reason to save charismatic species is that they are necessary for the sound functioning of the ecosystems that support humankind. Perhaps the most well-known of these stories is about the ecological changes wolves drove when they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Through some 25 peer-reviewed papers, two ecologists claimed to demonstrate that the reappearance of wolves in Yellowstone changed the behavior of elk, causing them to spend less time browsing the saplings of trees near rivers. This led to a chain of cause and effect (a trophic cascade) that affected beavers, birds, and even the flow of the river. A YouTube video on the phenomenon called “How Wolves Change Rivers” has been viewed more than 45 million times.

But other scientists were unable to replicate these findings—they discovered that the original statistics were flawed, and that human hunters likely contributed to elk population declines in Yellowstone.Ultimately, a 2019 review of the evidence by a team of researchers concluded that “the most robust science suggests trophic cascades are not evident in Yellowstone.” Similar ecological claims about tigers and sharks as apex predators also fail to withstand scientific scrutiny.

Elephants—widely described as “keystone species”—are also stars of a host of similar ecological stories. Many are featured on the Colossal website, including one of the most common claims about the role elephants play in seed dispersal. “Across all environments,” reads the website, “elephant dung filled with seeds serve to spread plants […] boosting the overall health of the ecosystem.” But would the disappearance of elephants really result in major changes in plant life? After all, some of the world’s grandest forests (like the Amazon) have survived for millennia after the disappearance of mammoth-sized megafauna.

For my PhD research in northeast India, I tried to systematically measure how important Asian elephants were for seed dispersal compared to other animals in the ecosystem; our team’s work, published in five peer-reviewed ecological journals (reviewed here), does find that elephants are uniquely good at dispersing the seeds of a few large-fruited species. But we also found that domestic cattle and macaques disperse some species’ seeds quite well, and that 80 percent of seeds dispersed in elephant dung end up eaten by ants. After several years of study, I cannot say with confidence that the forests where I worked would be drastically different in the absence of elephants.

The evidence for how living elephants affect carbon sequestration is also quite mixed. On the one hand, one paper finds that African forest elephants knock down softwood trees, making way for hardwood trees that sequester more carbon. But on the other hand, many more researchers looking at African savannas have found that elephants knock down lots of trees, converting forests into savannas and reducing carbon sequestration.

Colossal’s website offers links to peer-reviewed research that support their suppositions on the ecological role of woolly mammoths. A key study offers intriguing evidence that keeping large herbivores—reindeer, Yakutian horses, moose, musk ox, European bison, yaks, and cold-adapted sheep—at artificially high levels in a tussock grassland helped achieve colder ground temperatures, ostensibly protecting permafrost. But the study raises lots of questions: is it possible to boost these herbivores’ populations across the whole northern latitudes? If so, why do we need mammoths at all—why not just use species that already exist, which would surely be cheaper?

Plus, as ecologist Michelle Mack noted, as the winters warm due to climate change, too much trampling or sweeping away of snow could have the opposite effect, helping warm the soils underneath more quickly—if so, mammoths could be worse for the climate, not better.

All this is to say that ecosystems are diverse and messy, and those of us working in functional ecology don’t always discover consistent patterns. Researchers in the field often struggle to find robust evidence for how a living species affects modern-day ecosystems—surely it is far harder to understand how a creature extinct for around 10,000 years shaped its environment? And harder still to predict how it would shape tomorrow’s ecosystems? In effect, Colossal’s ecological narrative relies on that difficulty. But just because claims about the distant past are harder to fact-check doesn’t mean they are more likely to be true.

Ethical blind spots

Colossal’s website spells out 10 steps for mammoth resurrection. Steps nine and 10 are: “implant the early embryo into the healthy Asian or African elephant surrogates,” and “care for the surrogates in a world-class conservation facility for the duration of the gestation and afterward.”

Colossal’s cavalier plans to use captive elephants as surrogates for mammoth calves illustrate an old problem in modern wildlife conservation: indifference towards individual animal suffering. Leading international conservation NGOs lack animal welfare policies that would push conservationists to ask whether the costs of interventions in terms of animal welfare outweigh the biodiversity benefits. Over the years, that absence has resulted in a range of questionable decisions.

Colossal’s efforts take this apathy towards individual animals into hyperdrive. Despite society’s thousands of years of experience with Asian elephants, conservationists struggle to breed them in captivity. Asian elephants in modern zoo facilities suffer from infertility and lose their calves to stillbirth and infanticides almost twice as often as elephants in semi-wild conditions. Such problems will almost certainly be compounded when scientists try to have elephants deliver babies created in the lab, with a hodge podge of features from Asian elephants and mammoths.

Even in the best-case scenario, there would likely be many, many failed efforts to produce a viable organism before Colossal gets to a herd that can survive. This necessarily trial-and-error process could lead to incredible suffering for both elephant mothers and mammoth calves along the way. Elephants in the wild have been observed experiencing heartbreaking grief when their calves die, sometimes carrying their babies’ corpses for days—a grief the mother elephants might very well be subjected to as they are separated from their calves or find themselves unable to keep their chimeric offspring alive.

For the calves that do survive, their edited genomes could lead to chronic conditions, and the ancient mammoth gut microbiome might be impossible to resurrect, leading to digestive dysfunction. Then there will likely be social problems. Research finds that Asian elephants in Western zoos don’t live as long as wild elephants, and elephant researchers often bemoan the limited space, stimulation, and companionship available to elephants in captivity. These problems will surely also plague surviving animals.

Introduction to the wild will probably result in even more suffering: elephant experts recommend against introducing captive animals “that have had no natural foraging experience at all” to the wild as they are likely to experience “significant hardship.” Modern elephants survive not just through instinct, but through culture—matriarch-led herds teach calves what to eat and how to survive, providing a nurturing environment. We have good reason to believe mammoths also needed cultural instruction to survive. How many elephant/mammoth chimeras will suffer false starts and tragic deaths in the punishing Arctic without the social conditions that allowed them to thrive millennia ago?

Opportunity costs

If Colossal (or Colossal’s investors) really wish to foster Asian elephant conservation or combat climate change, they have many better options. The opportunity costs are especially striking for Asian elephant conservation: while over a trillion dollars is spent combatting climate change annually, the funds available to address the myriad of problems facing wild Asian elephants are far smaller. Take the example of India, the country with the largest population of wild Asian elephants in the world (estimated at 27,000) in a sea of 1.4 billion human beings.

Indians generally revere elephants and tolerate a great deal of hardship to enable coexistence—about 500 humans are killed due to human-elephant conflict annually there. But as a middle-income country continuing to struggle with widespread poverty, the federal government typically budgets less than $4M for Project Elephant, its flagship elephant conservation program. That’s less than $200 per wild elephant and 1/2000th as much as Colossal has raised so far. India’s conservation NGOs generally have even smaller budgets for their elephant work. The result is that conservationists are a decade behindwhere they expected to be in mapping where elephants range.

With Colossal’s budget, Asian elephant conservation NGOs could tackle the real threats to the survival of elephants: human-elephant conflict, loss of habitat and connectivity, poaching, and the spread of invasive plants unpalatable to elephants. Some conservationists are exploring creative schemes to help keep people and elephants safe from each other. There are also community-based efforts toremove invasive species like Lantana camara and restore native vegetation. Funds could enable development of an AI-powered system that allows the automated identification and monitoring of individual elephants. There is also a need for improved compensation schemes to ensure those who lose crops or property to wild elephants are made whole again.

As a US-based synthetic biology company, Colossal could also use its employees’ skills much more effectively to fight climate change. Perhaps they could genetically engineer trees and shrubs to sequester more carbon. Or Colossal could help us learn to produce meat from modified microbes or cultivated lines of cow, pig, and chicken cells, developing alternative proteins that could more efficiently feed the planet, protecting wildlife habitat and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The question is whether Colossal’s leaders and supporters are willing to pivot from a project that grabs news headlines to ones that would likely make positive differences. By tempting us with the resurrection of a long-dead creature, Colossal forces us to ask: do we want conservation to be primarily about feeding an unreflective imagination? Or do we want evidence, logic, and ethics to be central to our relationships with other species? For anyone who really cares about the climate, elephants, or animals in general, de-extincting the mammoth represents a huge waste and a colossal mistake.

Nitin Sekar served as the national lead for elephant conservation at WWF India for five years and is now a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission The views presented here are his own.

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