Science – Page 5

Rocket Report: SpaceX probes upper stage malfunction; Starship testing resumes

artemis II, blue origin, china, Firefly Aerospace, NASA, new shepard, rocket report, Science, Space, space launch system, spacex, starship / Kelly Newman / February 7, 2026

Amazon has booked 10 more launches with SpaceX, citing a “near-term shortage in launch capacity.”

The top of SpaceX’s next Super Heavy booster, designated Booster 19, as the rocket undergoes testing at Starbase, Texas. The Rio Grande River is visible in the background. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn’t solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA’s second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA’s sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week. NASA will conduct another fueling test in the coming weeks after troubleshooting the rocket’s leaky fueling line, but the launch of the Artemis II mission is off until March.

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.

Blue Origin “pauses” New Shepard flights. Blue Origin has “paused” its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative, Ars reports. The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

Moon first… So why is Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos more than a quarter of a century ago, ending the company’s longest-running program? “We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn,” wrote the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, in an internal email on January 30. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of our nation’s goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence.” The cancellation came, generally, as a surprise to Blue Origin employees. The company flew its most recent mission a week prior to the announcement, launching six people into space.

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Firefly nears return to flight. Firefly Aerospace is preparing to launch its next 1-ton-class Alpha rocket later this month from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The Texas-based company announced last month that it shipped the Alpha rocket to the California spaceport, and a follow-up post on social media on January 29 showed a video of the rocket rolling out to its launch pad for testing. “Alpha is vertical on the pad and getting ready for our static fire ahead of the Stairway to Seven mission!” Firefly wrote on X.

Getting back on track... This is an important mission for Firefly’s Alpha rocket program. On the most recent Alpha flight last April, the rocket’s first stage exploded in flight, moments after separation from the second stage. The blast wave damaged the upper stage engine, preventing it from reaching orbit with a small commercial tech demo satellite. Then, in September, the booster stage for the next Alpha launch was destroyed during a preflight test in Texas. Firefly says the upcoming mission is purely a test flight and won’t fly with any customer payloads. The company announced that an upgraded “Block II” version of the Alpha rocket will debut on the subsequent mission.

China to test next-gen crew capsule. China is gearing up for an important test of its new Mengzhou spacecraft, perhaps as soon as February 11, according to airspace warning notices issued around the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island. Images from public viewing sites around the launch site showed a test model of the Mengzhou spacecraft being lifted atop a booster stage this week. The flight next week is expected to include an in-flight test of the capsule’s launch abort system. Mengzhou is China’s next-generation crew spacecraft for human flights to the Moon. It will also replace China’s Shenzhou crew spacecraft used for flights to the Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit.

Proceeding apace... The in-flight abort test follows a pad abort test of the Mengzhou spacecraft last year as China marches toward the program’s first orbital test flight. The booster stage for the in-flight abort test is a subscale version of China’s new Long March 10 rocket, the partially reusable human-rated launcher under development for the country’s lunar program. Therefore, next week’s milestone flight will serve as an important test of not only the Mengzhou spacecraft but also its rocket.

SpaceX confirms upper stage malfunction. SpaceX kicked off the month of February with a Monday morning Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. However, the rocket experienced an anomaly near the end of the mission, Spaceflight Now reports. The rocket deployed its payload of 25 Starlink satellites as planned, but SpaceX said the Falcon 9’s second stage “experienced an off-nominal condition” during preparation for an engine firing to steer back into the atmosphere for a guided, destructive reentry. The rocket remained in a low-altitude orbit and made an unguided reentry later in the week.

Launches temporarily on hold... “Teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight,” SpaceX said in a statement. A Starlink launch from Florida originally planned for this week is now on hold. SpaceX returned the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing, containing the Starlink payloads, from the launch pad back to the hangar at Kennedy Space Center to wait for the next launch opportunity. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 team in Florida is now focusing on preparations for launch of the Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station, targeted for no earlier than February 11. The schedule for Crew-12 will hinge on how quickly SpaceX can complete the investigation into Monday’s upper stage malfunction. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Amazon’s new booking with SpaceX. Amazon has purchased an additional 10 Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX as part of its efforts to accelerate deployment of its broadband satellite constellation, Space News reports. The deal, which neither Amazon nor SpaceX previously announced, was disclosed in an Amazon filing with the Federal Communications Commission on January 30, seeking an extension of a July deadline to deploy half of its Amazon Leo constellation. Amazon has launched only 180 satellites of its planned 3,232-satellite constellation, rendering the July deadline unattainable. Amazon asked the FCC to extend the July deadline by two years or waive it entirely, but did not request an extension to the 2029 deadline for full deployment of the constellation.

“Near-term shortage in launch capacity”… In the filing with the FCC, Amazon said it faces a “near-term shortage of launch capacity” and is securing additional launch options “wherever available.” That effort includes working with SpaceX, whose Starlink constellation directly competes with Amazon Leo. Amazon bypassed SpaceX entirely when it made its initial orders for more than 80 Amazon Leo launches with United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But Amazon later reserved three launches with SpaceX that flew last year and has now added 10 more SpaceX launches to its manifest. So far, Amazon has only launched satellites on ULA’s soon-to-retire Atlas V rocket and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Amazon has not started flying on the new Vulcan, Ariane 6, or New Glenn rockets, which comprise the bulk of the constellation’s launch bookings. That could change next week with the first launch of Amazon Leo satellites on Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China launches satellite for Algeria. Algeria’s Alsat-3B mission, an Earth observation satellite developed in collaboration with China, launched aboard a Chinese Long March 2C rocket on January 30, Connecting Africa reports. Alsat-3B is the twin of Alsat-3A, which launched from China earlier in the month. Algeria’s government signed a contract with China in 2023 covering the development and launch of the two Alsat-3 satellites. Both satellites are designed to provide high‑resolution Earth observation imagery, enhancing Algeria’s geospatial intelligence capabilities.

Belt, road, and orbit… In a joint statement, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the Algerian remote-sensing satellite project is another successful example of China-Algeria aerospace cooperation and an important demonstration of the two nations’ comprehensive strategic partnership. China has inked similar space-related partnerships to produce and launch satellites for other African nations, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Sudan.

Soyuz-5 launch set for March. Just a few months ago, Russia aimed to launch the first flight of the new Soyuz-5 medium-lift rocket before the end of 2025. Now, the Soyuz-5’s debut test flight is targeted for the end of March, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Dmitry Baranov, the deputy head of Roscosmos, announced the new schedule at a scientific conference in Moscow. The mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan would mark the first flight of a new Russian rocket since 2014.

A reactionary rocket… Ars has reported on the Soyuz-5 project before. While the rocket will use a new overall design, the underlying technology is not all that new. The Soyuz-5, also named Irtysh, is intended to be a replacement for the Zenit rocket, a medium-lift launcher developed in the final years before the fall of the Soviet Union. The Zenit rocket’s main stages were manufactured in Ukraine, and tensions between Russia and Ukraine spelled the end of the Zenit program even before Russia invaded its neighbor in 2022. The Soyuz-5 uses a modified version of the RD-171 engine that has flown since the 1980s. This new RD-171 design uses all Russian components. The upper stage engine is based on the same design flown on Russia’s workhorse Soyuz-2 rocket.

Fueling test reveals leaks on SLS rocket. The launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test on Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Ars reports. The practice countdown was designed to identify problems and provide NASA an opportunity to fix them before launch. Most importantly, the test revealed NASA still has not fully resolved recurring hydrogen leaks that delayed the launch of the unpiloted Artemis I test flight by several months in 2022. Artemis I finally launched successfully after engineers revised their hydrogen loading procedures to overcome the leak.

Hardware poor… Now, the second Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is on the cusp of launching a crew for the first time. Even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast. It has been more than three years since NASA discovered leaks on the first SLS rocket. The rocket alone costs more than $2 billion to build. The program is hardware poor, leaving NASA unable to build a test model that might have been used to troubleshoot and resolve the hydrogen leaks before the agency proceeded into the Artemis II launch campaign. “Every SLS rocket is a work of art, every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. It’s definitely not ideal,” Ars reported in a story examining this problem.

SpaceX, meet xAI. SpaceX has formally acquired another one of Elon Musk’s companies, xAi, Ars reports. The merging of what is arguably Musk’s most successful company, SpaceX, with the more speculative xAI venture is a risk. Founded in 2023, xAI’s main products are the generative AI chatbot Grok and the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. The company aims to compete with OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms. However, Grok has been controversial, including the sexualization of women and children through AI-generated images, as has Musk’s management of Twitter.

Lots of assumptions… There can be no question that the merger of SpaceX—the world’s premier spaceflight company—and the artificial intelligence firm offers potential strategic advances. With this merger, Musk plans to use SpaceX’s deep expertise in rapid launch and satellite manufacturing and management to deploy a constellation of up to 1 million orbital data centers, providing the backbone of computing power needed to support xAI’s operations. All of this is predicated on several assumptions, including that AI is not a bubble, orbital data centers are cost-competitive compared to ground-based data centers, and that compute is the essential roadblock that will unlock widespread adoption of AI in society. Speculative, indeed, but only SpaceX has a rocket that might one day be able to realistically deploy a million satellites.

Starship testing resumes. The enormous rocket we’re talking about, of course, is SpaceX’s Starship. Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, have rolled the Super Heavy booster for SpaceX’s next Starship flight to a test stand for a series of checkouts ahead of the flight, currently slated for sometime in March. This will be the first launch of SpaceX’s upgraded “Block 3” Starship, with improvements aimed at making the rocket more reliable following several setbacks with Starship Block 2 last year.

Frosty night on the border… This is the second time a Block 3 booster has made the trip to the test stand at Starbase, located just north of the US-Mexico border. Booster 18 suffered a structural failure at the test site in November, forcing SpaceX to scrap it and complete the next rocket in line, Booster 19. On Wednesday night, SpaceX put Booster 19 through cryogenic proof testing, clearing a key milestone on the path to launch. The next flight will likely follow a similar profile as previous Starship missions, with a suborbital arc carrying the ship from its South Texas launch base to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. If successful, the test will pave the way for bigger tests to come, including an in-space refueling demo and the catch and recovery of a Starship vehicle returning from space.

Next three launches

Feb. 7: Long March 2F | Chinese spaceplane? | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 03: 55 UTC

Feb. 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-33 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 17: 05 UTC

Feb. 11: Falcon 9 | Crew-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 11: 01 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.

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COVID-19 cleared the skies but also supercharged methane emissions

atmospheric science, chemistry, climate change, Covid, greenhouse gasses, methane, pandemic, pollution, Science / Beth Washington / February 6, 2026

The remaining question, though, was where all this methane was coming from in the first place. Throughout the pandemic, there was speculation that the surge might be caused by super-emitter events in the oil and gas sector, or perhaps a lack of maintenance on leaky infrastructure during lockdowns.

But the new research suggests that the source of these emissions was not what many expected.

The microbial surge

While the weakened atmospheric sink explained the bulk of the 2020 surge, it wasn’t the only factor at play. The remaining 20 percent of the growth, and an even larger portion of the growth in 2021 and 2022, came from an increase in actual emissions from the ground. To track the source of these emissions down, Peng’s team went through tons of data from satellites and various ground monitoring stations.

Methane comes in different isotopic signatures. Methane from fossil fuels like natural gas leaks or coal mines is heavier, containing a higher fraction of the stable isotope carbon-13. Conversely, methane produced by microbes found in the guts of livestock, in landfills, and most notably in wetlands, is lighter, enriched in carbon-12.

When the researchers analyzed data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration global flask network, a worldwide monitoring system tracking the chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere, they found that the atmospheric methane during the mysterious surge was becoming significantly lighter. This was a smoking gun for biogenic sources. The surge wasn’t coming from pipes or power plants; it was coming from microbes.

La Niña came to play

The timing of the pandemic coincided with a relatively rare meteorological event. La Niña, the cool phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation that typically leads to increased rainfall in the tropics, lasted for three consecutive Northern Hemisphere winters (from 2020 to 2023). This made the early 2020s exceptionally wet.

The researchers used satellite data from the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite and sophisticated atmospheric models to trace the source of the light methane to vast wetland areas in tropical Africa and Southeast Asia. In regions like the Sudd in South Sudan and the Congo Basin, record-breaking rainfall flooded massive swaths of land. In these waterlogged, oxygen-poor environments, microbial methanogens thrived, churning out methane at an accelerated pace.

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New critique debunks claim that trees can sense a solar eclipse

botany, Debunking, plant behavior, plant communication, Science / 9u50fv / February 6, 2026

“He puts forward logical alternative hypotheses,” said Cahill of Novoplansky’s critique. “The original work should have tested among a number of different hypotheses rather than focusing on a single interpretation. This is in part what makes it pseudoscience and promoting a worldview.”

Granted, “[p]lants have extensive and well established mechanisms of communication, with that of volatiles being the most well studied and understood,” he added. “There is also growing recognition that root exudates play a role in plant-plant interactions, though this is only now being deeply investigated. Nothing else, communication through mychorriza, has withstood independent investigation.”

Chiolerio and Gagliano stand by their research, saying they have always acknowledged the preliminary nature of their results. “We measured [weather-related elements like] temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and daily solar radiation,” Chiolerio told Ars. “None of them shows strong correlation with the transients of the electrome during the eclipse. We did not measure environmental electric fields, though; therefore, I cannot exclude effects induced by nearby lightnings. We did not have gravitational probes, did not check neutrinos, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, etc.”

“I’m not going to debate an unpublished critique in the media, but I can clarify our position,” Gagliano told Ars. “Our [2025] paper reports an empirical electrophysiological/synchrony pattern in the eclipse window, including changes beginning prior to maximum occultation, and we discussed candidate cues explicitly as hypotheses rather than demonstrated causes. Describing weather/lightning as ‘more parsimonious’ is not evidence of cause. Regional lightning strike counts and other proxies can motivate a competing hypothesis, but they do not establish causal attribution at the recording site without site-resolved, time-aligned field measurements. Without those measurements, the lightning/weather account remains a hypothesis among other possibilities rather than a supported or default explanation for the signals we recorded.”

“We acknowledged the limited sample size and described the work as an initial field report; follow-up work is ongoing and will be communicated through peer-reviewed channels,” Gagliano added. As for the suggestion of pseudoscience, “I won’t engage with labels; scientific disagreements should be resolved with transparent methods, data, and discriminating tests.”

“It seems that the public appeal is something particularly painful for the colleagues who published their opinion on Trends in Plant Science,” Chiolerio said. “We did not care about public appeal, we wanted to share as much as possible the results of years of hard work that led to interesting data.”

DOI: Trends in Plant Science, 2026. 10.1016/j.tplants.2025.12.001 (About DOIs).

DOI: A. Chiolerio et al., Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.241786 (About DOIs).

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Lawmakers ask what it would take to “store” the International Space Station

congress, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, space debris, space policy / Shannon Garcia / February 6, 2026

NASA shall evaluate the “viability of transferring the ISS to a safe orbital harbor” after retirement.

The International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, is seen in silhouette as it transits the Moon at roughly five miles per second on Saturday, December 2, 2017, in Manchester Township, York County, Pennsylvania. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee voted to approve a NASA authorization bill this week, advancing legislation chock full of policy guidelines meant to give lawmakers a voice in the space agency’s strategic direction.

The committee met to “mark up” the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, adding more than 40 amendments to the bill before a unanimous vote to refer the legislation to the full House of Representatives. Wednesday’s committee vote was just one of several steps needed for the bill to become law. It must pass a vote on the House floor, win approval from the Senate, and then go to the White House for President Donald Trump’s signature.

Ars has reported on one of the amendments, which would authorize NASA to take steps toward a “commercial” deep space program using privately owned rockets and spacecraft rather than vehicles owned by the government.

Another add-on to the authorization bill would require NASA to reassess whether to guide the International Space Station (ISS) toward a destructive atmospheric reentry after it is decommissioned in 2030. The space agency’s current plan is to deorbit the space station in 2031 over the Pacific Ocean, where debris that survives the scorching reentry will fall into a remote, unpopulated part of the sea.

No policy change—yet

The most recent NASA authorization act, passed in 2022, extended the US government’s support for the ISS program until 2030. The amendment tacked onto this year’s bill would not change the timeline for ending operations on the ISS, but it asks NASA to reconsider its decision about what to do with the complex after retirement.

The amendment would direct NASA to “carry out an engineering analysis to evaluate the technical, operational, and logistical viability of transferring the ISS to a safe orbital harbor and storing the ISS in such harbor after the end of the operational low-Earth orbit lifetime of the ISS to preserve the ISS for potential reuse and satisfy the objectives of NASA.”

Rep. George Whitesides (D-Calif.) submitted the amendment with cosponsorship from Rep. Nick Begich (R-Alaska). The proposal passed the committee through a voice vote with bipartisan support. Whitesides was a NASA chief of staff and longtime executive in the space industry before his election to the House last year.

“The International Space Station is one of the most complex engineering achievements in human history,” Whitesides said. “It represents more than three decades of international collaboration and investment by US taxpayers estimated at well over $100 billion. Current plans call for the station to be deorbited at the end of its service life in 2030. This amendment does not seek to change that policy. Instead, it asks a straightforward question: Before we permanently dispose of an asset of this magnitude, should we fully understand whether it’s viable to preserve it in orbit for potential use by future generations?”

In 2024, NASA awarded SpaceX a nearly $1 billion contract to develop a souped-up version of its Dragon spacecraft, which would be equipped with additional thrusters and propellant tanks to provide the impulse required to steer the space station toward a targeted reentry. The deorbit maneuvers will slow the station’s velocity enough for Earth’s gravity to pull it back into the atmosphere.

Artist’s illustration of SpaceX’s deorbit vehicle, based on the design of the company’s Dragon spacecraft. The modified spacecraft will have 46 Draco thrusters—30 for the deorbit maneuvers and 16 for attitude control. Credit: SpaceX

The deorbit vehicle needs to slow the station’s speed by about 127 mph (57 meters per second), a tiny fraction of the spacecraft’s orbital velocity of more than 17,000 mph (7.7 kilometers per second). But the station mass is around 450 tons (400 metric tons), equivalent to two freight train locomotives, and measures about the length of a football field. Changing its speed by just 127 mph will consume about 10 tons (9 metric tons) of propellant, according to a NASA analysis released in 2024.

The analysis document shows that NASA considered alternatives to discarding the space station through reentry. One option NASA studied involved moving the station into a higher orbit. At its current altitude, roughly 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the Earth, the ISS would take one to two years to reenter the atmosphere due to aerodynamic drag if reboosts weren’t performed. NASA does not want the space station to make an uncontrolled reentry because of the risk of fatalities, injuries, and property damage from debris reaching the ground.

Boosting the space station’s orbit to somewhere between 400 and 420 miles (640 to 680 kilometers) would require a little more than twice the propellant (18.9 to 22.3 metric tons) needed for deorbit maneuvers, according to NASA’s analysis. At that altitude, without any additional boosts, NASA says the space station would likely remain in orbit for 100 years before succumbing to atmospheric drag and burning up. Going higher still, the space station could be placed in a 1,200-mile-high (2,000-kilometer) orbit, stable for more than 10,000 years, with about 146 tons (133 metric tons) of propellant.

There are two problems with sending the ISS to higher altitudes. One is that it would require the development of new propulsive and tanker vehicles that do not currently exist, according to NASA.

“While still currently in development, vehicles such as the SpaceX Starship are being designed to deliver significant amounts of cargo to these orbits,” NASA officials wrote in their analysis. “However, there are prohibitive engineering challenges with docking such a large vehicle to the space station and being able to use its thrusters while remaining within space station structural margins. Other vehicles would require both new certifications to fly at higher altitudes and multiple flights to deliver propellant.”

Going higher would also expose the space station to an increased risk of collision with space junk. The hazards from space debris are most severe at about 500 miles (800 kilometers), according to the engineers who conducted the analysis. “This means that the likelihood of an impact leaving station unable to maneuver or react to future threats, or even a significant impact resulting in complete fragmentation, is unacceptably high.”

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

Whitesides’ office did not respond to Ars’ questions, but he said in Wednesday’s hearing that his amendment would direct NASA to further examine the costs and risks of putting the ISS in a higher orbit. The legislation “simply ensures that Congress receives a rigorous fact-based analysis so that future decisions involving the ISS are informed by scientific reality,” he said.

“At a time when we’re thinking seriously about sustainability in space, this amendment protects taxpayer investments and ensures that we fully understand our options before an irreplaceable asset is permanently retired.”

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said he “wholeheartedly” supports Whitesides’ amendment. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) also endorsed it in brief remarks during Wednesday’s markup hearing.

“I just hate the thought that we would take something not just that we spent all the money on, but such an important part of human history, and dump it in the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen again, rather than preserving it,” Beyer said. “We don’t know whether we can do it in orbit, but if we can, we should really explore that hard.”

It’s not too late

Although NASA’s official policy is still to decommission the ISS in 2030, the door hasn’t closed on extending the lab’s operations into the next decade. There are some concerns about aging hardware, but NASA said in 2024 that engineers have “high confidence” that the primary structure of the station could support operations beyond 2030.

The oldest segments of the station have been in orbit since 1998, undergoing day-night thermal cycles every 45 minutes as they orbit the planet. The structural stability of the Russian section of the outpost is also in question. Russian engineers traced a small but persistent air leak to microscopic structural cracks in one Russian module, but cosmonauts were able to seal the cracks, and air pressure in the area is “holding steady,” a NASA spokesperson said last month.

One of the lab’s most critical elements, its power-generation system, is in good shape after NASA recently installed upgraded solar arrays outside the station. Another set of upgraded solar panels is scheduled to arrive at the station later this year, just a few years before the complex is to be retired.

NASA’s strategy is to decommission the ISS and turn to the commercial sector for new, cheaper, smaller space stations to continue conducting research in low-Earth orbit. This would allow NASA to buy time on a commercial space station for its astronauts and experiments, while the agency’s human spaceflight program focuses on missions to the Moon.

That’s a fine plan, but NASA’s program to support commercial space stations, known as Commercial LEO Destinations (CLDs), is going nowhere fast. Supporters of the CLD program say it has been underfunded from the start, and the strategy became more muddled last year when Sean Duffy, then NASA’s acting administrator, changed the agency’s rules for private space stations. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is reviewing the changes, and the requirements for stations may shift again.

NASA spends more than $3 billion per year for ISS operations, including crew and cargo transportation services to staff and support the outpost. NASA’s budget for deep space exploration in fiscal year 2026 is nearly $7.8 billion. NASA is receiving $273 million for the Commercial LEO Destinations program this year, with the money to be divided among multiple companies.

Any private space station will need to sustain itself, at least partially, on commercial business to be profitable. Developers have raised concerns that they will be unable to attract sufficient commercial business—in areas like pharmaceutical research, tech demos, or space tourism—as long as the government-funded ISS is still operating.

One of the companies vying for NASA funding is Vast, which plans to launch its first single-module private outpost to orbit in early 2027. This first station, named Haven-1, will accommodate crews for short-duration temporary stays. Vast plans to follow Haven-1 with a much larger multi-module station capable of supporting a permanent crew.

Max Haot, Vast’s CEO, does not seem bothered by lawmakers’ efforts to revisit the question of deorbiting the International Space Station.

“The amendment directs NASA to study the feasibility of something other than deorbit and disposal after ISS end of life, which is separate from the issue of retiring the space station and transitioning to commercial partners,” Haot said in a statement to Ars. “We support President Trump’s directive in national space policy to replace the ISS by 2030, with commercial partners who can ensure there is no gap in America’s continuous human presence in space.”

The other top contenders in the commercial space station arena are Starlab, a joint venture between Voyager Space and Airbus, the Blue Origin-led Orbital Reef project, and Axiom Space. Voyager and Blue Origin did not respond to requests for comment from Ars, and an Axiom spokesperson was unable to provide a statement by publication time.

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Watch Kanzi the bonobo pretend to have a tea party

animal behavior, animal cognition, Biology, bonobos, primate studies, Science / Mike M. / February 5, 2026

Such studies have nonetheless been met with skepticism when it comes to interpreting the behavior as evidence of animals’ ability to engage in make-believe. For instance, it’s possible the animals are responding to behavioral cues, like the direction of a gaze, to solve such tasks.

“Kanzi, let’s play a game!”

Enter Kanzi, a 43-year-old bonobo who lives at the Ape Initiative and is capable of responding to verbal prompts, either by pointing or using a lexigram of more than 300 symbols. There had also been anecdotal observations of Kanzi engaging in pretense. Krupenye et al. conducted three distinct experiments with Kanzi, each involving an 18-trial session.

In the first experiment, a scientist would offer a verbal prompt: “Kanzi, let’s play a game! Let’s find the juice!” They would then place two empty transparent cups on a table and pretend to fill them from an empty transparent pitcher, with another verbal prompt (“Kanzi, look!”). The scientist would pretend to pour the “juice” in one of the cups back into the pitcher, placing the pitcher under the table. Then they asked, “Kanzi, where’s the juice?” and recorded which cup the bonobo pointed to first.

“If Kanzi could only track reality (that both cups were empty), he should have chosen at chance between the two options, whereas if his choices were guided by stimulus enhancement, he should have selected the incorrect cup that had been ‘emptied’ above chance,” the authors wrote. “In contrast, if Kanzi could represent the pretend juice, he should have chosen above chance the cup containing the ‘imaginary’ juice, the empty cup that had not been ‘poured’ back into the pitcher. That is exactly what Kanzi did.” Kanzi selected the correct cup 34 out of 50 times (68 percent).

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This black hole “burps” with Death Star energy

astronomy, astrophysics, black holes, Science, tidal disruption events / Kelly Newman / February 5, 2026

When AT2018hyz, aka “Jetty,” was first discovered, radio telescopes didn’t detect any signatures of an outflow emission of material within the first few months. According to Cendes, that’s true of some 80 percent of TDEs, so astronomers moved on, preferring to use precious telescope time for more potentially interesting objects. A few years later, radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) showed that Jetty was lighting up the skies again, spewing out material at a whopping 1.4 millijansky at 5 GHz.

Since then, that brightness has kept increasing. Just how large is the increase? Well, people have estimated the fictional Death Star’s emitted energy in the Star Wars saga, and Jetty McJetface’s emissions are a trillion times more than that, perhaps as much as 100 trillion times the energy. As for why Jetty initially eluded detection, there seems to be a single jet emitting radiation in one direction that might not have been aimed at Earth. Astronomers should be able to confirm this once the energy peaks.

Cendes and her team are now scouring the skies for similar behavior in high-energy TDEs, since the existence of Jetty suggests that delayed outflow is more common than astronomers previously expected. It’s such an unprecedented phenomenon that astronomers haven’t really looked for them before. After all, “If you have an explosion, why would you expect there to be something years after the explosion happened when you didn’t see something before?” said Cendes.

DOI: Astrophysical Journal, 2026. 10.3847/1538-4357/ae286d (About DOIs).

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Court orders restart of all US offshore wind construction

department of the interior, green, injunction, lawsuit, offshore wind, Policy, renewable energy, Science, trump administration, wind power / Mike M. / February 2, 2026

Based on reporting elsewhere, some of the judges viewed the classified report that was used to justify the order to halt construction, but they didn’t find it persuasive. In one case, the judge noted that the government wasn’t acting as if the security risks were real. The threat supposedly comes from the operation of the wind turbines, but the Department of the Interior’s order blocked construction while allowing any completed hardware to operate.

“If the government’s concern is the operation of these facilities, allowing the ongoing operation of the 44 turbines while prohibiting the repair of the existing turbines and the completion of the 18 additional turbines is irrational,” Judge Brian E. Murphy said. That once again raises the possibility that the order halting construction will ultimately be held to be arbitrary and capricious.

For now, however, the courts are largely offering the wind projects relief because the ruling was issued without any warning or communication from the government and would clearly inflict substantial harm on the companies building them. The injunction blocks the government’s hold on construction until a final ruling is issued. The government can still appeal the decision before that point, but the consistency among these rulings suggests it will likely fail.

Several of these projects are near completion and are likely to be done before any government appeal can be heard.

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A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

chemistry, geochemistry, leaded gasoline, Science / Mike M. / February 2, 2026

Science also produced a hero in this saga: Caltech geochemist Clair Patterson. Along with George Tilton, Patterson developed a lead-dating method and used it to calculate the age of the Earth (4.55 billion years), based on analysis of the Canton Diablo meteorite. And he soon became a leading advocate for banning leaded gasoline and the “leaded solder” used in canned foods. This put Patterson at odds with some powerful industry lobbies, for which he paid a professional price.

But his many experimental findings on the extent of lead contamination and its toxic effects ultimately led to the rapid phase-out of lead in all standard automotive gasolines. Prior to the EPA’s actions in the 1970s, most gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon, which quickly adds up to nearly 2 pounds of lead released via automotive exhaust into the environment, per person, every year.

The proof is in our hair

The U.S. Mining and Smelting Co. plant in Midvale, Utah, 1906. — The US Mining and Smelting Co. plant in Midvale, Utah, 1906. Credit: Utah Historical Society

Lead can linger in the air for several days, contaminating one’s lungs, accumulating in living tissue, and being absorbed by one’s hair. Cerling had previously developed techniques to determine where animals lived and their diet by analyzing hair and teeth. Those methods proved ideal for analyzing hair samples from Utah residents who had previously participated in an earlier study that sampled their blood.

The subjects supplied hair samples both from today and when they were very young; some were even able to provide hair preserved in family scrapbooks that had belonged to their ancestors. The Utah population is well-suited for such a study because the cities of Midvale and Murray were home to a vibrant smelting industry through most of the 20th century; most other smelters in the region closed down in the 1970s when the EPA cracked down on using lead in consumer products.

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Judge rules Department of Energy’s climate working group was illegal

climate change, doe, endangerment finding, EPA, greenhouse gasses, lawsuit, Policy, Science / Shannon Garcia / February 2, 2026

But the flaws weren’t limited to scientific deficiencies. Two advocacy organizations, the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists, sued, alleging that the Climate Working Group violated various provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. This requires that any groups formed to provide the government with advice must be fairly balanced and keep records that are open to the public. The Climate Working Group, by contrast, operated in secret; in fact, emails obtained during the trial showed that its members were advised to use private emails to limit public scrutiny of their communications.

In response, the DOE dissolved the Climate Working Group in order to claim that the legal issues were moot, as the advisory committee at issue in the suit no longer existed.

No defense

In court, the government initially argued that the Federal Advisory Committee Act didn’t apply, claiming that the Climate Working Group was simply organized to provide information to the government. Based on Friday’s ruling, however, once the court tried to consider that issue, the government shifted to simply arguing that the Climate Working Group no longer existed, so none of this mattered. “The Defendants, in their Opposition and subsequent filings, ignore the allegations relating to the [Federal Advisory Committee Act] violations themselves,” the judge states. “Rather, the Defendants argue only that these claims are moot because the Climate Working Group has been dissolved.”

So, the court was left with little more than the accusations that the Climate Working Group had a membership with biased opinions, failed to hold open meetings, and did not keep public records. Given the lack of opposing arguments, “These violations are now established as a matter of law.”

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At NIH, a power struggle over institute directorships deepens

National Institutes of Health, NIH, NIH funding, NIH grants, Science, syndication / 9u50fv / February 1, 2026

The research agency has 27 institute and center directors. Will those roles become politicized?

When a new presidential administration comes in, it is responsible for filling around 4,000 jobs sprinkled across the federal government’s vast bureaucracy. These political appointees help carry out the president’s agenda, and, at least in theory, make government agencies responsive to elected officials.

Some of these roles—the secretary of state, for example—are well-known. Others, such as the deputy assistant secretary for textiles, consumer goods, materials, critical minerals & metals industry & analysis, are more obscure.

Historically, science agencies like NASA or the National Institutes of Health tend to have fewer political appointees than many other parts of the federal government. Sometimes, very senior roles—with authority over billions of dollars of spending, and the power to shape entire fields of research—are filled without any direct input from the White House or Congress. The arrangement reflects a long-running argument that scientists should oversee the work of funding and conducting research with very little interference from political leaders.

Since the early 2000s, according to federal employment records, NIH, the country’s premier biomedical research agency, has usually had just a few political appointees within its workforce. (As of November 2025, that workforce numbered around 17,500 people, after significant cuts.) Staff scientists and external experts played a key role in selecting the directors of the 27 institutes and centers that make up NIH. That left the selection of people for powerful positions largely outside of direct White House oversight.

What is the future of that status quo under the Trump administration?

Those questions have recently swirled at NIH. The arrival of political appointees in the kinds of positions previously held by civil servants, and apparent changes to hiring practices for other key positions, have raised concerns among current and former officials about a new era of politicization.

For decades, NIH has enjoyed strong bipartisan support. But conservative lawmakers have periodically raised questions about some of the agency’s spending, and according to one 2014 survey, the agency is perceived by federal executives as being a progressive place. (Since the early 2000s, some data suggests, US scientists as a whole have grown considerably more liberal relative to the general population.)

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many conservatives have criticized NIH for funding the kind of controversial virology experiments that some experts believe may have started the pandemic, and for promoting public health strategies that many on the right viewed as unscientific and authoritarian. One of the NIH institute directors, Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until his retirement in 2022, came to be a highly polarizing figure, described on the right as an unelected official wielding considerable power.

Over the years, some biomedical researchers have argued for changes to the way NIH hires and retains people in leadership positions. In 2019, the agency announced plans to impose term limits on some midlevel roles, in a bid to diversify its management. More recently, Johns Hopkins University physician and researcher Joseph Marine argued in an essay for The Free Press that NIH should set five to 10-year term limits on the directors of individual NIH institutes. “Regular turnover of leadership,” he wrote, “brings fresh ideas and a healthy reassessment of priorities.”

Shortly after winning the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump tapped Jay Bhattacharya, a prominent critic of NIH, to lead the agency. It may not be entirely surprising that an administration advocating for reforms to NIH would seek to flip key management positions that often experience little turnover.

Former official Mike Lauer, who until early 2025 oversaw NIH’s vast external grants program, said there were signs before Trump’s second inauguration that institute directors might be subject to fresh political scrutiny.

“There was a frustration that so much of the agency’s direction, as well as financial decision-making, was being made by people who are outside of the political sphere,” Lauer told Undark. He pointed to a line in Project 2025, a proposed roadmap for the Trump administration that was produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Funding for scientific research,” the report argues, “should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades.”

Soon after Trump’s inauguration, some senior officials at NIH were put on administrative leave or abruptly departed, including Lawrence Tabak, who had spent more than a decade as principal deputy director and served as NIH’s interim leader for almost two years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time, the administration grew the number of political appointees at NIH. As of late June, according to federal records, the Trump administration had placed nine political appointees at the agency, up from four the year before—itself higher than in most previous years. One of them, Seana Cranston, is a former Republican Congressional staffer who serves as chief of staff to the NIH Director; her predecessor was a career civil servant who had spent nearly 40 years in the NIH, the last four as chief of staff. Another is Michael Allen, who took the role of chief operating officer for the $6.5 billion NIAID, Fauci’s former institute. (Allen was appointed with no official announcement, and appears to have no official biography or background information posted on NIH websites.)

Those numbers still left NIH with fewer political appointees than many other agencies, including NASA, a comparably sized science agency.

The administration has departed from the traditional process for hiring NIH’s 27 institute and center directors, who are responsible for overseeing most of the funding decisions and day-to-day operations of NIH.

In the spring of 2025, five of those directors—including the head of NIAID—were fired or placed on administrative leave. (They have all since been removed from their positions.)

Then, in September, part of the search committee for the National Institute of Mental Health was abruptly disbanded, and then just as suddenly reconvened, according to Joshua Gordon, the former head of that institute, and one other source close to NIH.

In October, the directorship of another agency, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was filled by a close personal friend of Vice President JD Vance, without any apparent search process — a move that multiple former NIH officials told Undark may be unprecedented.

By then, 13 other NIH institutes and centers had vacant leadership posts. Other roles have opened up more recently: In an email to NIH staff on Dec. 30, Bhattacharya announced the departure of Walter Koroshetz, leader of the agency’s main neuroscience research institute. In the email, Bhattacharya seemed to suggest he had opposed the decision: “Dr. Koroshetz’s performance as Director has been exceptional,” Bhattacharya wrote, but “the Department of Health and Human Services has elected to pursue a leadership transition.”

In early January, the Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute announced his retirement, bringing the total number of open posts to 15.

The searches, NIH insiders say, appear to be happening on a compressed timeline. And while the NIH director has typically relied on search committees consisting of both NIH career scientists and external experts, multiple sources close to NIH say the agency has not formed those kinds of committees to make the latest round of hires.

In response to questions from Undark in early January, the Department of Health and Human Services sent a brief emailed statement, signed “NIH Press Team,” explaining that “an NIH leadership team with experience in scientific agency management will consider the applicant pool and make recommendations to the NIH Director.” The press representative declined to respond to follow-up questions about who would be on that team, or why the hiring process had changed.

Those changes have prompted speculation among some NIH insiders that the Trump administration is seeking to exert more political control over the hiring of directorships.

“Having external members on the search committee is vitally important for preventing politicization,” said Mark Histed, an NIH scientist who has recently been a critic — on his personal time, he stresses — of Trump’s approach to the agency. “Because, as you can imagine, if you’ve got a bunch of external scientists, it’s a lot harder to ram down what the White House wants, because people are not part of the political system.”

That kind of open and non-politicized search process, Histed said in a follow-up interview, isn’t unique to NIH: It’s one widely used by scientific institutions around the world. And it has worked, he argued, to help make NIH a scientific juggernaut: “That process,” he said, “led to 80 years of staggering scientific success.”

Members of Congress have taken notice. In language attached to the current appropriations bill moving through Congress, lawmakers direct NIH “to maintain its longstanding practice of including external scientists and stakeholders” in the search process. (Agencies are supposed to follow these Congressional instructions, but they are not binding.) In late January, Diana DeGette, a Democratic representative from Colorado, sponsored a bill that, according to a press release, would “Protect NIH From Political Interference” by, among other steps, capping the number of political appointees at the agency.

Lauer, the former NIH grants chief, took a broader historical view of the changes. There has long been a tug-of-war, he said, between presidential administrations that seek more political control over an agency, and civil servants and other bureaucratic experts who may resist that perceived incursion. From the point of view of politicians and their staff, Lauer said, “what they’ll say—I understand where they’re coming from—what they’ll say is, is that more political control means that the agency is going to be responsive to the will of the electorate, that there’s a greater degree of transparency and public accountability.”

Those upsides can be significant, Lauer said, but there are also downsides, including more short-term thinking, unstable budgets, and the potential loss of expertise and competence.

Mark Richardson, a political scientist at Georgetown University, is an expert on politicization and the federal bureaucracy. In his work, he said, he has observed a correlation between how much political parties disagree over the role of a specific agency, and the degree to which presidential administrations seek to exert control there through appointees and other personnel choices. NIH has historically fallen alongside agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that are subject to broad alignment across the parties.

“I think what you’re seeing more with the Trump administration is kind of an expansion of political conflict to these types of agencies,” Richardson said.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Fungus could be the insecticide of the future

biochemistry, Biology, fungus, insecticides, pine beetles, Science / Kelly Newman / February 1, 2026

Exterminators keep getting calls for a reason. Wood-devouring insects, such as beetles, termites, and carpenter ants, are constantly chewing through walls or infecting trees and breaking them down. The fight against these insects usually involved noxious insecticides; but now, at least some of them can be eliminated using a certain species of fungus.

Infestations of bark beetles are the bane of spruce trees. Eurasian spruce bark beetles (Ips typographus) ingest bark high in phenolic compounds, organic molecules that often act as antioxidants and antimicrobials. They protect spruce bark from pathogenic fungi—and the beetles take advantage. Their bodies boost the antimicrobial power of these compounds by turning them into substances that are even more toxic to fungi. This would seem to make the beetles invulnerable to fungi.

There is a way to get past the beetles’ borrowed defenses, though. Led by biochemist Ruo Sun, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, found that some strains of the fungus Beauveria bassiana are capable of infecting and killing the pests.

“Insect herbivores have long been known to accumulate plant defense metabolites from their diet as defenses against their own enemies,” she said in a study recently published in PNAS. “However, as shown here for B. bassiana, fungal pathogens are able to circumvent the toxicity of these dietary defenses and cause disease.”

First line of defense

Populations of bark beetles have recently exploded in temperate forests because of climate change. One species they feed on is the Norway spruce (Picea abies), which makes organic phenolic compounds known as stilbenes and flavonoids. Stilbenes are hydrocarbons that function as secondary metabolites for plants, and flavonoids, which are polyphenols, are also secondary plant metabolites that are often antioxidants. The spruce links both classes of compounds with sugars and relies on their antibacterial and antifungal activity.

When metabolized by the beetles, the spruce sugars are removed through hydrolysis, converting them into aglycones that are even more toxic to microscopic invaders. Despite that, some fungi appear to be able to deactivate these compounds. Strains of the fungal insect pathogen B. bassiana have been documented as killing some of these beetles in the wild.

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Research roundup: 6 cool stories we almost missed

research roundup, Science / Mike M. / February 1, 2026

A lip-syncing robot, Leonardo’s DNA, and new evidence that humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

Credit: Yuhang Hu/Creative Machines Lab

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. January’s list includes a lip-syncing robot; using brewer’s yeast as scaffolding for lab-grown meat; hunting for Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA in his art; and new evidence that humans really did transport the stones to build Stonehenge from Wales and northern Scotland, rather than being transported by glaciers.

Humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

Stonehenge is an iconic landmark of endless fascination to tourists and researchers alike. There has been a lot of recent chemical analysis identifying where all the stones that make up the structure came from, revealing that many originated in quarries a significant distance away. So how were the stones transported to their current location?

One theory holds that glaciers moved the bluestones at least part of the way from Wales to Salisbury Plain in southern England, while others contend that humans moved them—although precisely how that was done has yet to be conclusively determined. Researchers at Curtin University have now produced the strongest scientific evidence to date that it was humans, not glaciers, that transported the stones, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Curtin’s Anthony Clarke and co-authors relied on mineral fingerprinting to arrive at their conclusions. In 2024, Clarke’s team discovered the Stonehenge Altar Stone originated from the Orkney region in the very northeast corner of Scotland, rather than Wales. This time, they analyzed hundreds of zircon crystals collected from rivers close to the historic monument, looking for evidence of Pleistocene-era sediment. Per Clarke, if the stones had “sailed” to the plain from further north, there would be a distinct mineral signature in that sediment as the transported rocks eroded over time. They didn’t find that signature, making it far more likely that humans transported the stone.

DOI: Communications Earth & Environment, 2026. 10.1038/s43247-025-03105-3 (About DOIs).

When grasshoppers fly

An American grasshopper sample with three iterations of model gliders. — Credit: Princeton University/Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Everyone knows grasshoppers can hop, but they can also flap their wings, jump, and glide, moving seamlessly across both the ground and through the air. That ability inspired scientists from Princeton University to devise a novel approach to building robotic wings, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This could one day enable multimodal locomotion for miniature robots with extended flight times.

According to the authors, grasshoppers have two sets of wings: forewings and hindwings. Forewings are mostly used for protection and camouflage, while the latter are involved in flapping and gliding, and are corrugated to allow them to fold into the insect’s body. The team took CT scans to capture the geometry of grasshopper wings and used the scans to 3D print model wings with varying designs. Next they tested each variant in a water channel to study how water flowed around the wing, isolating key features like a wing’s shape or corrugation to see how this impacted the flow.

Once they had perfected their design, they printed new wings and attached them to small frames to create grasshopper-sized gliders. The team then launched the gliders across the lab and used motion capture to evaluate how well they flew. The glider performed as well as actual grasshoppers. In addition, they found that a smooth wing resulted in more efficient gliding. So why do real grasshopper wings have corrugations? The authors suggest that these evolved because they help with executing steep angles.

DOI: Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2026. 10.1098/rsif.2025.0117 (About DOIs).

Lip-syncing robot

Credit: Yuhang Hu/Creative Machines Lab

Humanoid robots are fascinating, but nobody would mistake them for actual humans, in part because even the ones that have faces are far too limited in facial gestures, including lip motion—hence, the “Uncanny Valley.” Columbia University engineers have now created a robot capable of learning facial lip motions for speaking and singing. According to a paper published in Science Robotics, the resulting robotic face was able to speak words in several different languages and sing an AI-generated song. (Its AI-generated debut album is aptly titled hello world.).

What makes human faces so uniquely capable of expression are the dozens of muscles lying just under the skin. Robotic faces are rigid and hence only have a limited range of motion. The Columbia team built their robotic face out of flexible material augmented with 26 motors (actuators). The robot learned to how its face moved in response to different actuator activity by watching itself in a mirror as it attempted thousands of random facial expressions. Eventually it learned how to achieve specific facial gestures.

The next step was to let the robot watch recorded videos of humans talking and singing, augmented with an AI algorithm that enabled it to learn exactly how the human mouths moved when performing those tasks so it could lip sync along. The resulting lip motion wasn’t perfect; the robot struggled with “B” and “W” sounds in particular. But the authors believe the robot will improve with more practice; combining this ability with ChatGPT or Gemini could further improve its lip-syncing ability.

DOI: Science Robotics, 2026. 10.1126/scirobotics.adx3017 (About DOIs).

Is Leonardo’s DNA preserved in his art?

Artist Karina Åberg swabs a 14th century da Vinci family letter from the State Archive in Prato for biological clues, following research initiated by Rossella Lorenzi. — Credit: Paola Agazzi / Archivio di Stato di Prato / Italian Ministry of Culture

In 2020, scientists analyzed the microbes found on several of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and discovered that each had its own distinct microbiome/. A second team, working with the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project in France, collected and analyzed swabs taken from centuries-old art in a private collection housed in Florence, Italy. They concluded that microbial signatures could be used to differentiate artwork according to the materials used—dubbing this emerging subfield “arteomics.”

Yet another team collaborating with the project painstakingly assembled Leonardo’s family tree in 2021, spanning 21 generations from 1331 to the present, resulting a full-length book published last year. The idea was that this will one day provide a means of conducting DNA testing to confirm whether the bones interred in Leonardo’s grave are actually the his. And now the project’s scientists are back with a preprint posted to the bioRxiv, announcing the successful sequencing of human DNA collected from a handful of artifacts associated with Leonardo—including a drawing of the Holy Child that some scholars attribute to Leonardo, as well as letters from a da Vinci family member.

The team lightly swabbed samples from the artifacts’ surfaces and were able to recover human Y-chromosome sequences from several of the samples. Several of these sequences were related and the authors speculate that some might even be Leonardo’s, although they cautioned that the samples would need to be compared to samples taken from the artist’s notebooks, burial site, and family tomb to make a definitive identification. The authors also found DNA from bacteria, fungi, flowers, and animals in some of the samples, as well as traces of viruses and parasites.

DOI: bioRxiv, 2026. 10.64898/2026.01.06.697880 (About DOIs).

From pint to plate

Flowchart showing the production process proposed in the current study. BSY is taken from the fermentation tank and used to culture K. xylinus bacteria to produce cellulose pellicles. Pellicles are then harvested, seeded with cells, then stacked and encased in gel to create a cube. — Credit: Christian Harrison et al., 2026

Lab-grown meat is often touted as a more environmentally responsible alternative to the real deal, but carnivorous consumers are often put off by the unappealing mouthfeel and texture (and, for me, a weird oily aftertaste). A new method using spent brewer’s yeast to make edible “scaffolding” for cultivating meat in the lab might one day offer a solution, according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.

Typically, a nutrient broth is used as a source of bacteria for the scaffolding. But Richard Day of University College London and his co-authors decided to use brewer’s yeast, usually discarded as waste, to culture a species of bacteria known for making high-quality cellulose. Then they tested the mechanical and structural properties of that cellulose with a “chewing machine.” They concluded that the cellulose made from spent brewer’s yeast was much closer in texture to real meat than the cellulose scaffolding made from a nutrient broth. The next step is to incorporate fat and muscle cells into the cellulose, as well as testing yeast from different kinds of beer.

DOI: Frontiers in Nutrition, 2026. 10.3389/fnut.2025.1656960 (About DOIs).

Water-driven gears

New York University scientists created a gear mechanism that relies on water to generate movement. For some conditions, the rotors spin in the same direction like pulleys looped together with a belt.

Gears have been around for thousands of years; the Chinese were using them in two-wheeled chariots as far back as 3000 BCE, and they are a mainstay in windmills, clocks, and the famed Antikythera mechanism. Roboticists also use gears in their inventions, but whether they are made of wood, metal or plastic, such gears tend to be inflexible and hence more prone to breakage. That’s why New York University mathematician Leif Reistroph and colleagues decided to see if flowing air or water could be used to rotate robotic structures.

Ristroph’s lab frequently addresses all manner of colorful real-world puzzles: fine-tuning the recipe for the perfect bubble, for instance; exploring the physics of the Hula-Hoop; or the formation processes underlying so-called “stone forests” common in China and Madagascar. In 2021, his lab built a working Tesla valve, in accordance with the inventor’s design; the following year they studied the complex aerodynamics of what makes a good paper airplane—specifically what is needed for smooth gliding; and in 2024 they cracked the conundrum of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, had grappled with since the 1940s.

For their latest paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Ristroph et al. wanted to devise something that functioned like a gear only with flowing liquid driving the motion, instead of teeth grinding against each other. They conducted a series of experiments in which they immersed cylindrical rotors in a glycerol-and-water solution. One cylinder would rotate while the other was passive.

They found that the rotating cylinder, combined with fluid flow, was sufficient to induce rotation in the passive cylinder. The flows functioned much in the same way as gear teeth when the cylinders were close together. Moving the cylinders further apart caused the active cylinder to rotate faster, looping the flows around the passive cylinder—essentially mimicking a belt and pulley system.

DOI: Physical Review Letters, 2026. 10.1103/m6ft-ll2c (About DOIs).

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

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