The team tested their lenses on humans by asking subjects to detect flashing signals, akin to Morse code, in the infrared, and to identify the direction of incoming infrared light. The subjects could only perform those tasks while wearing the special contact lenses.
The authors were intrigued to find that both mice and humans were better able to discriminate infrared light compared to visible light when their eyes were closed, which they attribute to the fact that infrared light can penetrate the eyelid more effectively than visible light. They also tweaked the nanoparticles so that they could color-code different infrared wavelengths, thereby enabling wearers to perceive more details in the infrared, an adaptation that could help color-blind people perceive more wavelengths.
There are some limitations. The contact lenses are so close to the retina that they can’t really capture fine details very well, because the converted light particles tend to scatter. The team made a wearable glass version of their nanoparticle technology so wearers could get higher resolution in the infrared. And right now the lenses can only detect infrared light projected from an LED; increasing the sensitivity of the nanoparticles to pick up lower levels of infrared would address this issue.
Still, it’s a significant step. “Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” said co-author Tian Xue, a neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China. “There are many potential applications right away for this material. For example, flickering infrared light could be used to transmit information in security, rescue, encryption, or anti-counterfeiting settings. In the future, by working together with materials scientists and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity.”
Whenever something bad happens to us, brain systems responsible for mediating emotions kick in to prevent it from happening again. When we get stung by a wasp, the association between pain and wasps is encoded in the region of the brain called the amygdala, which connects simple stimuli with basic emotions.
But the brain does more than simple associations; it also encodes lots of other stimuli that are less directly connected with the harmful event—things like the place where we got stung or the wasps’ nest in a nearby tree. These are combined into complex emotional models of potentially threatening circumstances.
Till now, we didn’t know exactly how these models are built. But we’re beginning to understand how it’s done.
Emotional complexity
“Decades of work has revealed how simple forms of emotional learning occurs—how sensory stimuli are paired with aversive events,” says Joshua Johansen, a team director at the Neural Circuitry of Learning and Memory at RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Tokyo. But Johansen says that these decades didn’t bring much progress in treating psychiatric conditions like anxiety and trauma-related disorders. “We thought if we could get a handle of more complex emotional processes and understand their mechanisms, we may be able to provide relief for patients with conditions like that,” Johansen claims.
To make it happen, his team performed experiments designed to trigger complex emotional processes in rats while closely monitoring their brains.
Johansen and Xiaowei Gu, his co-author and colleague at RIKEN, started by dividing the rats into two groups. The first “paired” group of rats was conditioned to associate an image with a sound. The second “unpaired” group watched the same image and listened to the same sound, but not at the same time. This prevented the rats from making an association.
“I think we’ve known for a long time that we’re interfering with the climate system in a very dangerous way,” he said. “And one of the points of our paper is to demonstrate that one part of the climate system, the ice sheets, are showing some very disturbing signals right now.”
Some of the most vulnerable places are far from any melting ice sheets, including Belize City, home to about 65,000 people, where just 3 feet of sea level rise would swamp 500 square miles of land.
In some low-lying tropical regions around the equator, sea level is rising three times as fast as the global average. That’s because the water is expanding as it warms, and as the ice sheets melt, their gravitational pull is reduced, allowing more water to flow away from the poles toward the equator.
“At low latitudes, it goes up more than the average,” Bamber said. “It’s bad news for places like Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and the Nile Delta.”
Global policymakers need to be more aware of the effects of a 1.5° C temperature increase, Ambassador Carlos Fuller, long-time climate negotiator for Belize, said of the new study.
Belize already moved its capital inland, but its largest city will be inundated at just 1 meter of sea-level rise, he said.
“Findings such as these only sharpen the need to remain within the 1.5° Paris Agreement limit, or as close as possible, so we can return to lower temperatures and protect our coastal cities,” Fuller said.
While the new study is focused on ice sheets, Durham University’s Stokes notes that recent research shows other parts of the Earth system are already at, or very near, tipping points that are irreversible on a timescale relevant to human civilizations. That includes changes to freshwater systems and ocean acidification.
“I think somebody used the analogy that it’s like you’re wandering around in a dark room,” he said. “You know there’s a monster there, but you don’t know when you’re going to encounter it. It’s a little bit like that with these tipping points. We don’t know exactly where they are. We may have even crossed them, and we do know that we will hit them if we keep warming.”
Prosthetics are becoming increasing affordable and accessible thanks to 3D printers.
Three-dimensional printing is transforming medical care, letting the health care field shift from mass-produced solutions to customized treatments tailored to each patient’s needs. For instance, researchers are developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands specifically designed for children, made with lightweight materials and adaptable control systems.
These continuing advancements in 3D-printed prosthetics demonstrate their increasing affordability and accessibility. Success stories like this one in personalized prosthetics highlight the benefits of 3D printing, in which a model of an object produced with computer-aided design software is transferred to a 3D printer and constructed layer by layer.
We are a biomedical engineer and a chemist who work with 3D printing. We study how this rapidly evolving technology provides new options not just for prosthetics but for implants, surgical planning, drug manufacturing, and other health care needs. The ability of 3D printing to make precisely shaped objects in a wide range of materials has led to, for example, custom replacement joints and custom-dosage, multidrug pills.
Better body parts
Three-dimensional printing in health care started in the 1980s with scientists using technologies such as stereolithography to create prototypes layer by layer. Stereolithography uses a computer-controlled laser beam to solidify a liquid material into specific 3D shapes. The medical field quickly saw the potential of this technology to create implants and prosthetics designed specifically for each patient.
One of the first applications was creating tissue scaffolds, which are structures that support cell growth. Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital combined these scaffolds with patients’ own cells to build replacement bladders. The patients remained healthy for years after receiving their implants, demonstrating that 3D-printed structures could become durable body parts.
As technology progressed, the focus shifted to bioprinting, which uses living cells to create working anatomical structures. In 2013, Organovo created the world’s first 3D-bioprinted liver tissue, opening up exciting possibilities for creating organs and tissues for transplantation. But while significant advances have been made in bioprinting, creating full, functional organs such as livers for transplantation remains experimental. Current research focuses on developing smaller, simpler tissues and refining bioprinting techniques to improve cell viability and functionality. These efforts aim to bridge the gap between laboratory success and clinical application, with the ultimate goal of providing viable organ replacements for patients in need.
Three-dimensional printing already has revolutionized the creation of prosthetics. It allows prosthetics makers to produce affordable custom-made devices that fit the patient perfectly. They can tailor prosthetic hands and limbs to each individual and easily replace them as a child grows.
Three-dimensionally printed implants, such as hip replacements and spine implants, offer a more precise fit, which can improve how well they integrate with the body. Traditional implants often come only in standard shapes and sizes.
Additionally, 3D printing is making significant strides in dentistry. Companies such as Invisalign use 3D printing to create custom-fit aligners for teeth straightening, demonstrating the ability to personalize dental care.
Scientists are also exploring new materials for 3D printing, such as self-healing bioglass that might replace damaged cartilage. Moreover, researchers are developing 4D printing, which creates objects that can change shape over time, potentially leading to medical devices that can adapt to the body’s needs.
For example, researchers are working on 3D-printed stents that can respond to changes in blood flow. These stents are designed to expand or contract as needed, reducing the risk of blockage and improving long-term patient outcomes.
Simulating surgeries
Three-dimensionally printed anatomical models often help surgeons understand complex cases and improve surgical outcomes. These models, created from medical images such as X-rays and CT scans, allow surgeons to practice procedures before operating.
For instance, a 3D-printed model of a child’s heart enables surgeons to simulate complex surgeries. This approach can lead to shorter operating times, fewer complications, and lower costs.
Personalized pharmaceuticals
In the pharmaceutical industry, drugmakers can three-dimensionally print personalized drug dosages and delivery systems. The ability to precisely layer each component of a drug means that they can make medicines with the exact dose needed for each patient. The 3D-printed anti-epileptic drug Spritam was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015 to deliver very high dosages of its active ingredient.
Drug production systems that use 3D printing are finding homes outside pharmaceutical factories. The drugs potentially can be made and delivered by community pharmacies. Hospitals are starting to use 3D printing to make medicine on-site, allowing for personalized treatment plans based on factors such as the patient’s age and health.
However, it’s important to note that regulations for 3D-printed drugs are still being developed. One concern is that postprinting processing may affect the stability of drug ingredients. It’s also important to establish clear guidelines and decide where 3D printing should take place – whether in pharmacies, hospitals or even at home. Additionally, pharmacists will need rigorous training in these new systems.
Printing for the future
Despite the extraordinarily rapid progress overall in 3D printing for health care, major challenges and opportunities remain. Among them is the need to develop better ways to ensure the quality and safety of 3D-printed medical products. Affordability and accessibility also remain significant concerns. Long-term safety concerns regarding implant materials, such as potential biocompatibility issues and the release of nanoparticles, require rigorous testing and validation.
While 3D printing has the potential to reduce manufacturing costs, the initial investment in equipment and materials can be a barrier for many health care providers and patients, especially in underserved communities. Furthermore, the lack of standardized workflows and trained personnel can limit the widespread adoption of 3D printing in clinical settings, hindering access for those who could benefit most.
On the bright side, artificial intelligence techniques that can effectively leverage vast amounts of highly detailed medical data are likely to prove critical in developing improved 3D-printed medical products. Specifically, AI algorithms can analyze patient-specific data to optimize the design and fabrication of 3D-printed implants and prosthetics. For instance, implant makers can use AI-driven image analysis to create highly accurate 3D models from CT scans and MRIs that they can use to design customized implants.
Furthermore, machine learning algorithms can predict the long-term performance and potential failure points of 3D-printed prosthetics, allowing prosthetics designers to optimize for improved durability and patient safety.
Three-dimensional printing continues to break boundaries, including the boundary of the body itself. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a technique that uses ultrasound to turn a liquid injected into the body into a gel in 3D shapes. The method could be used one day for delivering drugs or replacing tissue.
Overall, the field is moving quickly toward personalized treatment plans that are closely adapted to each patient’s unique needs and preferences, made possible by the precision and flexibility of 3D printing.
The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community. Our team of editors work with these experts to share their knowledge with the wider public. Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and hopefully improve the quality of public discourse on them.
On Monday, however, the company announced that the hold had been lifted and construction would resume. But as with the hold itself, the reasons for its end remain mysterious. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management page for the project was only updated with a new letter on Tuesday. That letter indicates a review of its approval is ongoing, but construction can resume during the review.
The Department of the Interior has not addressed the change and has not responded to a request for comment. A post by Interior Secretary Burgum doesn’t mention Empire Wind but does suggest the governor of New York will approve a pipeline: “I am encouraged by Governor Hochul’s comments about her willingness to move forward on critical pipeline capacity.”
That suggests there was a deal that allowed Empire Wind to resume construction in return for a pipeline for fossil fuels. The New York Times suggests that this is a reference to the proposed Constitution Pipeline, which was planned to move natural gas from Pennsylvania to eastern New York but was cancelled in 2020 due to state opposition.
But Governor Kathy Hochul has not made any comments about a willingness to move forward on any pipelines. Instead, Hochul’s statement on Empire Wind is very vague, saying that she “reaffirmed that New York will work with the Administration and private entities on new energy projects that meet the legal requirements under New York law.”
So while it’s good news that construction on Empire Wind has restarted, the whole process has been problematic, driven by apparently arbitrary decisions that the government has refused to justify.
Biotechnology company Regeneron will acquire 23andMe out of bankruptcy for $256 million, with a plan to keep the DNA-testing company running without interruption and uphold its privacy-protection promises.
In its announcement of the acquisition, Regeneron assured 23andMe’s 15 million customers that their data—including genetic and health information, genealogy, and other sensitive personal information—would be safe and in good hands. Regeneron aims to use the large trove of genetic data to further its own work using genetics to develop medical advances—something 23andMe tried and failed to do.
“As a world leader in human genetics, Regeneron Genetics Center is committed to and has a proven track record of safeguarding the genetic data of people across the globe, and, with their consent, using this data to pursue discoveries that benefit science and society,” Aris Baras, senior vice president and head of the Regeneron Genetics Center, said in a statement. “We assure 23andMe customers that we are committed to protecting the 23andMe dataset with our high standards of data privacy, security, and ethical oversight and will advance its full potential to improve human health.”
Baras said that Regeneron’s Genetic Center already has its own genetic dataset from nearly 3 million people.
The safety of 23andMe’s dataset has drawn considerable concern among consumers, lawmakers, and regulators amid the company’s downfall. For instance, in March, California Attorney General Rob Bonta made the unusual move to urge Californians to delete their genetic data amid 23andMe’s financial distress. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson also weighed in, making clear in a March letter that “any purchaser should expressly agree to be bound by and adhere to the terms of 23andMe’s privacy policies and applicable law.”
“So, we’re off working now with that program office to go start off a more commercial line,” Purdy said. “And when I say commercial in this particular aspect, just to clarify, this is accomplishing the same GSSAP mission. Our operators will fly the GSSAP system using the same ground systems and data they do now, but these would be using faster, commercial build times… and cheaper, less expensive parts in order to bring that together in a faster sense.”
An artist’s illustration of two of the Space Force’s GSSAP surveillance satellites, built by Northrop Grumman. Credit: US Space Force
The next-gen GSSAP spacecraft may not meet the same standards as the Space Force’s existing inspector satellites, but the change comes with benefits beyond lower costs and faster timelines. It will be unclassified and will be open to multiple vendors to build and launch space surveillance satellites, injecting some level of competition into the program. It will also be eligible for sales to other countries.
More for less with GPS
There’s another area where Purdy said the Space Force was surprised by what commercial satellite builders were offering. Last year, the Pentagon used a new “Quick Start” procurement model authorized by Congress to establish a program to bolster the GPS navigation network, which is run by the Space Force but relied upon by commercial users and private citizens around the world.
The Space Force has more than 30 GPS satellites in medium-Earth orbit (MEO) at an altitude of roughly 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers). Purdy said the network is “vulnerable” because the constellation has a relatively small number of satellites, at least relative to the Space Force’s newest programs. In MEO, the satellites are within range of direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons. Many of the GPS satellites are aging, and the newer ones, built by Lockheed Martin, cost about $250 million apiece. With the Resilient GPS program, the Space Force aims to reduce the cost to $50 million to $80 million per satellite.
The satellites will be smaller than the GPS satellites flying today and will transmit a core set of signals. “We’re looking to add more resiliency and more numbers,” Purdy said.
“We actually didn’t think that we were going to get much, to be honest with you, and it was a surprise to us, and a major learning [opportunity] for us, learning last year that satellite prices had—they were low in LEO already, but they were lowering in MEO,” Purdy said. “So, that convinced us that we should proceed with it. The results have actually been more surprising and encouraging than we thought.
“The [satellite] buses actually bring a higher power level than our current program of record does, which allows us to punch through jamming in a better sense. We can achieve better results, we think, over time, going after these commercial buses,” Purdy said. “So that’s caused me to think, for our mainline GPS system, we’re actually looking at that for alternative ways to get after that.”
Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy oversees the Space Force’s acquisition programs at the Pentagon. Credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
In September, the Space Force awarded four agreements to Astranis, Axient, L3Harris, and Sierra Space to produce design concepts for new Resilient GPS satellites. Astranis and Axient are relatively new to satellite manufacturing. Astranis is a pioneer in low-mass Internet satellites in geosynchronous orbit and a non-traditional defense contractor. Axient, acquired by a company named Astrion last year, has focused on producing small CubeSats.
The military will later select one or more of these companies to move forward with producing up to eight Resilient GPS satellites for launch as soon as 2028. Early planning is already underway for a follow-on set of Resilient GPS satellites with additional capabilities, according to the Space Force.
The experience with the R-GPS program inspired the Space Force to look at other mission areas that might be well-served with a similar procurement approach. They settled on GSSAP as the next frontier.
Scolese, director of the NRO, said his agency is examining how to use commercial satellite constellations for other purposes beyond Earth imaging. This might include a program to employ commercially procured satellites for signals intelligence (SIGINT) missions, he said.
“It’s not just the commercial imagery,” Scolese said. “It’s also commercial RF (Radio Frequency, or SIGINT) and newer phenomenologies as where we’re working with that industry to go off and help advance those.”
There’s a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that’s changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms.
Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it’s produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe.
A shipping container for antimatter
The problem facing CERN comes from its own hardware. The antimatter it captures is produced by smashing a particle beam into a stationary target. As a result, all the anti-particles that come out of the debris carry a lot of energy. If you want to hold on to any of them, you have to slow them down, which is done using electromagnetic fields that can act on the charged antimatter particles. Unfortunately, as the team behind the new work notes, many of the measurements we’d like to do with the antimatter are “extremely sensitive to external magnetic field noise.”
In short, the hardware that slows the antimatter down limits the precision of the measurements you can take.
The obvious solution is to move the antimatter away from where it’s produced. But that gets tricky very fast. The antimatter containment device has to be maintained as an extreme vacuum and needs superconducting materials to produce the electromagnetic fields that keep the antimatter from bumping into the walls of the container. All of that means a significant power supply, along with a cache of liquid helium to keep the superconductors working. A standard shipping container just won’t do.
So the team at CERN built a two-meter-long portable containment device. On one end is a junction that allows it to be plugged into the beam of particles produced by the existing facility. That junction leads to the containment area, which is blanketed by a superconducting magnet. Elsewhere on the device are batteries to ensure an uninterrupted power supply, along with the electronics to run it all. The whole setup is encased in a metal frame that includes lifting points that can be used to attach it to a crane for moving around.
Critics call for an industry moratorium until more scientific data can be obtained.
Greenpeace activists protest on the opening morning of the annual Deep Sea Mining Summit on April 17, 2024 in London, England. Credit: Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images
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In 2013, a deep-sea mining company named UK Seabed Resources contracted marine biologist Diva Amon and other scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa to survey a section of the seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast swath of international waters located in the Pacific Ocean that spans around 2 million square miles between Hawaii and Mexico.
The area is known to have an abundant supply of rocky deposits the size of potatoes called polymetallic nodules. They are rich in metals like nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese, which have historically been used to make batteries and electric vehicles.
Someday, the company envisioned it might profit from mining them. But first it wanted to know more about the largely unexplored abyssal environment where they were found, Amon said.
Using a remotely operated vehicle equipped with cameras and lights, she began documenting life 2.5 miles deep.
On one of the robot’s first dives, an anemone-like creature with 8-foot-long billowing tentacles appeared about two feet above the seabed. It was attached to the stem of a sea sponge anchored on one of the valuable nodules.
Amon was overwhelmed with excitement. It was likely a new species, she said. She also felt a sense of grief. “Here was this incredibly beautiful animal,” she said, “that no one has likely ever seen before.” And they might not ever again. “I feel this immense sadness at the potential that this place that we have come to survey may be mined and essentially destroyed in the future,” she remembers thinking at that moment.
Now, more than a decade later, Amon worries her fears may be coming to fruition.
“The next gold rush”
On April 24, President Trump signed an executive order promoting deep-sea mining in the US and international waters, touting the industry’s potential to boost the country’s economic growth and national security.
“These resources are key to strengthening our economy, securing our energy future, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers for critical minerals,” the order states.
In an online post last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) described the political move as a step toward paving the way for “The Next Gold Rush,” stating: “Critical minerals are used in everything from defense systems and batteries to smartphones and medical devices. Access to these minerals is a key factor in the health and resilience of US supply chains.”
The order, titled “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” charges NOAA and the Secretary of Commerce with expediting the process for reviewing and issuing licenses to explore and permits to mine seabed minerals in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
Less than a week after it was issued, a US subsidiary of the Canadian deep-sea mining corporation called The Metals Company submitted its first applications to explore and exploit polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
If approved, the company could be the first to mine in international waters. It would also be the first to do so under US law, sparking a rebuke from those opposed to the industry. These ocean advocates say the risks of mining far outweigh the benefits of maintaining a healthy deep-sea ecosystem, which plays a vital role in managing the global climate by absorbing heat and excess carbon dioxide.
During a House Committee on Natural Resources oversight hearing on the potential impact of deep-sea mining on the American economy—held in April on the same day The Metals Company made its announcement—US Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) critiqued the president’s order.
“Despite what proponents claim, it is not the great silver bullet,” he said. “The industry has very questionable market prospects because battery technology is rapidly changing,” he said. “[Electrical vehicle] markets are already moving away from the nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese found in deep-sea nodules towards other minerals.”
A vast resistance
Prior to the president’s order, more than 900 leading scientists and marine policy experts from over 70 countries, including Amon from Trinidad and Tobago, had signed a statement calling for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining until more scientific data was obtained to prove related activity would not harm the marine environment.
Thirty-three countries, including Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and a number of Pacific Island Countries like Fiji and Vanuatu, are also calling for a moratorium or outright ban on deep-sea mining, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an alliance of more than 100 organizations dedicated to protecting the ocean’s depths.
“You cannot authorize mining that’s going to cause biodiversity loss, that’s going to cause irreparable damage to the marine environment, that is going to potentially drive species extinct before we even discover them, until you can sort all that out, until you have enough knowledge to understand how you can prevent that kind of stuff from happening,” said Matthew Gianni, the coalition’s co-founder and political and policy advisor.
Some Indigenous peoples say deep-sea mining also threatens their cultural heritage. Native Hawaiians, for example, believe the deep sea is where life began.
“The action of deep-sea mining is such a destructive process, and that process now intrudes into this place, in the story of my beginning, my creation,” said Solomon Pili Kahoʻohalahala, a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian elder and descendant from the island of Lānaʻi.
Legal experts also question whether Trump can authorize this activity.
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is the only organization that can legally approve mining in international waters, sometimes referred to as high seas or the “Area,” according to Duncan Currie, an attorney who has practiced international and environmental law for more than 25 years. The organization was established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international treaty that provides a legal framework for governing maritime rights related to shipping, navigation, marine commerce, and the peaceful and sustainable use of ocean resources.
Currie said Trump’s new order falsely purports decision-making power over international waters, citing an outdated law called the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA). The act was passed in 1980—two years before UNCLOS was established—with the intent of serving as a temporary mechanism for regulating deep-sea mining until an international oversight body could be put into place. But the convention has never been ratified by the US Senate.
To grant companies permission to mine the deep sea under US law in areas far outside the country’s jurisdiction is unlawful, he said in an interview.
“That would be a breach of international law without a shadow of a doubt,” he said. It would also set a dangerous precedent, Currie said. “If the United States can do it, other countries can do it. And so this is very concerning.”
The International Seabed Authority’s Secretary-General Leticia Reis de Carvalho responded to Trump’s order in a statement: “This can only refer to resources found on the US seabed and ocean floor because everything beyond is the common heritage of humankind,” Carvalho said. “No State has the right to unilaterally exploit the mineral resources of the Area outside the legal framework established by UNCLOS.” This applies to all nations, including those who have not ratified the treaty, like the US, she said.
Since the US never signed or ratified the treaty, it is not a voting member of the ISA, which includes 169 member states, plus the European Union. But, for the last 30 years, the US has still been an active participant in ISA negotiations aimed at developing industry regulations in a Mining Code, according to Carvalho.
“The US has been a reliable observer and significant contributor to the negotiations of the International Seabed Authority, actively providing technical expertise to each stage of the development of the ISA regulatory framework,” she said in her statement.
It is all the more “surprising,” she said, that the US would now preemptively circumvent the code the ISA aims to adopt later this year.
“It is the foundation for ensuring that any activities in the Area benefit all humanity, for present and future generations, while protecting the marine environment,” Carvalho’s statement said.
Into the deep
Below 650 feet, rays of sunlight cease to pierce the deep ocean, which makes up the planet’s largest ecosystem.
“It provides more than 95 percent of all the habitable space on Earth,” said Amon, who explored parts of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in 2013 and 2015 as a contractor for UK Seabed Resources, a company once owned by Lockheed Martin and acquired in 2023 by Norway’s Loke Marine Minerals. Loke filed for bankruptcy in April.
Amon has co-led or participated in deep-sea scientific expeditions in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mariana Trench National Marine Monument in the Pacific Ocean, among other places. “There’s new estimates that it’s actually .001 percent of the deep sea that has ever been seen with human eyes or camera,” she said.“We really, really haven’t scratched the surface.”
It is at these depths where thousands of species—the majority of which have yet to be identified or described—have specially adapted to live, she said. “From sharks that glow in the dark to blind white crabs that farm bacteria on their chests that they eat to corals that can live for millennia.”
Much of this life revolves around or depends upon the polymetallic nodules that mining companies plan to extract using massive industrial machinery.
“That process is going to destroy any biodiversity in the path of the vehicle because a lot of these animals can’t move,” Amon said.
Similar to a pearl, each of these nodules once began as a shark tooth or single piece of sediment that accrued layers of metals and minerals from the seawater “at a rate of just a few millimeters per million years,” the marine biologist said. These nodules litter parts of the seafloor in patches, like cobblestones on a street, she said.
Some of them are millions of years old, Amon said, and comprise a key part of the deep-sea ecosystem–“a whole thriving community down there”—so colorful and diverse that it conjures images of a Dr. Seuss book.
Purple, yellow, and white sea cucumbers. Brittle stars that resemble starfish but have long flexible arms. And corals, sponges, and anemones that use the polymetallic nodules as anchors to hold still and thrive on a seabed of silt, which, when mined, will be upturned and transformed into sediment plumes.
The plumes likely will form a sort of blinding “dust cloud” that will travel vertically and horizontally in the water far from the original mining sites, Amon said. The cloud may disorient and impair the vision of marine life that depend on sight to navigate or hunt for prey—or smother others.
“You can very safely say this mining would essentially lead to irreversible damage,” she said.
Mission patches are a decades-old tradition in spaceflight. They can range from the figurative to the abstract, prompting valuable insights or feeding confusion. Some are just plain weird.
Ars published a story a few months ago on spaceflight patches from NASA, SpaceX, Russia, and the NRO, the US government’s spy satellite agency, which is responsible for some of the most head-scratching mission logos.
Until recently, China’s entries in the realm of spaceflight patches often lacked the originality found in patches from the West. For example, a series of patches for China’s human spaceflight missions used a formulaic design with a circular shape and a mix of red and blue. The patch for China’s most recent Shenzhou crew to the country’s Tiangong space station last month finally broke the mold with a triangular shape after China’s human spaceflight agency put the patch up for a public vote.
But there’s a fascinating set of new patches Chinese officials released for a series of launches with top secret satellites over the last two months. These four patches depict Buddhist gods with a sense of artistry and sharp colors that stand apart from China’s previous spaceflight emblems, and perhaps—or perhaps not—they can tell us something about the nature of the missions they represent.
Guardians of the Dharma
The four patches show the Four Heavenly Kings, protector deities in Buddhism who guard against evil forces in the four cardinal directions, according to the Kyoto National Museum. The gods also shield the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, from external threats.
These gods have different names, but in China, they are known as Duōwén, Zēngzhǎng, Chíguó, and Guăngmù. Duōwén is the commander and the guardian of the north, the “one who listens to many teachings,” who is often depicted with an umbrella. Zēngzhǎng, guardian of the south, is a god of growth shown carrying a sword. The protector of the east is Chíguó, defender of the nation, who holds a stringed musical instrument. And guarding the west is Guăngmù, an all-seeing god usually depicted with a serpent.
In the boy’s fourth month, researchers were meeting with the Food and Drug Administration to discuss regulatory approval for a clinical trial—a trial where KJ would be the only participant. They were also working with the institutional review board (IRB) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to go over the clinical protocol, safety, and ethical aspects of the treatment. The researchers described the unprecedented speed of the oversight steps as being “through alternative procedures.”
In month five, they started toxicology testing in mice. In the mice, the experimental therapy corrected KJ’s mutation, replacing the errant A-T base pair with the correct G-C pair in the animals’ cells. The first dose provided a 42 percent whole-liver corrective rate in the animals. At the start of KJ’s sixth month, the researchers had results from safety testing in monkeys: Their customized base-editing therapy, delivered as mRNA via a lipid nanoparticle, did not produce any toxic effects in the monkeys.
A clinical-grade batch of the treatment was readied. In month seven, further testing of the treatment found acceptably low-levels of off-target genetic changes. The researchers submitted the FDA paperwork for approval of an “investigational new drug,” or IND, for KJ. The FDA approved it in a week. The researchers then started KJ on an immune-suppressing treatment to make sure his immune system wouldn’t react to the gene-editing therapy. Then, when KJ was still just 6 months old, he got a first low dose of his custom gene-editing therapy.
“Transformational”
After the treatment, he was able to start eating more protein, which would have otherwise caused his ammonia levels to skyrocket. But he couldn’t be weaned off of the drug treatment used to keep his ammonia levels down (nitrogen scavenging medication). With no safety concerns seen after the first dose, KJ has since gotten two more doses of the gene therapy and is now on reduced nitrogen scavenging medication. With more protein in his diet, he has moved from the 9th percentile in weight to 35th or 40th percentile. He’s now about 9 and a half months old, and his doctors are preparing to allow him to go home from the hospital for the first time. Though he will have to be closely monitored and may still at some point need a liver transplant, his family and doctors are celebrating the improvements so far.
How did reptilian things that looked something like crocodiles get to the Caribbean islands from South America millions of years ago? They probably walked.
The existence of any prehistoric apex predators in the islands of the Caribbean used to be doubted. While their absence would have probably made it even more of a paradise for prey animals, fossils unearthed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic have revealed that these islands were crawling with monster crocodyliform species called sebecids, ancient relatives of crocodiles.
While sebecids first emerged during the Cretaceous, this is the first evidence of them lurking outside South America during the Cenozoic epoch, which began 66 million years ago. An international team of researchers has found that these creatures would stalk and hunt in the Caribbean islands millions of years after similar predators went extinct on the South American mainland. Lower sea levels back then could have exposed enough land to walk across.
“Adaptations to a terrestrial lifestyle documented for sebecids and the chronology of West Indian fossils strongly suggest that they reached the islands in the Eocene-Oligocene through transient land connections with South America or island hopping,” researchers said in a study recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Origin story
During the late Eocene to early Oligocene periods of the mid-Cenozoic, about 34 million years ago, many terrestrial carnivores already roamed South America. Along with crocodyliform sebecids, these included enormous snakes, terror birds, and metatherians, which were monster marsupials. At this time, the sea levels were low, and the islands of the Eastern Caribbean are thought to have been connected to South America via a land bridge called GAARlandia (Greater Antilles and Aves Ridge). This is not the first land bridge to potentially provide a migration opportunity.
Fragments of a single tooth unearthed in Seven Rivers, Jamaica, in 1999 are the oldest fossil evidence of a ziphodont crocodyliform (a group that includes sebecids) in the Caribbean. It was dated to about 47 million years ago, when Jamaica was connected to an extension of the North American continent known as the Nicaragua Rise. While the tooth from Seven Rivers is thought to have belonged to a ziphodont other than a sebacid, that and other vertebrate fossils found in Jamaica suggest parallels with ecosystems excavated from sites in the American South.
The fossils found in areas like the US South that the ocean would otherwise separate suggest more than just related life forms. It’s possible that the Nicaragua Rise provided a pathway for migration similar to the one sebecids probably used when they arrived in the Caribbean islands.
