True wine aficionados might turn up their noses, but canned wines are growing in popularity, particularly among younger crowds during the summer months, when style often takes a back seat to convenience. Yet these same wines can go bad rather quickly, taking on distinctly displeasing notes of rotten eggs or dirty socks. Scientists at Cornell University conducted a study of all the relevant compounds and came up with a few helpful tips for frustrated winemakers to keep canned wines from spoiling. The researchers outlined their findings in a recent paper published in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.
“The current generation of wine consumers coming of age now, they want a beverage that’s portable and they can bring with them to drink at a concert or take to the pool,” said Gavin Sacks, a food chemist at Cornell. “That doesn’t really describe a cork-finished, glass-packaged wine. However, it describes a can very nicely.”
According to a 2004 article in Wine & Vines magazine, canned beer first appeared in the US in 1935, and three US wineries tried to follow suit for the next three years. Those efforts failed because it proved to be unusually challenging to produce a stable canned wine. One batch was tainted by “Fresno mold“; another batch resulted in cloudy wine within just two months; and the third batch of wine had a disastrous combination of low pH and high oxygen content, causing the wine to eat tiny holes in the cans. Nonetheless, wineries sporadically kept trying to can their product over the ensuing decades, with failed attempts in the 1950s and 1970s. United and Delta Airlines briefly had a short-lived partnership with wineries for canned wine in the early 1980s, but passengers balked at the notion.
The biggest issue was the plastic coating used to line the aluminum cans. You needed the lining because the wine would otherwise chemically react with the aluminum. But the plastic liners degraded quickly, and the wine would soon reek of dirty socks or rotten eggs, thanks to high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide. The canned wines also didn’t have much longevity, with a shelf life of just six months.
Thanks to vastly improved packing processes in the early 2000s, canned wine seems to finally be finding its niche in the market, initially driven by demand in Japan and other Asian markets and expanding after 2014 to Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK. In the US alone, projected sales of canned wines are expected to grow from $643 million in 2024 to $3.12 billion in 2034—a compound annual growth rate of 10.5 percent.
Granted, we won’t be seeing a fine Bordeaux in a can anytime soon; most canned wine comes in the form of spritzers, wine coolers, and cheaper rosés, whites, or sparkling wines. The largest US producers are EJ Gallo, which sells Barefoot Refresh Spritzers, and Francis Ford Coppola Winery, which markets the Sofia Mini, Underwood, and Babe brands.
Enlarge/ Locations within the body of a can sampled for liner and surface analysis.
M.J. Sheehan et al., 2024
There are plenty of oft-cited advantages to putting wine in cans. It’s super practical for picnics, camping, summer BBQs, or days at the beach, for example, and for the weight-conscious, it helps with portion control, since you don’t have to open an entire bottle. Canned wines are also touted as having a lower carbon footprint compared to glass—although that is a tricky calculation—and the aluminum is 100 percent recyclable.
This latest study grew out of a conference session Sacks led that was designed to help local winemakers get a better grasp on how best to protect the aromas, flavors, and shelf life of their canned wines since canned wines are still plagued by issues of corrosion, leakage, and off flavors like the dreaded rotten egg smell. “They said, ‘We’re following all the recommendations from the can suppliers and we still have these problems, can you help us out?’” Sacks said. “The initial focus was defining what the problem compounds were, what was causing corrosion and off aromas, and why was this happening in wines, but not in sodas? Why doesn’t Coca-Cola have a problem?”
Enlarge/ Night view of company logos in Nestlé Avanca Dairy Products Plant on January 21, 2019, in Avanca, Portugal. This plant produces Cerelac, Nestum, Mokambo, Pensal, Chocapic and Estrelitas, among others.
In high-income countries, Nestlé brand baby foods have no added sugars them, in line with recommendations from major health organizations around the world and consumer pressure. But in low- and middle-income countries, Nestlé adds sugar to those same baby products, sometimes at high levels, which could lead children to prefer sugary diets and unhealthy eating habits, according to an investigation released recently by nonprofit groups.
The investigation, conducted by Public Eye and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), says the addition of added sugars to baby foods in poorer countries, against expert recommendations, creates an “unjustifiable double standard.” The groups quote Rodrigo Vianna, an epidemiologist and professor at the Department of Nutrition of the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil, who calls added sugars in baby foods “unnecessary and highly addictive.”
“Children get used to the sweet taste and start looking for more sugary foods, starting a negative cycle that increases the risk of nutrition-based disorders in adult life,” Vianna told the organizations for their investigation. “These include obesity and other chronic non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes or high blood-pressure.”
The two groups compared the nutritional content of Nestlé’s Cerelac and Nido products, the company’s best-selling baby food brands in low- and middle-income countries that generate sales of over $2.5 billion. In a Cerelac wheat cereal product, for instance, the product contained up to 6 grams of added sugar in countries including Thailand, Ethiopia, South Africa, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. In the United Kingdom and Germany, the same product contained zero added sugars.
In the Philippines, where the sugar content was the highest, and in other countries—including Nigeria, Senegal, Vietnam and Pakistan—the added sugar content was not listed on Nestlé’s labeling, the investigation found.
Double standard
“There is a double standard here that can’t be justified,” Nigel Rollins, a WHO scientist, told the nonprofit groups. Rollins pointed out that the company does not add sugars to its baby products in Switzerland, where the company is headquartered. Thus, continuing to add it in low-resource settings is “problematic both from a public health and ethical perspective,” he said.
In a report last month, the WHO found that as of 2022, 37 million children under the age of 5 worldwide had overweight. Additionally, over 390 million children ages 5 to 19 had overweight and 160 million had obesity. The prevalence of overweight in children 5 to 19 rose from 8 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2022, the United Nations agency noted. Obesity rates in this age group, meanwhile, rose from 2 percent to 8 percent in the same timespan.
Nestlé responded to the investigation with a statement suggesting that the differences in sugar content “depend on several factors, including regulations and availability of local ingredients, which can result in offerings with lower or no-added sugars.” But it argued that these differences do not “compromise the nutritional value of our products for infants and young children.”
Nestlé is a multinational food and drink behemoth with a controversial history of selling baby products in poorer countries. In the 1970s and ’80s, the company came under heavy international fire for aggressively marketing its baby formula to impoverished mothers. Health advocates accused Nestlé of misleading mothers into thinking formula is better than breast milk for their babies, even though leading health organizations recommend exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life when possible.
Critics accused Nestlé of providing free formula to hospital maternity wards, causing new, low-income mothers to turn to it shortly after birth in the critical window in which breast milk production would otherwise ramp up in response to nursing a newborn. Without nursing in that time, mothers can struggle to lactate and become dependent on formula. Out of the hospital, the powdered formula is no longer free and must be mixed in proper amounts and in sanitary conditions to ensure it is safe and meeting the nutritional needs of the infant, which can be a struggle for poor families.
Nestlé now states that it follows international standards for marketing breast-milk substitutes, despite ongoing boycotts in some countries.
Enlarge/ Greylag geese sit on a field and rest while a cow passes by in the background.
Researchers around the world are growing more uneasy with the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) in US dairy cows as the virus continues to make its way into new herds and states. Several experts say the US is not sharing enough information from the federal investigation into the unexpected and growing outbreak, including genetic information from isolated viruses.
To date, the US Department of Agriculture has tallied 32 affected herds in eight states: Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas. In some cases, the movement of cattle between herds can explain the spread of the virus. But the USDA has not publicly clarified if all the herds are linked in a single outbreak chain or if there is evidence that the virus has spilled over to cows multiple times. Early infections in Texas were linked to dead wild birds (pigeons, blackbirds, and grackles) found on dairy farms. But the USDA reportedly indicated to Stat News that the infections do not appear to be all linked to the Texas cases.
Spread of the virus via cattle movements indicates that there is cow-to-cow transmission occurring, the USDA said. But it’s unclear how the virus is spreading between cows. Given that even the most symptomatic cows show few respiratory symptoms, the USDA speculates that the most likely way it is spreading is via contaminated milking equipment.
Adding to the uncertainty of the virus’s spread, The New York Times on Friday reported that the one herd found infected with H5N1 in North Carolina showed no symptoms of the virus. This raises the possibility that the virus could be silently spreading in unknown numbers of other asymptomatic herds and states. In its most recent FAQ document, the USDA encouraged testing for H5N1 if herds show clinical symptoms, such as lethargy, fever, low milk production, and loose stools. But the Times noted that the agency has begun reimbursing farms for testing asymptomatic cows.
Meanwhile, the USDA also reported that it has evidence that H5N1 from dairy farms has spread back into birds in nearby poultry farms, but how this is happening is also unknown.
Data gaps
All the uncertainty and widespread transmission raises concern about how the virus is evolving to infect mammals and whether it is heading for humans. Last week, the chief scientist for the World Health Organization, Jeremy Farrar, told reporters in Geneva that the spread of the virus in US dairy cows is an “enormous concern,” according to CNN. “The great concern, of course, is that in doing so and infecting ducks and chickens—but now increasingly mammals—that that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans. And then critically, the ability to go from human-to-human transmission.”
In particular, experts are wary that the dairy cow outbreaks could spill over to nearby pig farms as it’s doing with nearby poultry farms. Pigs can be infected with both bird flu viruses and human flu viruses, making them potential melting pots for new recombinant flu strains.
So far, the USDA says that genetic sequences of H5N1 viruses infecting cows has not revealed any mutations that “would make it more transmissible to humans and between people.” But last Thursday, Stat reported that international experts have faulted the USDA for not sharing more genetic data from its investigation, among other information. Until this weekend, the agency had only shared a few genetic sequences in an international database of viral genome sequences (GISAID).
“A country with capacity like the United States should be able to generate this information within days,” Marion Koopmans, head of the department of viroscience at Erasmus Medical Center in the Dutch city of Rotterdam told Stat last week. “I would expect very fast, very transparent updates, and it’s somewhat amazing not to see that happening.”
On Sunday, facing mounting criticism, the USDA announced the release of 239 genetic sequences to GISAID. It noted it is also adding raw data to a US federal database “in the interest of public transparency and ensuring the scientific community has access to this information as quickly as possible.” The agency said it will continue to make such data available on a rolling basis.
Dr. Rosemary Sifford, the USDA’s chief veterinarian, told the Times, “Please recall that we’ve been engaged in this for less than a month. We are working very hard to generate more information,” she said.
Overall, the USDA and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to consider the risk to the public to be low. Farmworkers and others who have direct contact with infected animals are encouraged to take precautions, however.
While deadly to birds, H5N1 in cows is relatively mild, rarely if ever causing deaths. Milk from sick animals contains high levels of virus, but it is being destroyed. Even if some infected milk makes its way into the milk supply, the Food and Drug Administration is confident that the virus would be killed in the pasteurization process. “Pasteurization has continually proven to inactivate bacteria and viruses, like influenza, in milk,” the agency said in an FAQ Friday. Some experts have called for data confirming this, though.
Enlarge/ A time-lapse showing how an insect’s wing adopts very specific positions during flight.
Florian Muijres, Dickinson Lab
About 350 million years ago, our planet witnessed the evolution of the first flying creatures. They are still around, and some of them continue to annoy us with their buzzing. While scientists have classified these creatures as pterygotes, the rest of the world simply calls them winged insects.
There are many aspects of insect biology, especially their flight, that remain a mystery for scientists. One is simply how they move their wings. The insect wing hinge is a specialized joint that connects an insect’s wings with its body. It’s composed of five interconnected plate-like structures called sclerites. When these plates are shifted by the underlying muscles, it makes the insect wings flap.
Until now, it has been tricky for scientists to understand the biomechanics that govern the motion of the sclerites even using advanced imaging technologies. “The sclerites within the wing hinge are so small and move so rapidly that their mechanical operation during flight has not been accurately captured despite efforts using stroboscopic photography, high-speed videography, and X-ray tomography,” Michael Dickinson, Zarem professor of biology and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Ars Technica.
As a result, scientists are unable to visualize exactly what’s going on at the micro-scale within the wing hinge as they fly, preventing them from studying insect flight in detail. However, a new study by Dickinson and his team finally revealed the working of sclerites and the insect wing hinge. They captured the wing motion of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) analyzing 72,000 recorded wing beats using a neural network to decode the role individual sclerites played in shaping insect wing motion.
Understanding the insect wing hinge
The biomechanics that govern insect flight are quite different from those of birds and bats. This is because wings in insects didn’t evolve from limbs. “In the case of birds, bats, and pterosaurs we know exactly where the wings came from evolutionarily because all these animals fly with their forelimbs. They’re basically using their arms to fly. In insects, it’s a completely different story. They evolved from six-legged organisms and they kept all six legs. However, they added flapping appendages to the dorsal side of their body, and it is a mystery as to where those wings came from,” Dickinson explained.
Some researchers suggest that insect wings came from gill-like appendages present in ancient aquatic arthropods. Others argue that wings originated from “lobes,” special outgrowths found on the legs of ancient crustaceans, which were ancestors of insects. This debate is still ongoing, so its evolution can’t tell us much about how the hinge and the sclerites operate.
Understanding the hinge mechanics is crucial because this is what makes insects efficient flying creatures. It enables them to fly at impressive speeds relative to their body sizes (some insects can fly at 33 mph) and to demonstrate great maneuverability and stability while in flight.
“The insect wing hinge is arguably among the most sophisticated and evolutionarily important skeletal structures in the natural world,” according to the study authors.
However, imaging the activity of four of the five sclerites that form the hinge has been impossible due to their size and the speeds at which they move. Dickinson and his team employed a multidisciplinary approach to overcome this challenge. They designed an apparatus equipped with three high-speed cameras that recorded the activity of tethered fruit flies at 15,000 frames per second using infrared light.
They also used a calcium-sensitive protein to track changes in the activity of the steering muscles of the insects as they flew (calcium helps trigger muscle contractions). “We recorded a total of 485 flight sequences from 82 flies. After excluding a subset of wingbeats from sequences when the fly either stopped flying or flew at an abnormally low wingbeat frequency, we obtained a final dataset of 72,219 wingbeats,” the researchers note.
Next, they trained a machine-learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN) using 85 percent of the dataset. “We used the CNN model to investigate the transformation between muscle activity and wing motion by performing a set of virtual manipulations, exploiting the network to execute experiments that would be difficult to perform on actual flies,” they explained.
In addition to the neural network, they also developed an encoder-decoder neural network (an architecture used in machine learning) and fed it data related to steering muscle activity. While the CNN model could predict wing motion, the encoder/decoder could predict the action of individual sclerite muscles during the movement of the wings. Now, it was time to check whether the data they predicted was accurate.
Enlarge/ Artist’s illustration of Dragonfly soaring over the dunes of Titan.
NASA has formally approved the robotic Dragonfly mission for full development, committing to a revolutionary project to explore Saturn’s largest moon with a quadcopter drone.
Agency officials announced the outcome of Dragonfly’s confirmation review last week. This review is a checkpoint in the lifetime of most NASA projects and marks the moment when the agency formally commits to the final design, construction, and launch of a space mission. The outcome of each mission’s confirmation review typically establishes a budgetary and schedule commitment.
“Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate. “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”
In the case of Dragonfly, NASA confirmed the mission with a total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion and a launch date of July 2028. That is roughly twice the mission’s original proposed cost and a delay of more than two years from when the mission was originally selected in 2019, according to NASA.
Busting the cost cap
Rising costs are not necessarily a surprise on a mission as innovative as Dragonfly. After reaching Titan, the eight-bladed rotorcraft lander will soar from place to place on Saturn’s hazy moon, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life.
Dragonfly will be the first mobile robot explorer to land on any other planetary body besides the Moon and Mars, and only the second flying drone to explore another planet. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was the first. Dragonfly will be more than 200 times as massive as Ingenuity and will operate six times farther from Earth.
Despite its distant position in the cold outer Solar System, Titan appears to be reminiscent of the ancient Earth. A shroud of orange haze envelops Saturn’s largest moon, and Titan’s surface is covered with sand dunes and methane lakes.
Titan’s frigid temperatures—hovering near minus 290° Fahrenheit (minus 179° Celsius)—mean water ice behaves like bedrock. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which flew past Titan numerous times before its mission ended in 2017, discovered weather systems on the hazy moon. Observations from Cassini found evidence for hydrocarbon rains and winds that appear to generate waves in Titan’s methane lakes.
Clearly, Titan is an exotic world. Most of what scientists know about Titan comes from measurements collected by Cassini and the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, which Cassini released to land on Titan in 2005. Huygens returned the first pictures from Titan’s surface, but it only transmitted data for 72 minutes.
Dragonfly will explore Titan for around three years, flying tens of kilometers about once per month to measure the prebiotic chemistry of Titan’s surface, study its soupy atmosphere, and search for biosignatures that could be indications of life. The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan’s equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly’s principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
“The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore an ocean world in a way that we have never done before,” Turtle said in a statement. “The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life.”
However, this high level of ambition comes at a high cost. NASA selected Dragonfly to proceed into initial development in 2019. Turtle’s science team proposed Dragonfly to NASA through the agency’s New Frontiers program, which has developed a series of medium-class Solar System exploration missions. The New Frontiers program has an impressive pedigree, beginning with the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto in 2015, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.
Enlarge/ The final letter from George Mallory from Camp I, Mount Everest, to his wife Ruth Mallory, May 27, 1924.
The Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge
In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew “Sandy” Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—just two casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date. Mallory was an alumnus of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, which maintains a collection of his personal correspondence, much of it between Mallory and his wife, Ruth. The college has now digitized the entire collection for public access. The letters can be accessed and downloaded here.
“It has been a real pleasure to work with these letters,” said Magdalene College archivist Katy Green. “Whether it’s George’s wife Ruth writing about how she was posting him plum cakes and a grapefruit to the trenches (he said the grapefruit wasn’t ripe enough), or whether it’s his poignant last letter where he says the chances of scaling Everest are ’50 to 1 against us,’ they offer a fascinating insight into the life of this famous Magdalene alumnus.”
As previously reported, Mallory is the man credited with uttering the famous line “because it’s there” in response to a question about why he would risk his life repeatedly to summit Everest. An avid mountaineer, Mallory had already been to the mountain twice before the 1924 expedition: once in 1921 as part of a reconnaissance expedition to produce the first accurate maps of the region and again in 1922—his first serious attempt to summit, although he was forced to turn back on all three attempts. A sudden avalanche killed seven Sherpas on his third try, sparking accusations of poor judgement on Mallory’s part.
Undeterred, Mallory was back in 1924 for the fated Everest expedition that would claim his life at age 37. He aborted his first summit attempt, but on June 4, he and Irvine left Advanced Base Camp (21,330 feet/6,500 meters). They reached Camp 5 on June 6, and Camp 6 the following day, before heading out for the summit on June 8. Team member Noel Odell reported seeing the two men climbing either the First or Second Step around 1 pm before they were “enveloped in a cloud once more.”
Nobody ever saw Mallory and Irvine again, although their spent oxygen tanks were found just below the First Step. Climbers also found Irvine’s ice axe in 1933. Mallory’s body wasn’t found until 1999, when an expedition partially sponsored by Nova and the BBC found the remains on the mountain’s north face, at 26,760 feet (8,157 meters)—just below where Irvine’s axe had been found. The name tags on the clothing read “G. Leigh Mallory.” Personal artifacts confirmed the identity: an altimeter, a pocket knife, snow goggles, a letter, and a bill for climbing equipment from a London supplier. Irvine’s body has yet to be found, despite the best efforts of a 2019 National Geographic expedition, detailed in the riveting 2020 documentary Lost on Everest.
Enlarge/ Final page of letter from Ruth Mallory to George Mallory, March 3, 1924.
The Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge
The collection makes for some fascinating reading; Mallory led an adventurous life. Among the highlights of the Magdalene College collection is the final letter Mallory wrote to Ruth before attempting his fateful last summit attempt:
“Darling I wish you the best I can—that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this—with the best news. Which will also be the quickest. It is 50 to 1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet & do ourselves proud. Great love to you. Ever your loving, George.”
Three of the letters were found in Mallory’s jacket pocket 75 years after his disappearance when his body was discovered, exceptionally well-preserved. Other letters detailed his experiences at the Battle of the Somme during World War II; his first reconnaissance expedition to Everest; and the aforementioned second Everest expedition in which seven Sherpas were lost. On a lighter note are letters describing his adventures during a 1923 trip to the Prohibition Era US. (He would ask for milk at speakeasies and get whiskey served to him through a secret hatch.) There are also letters from Ruth—including her only surviving letter to Mallory during his Everest explorations—and from Mallory’s sister, Mary Brooke.
Enlarge/ A Day octopus (Octopus cyanea) named Scarlet parachutes her web over a coral head while Dr. Alex Schnell observes.
National Geographic/Disney/Craig Parry
With Earth Day fast approaching once again, it’s time for another new documentary from National Geographic and Disney+: Secrets of the Octopus. It’s the third in what has become a series, starting with the remarkable 2021 documentary Secrets of the Whales (narrated by Sigourney Weaver) and 2023’s Secrets of the Elephants (Natalie Portman as narrator). James Cameron served as producer on all three.
Secrets of the Octopus is narrated by Paul Rudd. Per the official synopsis:
Octopuses are like aliens on Earth: three hearts, blue blood and the ability to squeeze through a space the size of their eyeballs. But there is so much more to these weird and wonderful animals. Intelligent enough to use tools or transform their bodies to mimic other animals and even communicate with different species, the secrets of the octopus are more extraordinary than we ever imagined.
Each of the three episodes focuses on a specific unique feature of these fascinating creatures: “Shapeshifters,” “Masterminds,” and “Social Networks.” The animals were filmed in their natural habitats over 200 days and all that stunning footage is accompanied by thoughtful commentary by featured scientists. One of those scientists is Dr. Alex Schnell, a native Australian and self described storytelling who has worked at Macquarie University, the University of Cambridge, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, among other institutions. Her research focuses on the intelligence of marine animals, particularly cuttlefish and octopuses.
Ars caught up with Schnell to learn more.
Ars Technica: How did you become interested in studying octopuses?
Alex Schnell: I had this pivotal moment when I was young. I had the luxury of actually growing up on the beaches of Sydney so I would spend a lot of time in the water, in rock pools, looking at all the critters. When I was about five years old, I met my first octopus. It was such a monumental moment that opened up a completely different world for me. That’s the day I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist.
Alex Schnell prepares for a dive on the Great Barrier Reef
National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry
Alex Schnell SCUBA dives over a coral garden on the Great Barrier Reef, while an Australian research vessel floats on the surface above.
National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry
A Day octopus perched on corals on the Great Barrier Reef.
National Geographic/Disney/Richard Woodgett
Director and DOP Adam Geiger operates a jib arm with Producer / Camera operator, Rory McGuinness, and Camera Assistant, Woody Spark.
National Geographic for Disney/Annabel Robinson
Woody Spark preparing cameras and underwater housings with cinematographer Rory McGuinness.
National Geographic for Disney/Harriet Spark
Alex Schnell observes a Mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) while on a dive with wildlife photographer and local dive guide, Benhur Sarinda
National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry
A Mimic octopus, with striped skin patterning, stretches out all eight arms across black volcanic sand.
National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry
A Blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) displays bright blue rings, a warning that the venom in her bite is deadly.
National Geographic
Ars Technica: What is the focus of your research?
Alex Schnell: I’m a marine biologist that turned into a comparative psychologist—just a fancy word for studying the different minds of animals. What I’m really interested is how intelligence evolved, where and when. The octopus is the perfect candidate to answer some of these questions because they diverge from our own lineage over 550 million years ago. We share an ancestor that looked like a flat worm. So if the octopus shows glimmers of intelligence that we see in ourselves or in animals that are closely related to us, it reveals a lot about the patterns of evolution and how it evolved throughout the animal kingdom.
When you meet an octopus, you really get the sense that there is another being looking out at you. A few years ago, I worked with a team at London School of Economics to write a report reviewing the evidence of sentience in animals. Does the animal have the capacity to feel emotions? We found really strong evidence in octopuses and it ended up changing UK law. Now under UK law, we have to treat octopuses ethically and with compassion.
Ars Technica: One behavioral aspect the series explores is tool use by octopuses. I was struck by the scene where a little coconut octopus uses her clamshell both for shelter and as a shield. I’ve never seen that before.
Alex Schnell: Neither had I. Before we traveled to Indonesia on that shoot, I had read about that particular defensive tool use by the coconut octopus. This species will often be seen carrying around two halves of a coconut, like a mobile den or an RV home. And they use it as protection because they live in a very barren sandy landscape. So I was really excited to see that behavior unfold.
We got more than we bargained for, because in the clip that you mentioned, our coconut octopus was being threatened by this angry mantis shrimp. They pack a really powerful punch that’s been known to break through aquarium glass. And here we have this defenseless little octopus with no bones or anything. In that moment we witnessed her have this idea. She walked over to the shell and picked it up and dragged it back to her original spot and literally used it like a shield to fend off this angry mantis shrimp. She had imagined herself a shield. I saw her get an idea, she imagined it, and she walked over it and used it. I was so blown away that I was screaming with excitement underwater.
Rory McGuinnes, operating an underwater jib arm to film a colorful coral reef on the Lembeh Strait.
National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger
Woody Spark tests the controls for the underwater camera-and-slider system
National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger
Local dive guides Reifani and Benhur Sarinda observe a Coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) sheltering between two clam shells.
National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger
Woody Spark uses the underwater camera-and-slider system to film a Coconut octopus sheltering between clam shells.
National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger
An 8-foot Giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) rests on the arms of tech diver and octopus enthusiast, Krystal Janicki, on a dive in the shallow waters off Vancouver Island.
National Geographic for Disney/Maxwel Hohn
A Giant Pacific octopus crawls over the sandy seafloor in shallow waters
National Geographic for Disney/Maxwel Hohn
Dr. C.E. O’Brien observes a resting Island octopus (Octopus insularis) on a dive in Turks and Caicos.
National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger
Ars Technica: At one point in the series you celebrate having a “conversation” with an octopus. How do octopuses communicate?
Alex Schnell: Octopuses generally communicate with changes to their skin. They can change the color and the texture of their skin in the blink of an eye, and they can also change their posture. What we’ve found with one particular species is that they have cross-species communication, so they collaboratively hunt with some reef fish. Again, I had only read about this behavior until I had a chance to see it in person.
I had this kind of playful idea while I was down there with a Day octopus named Scarlet, who was allowing me to follow her on a lot of her hunts. Because I was so close to her, I noticed she was missing little crabs here and there. Normally her fish hunting partner will do a head stand to point to where the missed food is. I thought, I wonder what’s going to happen if I just point at it, not expecting anything. To my astonishment, she responded and swum right over and looked where I had pointed.
So that’s what I mean by having a conversation with an octopus. I can’t change color sadly, but it’s as if she was responding to my pointing, my “referential signaling,” which is incredible because this is kind of what we see in humans and chimpanzees: this development of communication before language develops. Here we have this octopus responding to a human pointing.
Ars Technica: Scarlet actually reached out her little tentacle to you on multiple occasions; she seemed to recognize you and accept you.
Alex Schnell: I had had those moments before, the ET moment where you get to meet an octopus, and I’ve spoken to other avid divers and people who have a love for octopuses that have had similar experiences. The really special thing with this relationship that I had with Scarlet is that we were able to develop it over weeks and months. Every time I would return to her, she would appear to recognize me quickly and let me back into her world.
What continues to blow me away is that Scarlet grew to trust me really quickly. She reached out and shook my hand after 30 minutes of me watching her, and she let me swim alongside her as she hunted. This is a creature with no skeleton, no shell, no teeth, no claws to protect itself. And despite that extreme vulnerability, she quickly let her guard down. It’s like she was driven by curiosity and this need to reach out and connect, even with an alien creature like me.
Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that octopuses have such short lifespans.
Alex Schnell: A lot people ask me if they lived longer, would they take over the world? Maybe. It’s life in the fast lane. They are essentially born as orphans because they don’t have any parents or siblings to guide them. They just drift off. They’re loners for most of their lives and they teach themselves. Everything is driven by this intense curiosity to learn. I think that’s why a lot of people have had these incredible moments with octopuses because even the fear or the vulnerability that they might feel is outweighed by a curiosity to interact.
Alex Schnell on the surface in full SCUBA gear.
National Geographic/Harriet Spark
A Coconut octopus pokes an eye out from between partially buried clam shells. Her powerful suckers hold the two shells together for protection from passing predators.
National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry
Alex Schnell and Benhur Sarinda observe a Coconut octopus walking across the seafloor with clam shells held underneath her web.
National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry)
A tiny Coconut octopus reaches out to touch Alex Schnell’s hand.
National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry
An Algae octopus (Abdopus aculeatus) foraging amongst the algae and seagrass in Bunaken Marine Park.
National Geographic/Annabel Robinson
Alex Schnell observing a Southern keeled octopus (Octopus berrima) on a night dive in Port Phillip Bay
National Geographic
A Dorado octopus mother group with eggs
Schmidt Ocean Institute
Ars Technica: Do you find yourself having to be on guard about anthropomorphizing these amazing creatures a bit too much?
Alex Schnell: I think there’s a fine balance. As a trained comparative psychologist, we are taught to be really careful not to anthropomorphize and attribute human traits onto the animals that we see or that we work with. At the same time, I think that we’ve moved too far into a situation that Frans de Waal called “anthro-denialism.” Traits didn’t just sprout up in the human species. They have an evolutionary history, and while they might not be exactly the same in other animals, there are similarities. So sometimes we need to call it what it is. One of der Waal’s examples was researchers who described chimpanzees kissing as “mouth-to-mouth contact” because they didn’t want to anthropomorphize it. Come on guys, they’re kissing.
We do strive to see human traits in other animals. We watched cartoons growing up, we had pets around us, so it’s really hard not to. Our job is as comparative psychologists is to find really strong evidence for the similarities and the differences between the different minds of the animals that we share our planet with.
Ars Technica: What were some of the highlights for you, filming this documentary series?
Alex Schnell: It was challenging in the sense that when the production team first approached me, I was 38 weeks pregnant. So I went out into the field with a five-month-old baby. I was sleep-deprived, trying to go diving and also be on camera. I had worked on natural history films before, but always on the other side of the camera. So it was a steep learning curve.
But it was such a rewarding experience to be able to have the luxury of time to be out with these animals. I had no project because I was on maternity leave. Sometimes when you’re part of a project, you can get tunnel vision. “I’m going to see this particular behavior and that’s what I’m focusing on.” But I could be completely mindful in the moment with my time with octopuses and get to see how they interact in their natural environment. It opens up this incredible secret world that they have. I was seeing things that, yes, I’d read about some of them, but some I’d never heard of before. I think each episode in this series reveals secrets that will take your breath away.
Ars Technica: What is next for you?
Alex Schnell: I’m working on a project called One World, Many Minds. What this project strives to do is accentuate that, yes, we are one world, but there are many minds that make up our collective existence. I really want to showcase the minds of animals like the octopus or the cuttlefish or a big grouper, and show that we have traits that we can recognize, that we can connect with. That will help remove a barrier of otherness, and highlight our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with animals.
Secrets of the Octopus premieres on Disney+ and Hulu on April 22, 2024.
Enlarge/ This image taken by NASA’s Orion spacecraft shows its view just before the vehicle flew behind the Moon in 2022.
NASA
Although NASA is unlikely to speak about it publicly any time soon, the space agency is privately considering modifications to its Artemis plan to land astronauts on the surface of the Moon later this decade.
Multiple sources have confirmed that NASA is studying alternatives to the planned Artemis III landing of two astronauts on the Moon, nominally scheduled for September 2026, due to concerns about hardware readiness and mission complexity.
Under one of the options, astronauts would launch into low-Earth orbit inside an Orion spacecraft and rendezvous there with a Starship vehicle, separately launched by SpaceX. During this mission, similar to Apollo 9, a precursor to the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the crew would validate the ability of Orion and Starship to dock and test habitability inside Starship. The crew would then return to Earth. In another option NASA is considering, a crew would launch in Orion and fly to a small space station near the Moon, the Lunar Gateway, and then return to Earth.
To discuss these options, Ars asked for an interview with Catherine Koerner, a deputy associate administrator who oversees Exploration Systems Development for NASA. Instead, the space agency offered a noncommittal statement.
“NASA continues to work toward the Artemis II crewed test flight in September of 2025 and the Artemis III test flight to land astronauts near the lunar South Pole in September of 2026,” the statement read. “The agency evaluates element progress and status on a daily basis and uses that data to make decisions at the right time for each mission as a part of prudent programmatic and mission management. Should a particular hardware element not be available to support a mission as scheduled or planned, NASA will evaluate the readiness of available hardware for options to make those decisions with crew safety as the number one priority.”
An unrealistic timeline
The space agency’s date for Artemis II is optimistic but potentially feasible if NASA can resolve the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield issues. A lunar landing in September 2026, however, seems completely unrealistic. The biggest stumbling blocks for Artemis III are the lack of a lander, which SpaceX is developing through its Starship program, and spacesuits for forays onto the lunar surface by Axiom Space. It is not clear when the lander or the suits, which NASA only began funding in the last two to three years, will be ready.
There are also concerns about the complexity of Artemis III. It will require a number of previously untested steps, including an Orion-Starship rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit; humans flying inside of Starship in space; Starship going down to the surface and coming back up to dock with Orion; and more. Mission planners would be more comfortable if they could, in NASA parlance, “buy down the risk” of Artemis III by validating some of these delicate maneuvers before the lunar landing mission.
This is why NASA has asked SpaceX to look at a mission where Orion would rendezvous with the Starship vehicle in orbit around Earth. Such a mission—whether called Artemis IIS or Artemis III—would solve a lot of problems for the space agency and appears to be the preferred option at this time. Critically, it would verify the ability of the two spacecraft to dock in an environment where, if there were a problem, it would be much easier for the crew to return safely home. It would also validate the ability of astronauts to live inside Starship and perform some ascent and descent maneuvers.
Enlarge/ Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82.
World renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.
(Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was a friend and colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll. Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed.)
Stunned reactions to Dennett’s unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. “Wrenching news. He’s been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career,” the Santa Fe Institute’s Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, wrote on X. “I will miss him enormously.”
“He was a towering figure in philosophy and in particular in the philosophy of AI,” roboticist Rodney Brooks (MIT, emeritus) wrote on X, bemoaning that he’d never replied to Dennett’s last email from 30 days ago. “Now we have only memories of him.
A 2017 New Yorker profile described Dennett as “a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus,” with “a fluffy white beard and a round belly.” That jolly appearance was accompanied by an intellectual ferocity—generously embellished with his sparkling wit—as he battled such luminaries as Stephen J. Gould, John Searle, Noam Chomsky, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, and Richard Lewontin, among others, over consciousness and evolution, free will, AI, religion, and many other topics.
Dennett’s many books, while dense, nonetheless sold very well and were hugely influential, and he was a distinguished speaker in great demand. His 2003 TED talk, “The Illusion of Consciousness,” garnered more than 4 million views. While he gained particular prominence as a leader of the “New Atheist” movement of the early 2000s—colorfully dubbed one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—that was never his primary focus, merely a natural extension of his more central philosopical concerns.
Enlarge/ David Wallace, Sean Carroll, and Daniel Dennett at the Santa Fe Institute in March.
Sean Carroll
David Wallace, historian and philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh, offered Ars Technica this succinct summation of Dennett’s extraordinary influence:
To me, Dan Dennett exemplified what it means to do philosophy in an age of science. He once said that there was no such thing as philosophy-free science, only science that didn’t interrogate its philosophical assumptions; equally, he saw more deeply than almost anyone that the deepest traditional questions of philosophy, from free will to consciousness to metaphysics, were irreversibly transformed by modern science, most especially by natural selection.
His approach, as much as his own towering contributions, has inspired generations of philosophers, far beyond cognitive science and the philosophy of mind (his ideas have been influential in the interpretation of quantum theory, for instance). He was one of the great philosophers of the last century, and one of the very few whose work has been transformative outside academic philosophy.
“Dan Dennett was the embodiment of a natural philosopher—someone who was brilliant at the careful conceptual analysis that characterizes the best philosophy, while caring deeply about what science has to teach us about the natural world,” Johns Hopkins University physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll told Ars. “At the same time, he was the model of a publicly-engaged academic, someone who wrote substantive books that anyone could read and who had a real impact on the wider world. People like that are incredibly rare and precious, and his passing is a real loss.”
Born in Boston in 1942, Dennett’s father was a professor of Islamic history who became a secret agent for the OSS during World War II, posing as a cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Beirut. Dennett spent his early childhood there until his father was killed in a plane crash while on a mission to Ethiopia. Dennett, his mother, and two sisters returned to Boston after that, and his family assumed he would attend Harvard just like his late father. But after graduating from the Phillips Exeter Academy, Dennett opted to attend Wesleyan University instead—at least until be came across Harvard logician and philosopher W.V.O. Quine‘s 1963 treatise, From a Logical Point of View.
Dennett ended up transferring to Harvard to study under Quine and become a philosopher, initially intent on proving Quine wrong. By the time he was a graduate student at Oxford University, he was known among his fellow students as “the village Quinean.” In his 2023 memoir, I’ve Been Thinking, Dennett traced his interest in applying his field to questions of science began during this period. He recalled experiencing the universal sensation of one’s hand falling asleep and feeling like an alien thing, rather than part of one’s own body. He wondered what was going on in the body and the brain.
Enlarge/ Dennett at a group dinner in February 2023. He was the inaugural speaker for the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture series.
Sean Carroll
“The other philosophers thought, that’s not philosophy. I said, well, it should be,” he told Tufts Now last year. “So I started learning. I didn’t even know what a neuron was back then in the early ’60s, but I soon learned. I was lucky to get in on the ground floor of cognitive neuroscience. Some of the early pioneers in that field were my heroes and mentors and friends.”
Dennett’s first academic position was at the University of California, Irvine, and a revised version of his doctoral thesis became his first book: 1969’s Content and Consciousness. He moved to Tufts University in 1971, where he remained for the rest of his career. One of Dennett’s earliest collaborators was Douglas Hofstadter, author of the bestselling Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, who called Dennett “a lodestar in my life” in an email [quoted with permission] to colleagues after hearing of the latter’s death:
Dan was a deep thinker about what it is to be human. Quite early on, he arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components), and from then on, he was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well). Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.
Dennett was a a confirmed compatibilist on the fiercely debated subject of free will, meaning that he saw no conflict between philosophical determinism and free will. “Our only notable divergence was on the question of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of ‘free,’ whereas I just agreed that ‘will’ exists, but maintained that there is no freedom in it,” Hoftstadter recalled.
Screenshot/X
Johns Hopkins philosopher Jenann Ismael recalled corresponding with Dennett after her own book on free will, How Physics Makes Us Free, was published in 2016. She had not yet met Dennett, but his work was naturally a significant influence, even though her book was largely critical of his stance on the subject. Ismael opened her book by discussing Dennett’s fictional short story, “Where Am I?“, calling it “the best of piece of philosophical fiction ever written.” (Check out this short film based on the story, starring Dennett himself uttering such immortal lines as, “They made a sparkling new vat for my brain.”)
Dennett read her book and emailed Ismael with a few notes—not about how he felt she’d misrepresented his views (which he deemed of “no matter”) but correcting her mistakes about the plot of his short story. “It turns out I got the story wrong,” Ismael told Ars. “I’d read it so long ago, I just embellished it in my head and embarrassingly never realized. Where I criticized him in my book, he wasn’t as keen to correct me as he was excited to talk about the ideas.”
She found him to be filled with infectious warmth. “It was true that he could suck the air out of a room when he entered and even sitting at a round dinner table, he somehow became the center of it, he took possession of the discussion,” said Ismael. “But he also paid close attention to people, read voraciously, listened to and heard what others were saying, taking what he could and disseminating what he learned. He had immense curiosity and he wanted to share everything that he learned or liked.”
In his later years, Dennett wasn’t shy about sounding the alarm regarding AI, even writing an article for The Atlantic last year on the topic about the dangers ahead, particularly with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT. “The most pressing problem is not that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going to change warfare, but that they’re going to destroy human trust,” he told Tufts Now. “They’re going to move us into a world where you can’t tell truth from falsehood. You don’t know who to trust. Trust turns out to be one of the most important features of civilization, and we are now at great risk of destroying the links of trust that have made civilization possible.”
Enlarge/ Dennett at our Baltimore home in February 2023, holding forth on philosophical matters.
Landon Ross
Dennett was not one to traffic in false modesty over his many accomplishments and always evinced a strong degree of self-confidence, fondly recounting in his memoir of the time fellow philosopher Don Ross wryly observed, “Dan believes modesty is a virtue to be reserved for special occasions.”
His myriad interests weren’t limited to the academic. Dennett loved art, music, sailing, pottery, trout fishing, windsurfing, ran his own cider press, and made his own Calvados on a Prohibition-era still. He could call a square dance, whittle a wooden walking stick, and was fond of pondering knotty philosophical questions while driving his tractor on his 200-acre farm in Blue Hill, north of Boston, which he bought in the 1970s. (He sold the farm around 2014.)
“Dan was a bon vivant, a very zesty fellow, who loved travel and hobnobbing with brilliance wherever he could find it,” Hoftstadter wrote in his tribute. “In his later years, as he grew a little teetery, he proudly carried a wooden cane with him all around the world, and into it he chiseled words and images that represented the many places he visited and gave lectures at. Dan Dennett was a mensch, and his ideas on so many subjects will leave a lasting impact on the world, and his human presence has had a profound impact on those of us who were lucky enough to know him well and to count him as a friend.”
Ismael recalled him sending her YouTube videos of “swing dancing and silly outfits” during the pandemic, his emails littered with colorful emojis. He was “a strange man, who didn’t take himself as seriously as you might think,” she said. “I really loved him, loved his spirit, his generosity, the expansiveness of his thinking, his delight in ideas, and his great good cheer. Philosophically, I think he had true greatness. It seems impossible he is gone.”
Daniel Dennett gives the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture, 2023.
Intermittent fasting, aka time-restricted eating, can help people lose weight—but the reason why may not be complicated hypotheses about changes from fasting metabolism or diurnal circadian rhythms. It may just be because restricting eating time means people eat fewer calories overall.
In a randomized-controlled trial, people who followed a time-restricted diet lost about the same amount of weight as people who ate the same diet without the time restriction, according to a study published Friday in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The finding offers a possible answer to a long-standing question for time-restricted eating (TRE) research, which has been consumed by small feeding studies of 15 people or fewer, with mixed results and imperfect designs.
The new study—led by Nisa Marisa Maruthur, an internal medicine expert at Johns Hopkins—has its own limitations and, like any one study, isn’t the last word on the matter. But “it takes us one step closer to identifying the underlying mechanisms of TRE,” nutrition experts Krista Varady and Vanessa Oddo of the University of Illinois wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “Using a controlled feeding design, Maruthur and colleagues show that TRE is effective for weight loss, simply because it helps people eat less.”
The study involved 41 people, 21 who followed a time-restricted diet for 12 weeks and 20 who ate a usual eating pattern (UEP). Most of the participants were Black women (93 percent) with obesity and either pre-diabetes or diet-controlled diabetes, limiting the generalizability of the findings. But the study carefully controlled what and when the participants ate; each participant got controlled meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack) with identical macro- and micro-nutrients. Each participant was assigned a calorie level for their meals based on an established, standardized equation that estimates baseline caloric need. They were told to maintain their current exercise level, which was monitored with a wrist-worn accelerometer.
No magic necessary
In the time-restricted group, people only ate in a 10-hour window between 8 am and 6 pm, with 80 percent of their total daily calories consumed before 1 pm. In the usual eating group, people ate between 8 am and midnight, with 55 percent of their calories eaten after 5 pm for dinner and a night-time snack. In each eating group, participants were given specific windows of a couple of hours in which they should eat each pre-made meal. The participants ate three meals each week at a research site, where dieticians addressed adherence issues, and their eating was carefully monitored with the use of food diaries and urine tests. Approximately 96 percent of people in both groups followed the schedules to within 30 minutes. Diet adherence—eating all their assigned food and not eating outside food—was also high, with 93 percent in the time-restricted group and 95 percent in the usual eating group.
At the end of the 12 weeks, both groups lost about the same amount of weight, an average of around 2.4 kg (5.3 pounds), with no statistically significant difference between the two groups. The researchers also found no differences between the two groups in their glucose homeostasis, waist circumference, blood pressure, or lipid levels.
“Our results indicate that when food intake is matched across groups and calories are held constant, TRE, as operationalized in our study, does not enhance weight loss,” Maruthur and her colleagues concluded. The authors are upfront about the limitations of the study, though, noting that the results could have been different in different groups of people and potentially in shorter time-restricted windows, such as eight hours instead of 10. They called for more research to explore those questions.
Outside experts applauded the study while also adding that it’s not surprising. “The headline finding that TRE does not magically lead to more weight loss sounds sensational but is also obvious,” Adam Collins, a nutrition expert at the University of Surrey, said.
Naveed Sattar, a professor of cardiometabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow, called the study “well done.” It “tells us what we expected—that there is nothing magical about time-restricted eating on weight change other than effects to reduce caloric intake,” he said. “If time-restricted eating helps some people eat less calories than they would otherwise, great.”
The experts Varady and Oddo, meanwhile, see it as a boon for anyone trying to lose weight. “Many patients stop following standard-care diets (such as daily calorie restriction) because they become frustrated with having to monitor food intake vigilantly each day,” they wrote in their commentary. “Thus, TRE can bypass this requirement simply by allowing participants to ‘watch the clock’ instead of monitoring calories while still producing weight loss.” It’s a “simplified” and “accessible” dietary strategy that anyone can follow, including lower-resource populations, the researchers wrote.
Ever since the Voyager mission sent home images of Jupiter’s moon Io spewing material into space, we’ve gradually built up a clearer picture of Io’s volcanic activity. It slowly became clear that Io, which is a bit smaller than Mercury, is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, with all that activity driven by the gravitational strain caused by Jupiter and its three other giant moons. There is so much volcanism that its surface has been completely remodeled, with no signs of impact craters.
A few more details about its violence came to light this week, with new images being released of the moon’s features, including an island in a lake of lava, taken by the Juno orbiter. At the same time, imaging done using an Earth-based telescope has provided some indications that this volcanism has been reshaping Io from almost the moment it formed.
Fiery, glassy lakes
The Juno orbiter’s mission is primarily focused on studying Jupiter, including the dynamics of its storms and its internal composition. But many of its orbital passes have taken it right past Io, and this week, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released some of the best images from these flybys. They include a shot of Loki Patera, a lake of lava that has an island within it. Also featured: the impossibly sheer slopes of Io’s Steeple Mountain.
Looking more closely at the lake, the Juno team found that some of the areas within it were incredibly smooth, raising the possibility that obsidian glass had formed on the surface where it had cooled enough to solidify. Given the level of volcanism on Io, this may be more widespread than the Loki Patera.
Volcanic ash would also create a relatively smooth surface, and is likely to be even more common, but it would have significantly different reflective properties.
How long has this been going on?
But we don’t have to send hardware to Jupiter to learn something about Io. A US-based team got time on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and used it to record emissions from atoms in Io’s sparse atmosphere. By combining the imaging power of lots of smaller telescopes scattered across a plateau, ALMA is able to spot regional differences in the presence of specific elements in Io’s atmosphere, as well as identify different isotopes of those elements.
What can isotopes tell us? Any atoms that reach Io’s upper atmosphere are at risk of being lost to space. And, because of their relative atomic weights, lighter isotopes have a higher probability of being lost. So, it’s possible to compare the present ratio of elements in the atmosphere with the expected ratio, and we can make inferences about the history of loss of lighter isotopes. And, since the material is put into the atmosphere by volcanoes in the first place, that tells us something about the history of volcanism.
The research team focused on two particular elements: sulfur and chlorine. Sulfur has two common non-radioactive isotopes, 32S and 34S, and chlorine, its neighbor on the periodic table, has 35Cl and 37Cl. There are differences in the ratio of these isotopes throughout the bodies of the Solar System, but those differences are generally small. And, because we think we know what sort of material contributed to the formation of Io, we can focus on the ratios found in bodies that have a similar origin.
Chlorine enters the atmosphere from volcanoes primarily in the form of sodium and potassium salts. These have a very short half-life before they’re split up by exposure to light and radiation. The ALMA data indicated both these chemicals were present in localized regions, likely corresponding to active volcanic plumes. The data from the chlorine isotopes were a bit noisy, so were largely used as a sanity check for the ones obtained from sulfur isotopes.
Enlarge/ The SLS rocket is seen on its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in August 2022.
Trevor Mahlmann
On Thursday senior Boeing officials leading the Space Launch System program, including David Dutcher and Steve Snell, convened an all-hands meeting for the more than 1,000 employees who work on the rocket.
According to two people familiar with the meeting, the officials announced that there would be a significant number of layoffs and reassignments of people working on the program. They offered a handful of reasons for the cuts, including the fact that timelines for NASA’s Artemis lunar missions that will use the SLS rocket are slipping to the right.
Later on Thursday, in a statement provided to Ars, a Boeing spokesperson confirmed the cuts to Ars: “Due to external factors unrelated to our program performance, Boeing is reviewing and adjusting current staffing levels on the Space Launch System program.”
Better late than never?
For nearly a decade and a half, Boeing has led development of the core stage of the massive SLS rocket that NASA intends to use to launch the Orion spacecraft for its crewed Moon missions.
The contract has been lucrative for Boeing, and subject to considerable criticism over the years for its largesse, as NASA has spent tens of billions of dollars developing a rocket that reuses Space Shuttle main engines and other elements. Also, the rocket was originally supposed to make its debut in late 2016 or 2017, but did not actually fly for the first time until November 2022. And NASA’s Inspector General has characterized Boeing’s management of the SLS rocket program, at times, as “poor.”
However, when the SLS rocket made its debut a year and a half ago, it performed exceptionally well in lofting an uncrewed Orion spacecraft toward the Moon. After that mission NASA declared the rocket to be “operational,” and Boeing moved into production of the vehicle for future missions that will carry astronauts to the Moon.
So in some sense, these cuts were inevitable. Boeing required a lot of resources to design, develop, test, and write software for the rocket. Now that the development phase is over, it is natural that the company would be scaling down development activities for the core stage.
The Boeing statement did not say so, but sources told Ars that the cuts may eventually amount to hundreds of employees. They will be spread across the company’s rocket facilities in Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida, primarily. The cuts will hit both the core stage program as well as the Exploration Upper Stage program, a new upper stage for the rocket that is also beginning to move from development into production.
Waiting on other elements
When Boeing cites “external factors,” it is referring to the slipping timelines for NASA’s Artemis Program. In January officials with the space agency announced approximately one-year delays for both the Artemis II mission, a crewed lunar flyby, to September 2025; and Artemis III, a lunar landing, to September 2026. Neither of these schedules are set in stone, either. Further delays are possible for Artemis II, and likely for Artemis III if NASA sticks to the current mission plans.
Although the SLS rocket will be ready for the current schedule, barring a catastrophe, the other elements are in doubt. For Artemis II, NASA still has not cleared a heat shield issue with the Orion spacecraft. That must be resolved before the mission gets a green light to proceed next year.
The challenges are even greater for Artemis III. For that mission NASA needs to have a lunar lander—which is being provided by SpaceX with its Starship vehicle—in addition to spacesuits for the lunar surface provided by Axiom Space. Both of these elements remain solidly in the development phase.
Additionally, NASA is grappling with budget challenges. For the first time in more than a decade, the agency is facing budget cuts. This week the space agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, told Congress, “With less money, we have to make some very tough choices.” Among these could be seeking to use future SLS funding to shore up other elements of Artemis.
One of the people familiar with Boeing’s internal meeting on Thursday said the space agency had come to the company earlier this year and said, in effect, that Boeing would receive less funding as SLS development wound down. The company was given the choice to “stretch” the funding it would receive, or pause for a year due to the delays in the Artemis mission. Boeing chose to stretch the funds, and that was a driver of the cuts this week.
It would be easy, but unfair, to blame SpaceX and Axiom for the delays to future Artemis missions. Congress created the SLS rocket with an authorization bill back in 2010, but Boeing actually had been receiving funding for related work dating back to 2007. By contrast, NASA did not start funding work on the Starship lunar lander until late 2021, and the Axiom spacesuits until 2022. In some sense, these developments are as technically demanding as the SLS rocket work, if not more so.
