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teen-creates-memecoin,-dumps-it,-earns-$50,000

Teen creates memecoin, dumps it, earns $50,000

Cryptocurrency, memecoins, Policy, syndication / /

dontbuy. Seriously, don’t buy it

Unsurprisingly, he and his family were doxed by angry traders.

On the evening of November 19, art adviser Adam Biesk was finishing work at his California home when he overheard a conversation between his wife and son, who had just come downstairs. The son, a kid in his early teens, was saying he had made a ton of money on a cryptocurrency that he himself had created.

Initially, Biesk ignored it. He knew that his son played around with crypto, but to have turned a small fortune before bedtime was too far-fetched. “We didn’t really believe it,” says Biesk. But when the phone started to ring off the hook and his wife was flooded with angry messages on Instagram, Biesk realized that his son was telling the truth—if not quite the full story.

Earlier that evening, at 7: 48 pm PT, Biesk’s son had released into the wild 1 billion units of a new crypto coin, which he named Gen Z Quant. Simultaneously, he spent about $350 to purchase 51 million tokens, about 5 percent of the total supply, for himself.

Then he started to livestream himself on Pump.Fun, the website he had used to launch the coin. As people tuned in to see what he was doing, they started to buy into Gen Z Quant, leading the price to pitch sharply upward.

By 7: 56 pm PT, a whirlwind eight minutes later, Biesk’s son’s tokens were worth almost $30,000—and he cashed out. “No way. Holy fuck! Holy fuck!” he said, flipping two middle fingers to the webcam, with tongue sticking out of his mouth. “Holy fuck! Thanks for the twenty bandos.” After he dumped the tokens, the price of the coin plummeted, so large was his single trade.

To the normie ear, all this might sound impossible. But in the realm of memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency with no purpose or utility beyond financial speculation, it’s relatively routine. Although many people lose money, a few have been known to make a lot—and fast.

In this case, Biesk’s son had seemingly performed what is known as a soft rug pull, whereby somebody creates a new crypto token, promotes it online, then sells off their entire holdings either swiftly or over time, sinking its price. These maneuvers occupy something of a legal gray area, lawyers say, but are roundly condemned in the cryptosphere as ethically dubious at the least.

After dumping Gen Z Quant, Biesk’s son did the same thing with two more coins—one called im sorry and another called my dog lucy—bringing his takings for the evening to more than $50,000.

The backlash was swift and ferocious. A torrent of abuse began to pour into the chat log on Pump.Fun, from traders who felt they had been swindled. “You little fucking scammer,” wrote one commenter. Soon, the names and pictures of Biesk, his son, and other family members were circulating on X. They had been doxed. “Our phone started blowing up. Just phone call after phone call,” says Biesk. “It was a very frightening situation.”

As part of their revenge campaign, crypto traders continued to buy into Gen Z Quant, driving the coin’s price far higher than the level at which Biesk’s son had cashed out. At its peak, around 3 am PT the following morning, the coin had a theoretical total value of $72 million; the tokens the teenager had initially held were worth more than $3 million. Even now, the trading frenzy has died down, and they continue to be valued at twice the amount he received.

“In the end, a lot of people made money on his coin. But for us, caught in the middle, there was a lot of emotion,” says Biesk. “The online backlash became so frighteningly scary that the realization that he made money was kind of tempered down with the fact that people became angry and started bullying.”

Biesk concedes to a limited understanding of crypto. But he sees little distinction between what his son did and, say, playing the stock market or winning at a casino. Though under California law, someone must be at least 18 years old to gamble or invest in stocks, the unregulated memecoin market, which has been compared to a “casino” in risk profile, had given Biesk’s teenage son early access to a similar arena, in which some must lose for others to profit. “The way I understand it is he made money and he cashed out, which to me seems like that’s what anybody would’ve done,” says Biesk. “You get people who are cheering at the craps table, or angry at the craps table.”

Memecoins have been around since 2013, when Dogecoin was released. In the following years, a few developers tried to replicate the success of Dogecoin, making play of popular internet memes or tapping into the zeitgeist in some other way in a bid to encourage people to invest. But the cost and complexity of development generally limited the number of memecoins that came to market.

That equation was flipped in January with the launch of Pump.Fun, which lets people release new memecoins instantly, at no cost. The idea was to give people a safer way to trade memecoins by standardizing the underlying code, which prevents developers from building in malicious mechanisms to steal funds, in what’s known as a hard rug pull.

“Buying into memecoins was a very unsafe thing to do. Programmers could create systems that would obfuscate what you are buying into and, basically, behave as malicious actors. Everything was designed to suck money out of people,” one of the three anonymous cofounders of Pump.Fun, who goes by Sapijiju, told WIRED earlier in the year. “The idea with Pump was to build something where everyone was on the same playing field.”

Since Pump.Fun launched, millions of unique memecoins have entered the market through the platform. By some metrics, Pump.Fun is the fastest-growing crypto application ever, taking in more than $250 million in revenue—as a 1 percent cut of trades on the platform—in less than a year in operation.

However, Pump.Fun has found it impossible to insulate users from soft rug pulls. Though the platform gives users access to information to help assess risk—like the proportion of a coin belonging to the largest few holders—soft rug pulls are difficult to prevent by technical means, claims Sapijiju.

“People say there’s a bunch of different stuff you can do to block [soft rug pulls]—maybe a sell tax or lock up the people who create the coin. Truthfully, all of this is very easy to manipulate,” he says. “Whatever we do to stop people doing this, there’s always a way to circumnavigate if you’re smart enough. The important thing is creating an interface that is as simple as possible and giving the tools for users to see if a coin is legitimate or not.”

The “overwhelming majority” of new crypto tokens entering the market are scams of one form or another, designed expressly to squeeze money from buyers, not to hold a sustained value in the long term, according to crypto security company Blockaid. In the period since memecoin launchpads like Pump.Fun began to gain traction, the volume of soft rug pulls has increased in lockstep, says Ido Ben-Natan, Blockaid founder.

“I generally agree that it is kind of impossible to prevent holistically. It’s a game of cat and mouse,” says Ben-Natan. “It’s definitely impossible to cover a hundred percent of these things. But it definitely is possible to detect repeat offenders, looking at metadata and different kinds of patterns.”

Now memecoin trading has been popularized, there can be no putting the genie back in the bottle, says Ben-Natan. But traders are perhaps uniquely vulnerable at present, he says, in a period when many are newly infatuated with memecoins, yet before the fledgling platforms have figured out the best way to protect them. “The space is immature,” says Ben-Natan.

Whether it is legal to perform a rug pull is also something of a gray area. It depends on both jurisdiction and whether explicit promises are made to prospective investors, experts say. The absence of bespoke crypto regulations in countries like the US, meanwhile, inadvertently creates cloud cover for acts that are perhaps not overtly illegal.

“These actions exploit the gaps in existing regulatory frameworks, where unethical behavior—like developers hyping a project and later abandoning it—might not explicitly violate laws if no fraudulent misrepresentation, contractual breach, or other violations occur,” says Ronghui Gu, cofounder of crypto security firm CertiK and associate professor of computer science at Columbia University.

The Gen Z Quant broadcast is no longer available to view in full, but in the clips reviewed by WIRED, at no point does Biesk’s son promise to hold his tokens for any specific period. Neither do the Pump.Fun terms of use require people to refrain from selling tokens they create. (Sapijiju, the Pump.Fun cofounder, declined to comment on the Gen Z Quant incident. They say that Pump.Fun will be “introducing age restrictions in future,” but declined to elaborate.)

But even then, under the laws of numerous US states, among them California, “the developer likely still owes heightened legal duties to the investors, so may be liable for breaching obligations that result in loss of value,” says Geoffrey Berg, partner at law firm Berg Plummer & Johnson. “The developer is in a position of trust and must place the interests of his investors over his own.”

To clarify whether these legal duties apply to people who release memecoins through websites like Pump.Fun—who buy into their coins like everyone else, albeit at the moment of launch and therefore at a discount and in potentially market-swinging quantities—new laws may be required.

In July 2026, a new regime will take effect in California, where Biesk’s family lives, requiring residents to obtain a license to take part in “digital financial asset business activity,” including exchanging, transferring, storing or administering certain crypto assets. President-elect Donald Trump has also promised new crypto regulations. But for now, there are no crypto-specific laws in place.

“We are in a legal vacuum where there are no clear laws,” says Andrew Gordon, partner at law firm Gordon Law. “Once we know what is ‘in bounds,’ we will also know what is ‘out of bounds.’ This will hopefully create a climate where rug pulls don’t happen, or when they do they are seen as a criminal violation.”

On November 19, as the evening wore on, angry messages continued to tumble in, says Biesk. Though some celebrated his son’s antics, calling for him to return and create another coin, others were threatening or aggressive. “Your son stole my fucking money,” wrote one person over Instagram.

Biesk and his wife were still trying to understand quite how their son was able to make so much money, so fast. “I was trying to get an understanding of exactly how this meme crypto trading works,” says Biesk.

Some memecoin traders, sensing there could be money in riffing off the turn of events, created new coins on Pump.Fun inspired by Biesk and his wife: QUANT DAD and QUANTS MOM. (Both are now practically worthless.)

Equally disturbed and bewildered, Biesk and his wife formed a provisional plan: to make all public social media accounts private, stop answering the phone, and, generally, hunker down until things blew over. (Biesk’s account is active at the time of writing.) Biesk declined to comment on whether the family made contact with law enforcement or what would happen to the funds, saying only that his son would “put the money away.”

A few hours later, an X account under the name of Biesk’s son posted on X, pleading for people to stop contacting his parents. “Im sorry about Quant, I didnt realize I get so much money. Please dont write to my parents, I wiill pay you back [sic],” read the post. Biesk claims the account is not operated by his son.

Though alarmed by the backlash, Biesk is impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit and technical capability his son displayed. “It’s actually sort of a sophisticated trading platform,” he says. “He obviously learned it on his own.”

That his teenager was capable of making $50,000 in an evening, Biesk theorizes, speaks to the fundamentally different relationship kids of that age have with money and investing, characterized by an urgency and hyperactivity that rubs up against traditional wisdom.

“To me, crypto can be hard to grasp, because there is nothing there behind it—it’s not anything tangible. But I think kids relate to this intangible digital world more than adults do,” says Biesk. “This has an immediacy to him. It’s almost like he understands this better.”

On December 1, after a two-week hiatus, Biesk’s son returned to Pump.Fun to launch five new memecoins, apparently undeterred by the abuse. Disregarding the warnings built into the very names of some of the new coins—one was named test and another dontbuy—people bought in. Biesk’s son made another $5,000.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Photo of WIRED

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Lower-cost sodium-ion batteries are finally having their moment

Cars, EVs, sodium batteries, sodium-ion batteries, syndication / /

In contrast, a sodium-ion battery relies on an element—sodium—that you can find in table salt and ocean water.

Among the other benefits, sodium-ion batteries perform better than lithium-ion batteries in extreme cold. CATL has said its new battery works in temperatures as low as -40° Fahrenheit.

Also, a sodium-ion battery has much lower risk of fire. When lithium-ion batteries sustain damage, it can lead to “thermal runaway,” which triggers a dangerous and toxic fire.

The process of manufacturing sodium-ion batteries is similar to that of lithium-ion batteries, or at least similar enough that companies can shift existing assembly lines without having to spend heavily on retooling.

But sodium-ion batteries have some disadvantages. The big one is low energy density compared to lithium-ion. As a result, an EV running on a sodium-ion battery will go fewer miles per charge than a lithium-ion battery of the same size.

“That is just what nature has given us,” Srinivasan said. “From a physics perspective, sodium batteries inherently have lower energy density than lithium batteries.”

A typical sodium-ion battery has an energy density of about 150 watt-hours per kilogram at the cell level, he said. Lithium-ion batteries can range from about 180 to nearly 300 watt-hours per kilogram.

I asked Srinivasan what he makes of CATL’s claim of a sodium-ion battery with 200 watt-hours per kilogram.

“We tend to be skeptical of news releases from companies,” he said. He specified that his comment applies to all battery companies.

Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science, discusses battery research with a materials scientist in one of the energy storage discovery labs at Argonne National Laboratory.

Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science, discusses battery research with a materials scientist in one of the energy storage discovery labs at Argonne National Laboratory. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

The national labs’ initiative has a five-year timeline, with a goal of developing sodium-ion batteries with energy densities that match or exceed those of today’s iron phosphate-based lithium-ion batteries. Researchers would do this by finding various efficiencies in design and materials.

The project is happening alongside the labs’ ongoing work to develop and improve other kinds of batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries dominate today’s market. This year, global production of lithium-ion batteries was about 1,500 gigawatt-hours, and production of sodium-ion batteries was 11 gigawatt-hours, or less than 1 percent, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

Lower-cost sodium-ion batteries are finally having their moment Read More »

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Seagrass is fantastic at carbon capture—and it’s at risk of extinction

climate change, eel grass, Science, sea grass, syndication / /

An underwater gardening experiment along the East Coast aims at restoration.

A crab inhabits a bed of eelgrass at Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. Eelgrass provides critical habitat for hundreds of species. Credit: Holly Plaisted/National Park Service

In late September, seagrass ecologist Alyssa Novak pulled on her neoprene wetsuit, pressed her snorkel mask against her face, and jumped off an oyster farming boat into the shallow waters of Pleasant Bay, an estuary in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. Through her mask she gazed toward the sandy seabed, about 3 feet below the surface at low tide, where she was about to plant an experimental underwater garden of eelgrass.

Naturally occurring meadows of eelgrass—the most common type of seagrass found along the East Coast of the United States—are vanishing. Like seagrasses around the world, they have been plagued for decades by dredging, disease, and nutrient pollution from wastewater and agricultural runoff. The nutrient overloads have fueled algal blooms and clouded coastal waters with sediments, blocking out sunlight the marine plants need to make food through photosynthesis and suffocating them.

The United Nations Environment Program reports more than 20 of the world’s 72 seagrass species are on the decline. As a result, an estimated 7 percent of these habitats are lost each year.

In the western Atlantic, some eelgrass meadows have been reduced by more than 90 percent in the last 100 years, according to The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit that works to protect lands and waters around the world.

Now, rising sea surface temperatures caused by global warming are pushing the plant to the brink of extinction. Novak, a research assistant professor at Boston University who has studied eelgrass in New England for more than a decade, and a multidisciplinary team of scientists in different states are trying their best to make sure this does not become reality.

Together, they are working to restore eelgrass populations in coastal parks from Maine to North Carolina using a novel approach that has never been tried before with a marine plant: assisted migration.

“We’re trying to identify thermo-tolerant individuals up and down the East Coast and try to move them into areas where the populations are stressed by increases in sea surface temperature, so that we can give those populations a chance of surviving into the future,” Novak said.

Typically, eelgrass thrives in water temperatures between 60° and 68° Fahrenheit, according to Novak. In the last 20 years, sea surface temperatures in the Northeast have warmed faster than the global ocean and exceeded that safe range, mostly due to human activity like burning fossil fuels, according to NOAA Fisheries, a federal agency charged with managing and protecting marine resources in the US.

Blades of eelgrass are viewed up close at Cape Cod National Seashore.

Credit: Holly Plaisted/National Park Service

Blades of eelgrass are viewed up close at Cape Cod National Seashore. Credit: Holly Plaisted/National Park Service

Around 77° Fahrenheit the plants become stressed and struggle to photosynthesize, said Novak. Around 82° they begin to expire. “That’s when the plants no longer can handle the heat stress, and they end up dying,” she said. And it’s getting hotter.

In recent years, she said, water temperatures along the East Coast have surpassed 82° during peak summer months. By 2050, they are expected to increase in the Northeast by two degrees, she said.

The common garden experiment

Anticipating the deadly forecast for eelgrass, The Nature Conservancy brought together a group of scientists in 2022 to figure out how they might change the plant’s trajectory. Together, the experts on seagrasses, corals, agriculture, forestry, and plant genetics explored options based on what had been done to address the effects of climate change on other ecosystems.

“We wanted to figure out what the solutions were that different groups had come up with, and from those, which ones might apply to the seagrass world,” said Boze Hancock, senior marine restoration scientist with The Nature Conservancy’s global oceans team.

Prolonged marine heatwaves and coral disease have prompted some scientists to experiment with cross-breeding and replanting heat-resistant corals in warming waters, for example. In some cases they have removed whole coral colonies from their natural habitat to preserve their genetics in land-based biobanks.

One of the workshop invitees, biologist Thomas Whitham, shared with the group how he’s used a scientific research tool called the “common garden experiment” to restore deciduous Fremont cottonwood forests that have been dying off in Arizona due to rising temperatures and drought.

The experiments involve collecting plants from different locations and moving them to designated locations to observe how they respond to new environmental conditions. In the case of Fremont cottonwoods, Whitham said the technique has proven vital to identifying trees with specific genetic traits that make them more heat and drought resilient. Cuttings from these trees are now being planted in areas where less resilient trees died off to restore the species in a process known as “assisted migration.”

“We’ve planted many thousands, tens of thousands, of trees using this common garden approach,” said Whitham, a Regents’ professor in the department of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University. It could work for eelgrass too, he told the group.

They could collect seeds from eelgrass populations in the south and plant them in cooler northern waters alongside local seeds and, in effect, identify plants that have a propensity to thrive in warmer temperatures.

Workshop participants were eager to try, said attendee Jonathan Lefcheck, a research ​scientist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who has studied seagrasses in the Chesapeake Bay for more than 15 years. “If we do nothing, it’s likely that seagrass—eelgrass—will be extirpated all the way up to New York in the next 50 years,” he said. And with it, all the services it provides to wildlife and humans.

Underwater forests

Eelgrass provides critical habitat for hundreds of species.

“It’s the forest under the water in the estuaries,” said Bradley Peterson, a professor of marine science at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences who helped initiate the workshops in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy.

Scientists believe seagrasses evolved from terrestrial plants 70 to 100 millions years ago. “When they went into the marine world, they brought all the machinery they had with them for the terrestrial world, real seeds, real flowers, and real roots,” said Peterson, who is working to restore eelgrass near Long Island.

Its green grass blades, which can grow up to a couple feet long, offer food and shelter to horseshoe crabs, seahorses, and fish of all sizes that weave through its mazes. Little shrimp pollinate the plant’s flowers like “bees of the sea,” said Lefcheck. For bigger fish, “it’s this beautiful buffet,” he said. “You get this whole ecosystem that’s built up around this habitat that’s just sort of gently swaying there underneath the waves.”

In New England, eelgrass is vital for commercial scallop and oyster fisheries. Same for the Atlantic cod. “The cod industry is massive, so if you start losing that habitat, then your commercial fisheries go,” Novak said.

You also lose important coastline protection. Seagrass helps prevent erosion and buffers shorelines from flooding and storm surge. It can reduce wave energy by 50 percent, according to Novak. It also improves water quality and clarity by filtering pollutants and storing excess nutrients, reducing the prevalence of bacteria that can cause coral disease or contaminate seafood. “If you lose eelgrass, you’re going to have dirtier waters,” she said. Global warming could also be exacerbated.

tuft of eel grass

Eelgrass is the most dominant type of seagrass along the East Coast.

Credit: d3_plus D.Naruse @ Japan via Getty

Eelgrass is the most dominant type of seagrass along the East Coast. Credit: d3_plus D.Naruse @ Japan via Getty

Seagrasses sequester up to 18 percent of carbon stored in the ocean, capturing it 35 times faster than tropical rainforests, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. The New York Department of State, Office of Planning, Development and Community Infrastructure reports each acre of seagrass can potentially sequester the same amount of carbon emitted by a car driving nearly 4,000 miles each year. But when this unique marine habitat is destroyed, carbon that has been stored in the plant’s roots and sediments—sometimes for thousands of years—is released back into the atmosphere, said Novak.

Sharing seeds

To have a chance at repopulating eelgrass along the East Coast, scientists like Novak, Peterson, and Lefcheck realized they would have to share information and collaborate across state borders—something to which academics are not always accustomed, according to Novak.

“It’s not our nature to share information that freely, because we’re supposed to be focusing on publishing,” she said. But the crisis at hand had inspired a change in the status quo. “We’re a team,” she said. “We’re about saving the eelgrass and doing what’s best for this ecosystem.”

They call the regional effort HEAT (Helping Eelgrass Adapt to Temperature). In the last year, participants have been working together to identify the best possible sites for planting common gardens along the East Coast. So far, they’ve homed in on several national parks: the Cape Cod National Seashore, Fire Island National Seashore in New York, Assateague Island in Maryland and Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout national seashores in North Carolina.

“We want to set ourselves up for some success and use the information we have about these parks to guide our decision-making and make sure we’re putting these in places where they might have enough light, where they won’t have as many human impacts,” said Lefcheck.

They’ve also begun collecting and sharing seeds. “We’re sharing actual plants with each other for genomics, and then we’re also sharing seeds with each other for doing our common gardens and for experiments,” Novak said.

This past year Novak sent samples of eelgrass plants collected in Massachusetts to the University of North Carolina Wilmington for Stephanie Kamel, a professor in the department of biology and marine biology at the university, to analyze. Kamel is looking for plants that have specific genetic markers that might make them more resilient to challenging environmental conditions like warmer temperatures and lower light, which is becoming an increasing problem as sea levels rise due to global warming pushing the plants deeper underwater. Currently, she’s analyzing the DNA of 800 eelgrass plants from 60 meadows along the East Coast. “We’re going to have this sort of unprecedented level of detail about genomic variation across the range of Zostera (eelgrass),” said Kamel.

This information could be used to help collaborators figure out which seeds they should plant in different locations based on their specific environmental conditions and challenges, said Jessie Jarvis, a seagrass ecologist and professor who works with Kamel at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

“It’s almost like a dating app for seagrass,” Jarvis said. “You could be a little bit smarter about picking your source populations to match what your restoration needs are, rather than just kind of throwing seeds from everywhere and hoping that something works.”

In the meantime, though, common gardening remains the most practical tool to figure out which plants from which locations may be the best stock for future eelgrass populations. This past year Kamel and Jarvis piloted a common garden experiment in North Carolina and Virginia.

“We took those seeds from what we thought were, quote, unquote, good sources (in North Carolina), and we actually moved them to Virginia. And then we took some Virginia seeds and moved them to North Carolina to actually see what would happen in terms of growth,” said Kamel. While it’s still too early to draw firm conclusions from the experiment, Kamel said preliminary results seem promising. “There are really encouraging signs that we have been able to find some genomic changes associated with temperature resilience,” she said.

Others are following suit. This past spring, Novak and Peterson harvested reproductive eelgrass shoots filled with seeds while snorkeling and scuba diving in Acadia National Park in Maine and Cape Cod, Nantucket, Gloucester in Massachusetts. Lefcheck harvested in Maryland. “What we do is harvest them before they’ve released the seeds, because the seeds are tiny, like the size of a pinhead,” Lefcheck said. The shoots are then held in saltwater tanks until the seeds drop and can easily be collected and stored until it’s time to plant them.

It’s best to wait to plant eelgrass in the early fall, after most of the late summer storms have passed, according to Novak, who spent several days planting seeds in Pleasant Bay and nearby East Harbor this September with a team including a biologist from the National Park Service and a representative from the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. To get to the Pleasant Bay site, they motored out onto the water on an oyster farming boat. “The oyster farmers are interested in the project because our site is adjacent to their farm and they recognize that healthy beds are important to sustaining their livelihood,” Novak said.

Before getting wet, Novak and her team ran through their gardening plan. “We do dry runs on land, just to get everybody organized, but it’s not the same when you get into the water,” she said. “You’re trying to hold things underwater. You can’t see as well, even if you have a mask on.”

They would establish two 25-meter transect lines and then plant seeds from different donor sites in New York and Massachusetts. Nantucket was one of them. “We knew conditions were warmer at that particular site, so we said, let’s, let’s test them at Cape Cod,” she said.

Up to 500 seeds from each location would be planted by releasing them into the water column from a test tube or dropping tea bags filled with the seeds that would meander their way down to the seabed into 1-meter plots.

It was a slow process, Novak said, requiring hyper organization to make sure it’s clear which seeds have been planted where so that they can be monitored. In January, she will return to the sites to see if the plants are germinating. Then in the spring she’ll really be able to measure growth and compare how the different plants are faring in comparison to one another. “By next summer, we should have genomics for all of our populations, so that should really be guiding our efforts at that point,” she said.

Teresa Tomassoni is an environmental journalist covering the intersections between oceans, climate change, coastal communities, and wildlife for Inside Climate News. Her previous work has appeared in The Washington Post, NPR, NBC Latino, and the Smithsonian American Indian Magazine. Teresa holds a graduate degree in journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She is also a recipient of the Stone & Holt Weeks Social Justice Reporting Fellowship. In addition to reporting on oceans, Teresa teaches climate solutions reporting for The School of the New York Times.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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Vintage digicams aren’t just a fad. They’re an artistic statement.

digicams, digital photography, syndication, Tech / /

In the age of AI images, some photographers are embracing the quirky flaws of vintage digital cameras.

Spanish director Isabel Coixet films with a digicam on the red carpet ahead of the premiere of the film “The International” on the opening night of the 59th Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin in 2009. Credit: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images

Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras. It’s not surprising that, perhaps as a reaction to the ubiquity of the phone, some young creative photographers are leaving their handsets in their pockets in favor of compact point-and-shoot digital cameras—the very type that camera manufacturers are actively discontinuing.

Much of the buzz among this creative class has centered around premium, chic models like the Fujifilm X100 and Ricoh GR, or for the self-anointed “digicam girlies” on TikTok, zoom point-and-shoots like the Canon PowerShot G7 and Sony RX100 models, which can be great for selfies.

But other shutterbugs are reaching back into the past 20 years or more to add a vintage “Y2K aesthetic” to their work. The MySpace look is strong with a lot of photographers shooting with authentic early-2000s “digicams,” aiming their cameras—flashes a-blazing—at their friends and capturing washed-out, low-resolution, grainy photos that look a whole lot like 2003.

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“It’s so wild to me cause I’m an elder millennial,” says Ali O’Keefe, who runs the photography channel Two Months One Camera on YouTube. “My childhood is captured on film … but for [young people], theirs were probably all captured on, like, Canon SD1000s,” she says, referencing a popular mid-aughts point-and-shoot.

It’s not just the retro sensibility they’re after, but also a bit of cool cred. Everyone from Ayo Edibiri to Kendall Jenner is helping fuel digicam fever by publicly taking snaps with a vintage pocket camera.

The rise of the vintage digicam marks at least the second major nostalgia boom in the photography space. More than 15 years ago, a film resurgence brought thousands of cameras from the 1970s and ’80s out of closets and into handbags and backpacks. Companies like Impossible Project and Film Ferrania started up production of Polaroid-compatible and 35-mm film, respectively, firing up manufacturing equipment that otherwise would have been headed to the scrap heap. Traditional film companies like Kodak and Ilford have seen sales skyrocket. Unfortunately, the price of film stock also increased significantly, with film processing also getting more costly. (Getting a roll developed and digitally scanned now typically costs between $15 and $20.)

For those seeking to experiment with their photography, there’s an appeal to using a cheap, old digital model they can shoot with until it stops working. The results are often imperfect, but since the camera is digital, a photographer can mess around and get instant gratification. And for everyone in the vintage digital movement, the fact that the images from these old digicams are worse than those from a smartphone is a feature, not a bug.

What’s a digicam?

One of the biggest points of contention among enthusiasts is the definition of “digicam.” For some, any old digital camera falls under the banner, while other photographers have limited the term’s scope to a specific vintage or type. Sofia Lee, photographer and co-founder of the online community digicam.love, has narrowed her definition over time.

“There’s a separation between what I define as a tool that I will be using in my artistic practice versus what the community at large would consider to be culturally acceptable, like at a meetup,” Lee stated. “I started off looking at any digital camera I could get my hands on. But increasingly I’m focused more on the early 2000s. And actually, I actually keep getting earlier and earlier … I would say from 2000 to 2003 or 2004 maybe.”

Lee has found that she’s best served by funky old point-and-shoot cameras, and doesn’t use old digital single-lens reflex cameras, which can deliver higher quality images comparable to today’s equipment. Lee says DSLR images are “too clean, too crisp, too nice” for her work. “When I’m picking a camera, I’m looking for a certain kind of noise, a certain kind of character to them that can’t be reproduced through filters or editing, or some other process,” Lee says. Her all-time favorite model is a forgotten camera from 2001, the Kyocera Finecam S3. A contemporary review gave the model a failing grade, citing its reliance on the then-uncommon SD memory card format, along with its propensity to turn out soft photos lacking in detail.

“It’s easier to say what isn’t a digicam, like DSLRs or cameras with interchangeable lenses,” says Zuzanna Neupauer, a digicam user and member of digicam.love. But the definition gets even narrower from there. “I personally won’t use any new models, and I restrict myself to digicams made before 2010,” Neupauer says.

Not everyone is as partisan. Popular creators Ali O’Keefe and James Warner both cover interchangeable lens cameras from the 2000s extensively on their YouTube channels, focusing on vintage digital equipment, relishing in devices with quirky designs or those that represent evolutionary dead-ends. Everything from Sigma’s boxy cameras with exotic sensors to Olympus’ weird, early DSLRs based on a short-lived lens system get attention in their videos. It’s clear that although many vintage enthusiasts prefer the simple, compact nature of a point-and-shoot camera, the overall digicam trend has increased interest in digital imaging’s many forms.

Digital archeology

The digital photography revolution that occurred around the turn of the century saw a Cambrian explosion of different types and designs of cameras. Sony experimented with swiveling two-handers that could be science fiction zap guns, and had cameras that wrote JPEGs to floppy disks and CDs. Minolta created modular cameras that could be decoupled, the optics tethered to the LCD body with a cord, like photographic nunchaku. “There are a lot of brands that are much less well known,” says Lee. “And in the early 2000s in particular, it was really like the Wild West.”

Today’s enthusiasts spelunking into the digital past are encountering challenges related to the passage of time, with some brands no longer offering firmware updates, drivers, or PDF copies of manuals for these old models. In many cases, product news and reviews sites are the only reminder that some cameras ever existed. But many of those sites have fallen off the internet entirely.

“Steve’s Digicams went offline,” says O’Keefe in reference to the popular camera news website that went offline after the founder, Steve Sanders, died in 2017. “It was tragic because it had so much information.”

“Our interests naturally align with archaeology,” says Sofia Lee. “A lot of us were around when the cameras were made. But there were a number of events in the history of digicams where an entire line of cameras just massively died off. That’s something that we are constantly confronted with.”

Hocus focus

YouTubers like Warner and O’Keefe helped raise interest in cameras with Charged-Coupled Device technology, an older type of imaging sensor that fell out of use around 2010. CCD-based cameras have developed a cult following, and certain models have retained their value surprisingly well for their age. Fans liken the results of CCD captures to shooting film without the associated hassle or cost. While the digicam faithful have shown that older cameras can yield pleasing results, there’s no guaranteed “CCD magic” sprinkled on those photos.

“[I] think I’ve maybe unfortunately been one of the ones to make it sound like CCD sensors in and of themselves are making the colors different,” says Warner, who makes classic digital camera videos on his channel Snappiness.

“CCDs differ from [newer] CMOS sensors in the layout of their electronics but at heart they’re both made up of photosensitive squares of silicon behind a series of color filters from which color information about the scene can be derived,” says Richard Butler, managing editor at DPReview. (Disclosure: I worked at DPReview as a part-time editor in 2022 and 2023.) DPReview, in its 25th year, is a valuable library of information about old digital cameras, and an asset to vintage digital obsessives.

“I find it hard to think of CCD images as filmlike, but it’s fair to say that the images of cameras from that time may have had a distinct aesthetic,” Butler says. “As soon as you have an aesthetic with which an era was captured, there’s a nostalgia about that look. It’s fair to say that early digital cameras inadvertently defined the appearance of contemporary photos.”

There’s one area where old CCD sensors can show a difference: They don’t capture as much light and dark information as other types of sensors, and therefore the resulting images can have less detail in the shadows and highlights. A careful photographer can get contrasty, vibrant images with a different, yet still digital, vibe. Digicam photographer Jermo Swaab says he prefers “contrasty scenes and crushed blacks … I yearn for images that look like a memory or retro-futuristic dream.”

Modern photographs, by default, are super sharp, artificially vibrant, with high dynamic range that makes the image pop off the screen. In order to get the most out of a tiny sensor and lens, smartphones put shots through a computationally intense pipeline of automated editing, quickly combining multiple captures to extract every fine detail possible, and eradicate pesky noise. Digital cameras shoot a single image at a time by default. Especially with older, lower resolution digital cameras, this can give images a noisier, dreamier appearance that digicam fans love.

“If you take a picture with your smartphone, it’s automatically HDR. And we’re just used to that today but that’s not at all how cameras have worked in the past,” Warner says. Ali O’Keefe agrees, saying that “especially as we lean more and more into AI where everything is super polished to the point of hyperreal, digicams are crappy, and the artifacts and the noise and the lens imperfections give you something that is not replicable.”

Lee also is chasing unique, noisy photos from compact cameras with small sensors: “I actually always shoot at max ISO, which is the opposite of how I think people shot their cameras back in the day. I’m curious about finding the undesirable aspects of it and [getting] aesthetic inspiration from the undesirable aspects of a camera.”

Her favorite Kyocera camera is known for its high-quality build and noisy pics. She describes it as ”all metal, like a briefcase,” of the sort that Arnold Schwarzenegger carries in Total Recall. “These cameras are considered legendary in the experimental scene,” she says of the Kyocera. “The unique thing about the Finecam S3 is that it produces a diagonal noise pattern.”

A time to buy, a time to sell

The gold rush for vintage digital gear has, unsurprisingly, led to rising prices on the resale market. What was once a niche for oddballs and collectors has become a potential goldmine, driven by all that social media hype.

“The joke is that when someone makes a video about a camera, the price jumps,” says Warner. “I’ve actually tracked that using eBay’s TerraPeak sale monitoring tool where you can see the history of up to two years of sales for a certain search query. There’s definitely strong correlation to a [YouTube] video’s release and the price of that item going up on eBay in certain situations.”

“It is kind of amazing how hard it is to find things now,” laments says O’Keefe. “I used to be able to buy [Panasonic] LX3s, one of my favorite point and shoots of all time, a dime a dozen. Now they’re like 200 bucks if you can find a working one.”

O’Keefe says she frequently interacts with social media users who went online looking for their dream camera only to have gotten scammed. “A person who messaged me this morning was just devastated,” she says. “Scams are rampant now because they’ve picked up on this market being sort of a zeitgeist thing.” She recommends sticking with sellers on platforms that have clear protections in place for dealing with scams and fraud, like eBay. “I have never had an issue getting refunded when the item didn’t work.”

Even when dealing with a trustworthy seller, vintage digital camera collecting is not for the faint of heart. “If I’m interested in a camera, I make sure that the batteries are still made because some are no longer in production,” says O’Keefe. She warns that even if a used camera comes with its original batteries, those cells will most likely not hold a charge.

When there are no new batteries to be had, Sofia Lee and her cohort have resuscitated vintage cameras using modern tech: “With our Kyoceras, one of the biggest issues is the batteries are no longer in production and they all die really quickly. What we ended up doing is using 5V DC cables that connect them to USB, then we shoot them tethered to a power bank. So if you see someone shooting with a Kyocera, they’re almost always holding the power bank and a digicam in their other hand.”

And then there’s the question of where to store all those JPEGs. “A lot of people don’t think about memory card format, so that can get tricky,” cautions Warner. Many vintage cameras use the CompactFlash format, and those are still widely supported. But just as many digicams use deprecated storage formats like Olympus’s xD or Sony’s MemoryStick. ”They don’t make those cards anymore,” Warner says. “Some of them have adapters you can use but some [cameras] don’t work with the adapters.”

Even if the batteries and memory cards get sorted out, Sofia Lee underscores that every piece of vintage equipment has an expiration date. “There is this looming threat, when it comes to digicams—this is a finite resource.” Like with any other vintage tech, over time, capacitors go bad, gears break, sensors corrode, and, in some circumstances, rubber grips devulcanize back into a sticky goo.

Lee’s beloved Kyoceras are one such victim of the ravages of time. “I’ve had 15 copies pass through my hands. Around 11 of them were dead on arrival, and three died within a year. That means I have one left right now. It’s basically a special occasions-only camera, because I just never know when it’s going to die.”

These photographers have learned that it’s sometimes better to move on from a potential ticking time bomb, especially if the device is still in demand. O’Keefe points to the Epson R-D1 as an example. This digital rangefinder from printer-maker Epson, with gauges on the top made by Epson’s watchmaking arm Seiko, was originally sold as a Leica alternative, but now it fetches Leica-like premium prices. “I actually sold mine a year and a half ago,” she says. “I loved it, it was beautiful. But there’s a point for me, where I can see that this thing is certainly going to die, probably in the next five years. So I did sell that one, but it is such an awesome experience to shoot. Cause what other digital camera has a lever that actually winds the shutter?”

#NoBadCameras

For a group of people with a recent influx of newbies, the digicam community seems to be adjusting well. Sofia Lee says the growing popularity of digicams is an opportunity to meet new collaborators in a field where it used to be hard to connect with like-minded folks. “I love that there are more people interested in this, because when I was first getting into it I was considered totally crazy,” she says.

Despite the definition of digicam morphing to include a wider array of cameras, Lee seems to be accepting of all comers. “I’m rather permissive in allowing people to explore what they consider is right,” says Lee. While not every camera is “right” for every photographer, many of them agree on one thing: Resurrecting used equipment is a win for the planet, and a way to resist the constant upgrade churn of consumer technology.

“It’s interesting to look at what is considered obsolete,” Lee says. “From a carbon standpoint, the biggest footprint is at the moment of manufacture, which means that every piece of technology has this unfulfilled potential.” O’Keefe agrees: “I love it from an environmental perspective. Do we really need to drive waste [by releasing] a new camera every few months?”

For James Warner, part of the appeal is using lower-cost equipment that more people can afford. And with that lower cost of entry comes easier access to the larger creator community. “With some clubs you’re not invited if you don’t have the nice stuff,” he says. “But they feel welcome and like they can participate in photography on a budget.”

O’Keefe has even coined the hashtag #NoBadCameras. She believes all digicams have unique characteristics, and that if a curious photographer just takes the time to get to know the device, it can deliver good results. “Don’t be precious about it,” she says. “Just pick something up, shoot it, and have fun.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Photo of WIRED

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

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Trump targets Mexico and Canada with tariffs, plus an extra 10% for China

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Trump had in particular targeted Mexico on the campaign trail, threatening to impose “whatever tariffs are required—100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent” to stop Chinese cars from crossing the southern border.

He has also warned Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, he would impose tariffs of 25 percent if she did not crack down on the “onslaught of criminals and drugs” crossing the border.

The levies could be imposed using executive powers that would override the USMCA, the free trade agreement Trump signed with Canada and Mexico during his first term as president.

“There’s a lot of integration of North American manufacturing in a lot of sectors, particularly autos, so this would be pretty disruptive for a lot of US companies and industries,” said Warren Maruyama, former general counsel at the Office of the US Trade Representative. “Tariffs are inflationary and will drive up prices,” he added.

Ricardo Monreal, leader of Mexico’s ruling party in the lower house of congress, said tariffs would “not solve the underlying issue” at the border. “Escalating trade retaliation would only hurt people’s pockets,” he wrote on X.

Diego Marroquín Bitar at the Wilson Center think tank warned that unilateral tariffs “would shatter confidence in USMCA and harm all three economies.”

In a joint statement, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, and public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc hailed the bilateral relationship with the US as “one of the strongest and closest… particularly when it comes to trade and border security.”

They also noted that Canada “buys more from the United States than China, Japan, France, and the UK combined,” and last year supplied “60 percent of US crude oil imports.”

“Even if this is a negotiating strategy, I don’t see what Canada has to offer that Trump is not already getting,” said Carlo Dade at the Canada West Foundation.

While Trump put tariffs at the center of his economic pitch to voters, President Joe Biden has also increased levies on Chinese imports. In May, Biden’s administration sharply increased tariffs on a range of imported clean-energy technologies, including boosting tariffs on electric vehicles from China to 100 percent.

Biden’s administration has also pushed Beijing for several years to crack down on the production of ingredients for fentanyl, which it estimated claimed the lives of almost 75,000 Americans in 2023. Beijing this year agreed to impose controls on chemicals crucial to manufacturing fentanyl following meetings with senior US officials.

Additional reporting by William Sandlund and Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong, Christine Murray in Mexico City, Ilya Gridneff in Toronto, Joe Leahy in Beijing, and Alex Rogers in Washington.

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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$300 billion pledge at COP29 climate summit a “paltry sum”

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The world’s most important climate talks were pulled back from the brink of collapse after poorer countries reluctantly accepted a finance package of “at least” $300 billion a year from wealthy nations after bitter negotiations.

Fears about stretched budgets around the world and the election of Donald Trump as US president, who has described climate change as a “hoax,” drove the developing countries into acceptance of the slightly improved package after Sunday 2: 30 am local time in Baku.

The UN COP29 climate summit almost collapsed twice throughout Saturday evening and into the early hours of Sunday morning, as vulnerable nations walked out of negotiations and India objected stridently.

As the gavel came down, India’s lead negotiator, Neelesh Shah, leapt to his feet to ask to take the floor, and when he was ignored made a furious timeout gesture above his head and led his team on to the stage in protest.

Speaking from the floor, Indian delegation member Chandni Raina said the country was “extremely disappointed” by the abrupt passage of the agreement, adding: “This was stage-managed.”

“It is a paltry sum,” she said. “I am sorry to say that we cannot accept it. We seek a much higher ambition from developed countries.” The agreement was “nothing more than an optical illusion,” she added.

The broadside was followed by objections from Bolivia, Chile, and Nigeria, who were told by COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev that their statements were noted. Smaller nations, such as Malawi, Fiji, and the Maldives, joined in the grievance.

Simon Stiell, head of the UN climate change arm, said the new goal was an “insurance policy for humanity, amid worsening climate impacts hitting every country” but added that it was “no time for victory laps.”

European Union climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra tried to assure disappointed smaller nations, saying he was “confident we will reach the $1.3 trillion” economists say developing countries need to shift to green energy and cope with climate change.

$300 billion pledge at COP29 climate summit a “paltry sum” Read More »

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What delusions can tell us about the cognitive nature of belief

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Natalie also recalled other beliefs, including that she was dead (known as Cotard delusion), which she did not share with clinicians at the time. She noted that she entertained this idea due to the failure of other explanations to account for her strange experiences and an idea from a television show.

Natalie said she eventually dismissed this idea as implausible while still holding other delusional ideas. This suggests that belief evaluation may involve different thresholds for different delusions. It also highlights the private nature of some delusions.

Across all of her delusions, Natalie described her active involvement in trying to explain and manage her experiences. She reported considering different explanations and testing these by seeking further information. For example, she asked questions of the people she thought were her in-laws. This suggests a surprisingly similar approach to how we typically form beliefs.

Natalie recalled the influence of television and movies on her ideas. She also recalled how she elaborated on her delusions, once formed, based on information in her surroundings.

These features challenge theories that delusions simply arise from anomalous sensory data. They instead highlight the role of the individual’s search for meaning and social context, as well as the subsequent impact of delusions on perception and thinking.

Implications

As a case study, Natalie’s experiences are not necessarily representative of all people who experience delusions or postpartum psychosis. However, Natalie’s case presents informative features that theories of delusions need to account for.

In particular, Natalie’s personalized insights highlight the critical role of the individual in actively trying to understand their experiences and bestow meaning. This is opposed to just passively accepting beliefs in response to anomalous sensory data or neuropsychological deficits. This suggests psychological therapies may be useful in treating psychosis, in combination with other treatments, in some cases.

More generally, Natalie’s account reveals commonalities between delusions and ordinary beliefs and supports the view that delusions can be understood in terms of cognitive processes across the stages of normal belief formation that we identified.

While there remain challenges in investigating delusions, further study may offer insights into the underpinnings of everyday belief and, in turn, of ourselves.The Conversation

Michael Connors, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry, UNSW Sydney, and Peter W Halligan, Hon Professor of Neuropsychology, Cardiff University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Elizabeth Warren calls for crackdown on Internet “monopoly” you’ve never heard of

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s prime real estate.

In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.

In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms on how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since hiked prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, though its service remains identical and could allegedly be provided far more cheaply by others.

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“VeriSign is exploiting its monopoly power to charge millions of users excessive prices for registering a .com top-level domain,” the letter claims. “VeriSign hasn’t changed or improved its services; it has simply raised prices because it holds a government-ensured monopoly.”

“We intend to respond to senator Warren and representative Nadler’s letter, which repeats inaccuracies and misleading statements that have been aggressively promoted by a small, self-interested group of domain-name investors for years,” said Verisign spokesperson David McGuire in a statement to WIRED. “We look forward to correcting the record and working with policymakers toward real solutions that benefit internet users.”

In an August blog post entitled “Setting the Record Straight,” the company claimed that discourse around its management of .com had been “distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of core technical concepts, and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition, and market dynamics in the domain name industry.”

In the same blog post, the company argues that it is not operating a monopoly because there are 1,200 generic top-level domains operated by other entities, including .org, .shop, .ai, and .uk.

Though far from a household name, VeriSign takes in about $1.5 billion in revenue each year for servicing its particular section of the Internet’s inscrutable plumbing.

In their letter, Warren and Nadler allege that VeriSign has exploited its exclusive right to charge for highly sought-after .com addresses to juice its revenues and drive up its share price—all at the expense of customers for whom there is no viable alternative.

Elizabeth Warren calls for crackdown on Internet “monopoly” you’ve never heard of Read More »

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Microsoft president asks Trump to “push harder” against Russian hacks

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Smith testified before the US Senate in September that Russia, China, and Iran had stepped up their digital efforts to interfere in global elections this year, including in the US.

However, Microsoft’s own security standards have come under fire in recent months. A damning report by the US Cyber Safety Review Board in March said its security culture was “inadequate,” pointing to a “cascade… of avoidable errors” that last year allowed Chinese hackers to access hundreds of email accounts, including those belonging to senior US government security officials, that were hosted on Microsoft’s cloud systems.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has said in response that the company would prioritize security “above all else,” including by tying staff remuneration to security.

The company is also making changes to its Windows operating system to help its customers recover more quickly from incidents such as July’s global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike’s botched security update.

Beyond cyber security, Smith said it was “a little early” to determine the precise impact of a second Trump administration on the technology industry. Any anticipated liberalization of M&A regulation in the US would have to be weighed up against continued scrutiny of dealmaking in other parts of the world, he said.

Smith also reiterated his plea for the US government to “help accelerate exports of key American digital technologies,” especially to the Middle East and Africa, after the Biden administration imposed export controls on AI chips, fearing the technology could leak to China.

“We really need now to standardize processes so that American technology can reach these other parts of the world as fast as Chinese technology,” he said.

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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Cracking the recipe for perfect plant-based eggs

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Hint: It involves finding exactly the right proteins.

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant food—and industrial egg production raises significant animal welfare issues.

So food scientists, and a few companies, are trying hard to come up with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to reverse-engineer an egg,” says David Julian McClements, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

That’s not easy, because real eggs play so many roles in the kitchen. You can use beaten eggs to bind breadcrumbs in a coating, or to hold together meatballs; you can use them to emulsify oil and water into mayonnaise, scramble them into an omelet or whip them to loft a meringue or angel food cake. An all-purpose egg substitute must do all those things acceptably well, while also yielding the familiar texture and—perhaps—flavor of real eggs.

Today’s plant-based eggs still fall short of that one-size-fits-all goal, but researchers in industry and academia are trying to improve them. New ingredients and processes are leading toward egg substitutes that are not just more egg-like, but potentially more nutritious and better tasting than the original.

In practice, making a convincing plant-based egg is largely a matter of mimicking the way the ovalbumin and other proteins in real eggs behave during cooking. When egg proteins are heated beyond a critical point, they unfold and grab onto one another, forming what food scientists call a gel. That causes the white and then the yolk to set up when cooked.

Woman cracking egg

Eggs aren’t just for frying or scrambling. Cooks use them to bind other ingredients together and to emulsify oil and water to make mayonnaise. The proteins in egg whites can also be whipped into a foam that’s essential in meringues and angel food cake. Finding a plant-based egg substitute that does all of these things has proven challenging.

Eggs aren’t just for frying or scrambling. Cooks use them to bind other ingredients together and to emulsify oil and water to make mayonnaise. The proteins in egg whites can also be whipped into a foam that’s essential in meringues and angel food cake. Finding a plant-based egg substitute that does all of these things has proven challenging. Credit: Adam Gault via Getty

That’s not easy to replicate with some plant proteins, which tend to have more sulfur-containing amino acids than egg proteins do. These sulfur groups bind to each other, so the proteins unfold at higher temperatures. As a result, they must usually be cooked longer and hotter than ones in real eggs.

To make a plant-based egg, food scientists typically start by extracting a mix of proteins from a plant source such as soybean, mung bean, or other crops. “You want to start with what is a sustainable, affordable, and consistent source of plant proteins,” says McClements, who wrote about the design of plant-based foods in the 2024 Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. “So you’re going to narrow your search to that group of proteins that are economically feasible to use.”

Fortunately, some extracts are dominated by one or a few proteins that set at low-enough temperatures to behave pretty much like real egg proteins. Current plant-based eggs rely on these proteins: Just Egg uses the plant albumins and globulin found in mung bean extract, Simply Eggless uses proteins from lupin beans, and McClements and others are experimenting with the photosynthetic enzyme rubisco that is abundant in duckweed and other leafy tissues.

These days, food technologists can produce a wide range of proteins in large quantities by inserting the gene for a selected protein into hosts like bacteria or yeast, then growing the hosts in a tank, a process called precision fermentation. That opens a huge new window for exploration of other plant-based protein sources that may more precisely match the properties of actual eggs.

A few companies are already searching. Shiru, a California-based biotech company, for example, uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence platform to identify proteins with specific properties from its database of more than 450 million natural protein sequences. To find a more egglike plant protein, the company first picked the criteria it needed to match. “For eggs, that is the thermal gel onset—that is, when it goes from liquid to solid when you heat it,” says Jasmin Hume, a protein engineer who is the company’s founder and CEO. “And it must result in the right texture—not too hard, not too gummy, not too soft.” Those properties depend on details such as which amino acids a protein contains, in what order, and precisely how it folds into a 3D structure—a hugely complex process that was the subject of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The company then scoured its database, winnowing it down to a short list that it predicted would fit the bill. Technicians produced those proteins and tested their properties, pinpointing a handful of potential egglike proteins. A few were good enough to start the company working to commercialize their production, though Hume declined to provide further details.

Cracking the flavor code

With the main protein in hand, the next step for food technologists is to add other molecules that help make the product more egglike. Adding vegetable oils, for example, can change the texture. “If I don’t put any oil in the product, it’s going to scramble more like an egg white,” says Chris Jones, a chef who is vice president of product development at Eat Just, which produces the egg substitute Just Egg. “If I put 8 to 15 percent, it’s going to scramble like a whole egg. If I add more, it’s going to behave like a batter.”

Developers can also add gums to prevent the protein in the mixture from settling during storage, or add molecules that are translucent at room temperature but turn opaque when cooked, providing the same visual cue to doneness that real eggs provide.

And then there’s the taste: Current plant-based eggs often suffer from off flavors. “Our first version tasted like what you imagine the bottom of a lawn mower deck would taste like—really grassy,” says Jones. The company’s current product, version 5, still has some beany notes, he says.

Those beany flavors aren’t caused by a single molecule, says Devin Peterson, a flavor chemist at Ohio State University: “It’s a combination that creates beany.” Protein extracts from legumes contain enzymes that create some of these off-flavor volatile molecules—and it’s a painstaking process to single out the offending volatiles and avoid or remove them, he says. (Presumably, cooking up single proteins in a vat could reduce this problem.) Many plant proteins also have molecules called polyphenols bound to their surfaces that contribute to beany flavors. “It’s very challenging to remove these polyphenols, because they’re tightly stuck,” says McClements.

Experts agree that eliminating beany and other off flavors is a good thing. But there’s less agreement on whether developers need to actively make a plant-based egg taste more like a real egg. “That’s actually a polarizing question,” says Jones.

Much of an egg’s flavor comes from sulfur compounds that aren’t necessarily pleasing to consumers. “An egg tastes a certain way because it’s releasing sulfur as it decays,” says Jones. When tasters were asked to compare Eat Just’s egg-free mayonnaise against the traditional, real-egg version, he notes, “at least 50 percent didn’t like the sulfur flavor of a true-egg mayo.”

That poses a quandary for developers. “Should it have a sulfur flavor, or should it have its own point of view, a flavor that our chefs develop? We don’t have an answer yet,” Jones says. Even for something like an omelet, he says, developers could aim for “a neutral spot where whatever seasoning you add is what you’re going to taste.”

As food technologists work to overcome these challenges, plant-based eggs are likely to get better and better. But the ultimate goal might be to surpass, not merely match, the performance of real eggs. Already, McClements and his colleagues have experimented with adding lutein, a nutrient important for eye health, to oil droplets in plant-based egg yolks.

In the future, scientists could adjust the amino acid composition of proteins or boost the calcium or iron content in plant-based eggs to match nutritional needs. “We ultimately could engineer something that’s way healthier than what’s available now,” says Bianca Datta, a food scientist at the Good Food Institute, an international nonprofit that supports the development of plant-based foods. “We’re just at the beginning of seeing what’s possible.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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Automatic braking systems save lives. Now they’ll need to work at 62 mph.

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Otherwise, drivers will get mad. “The mainstream manufacturers have to be a little careful because they don’t want to create customer dissatisfaction by making the system too twitchy,” says Brannon, at AAA. Tesla drivers, for example, have proven very tolerant of “beta testing” and quirks. Your average driver, maybe less so.

Based on its own research, IIHS has pushed automakers to install AEB systems able to operate at faster speeds on their cars. Kidd says IIHS research suggests there have been no systemic, industry-wide issues with safety and automatic emergency braking. Fewer and fewer drivers seem to be turning off their AEB systems out of annoyance. (The new rules make it so drivers can’t turn them off.) But US regulators have investigated a handful of automakers, including General Motors and Honda, for automatic emergency braking issues that have reportedly injured more than 100 people, though automakers have reportedly fixed the issue.

New complexities

Getting cars to fast-brake at even higher speeds will require a series of tech advances, experts say. AEB works by bringing in data from sensors. That information is then turned over to automakers’ custom-tuned classification systems, which are trained to recognize certain situations and road users—that’s a stopped car in the middle of the road up ahead or there’s a person walking across the road up there—and intervene.

So to get AEB to work in higher-speed situations, the tech will have to “see” further down the road. Most of today’s new cars come loaded up with sensors, including cameras and radar, which can collect vital data. But the auto industry trade group argues that the Feds have underestimated the amount of new hardware—including, possibly, more expensive lidar units—that will have to be added to cars.

Brake-makers will have to tinker with components to allow quicker stops, which will require the pressurized fluid that moves through a brake’s hydraulic lines to go even faster. Allowing cars to detect hazards at further distances could require different types of hardware, including sometimes-expensive sensors. “Some vehicles might just need a software update, and some might not have the right sensor suite,” says Bhavana Chakraborty, an engineering director at Bosch, an automotive supplier that builds safety systems. Those without the right hardware will need updates “across the board,” she says, to get to the levels of safety demanded by the federal government.

Automatic braking systems save lives. Now they’ll need to work at 62 mph. Read More »

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The amorous adventures of earwigs

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She ain’t scary, she’s my mother

Elaborate courtship, devoted parenthood, gregarious nature (and occasional cannibalism)—earwigs have a lot going for them.

Few people are fond of earwigs, with their menacing abdominal pincers—whether they’re skittering across your floor, getting comfy in the folds of your camping tent, or minding their own business.

Scientists, too, have given them short shrift compared with the seemingly endless attention they have lavished on social insects like ants and bees.

Yet, there are a handful of exceptions. Some researchers have made conscious career decisions to dig into the hidden, underground world where earwigs reside, and have found the creatures to be surprisingly interesting and social, if still not exactly endearing.

Work in the 1990s and early 2000s focused on earwig courtship. These often intricate performances of attraction and repulsion—in which pincers and antennae play prominent roles—can last hours, and the mating itself as long as 20 hours, at least in one Papua New Guinea species, Tagalina papua. The females usually decide when they’ve had enough, though males of some species use their pincers to restrain the object of their desire.

Males of the bone-house earwig Marava arachidis (often found in bone meal plants and slaughterhouses) are particularly coercive, says entomologist Yoshitaka Kamimura of Keio University in Japan, who has studied earwig mating for 25 years. “They bite the female’s antennae and use a little hook on their genitalia to lock them inside her reproductive tract.”

Size matters

Female earwigs collect sperm in one or more internal pouches and can use it to fertilize multiple broods, so they don’t need to mate again. The only thing most males can do is add their own sperm, but Kamimura has seen males of the pale-legged earwig Euborellia pallipes remove the sperm of other males using an elongated part of their peculiar penis.

It’s better if females can prevent this from happening, because they can be particular about the males they mate with. This may explain why, in some species, male and  female genitalia have increased in size as part of a kind of evolutionary arms race in which males benefit from access to the pouch and females benefit from keeping them out. In the bristly earwig Echinosoma horridum, the male’s genitalia are nearly as long as the rest of his body, and the female’s genitalia almost four times as long as the rest of hers.

Fascinating though they are, the amorous adventures of earwigs weren’t what first caught Kamimura’s attention. Rather, he was intrigued by the female’s dedication to her offspring. “When I was a student, I accidentally disturbed an earwig caring for her eggs in our backyard,” he recalls. “She ran away but returned the next day. I was very interested, and I started to rear them.”

Grow your own earwigs

The care that female earwigs provide to their eggs has also become the focus of study in Europe, where a surge of lab research on European earwigs—Forficula auricularia—was kick-started almost 20 years ago by entomologist Mathias Kölliker at the University of Basel, Switzerland. “Getting them to breed continuously over multiple generations was a big challenge,” he recalls. “The females did lay eggs, but they didn’t develop, and never hatched.”

It turned out that the eggs, which are laid in late fall and hatch in January, need the winter cold to start their development. So the scientists figured out a lab regimen that would chill but not kill the eggs. “That took us about two years,” says Kölliker.

In 2009, Kölliker hired entomologist Joël Meunier, who continues to study earwigs at the University of Tours in France and wrote an overview of the biology and social life of earwigs for the Annual Review of Entomology. Earwigs are high maintenance, he says. “If you work with fruit flies, you can breed 10 generations in a few months, but earwigs take much longer.… And they’re all kept in separate petri dishes—thousands of them—that we have to open twice a week to replace the food.

“I think this is one of the reasons few people work on them. But they’re very fascinating.”

Fending off males

The female’s careful egg grooming has at least two important functions. First, she uses a small brush on her mouthparts to remove the spores of fungi that can kill the eggs. Secondly, as Kölliker, Meunier, and colleagues found, she applies water-repellent hydrocarbons to keep them from drying out.

Males that attempt to approach the nest are aggressively chased away, and with good reason, says Meunier. “Once, when we were in the field in Italy to collect earwigs, we found a male and a female together with a clutch of eggs. We were quite excited: ‘Wow, biparental care, cool!’ So we brought them to the lab. But what we actually observed was that the female was very stressed out, showing a lot of aggression towards the male, while the clutch size was continuously decreasing.”

Males, it turns out, love to snack on eggs, even ones that they fathered. To chase them off, females raise their abdomens to show off their pincers. If that’s not enough, they can use the pincers to hurt the male—even to cut him in half. (Scary as they look, the pincers can’t harm people at all, Meunier says.)

Earwigs can also spray each other with defensive secretions that may have antimicrobial properties, too. “They often use those secretions when meeting others,” says Meunier. “Maybe it also prevents the spread of disease.”

As far as scientists know, these secretions are harmless to humans. But because they contain quinone derivatives, which are also found in substances like henna, they have some quirky side effects. “When you get a lot of it on your hands,” Meunier says, “they’ll turn blue, like a bruise, and these marks can last all week.”

The secretions smell quite pleasant, says Kölliker. “When I had a visitor in the lab, I would sometimes pick up an earwig and hold it under their nose. It’s a very nice odor, actually, kind of an earthy smell.” Kölliker’s cat was less appreciative when he tried it on her: “She immediately backed off,” he says.

A female earwig with her young.

A female earwig with her young. Credit: Patrick Lorne / Getty Images

Overbearing moms

Surprisingly, Meunier’s recent work suggests that earwig offspring may pay a price for their mom’s protectiveness. In European earwigs and several other species, although the nymphs that emerge from eggs can feed on their own after a couple of days, mothers usually stay with them for a few weeks after they hatch. Yet, at least in the lab, that does not seem to enhance the nymphs’ chances of survival.

“In the best case, the mother’s presence doesn’t change a thing,” says Meunier. “At worst, nymphs that grow up with their mother are less likely to reach adulthood and will become smaller adults.” It’s unclear why. But things may be different in the wild, where male earwigs or predators like spiders pose threats, making it safer to stay with mom.

The mother herself seems to benefit. Meunier has observed that as soon as the nymphs emerge, they eat the parasitic mites that often bother breeding females. And once they start foraging on their own, the feces they leave all over the nest may be food for their mother and help her to produce a second brood. The nymphs also feast on each other’s feces, sometimes straight from the source.

The voracious nymphs don’t stop there: They regularly eat each other, and nymphs of the hump earwig Anechura harmandi will almost always eat their mother. “It occurs in every family,” Meunier says, “and it helps the nymphs grow.”

Let’s get together

With all this aggression and cannibalism, you’d expect adult earwigs not actively seeking mates to avoid each other, and in many species, they do. Yet European earwigs regularly group together by the hundreds, sometimes mixing things up with other earwig species.

Recent work from Meunier’s lab showed that European earwigs that grew up in groups are more likely to look for company as adults than those reared in isolation, and females removed from these groups can get so stressed they are more likely to succumb to fungal infections.

“We have no idea why,” says Meunier. “Maybe it’s healthier to live together. Or maybe they just like company.”

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

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