In March 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev presented to the Russian Chemical Society a way of laying out around sixty elements then known. He ordered them by atomic weight and broke the line into rows so that elements with similar chemical behaviour fell into the same columns. Where the pattern called for an element that no one had found, he did not close the line up. He left the space empty and described what should eventually fill it.

The arrangement is now so familiar that the gaps are easy to overlook. They are the part worth dwelling on. Other people had already noticed that the elements repeat their properties at regular intervals. What Mendeleev did with the repetition was different in degree: he trusted the pattern enough to bet against the existing inventory, and to say, in print, that the inventory was incomplete in specific places by specific amounts.

What the table was built on

The organising idea was periodicity. Run through the elements in order of increasing atomic weight and their properties do not change steadily; they cycle. A reactive light metal is followed some steps later by another reactive light metal, a pungent gas by another pungent gas. Mendeleev arranged the rows so that these recurrences stacked into vertical groups, lithium above sodium above potassium, and so on.

Atomic weight was the only quantity he had to order by. He did not know what caused the periodicity, because the structure of the atom was still decades away. He was working from measured weights and observed chemistry, and arranging both until the columns made chemical sense. In a few cases the weights and the chemistry disagreed, and he chose the chemistry, placing an element where its behaviour fit even when its measured weight argued for somewhere else.

The gaps and the predictions

For three of the empty spaces, Mendeleev went further than leaving a blank. He gave the missing elements provisional names built from the Sanskrit prefix eka, meaning one, so that eka-aluminium meant the element one place below aluminium. For each he estimated an atomic weight, a density, and a set of chemical properties, reading them off the neighbours that surrounded the hole.

The estimates were close enough to be checked. Eka-aluminium arrived in 1875, when the French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran isolated a new metal he called gallium; its density, once measured carefully, matched Mendeleev’s figure. Eka-boron arrived in 1879 as scandium, identified by Lars Fredrik Nilson in Sweden. Eka-silicon arrived in 1886 as germanium, found by Clemens Winkler in Germany, and its properties tracked the prediction closely enough that the agreement is still the standard example taught from the episode.

Three confirmed predictions within seventeen years did more for the table than any argument could. A scheme that merely tidied the known elements would have been one convenience among several. A scheme that named absent elements and described them before anyone had seen them was harder to dismiss.

He was not the only one, and that matters

Mendeleev did not invent the idea that the elements form a periodic series. Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois had plotted them on a spiral in 1862. John Newlands, in London, had published his “law of octaves” in the mid-1860s, noting that every eighth element resembled the first, and had been mocked for it. The German chemist Lothar Meyer was developing his own table at almost the same time as Mendeleev and arguably had the periodicity of physical properties drawn more cleanly.

What separated Mendeleev’s version was not priority but nerve. Newlands had let the known elements set the length of his pattern. Mendeleev let the pattern set the length, and treated mismatches as evidence that an element was missing or that a measured weight was wrong, rather than as evidence against the scheme. The historian Eric Scerri, who has written the standard modern account of the table’s development, has argued that this willingness to subordinate the data to the system, and then to stake testable predictions on it, is the better explanation for why Mendeleev’s name attached to the result.

Where the 1869 table was wrong

The story is usually told as a clean run of successful forecasts. It was not clean. Mendeleev predicted elements that were never found, including light elements he expected to sit before hydrogen, tied later to his mistaken belief in a luminiferous ether. Several of his other interpolations did not pan out as described.

Two larger problems sat outside the 1869 table entirely. The noble gases, argon and its relatives, were discovered in the 1890s and formed a whole column that the original scheme had not anticipated; Mendeleev was at first reluctant to accept them. And the ordering principle itself was incomplete. A handful of pairs, tellurium and iodine among them, sat in the right chemical place but the wrong weight order. The reason became clear only in 1913, after Mendeleev’s death, when Henry Moseley showed that the elements are properly ordered not by weight but by nuclear charge, the atomic number. The table Mendeleev built by chemical intuition turned out to be tracking a physical quantity he had no way to measure.

That is the honest shape of it. The gaps were the achievement, and the parts he filled wrongly belong in the same account as the parts he filled before anyone else could.

The part worth keeping

The detail in the headline is fair: by 1869 the chemistry of the elements had become ordered enough that a missing piece could be described before it was found. That is a particular kind of confidence, and it is rarer than the finished table makes it look. It requires a pattern reliable enough to extrapolate from, and someone prepared to be checked against an empty square.

Mendeleev was prepared to be checked, and within his lifetime three of the squares filled in close to where he had said they would. The ones that did not fill in, and the deeper rule that only emerged after he was gone, are part of why the table is interesting rather than merely useful. It was right enough to predict, and wrong in ways that pointed at the physics underneath.

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If you had to summarise Seneca’s most uncomfortable observation in a single sentence, it would be this: most of what you are spending your life trying to acquire is not actually going to satisfy you when you get it. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher who served as tutor and later adviser to the Emperor Nero, wrote 124 surviving letters to a younger Roman official named Lucilius across the final years of his life — letters that have remained in continuous circulation for nearly 2,000 years and that contain some of the more concentrated observations of human psychology produced in the ancient world. Among the recurring themes in these letters is the curious gap between what people pursue and what actually makes them content. Seneca’s specific claim was that the pursuit of more — more wealth, more possessions, more recognition, more of essentially anything one could accumulate — does not converge on satisfaction. As the supply increases, the demand increases with it, and the gap between the two never closes.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s reference on Seneca, his writings repeatedly addressed this question across multiple letters and essays. “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor,” he wrote in his second letter to Lucilius. “Contented poverty,” he added, quoting his philosophical opponent Epicurus approvingly, “is an honourable estate.” In another letter, again quoting Epicurus: “Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the whole world.” Contentment, in Seneca’s account, is not a function of how much one has but of how little one needs. People who have learned to need less can be content with very little. People who have not can fail to be content with essentially anything.

The empirical convergence

For most of the period between Seneca’s death and the late twentieth century, his observations existed as philosophical claims — defensible by argument, supported by example, but unverifiable by anything resembling modern empirical methodology. This changed in 1971, when the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced into the social-science literature the concept of the “hedonic treadmill” — a model in which positive events produce short-term elevations in subjective well-being that fade over time as people adjust their expectations upward to match their new circumstances. The model predicted that lottery winners, despite their substantial good fortune, should not end up much happier than they were before winning, because their reference point would shift upward and their new wealth would come to feel normal rather than exceptional.

Per the Wikipedia reference on the hedonic treadmill and its empirical foundations, Brickman and his colleagues Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman tested this prediction directly in a now-famous 1978 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research team compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 demographically matched controls and 29 individuals who had been paralysed in accidents. The results were striking. Lottery winners were not significantly happier than controls. They reported finding less pleasure in ordinary daily activities than non-winners did, suggesting that the peak experience of winning had contaminated their capacity for mundane satisfaction. The paralysed accident victims, while clearly less happy than controls, were closer to controls than would have been predicted by the magnitude of their loss. The basic Stoic claim — that the relationship between external circumstances and inner contentment is much weaker than ordinary intuition suggests — was, in its broad outlines, empirically confirmed.

Why the mechanism works

The mechanism Brickman and Campbell identified, which Seneca had described in different language, is that humans adjust their internal reference point as their external circumstances improve. The first car you own provides substantial improvement over having no car. By the time you have reached the tenth car in a lifetime of progressively improving vehicles, each new one barely registers, even though every one of them would have seemed luxurious to the person you were before you owned any. The same pattern applies to houses, salaries, food, clothing, professional recognition, and essentially every other category of acquirable good.

The economist Richard Easterlin documented the same pattern at the level of whole societies in 1974, in what has come to be called the Easterlin Paradox. Within any given country at any given moment, richer people report being happier than poorer ones. But as an entire country grows richer over decades — as per-capita income doubles, then triples, then quadruples — average happiness barely moves. The collective acquisition of more does not produce collective contentment. The individual aspiration level rises in parallel with collective wealth, and the gap between aspiration and achievement remains essentially constant.

The hypocrisy charge

The honest account of Seneca’s argument requires noting an awkward complication. Seneca himself was extraordinarily wealthy. He served as a senior adviser to Emperor Nero and accumulated, over the course of his career, a personal fortune estimated by Roman historians at approximately 300 million sesterces — making him one of the richer private citizens in the Roman Empire. He owned multiple villas, substantial estates, and significant financial holdings, including loans to provincial elites that some historians believe may have helped trigger the Boudican revolt in Britain. The contrast between his philosophical writings on the worthlessness of wealth and his actual accumulation of substantial personal fortune has been the subject of debate since his own lifetime, when the Roman senator Publius Suillius Rufus publicly attacked him on this point in 58 CE.

Seneca’s response, articulated in his essay On the Happy Life, was that the wise person does not need wealth but is also not required to refuse it when it comes — that what matters is one’s relationship to one’s possessions, not the bare quantity of them. The defence is contested. Some readers find it self-serving. Others find it consistent with the broader Stoic framework, which emphasised the cultivation of an inner attitude rather than the renunciation of external goods. The biographical inconvenience does not, in any case, invalidate the underlying psychological claim. The clinical observation that the pursuit of more does not produce satisfaction can be empirically true even if the person making the observation happens to be wealthy. The Brickman and Easterlin data confirm Seneca’s claim regardless of how the philosopher himself lived.

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For people who carry two copies of the APOE4 gene, the message from clinical medicine over the past three decades has been blunt: your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease is dramatically elevated, the elevation is genetic, and there is not much you can do about it. About 2 percent of the human population falls into this category. They have inherited one copy of the APOE4 variant from each parent, which combine to produce a 12-fold higher lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s disease compared with people who carry no APOE4 copies. The dogma, until recently, was that this risk was essentially built in. Lifestyle changes might shift the odds at the margins. Nothing was thought to substantially overcome the genetic loading. In August 2025, a research team led by investigators at Mass General Brigham, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute published a paper in Nature Medicine suggesting that the dogma was wrong — or at least incomplete — and that a specific dietary pattern can substantially modulate even the highest-risk genetic profile.

According to the Mass General Brigham press release accompanying the study, the research team analysed data from approximately 5,700 participants in two long-running US cohorts — the Nurses’ Health Study (4,215 women, followed from 1989 to 2023) and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1,490 men, followed from 1993 to 2023). Combined, the data covered more than three decades of dietary records, genetic information, blood metabolomic profiles, and tracking of dementia outcomes across the participants’ lives. The study population was large enough, and the follow-up long enough, to provide statistically meaningful comparisons across genetic-risk subgroups — including the small but critical APOE4 homozygous subgroup, which most previous dietary studies had been too small to analyse on its own.

What the data showed

The headline finding was specific and striking. Per CNN Health’s coverage of the study, participants who most closely followed a Mediterranean dietary pattern — high in vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, legumes, fish, and olive oil; low in red meat, processed meat, and alcohol — showed reduced dementia risk across all genetic-risk categories. The protective effect was modest in people with no APOE4 copies. It was somewhat larger in people with one APOE4 copy. And it was substantially largest in people with two APOE4 copies, in whom close Mediterranean diet adherence was associated with at least a 35 percent reduction in dementia risk compared with APOE4 homozygotes who did not follow the dietary pattern. The protective effect, in other words, scaled with the genetic risk it was working against — the diet helped most in the people who needed it most.

Yuxi Liu, the study’s lead author and a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, summarised the finding for CNN: “We followed over 5,700 people for 34 years and found those who followed a baseline Mediterranean diet with little alcohol, red and processed meat but full of vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, legumes, fish and olive oil all reduced the risk of dementia. But the benefit was highest for people with the APOE4 gene, especially those with two copies of APOE4.” Richard Isaacson, an Alzheimer’s specialist not involved in the research, framed the implications more directly: “Hopefully this will change the current dogma that having two copies of the APOE4 is a ‘fait accompli’ for developing Alzheimer’s. Genes do not have to be your destiny.”

The metabolomic mechanism

What distinguishes the 2025 study from earlier dietary research on Alzheimer’s is that the team also measured the participants’ blood metabolomes — the full set of small molecules circulating in their plasma — and tracked how the metabolite profiles varied by genotype and by diet. As documented in the original paper by Yuxi Liu and colleagues in Nature Medicine, the integrated analysis identified 57 specific metabolites whose associations with dementia risk varied by APOE4 genotype or by other Alzheimer’s-related genetic variants. Cholesteryl esters and sphingomyelins, for example, were most strongly associated with increased dementia risk specifically in APOE4 homozygotes. Inverse associations with glycerides — meaning higher glyceride levels were associated with lower dementia risk — were also specific to the APOE4 homozygous genotype.

The Mediterranean diet, in the data, was unusually effective at modulating exactly the metabolites that mattered most in APOE4 homozygotes. The diet pushed cholesteryl ester and sphingomyelin levels downward (reducing dementia-associated metabolites) while supporting glyceride profiles associated with protection. The mechanism is not yet fully characterised, but the integrated metabolomic data provide what the authors call “biological plausibility” for the observed dietary effect — meaning the diet appears to be working through measurable biochemical pathways rather than through some unspecified general health benefit. The combination of long-term outcome data and detailed metabolomic profiling makes the 2025 finding substantially more mechanistically grounded than earlier dietary observational studies that established correlation without identifying the underlying biochemistry.

Why the APOE4 finding matters

The clinical significance of the APOE4 result is hard to overstate. Alzheimer’s disease has a substantial genetic component — heritability has been estimated at up to 80 percent — and APOE is by some distance the strongest single genetic risk factor for the common sporadic form of the disease. The 12-fold elevated risk that comes with carrying two APOE4 copies is among the largest known gene-disease effect sizes in medicine. For decades, the consensus framing was that this genetic load was essentially fixed. Patients who learned through genetic testing that they were APOE4 homozygotes typically received the news as a sentence rather than a probability — something to brace against rather than something to act on.

The 2025 finding does not, by itself, eliminate the elevated risk. A 35 percent reduction in dementia risk among APOE4 homozygotes following a Mediterranean diet still leaves these individuals at substantially elevated risk compared with the general population. What the finding does establish is that the risk is modifiable — that a daily food pattern, sustained over decades, can meaningfully shift the trajectory in a population that previous research had largely written off. As reported in Harvard Health Publishing’s coverage of the study, the practical recommendation for APOE4 carriers is not radically different from what cardiologists and neurologists have been telling everyone for decades — eat more vegetables, more fish, more olive oil, less red meat, less processed food — but the new evidence suggests that for the APOE4 homozygous subgroup specifically, the recommendation may carry substantially more weight than it does for the general population.

Limitations and what comes next

The Liu et al. 2025 paper is an observational study rather than a randomised controlled trial, and the authors acknowledged several limitations that warrant honest framing. The cohort consisted of well-educated individuals of European ancestry, which means the generalisability to other populations — different genetic backgrounds, different food cultures, different socioeconomic contexts — is not yet established. The dietary adherence was self-reported through periodic food-frequency questionnaires rather than objectively measured. The participants who closely followed a Mediterranean diet may have differed from non-followers in unmeasured ways that could partly account for the dementia difference. The 2025 finding is not, on its own, proof that Mediterranean diet directly causes reduced dementia risk in APOE4 homozygotes; it is strong observational evidence consistent with that conclusion.

What the paper adds to the existing literature is the genetic-stratified analysis and the metabolomic mechanism, both of which provide convergent support for the broader claim. Earlier work — the 2023 brain-autopsy study showing 40 percent lower odds of Alzheimer’s pathology in Mediterranean and MIND diet adherents, the FINGER multi-domain lifestyle trial in Finland, the long line of MIND diet research at Rush University — had built the case that diet matters for dementia risk in general populations. The 2025 paper extends the case specifically to APOE4 homozygotes, who had been the most pessimistically counselled subgroup and now appear to be the subgroup with the most to gain from dietary intervention. Whether this translates into changed clinical recommendations, changed genetic-counselling practice, and changed daily behaviour in the 2 percent of the population carrying two APOE4 copies will be the central question for the next several years of Alzheimer’s prevention research. The biological case for the diet has now been made. The cultural case for actually following it is, as always, harder.

The post A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer’s risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable appeared first on Space Daily.

The marshmallow test is one of the most repeated stories in popular psychology. A small child is left alone with a treat and told that waiting will earn a second one. The children who held out, the familiar version goes, grew into teenagers and adults who scored higher, coped better, and generally did well, as if a single act of willpower at four had set the course of a life.

A 2018 study tested that promise against a much larger and more varied group of children, and the promise mostly did not hold. Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, the researchers found that an extra minute of waiting at age four predicted only about a tenth of a standard deviation more achievement at age fifteen. That link was roughly half the size reported in the original work, and it shrank by about two-thirds once the researchers accounted for the child’s family background, early cognitive ability, and home environment.

What the replication actually did

The original results came from a study by Shoda, Mischel, and Peake in 1990, which reported strong correlations between a preschooler’s ability to delay gratification and both achievement and behaviour in adolescence. The sample was small and highly selective, drawn from children in the Stanford University community.

The 2018 team, led by Tyler Watts with Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan, ran what they called a conceptual replication. Rather than re-stage the exact experiment, they drew on the long-running NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which had measured children’s delay of gratification at 54 months and then followed them for years. Their analysis sample included 918 children, and the subgroup they focused on, children whose mothers had not finished college, numbered 552, about ten times the size of the original 1990 study.

That difference in scale matters. A larger and more economically mixed sample makes it possible to ask whether an apparent effect of willpower is really an effect of the circumstances that shape willpower in the first place.

The choice to focus on children of less-educated mothers was deliberate, and it cuts against the suspicion that the researchers were stacking the deck. The full study sample skewed toward advantaged families. The subgroup of children whose mothers had not completed college was, by the authors’ account, more comparable with a nationally representative sample of American children. In other words, the group where the marshmallow effect looked weakest was also the group that looked most like the country as a whole.

Why the story travelled so well

Part of what made the marshmallow test so sticky is how clean it looks. A child, a treat, a timer, and a single number: seconds waited. From that one number flowed a tidy moral that fit decades of advice about character and success, the idea that the capacity to wait is a stable trait, visible early, that quietly shapes the rest of a life.

A finding that simple is easy to repeat and hard to qualify. The original correlations were real, but they came from a small and unusual group of children, and a strong correlation in a narrow sample can look very different once a wider, more varied population is measured. That is the gap the 2018 study set out to probe, and it is why the size and makeup of the new sample do so much of the work.

The link did not vanish, but it thinned

It would overstate the findings to say the marshmallow test was debunked outright. Among children of less-educated mothers, waiting longer at age four was still associated with somewhat better achievement at fifteen. The point is how much of that association survived scrutiny.

Before controls, the correlation was already only half the size of the original studies’ headline numbers. After the researchers adjusted for family background, early cognitive skills, and the home environment, roughly two-thirds of even that smaller link disappeared. What remained was a faint association rather than the strong, life-shaping signal of the popular telling.

The team also noticed that most of the predictive value sat at the very start of the waiting period. Most of the variation in adolescent achievement came from whether a child could wait at least 20 seconds, not from the heroic minutes of resistance that make the test memorable. A child who could hold out briefly looked much like a child who held out for the full delay.

The part the famous version leaves out

The behavioural promise fared worst of all. The original story implied that early self-control predicted not just test scores but a calmer, better-adjusted adolescence. In the replication, associations between delay time and measures of behaviour at age fifteen were much smaller and rarely reached statistical significance.

In other words, the strand of the marshmallow legend most often repeated by parents, that a patient four-year-old becomes a well-behaved teenager, is the strand the larger study supported least.

What this does and does not prove

This is a single conceptual replication, and it should be read as one. Because it used a different sample and a different delay-of-gratification measure than the 1990 study, it is not a perfect like-for-like rerun, and the authors are careful to frame it as a replication and extension rather than a verdict. A follow-up analysis by other researchers later argued that the two studies’ results, read carefully, are less far apart than the headlines suggested.

The findings are also correlational. The study can show that early delay of gratification predicts later outcomes more weakly once background is accounted for; it cannot prove that teaching a child to wait would, or would not, change that child’s future. Self-control may still matter. What the data undercut is the specific, tidy claim that a few minutes of waiting at four reveals a trait that determines how the next decade goes.

And the controls themselves carry the real message. The reason the link thinned so much is that delay of gratification is bound up with the resources around a child: a parent’s education, the cognitive skills already in place by age four, the stability of the home. A test that looks like it measures character may be measuring circumstance.

What is left to sit with

The marshmallow test endures because it offers a clean moral: wait, and you will be rewarded. The larger study does not erase that idea so much as complicate it. A child’s patience at four still says something, but much of what it says is about the world that child was already living in.

That is a less quotable finding, and a harder one to put on a poster. It asks whether we have been admiring willpower when we were looking, much of the time, at advantage.

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Roopkund Lake sits more than 5,000 metres up in the Indian Himalayas, a shallow body of meltwater that stays frozen for much of the year. When the ice and snow retreat, bones appear: skulls, ribs, and limb fragments belonging to several hundred people, scattered along the shore and resting on the lake bottom. For most of the twentieth century, the favoured explanation was a single disaster, often told as a sudden, violent hailstorm that killed a group of travellers in one terrible afternoon.

A 2019 genetic study took that story apart. Researchers recovered genome-wide ancient DNA from 38 of the skeletons and found that the dead did not belong to one population, and did not die at one time. They fell into three genetically distinct groups, and radiocarbon dating placed two of those groups roughly a thousand years apart. One group carried ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean, thousands of kilometres from a remote Himalayan shrine.

What the bones actually held

The team reported ancestry that clustered cleanly into three sets. Twenty-three individuals had ancestry that falls within the range of present-day South Asians. Fourteen more had ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean, the kind seen today in people from places such as Greece and Crete. A single individual carried Southeast Asian-related ancestry.

The radiocarbon dates were the surprise that reframed everything. The South Asian group dated to around 800 CE, with evidence that they were deposited in more than one event rather than all at once. Every other sampled individual dated to around 1800 CE. Two clusters of dead, separated by something close to a thousand years, had come to rest in the same small lake.

That single result rules out any explanation that depends on one moment. A storm, a battle, a mass illness: whatever happened at Roopkund, it did not happen once.

The split showed up in more than the genes. Stable isotope measurements, which read the chemical traces of a person’s diet from their bones, revealed distinct dietary profiles for the two main groups. The DNA and the chemistry agreed: these were different people, living different lives, who happened to end up in the same place.

Where the hailstorm story came from

The disaster version was not invented from nothing. An earlier bioarchaeological survey of the site identified three individuals with unhealed compression fractures, injuries to the top of the skull and shoulders consistent with a sudden blow from above. From this, investigators floated the idea of a violent hailstorm, the sort that does occur near Roopkund, while openly noting that other scenarios were plausible.

The same survey had already sensed that more than one kind of person lay at the lake. It described both very robust, tall individuals, outside the range of almost all South Asians, and more gracile ones, and suggested at least two distinct groups were present. The genetics later confirmed that intuition, and then went further than any survey of bone shape could.

Crucially, even if a hailstorm did kill some of the people whose remains date to around 800 CE, it cannot account for a separate group who died near 1800 CE. The compression-fracture evidence, real as it is, covers a fraction of the dead and a fraction of the timeline.

A group from the far side of the ancient world

The hardest finding to explain is the Mediterranean-ancestry group. These were not local people, and the study found no genetic signal that they had mixed substantially with South Asian populations. Their chemistry pointed the same way: a predominantly terrestrial rather than marine-based diet, which suggested they had lived somewhere inland before travelling to the mountains.

Why they came remains genuinely unresolved. Local folklore tells of a pilgrimage to the shrine of the mountain goddess Nanda Devi, and pilgrimage is a real and recurring feature of the region. But the study’s authors point out that it would be surprising for a large group of eastern Mediterranean travellers to be undertaking a Hindu pilgrimage, in a tradition where such practices have not been common. Whether they were pilgrims, or were drawn to the lake for some other reason, the paper calls a mystery.

The explanations that do not fit

Other tidy stories failed too. One long-standing guess was that the dead were a single party travelling together, perhaps a family group or a military expedition caught by disaster. The genetics found no relative pairs of the third degree or closer among the sequenced individuals, which is evidence against the idea that the skeletons represent groups of families, and it sits awkwardly with the notion of one tight-knit company dying together.

The Mediterranean ancestry also tempted a romantic explanation: that these were descendants of Indo-Greek populations established in the region after the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the same deep history that left a genetic mark on some present-day groups such as the Kalash. The study found this unlikely. A community with that history would be expected to carry South Asian admixture built up over many generations, and the eastern Mediterranean individuals at Roopkund show no such mixing. Genetically, they look less like long-settled locals of distant Greek descent and more like people who arrived from the eastern Mediterranean not long before they died.

What this does and does not prove

It is worth being precise about what the DNA settles and what it leaves open. The genetics firmly establish that the Roopkund dead are not a single population and were not deposited in a single event. That much is hard to argue with once the radiocarbon dates are on the table.

It does not, however, tell us how any of these people died. Ancient DNA reports ancestry and, in some cases, kinship; it does not record a cause of death. The team also tested for disease and found no evidence that the individuals carried bacterial pathogens, which offers no support for the idea that they died in an epidemic. The authors add the honest caveat that absence of pathogen DNA in bone powder can simply mean it was present at too low a level to detect, so even “not an epidemic” is a soft conclusion rather than a closed case.

The site itself works against certainty. Roopkund is frequently disturbed by rockslides, and for many years visited by pilgrims and hikers who have handled the bones and carried off artifacts. Much of the context an archaeologist would normally rely on has been scrambled. The study analysed 38 individuals out of several hundred, so the three-group picture may yet gain a fourth or fifth as more remains are sampled.

What is left standing

Strip away the parts that cannot be confirmed, and a stranger story survives than the one it replaced. A high, frozen lake on a Himalayan ridge collected the dead across at least a thousand years. Some were South Asians who died around the ninth century, possibly in more than one episode. Others, centuries later, were people whose ancestors lived near the eastern Mediterranean, who somehow ended their journeys at the same waterline.

The neat single-disaster ending turned out to be the easy version. What the DNA left in its place is messier, older, and harder to close.

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On July 8, 2011, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on STS-135 carrying four astronauts and a logistics module called Raffaello, and when its wheels stopped on the runway thirteen days later NASA no longer had a way to put a human, or even a bag of groceries, on the International Space Station. The orbiting laboratory kept circling overhead at roughly 28,000 kilometers per hour, completing a full lap of the planet every ninety minutes, and the country that had built most of it suddenly had to buy seats from Russia at a price that eventually climbed past $90 million per astronaut.

The gap lasted nearly a decade for crew. For cargo it was shorter, because one private company, founded by a South African internet entrepreneur who had never built a rocket before 2002, stepped into the breach with a capsule called Dragon and a rocket called Falcon 9.

A lab the size of a football field, 400 kilometers up

The ISS is the largest structure humans have ever assembled in space. Its main construction ran from 1998 to 2011, stitched together across more than thirty assembly flights by the Space Shuttle and Russian Proton rockets. It weighs roughly 420 tonnes. Its pressurized volume is comparable to a six-bedroom house. It hosts a rotating crew of seven, drawn from NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA and the Canadian Space Agency, working in a laboratory that travels the equivalent of a trip to the Moon and back every day.

And every gram of food, every spare filter, every science experiment, every replacement urine pump has to be flown up to it.

Before 2011, NASA had three ways to do that: the Space Shuttle, Russian Progress freighters, and European and Japanese cargo vehicles. After Atlantis rolled into a museum in Florida, NASA had two ways, and none of them were American.

The retirement nobody had a replacement for

The Shuttle was retired for reasons that had been clear since the Columbia accident in 2003: it was expensive, it was aging, and two catastrophic accidents had killed fourteen astronauts. Challenger broke apart during ascent in 1986 after a solid rocket booster seal failed in the cold; Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003 after a breach in the orbiter’s heat shield let superheated gas into the wing. The Bush administration’s 2004 Vision for Space Exploration set the retirement date. The replacement vehicle, the Constellation program’s Ares I rocket and Orion capsule, was supposed to be flying crews by 2014.

It wasn’t. The Obama administration cancelled Constellation in 2010 after a review panel concluded the program was years behind and billions over budget. Orion survived in a slimmer form, eventually flying around the Moon uncrewed in 2022 on Artemis I, but it was never aimed at the ISS. The station, in other words, had been left without an American ride before the Shuttle even stopped flying.

NASA’s answer was something the agency had never tried at this scale: hand the job to industry, on fixed-price contracts, and buy the service rather than the spacecraft.

The contract that bet on a company that had blown up three rockets

In December 2008, NASA awarded the Commercial Resupply Services contract to two companies. One was Orbital Sciences, an established aerospace firm in Virginia. The other was SpaceX, then a six-year-old startup in Hawthorne, California, whose Falcon 1 rocket had failed on its first three attempts before finally reaching orbit in September 2008, just three months before the contract was signed.

The SpaceX award was worth $1.6 billion for twelve flights. The company had to design and build a pressurized capsule capable of berthing with the ISS, a heat shield capable of bringing experiments and hardware back down through reentry, and a rocket capable of putting both into the correct orbit. None of that hardware existed yet.

Dragon flew to the station for the first time on May 25, 2012. Astronaut Don Pettit reached out with the Canadarm2 robotic arm and grappled the capsule as it drifted alongside the ISS, the first time a private spacecraft had ever connected to the station. SpaceX has been flying cargo Dragons there ever since. In May 2026, the company launched its 34th commercial resupply mission, carrying 6,500 pounds of cargo on a Falcon 9.

The crew gap, and how long it actually lasted

Cargo was the easier half of the problem. Crew was harder, because the safety bar for a human-rated spacecraft is set higher than for anything else NASA buys.

From July 2011 onward, every American, European, Japanese and Canadian astronaut who reached the ISS got there on a Russian Soyuz launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA paid Roscosmos for seats under a series of contracts whose per-seat price kept climbing. By 2018 the agency was paying more than $80 million per astronaut. The arrangement was politically uncomfortable, financially painful, and operationally fragile — a single Soyuz failure, like the abort that cut short the MS-10 launch in October 2018, briefly left no humans able to reach the station at all.

NASA had launched the Commercial Crew Program in 2010 to fix this. In September 2014 it awarded two contracts: $4.2 billion to Boeing for a capsule called Starliner, and $2.6 billion to SpaceX for a crew version of Dragon. First flights were planned for 2017.

SpaceX got there in May 2020, when Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched on Crew Dragon Demo-2 from the same Kennedy Space Center pad — 39A — that had launched Apollo 11 and the final Shuttle. The gap between American crew launches from American soil was eight years and ten months.

Boeing’s Starliner did not get there on schedule. Its 2019 uncrewed test ended in the wrong orbit. Its 2024 Crew Flight Test reached the ISS but suffered thruster problems serious enough that NASA brought the astronauts home on a SpaceX Dragon instead, leaving Starliner to undock empty. The follow-up cargo version of the spacecraft remains under review, with NASA continuing to work through the technical issues uncovered during the crewed flight.

For the moment, the United States has exactly one operational crew vehicle to the ISS, and it is the one a private company built on a fixed-price contract.

What “private” actually means here

SpaceX did not invent commercial spaceflight on its own. The company that came closest to closing the gap was joined by Northrop Grumman, whose Cygnus cargo freighter flies on a mix of Antares and, more recently, Falcon 9 rockets. In April 2026, a Falcon 9 launched the NG-24 Cygnus mission to the ISS, an arrangement that would have seemed implausible a decade earlier — one private launcher carrying another private company’s cargo ship to a station the U.S. government built.

The model has spread beyond NASA’s resupply contracts. Three private companies — Axiom Space, Vast, and now Voyager Technologies — are flying or preparing to fly private astronaut missions to the ISS, paying NASA for access and using SpaceX Dragons to get there. The same companies are building the commercial stations meant to replace the ISS after it is deorbited in 2031.

The orbital ballet, every ninety minutes

The station itself does not care who is launching to it. It travels at about 7.66 kilometers per second, fast enough to circle Earth roughly every 90 minutes. Each lap, the crew sees a sunrise and a sunset. Each lap, the station drifts a little lower into the thin upper atmosphere and has to be boosted back up by visiting spacecraft firing their thrusters. For years that boost came from Russian Progress freighters and the European ATV. The Cygnus has done it. Dragon has done it. The job, like every job at the station, is now shared.

NASA’s next round of crew flights is already on the schedule. The agency has named the four astronauts assigned to Crew-13, the thirteenth operational Dragon flight to the ISS, continuing a cadence that has now exceeded a flight every six months for five years.

The gap, in numbers

From the moment Atlantis touched down on July 21, 2011, to the moment Crew Dragon Demo-2 docked on May 31, 2020, 3,237 days passed. During that stretch, the ISS completed roughly 51,800 orbits of the Earth. American astronauts continued to live and work onboard for almost every one of them, brought up and returned on Soyuz capsules launched from a Soviet-era pad in Kazakhstan, in deals brokered through a Russian space agency whose relationship with NASA grew steadily more strained.

The station kept circling. The lab kept running experiments. The view from the cupola — sixteen sunrises a day, oceans and continents rolling beneath — never paused. And the country that had welded most of the structure together watched its astronauts reach it on someone else’s rocket for nearly nine years, until a company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo finally got one of its own to dock.

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When Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally splashed down off the Florida panhandle in late March 2025 after more than nine months on the International Space Station, they came home inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The Boeing Starliner that had carried them up the previous June was already gone — its service module burned up in the atmosphere months earlier, taking with it the thrusters NASA investigators most wanted to examine. An eight-day test flight had become the longest unplanned stay in American spaceflight history, and the rescue had come from the only US company with a working crew capsule.

That moment crystallized something NASA officials had been quietly acknowledging for years. SpaceX has held a monopoly on US crewed access to the ISS since Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken splashed down aboard Endeavour in early August 2020, ending a nine-year gap in domestic human spaceflight. More than five years later, with Starliner still grounded, that monopoly has not loosened. It has hardened.

The official plan was never supposed to look like this. When NASA awarded its Commercial Crew contracts in September 2014, the agency split the work deliberately between two providers: Boeing for the CST-100 Starliner, SpaceX for Crew Dragon. Two vehicles, two rockets, two launch pads. Redundancy was the entire point.

The gap that was supposed to close in 2017

Both capsules were supposed to be carrying astronauts by 2017. Crew Dragon’s first operational flight, Crew-1, finally launched in November 2020 — three years late. Starliner’s first crewed flight didn’t lift off until early June 2024, seven years behind schedule, and it ended with NASA deciding the spacecraft was too risky to bring its own crew home.

Since the Wilmore-Williams rescue, every American who has reached the ISS has done it inside a Dragon. Crew-9, Crew-10, Crew-11. Private missions flown by Axiom Space. Even European Space Agency astronauts like Denmark’s Andreas Mogensen and Sweden’s Marcus Wandt have ridden up on Falcon 9. SpaceX now operates a fleet of five reusable capsules — Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance, Freedom, and the newest, Grace, which debuted on Axiom’s Ax-4 mission in 2025. Endeavour, the capsule that flew Hurley and Behnken in 2020, has now made five trips to orbit. The Falcon 9 boosters beneath them are themselves reused, scorched first stages returning to droneships off the Florida coast within minutes of liftoff.

Why the Russian backup quietly disappeared

For decades, the Soyuz was the safety net. From the Space Shuttle’s retirement in July 2011 until 2020, NASA bought seats on Soyuz at prices that climbed significantly over the years. Even after Dragon began flying, NASA and Roscosmos kept a barter arrangement going — a seat-swap so that at least one American and one Russian were always on station, on different vehicles, in case one was grounded.

That arrangement still technically exists. A NASA astronaut launched on a Soyuz in 2025 as part of the seat-swap program. But the political ground beneath it has thinned since February 2022, and the seat-swap is no longer the redundancy NASA can plan a decade around. The only American-built vehicle in the loop is Dragon.

What Starliner still has to prove

Boeing’s capsule isn’t dead, but its path back to flight has slipped repeatedly. Through the first half of 2025 NASA said it had not yet decided whether Starliner’s next mission would carry a crew, and in November 2025 the agency and Boeing settled the question: the next flight, designated Starliner-1, will be an uncrewed cargo run targeted for no earlier than April 2026, retesting the propulsion system that overheated and leaked helium on its way to the station in June 2024. In the same decision NASA trimmed the number of operational crew flights it is obligated to buy from Boeing. The thrusters that failed during docking — five of 28 reaction control jets in the service module — were destroyed when that module burned up during the empty return in early September 2024, which is partly why the investigation has taken so long. The hardware that misbehaved no longer exists.

Even on an optimistic schedule, Starliner’s return to crewed flight has not occurred as of mid-2026, and the regular crew rotations that would let it genuinely share the workload with Dragon sit further out still. The per-seat cost to NASA, under the fixed-price Commercial Crew contract, has been lower than what NASA paid for Soyuz seats in the final years of that arrangement. Boeing has taken significant financial charges against its Starliner program since 2016.

What the lack of alternatives actually means in 2026

It does not mean NASA has no rockets. The agency’s Space Launch System flew Artemis I around the Moon in late 2022, and Orion is built for deep space. But Orion cannot reach the ISS in any operational sense — it’s the wrong vehicle for a low-Earth-orbit rendezvous, and SLS launches cost in the multi-billions per flight. Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser, a winged cargo vehicle, is being prepared for uncrewed resupply runs but is years from a crewed variant.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn flew its first mission in January 2025 and has not been certified for crew. Vulcan, the rocket from United Launch Alliance that Boeing partly owns, is human-rated on paper but has no capsule attached to it now that Starliner uses Atlas V — and Atlas V’s remaining flights are spoken for.

So when NASA says it has no American alternative to Dragon, the agency means it in the narrow, literal sense: there is exactly one US-built, US-launched system today that can take a human being to the International Space Station and bring them home. That system has a single supplier.

The other quiet shift

While Dragon has become essential to crewed access, NASA has also leaned harder on commercial partners across the rest of its portfolio. The Roman Space Telescope built at Goddard is government-built but launches on a commercial rocket. The agency’s experimental aircraft program has begun accepting transferred military F-15Ds rather than buying new chase planes outright. The X-59 quiet supersonic demonstrator is being built by Lockheed Martin under a Skunk Works contract. The shape of NASA in 2026 is an agency that designs, contracts, and certifies more than it builds.

Within that shape, Dragon is not unusual. It is just the most consequential example, the one that touches every astronaut on every mission to the ISS — and the one that exposes the central tension in NASA’s commercial strategy. The agency made a bet that competitive procurement would deliver lower costs and more resilient supply than the old cost-plus model. On cost, that bet has clearly paid off. On resilience, it has not. A two-provider hedge only hedges if both providers actually fly.

What happens after 2030

The International Space Station is scheduled to be deorbited in 2030 or 2031 using a SpaceX-built US Deorbit Vehicle that NASA awarded in June 2024. The capsule that takes the last astronauts off the station will, on current plans, be a Dragon. The vehicle that pushes the station into the Pacific will, on current plans, also be made by SpaceX.

By then, NASA hopes commercial space stations from Axiom, Vast, Voyager Space, and Blue Origin will be in orbit, and the agency expects to buy crew transport to them the same way it buys crew transport to the ISS now — as a service. The architecture that replaces the ISS, in other words, will deepen the commercial-services model that produced the current Dragon dependency rather than retreat from it. Whether more than one provider will be flying crews by 2030 is the question the next four years will answer, and the answer will shape whether American human spaceflight in the 2030s rests on a competitive marketplace or on a single contractor whose business decisions become, by default, national space policy.

That is the deeper stake behind the Wilmore-Williams rescue and behind every Dragon launch since. For now, every American who looks up at the ISS as it crosses the evening sky — a moving point of light brighter than most stars, visible to the naked eye for about five minutes at a time — is looking at a station their country can only reach in one kind of spacecraft, built by one company, launched from one stretch of Florida coast. The redundancy that Congress demanded in 2014 has not been built. The dependency that resulted is now the plan.

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Inside a 140,000-square-foot building in Long Beach that the local aerospace crowd calls Space Beach, circuit boards for spacecraft and defense systems are now coming off the line in a matter of weeks — the same boards that used to take years. The people who run the plant are not claiming the engineers suddenly got faster. They are saying something stranger: there are no longer enough engineers to build the hardware the United States has ordered, and a software agent is now doing the parts a person used to do.

The facility belongs to Voyager Technologies, a Denver-based aerospace and defense company that opened the site on March 12, 2026. Its purpose is narrow and blunt — compress the timeline between a defense-electronics design and a working board, using agentic artificial intelligence to do it.

That single fact cuts against the loudest story being told about AI everywhere else. In most industries the technology arrives as a way to trim headcount. In aerospace and defense it is arriving because the headcount cannot be filled.

The boards that used to take years

Voyager’s Long Beach center runs research, development, and manufacturing across advanced electronics, mission hardware, propulsion, and autonomy systems, SpaceNews reported from the March opening. It is the company’s second major buildout in three months, following the 150,000-square-foot Voyager American Defense Complex that opened in Pueblo, Colorado, in January with a focus on missile defense and tactical munitions.

The man running the defense side is Matt Magaña, Voyager’s president for space, defense, and national security. He grew up in Long Beach and spent close to two decades as a Raytheon executive before joining Voyager in 2024. He describes the old way of building mission electronics in plain terms: it takes years and years, and that is the bottleneck.

The plant’s pitch is that agentic AI can collapse that. Magaña has described printing circuit boards within weeks and months rather than years, using AI to compress the journey from a design to a board headed for orbit. “We’ve got to cut that down to have the speed of relevance,” he told Aviation Week.

Speed of relevance is a military phrase, and it is doing real work here. Voyager is building alongside other Space Beach companies, including Anduril Industries and True Anomaly, in a stretch of Southern California where firms have clustered to stay near the engineering talent and suppliers left over from the region’s older aerospace era.

The robots-on-the-factory-floor story is decades old. What is new at Space Beach is the robot in the engineering office — the one drafting the design, not bolting the part.

Why there aren’t enough people

The shortage is not anecdotal. Clay Mowry, chief executive of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told an audience at the ASCEND conference in Washington that some companies are trying to lift production “by a factor of four,” according to SpaceNews. Firms in the missile-interceptor business, he said, have to scale fast, and there are not enough trained people to put in the jobs — so they are scrambling.

The demand is real and specific. The companies cannot bring in enough trained engineers, software developers, and specialized manufacturing staff to meet the contracts already signed, let alone the expansion the Pentagon now wants. They are all chasing the same small pool of workers fluent in autonomy, machine learning, and systems integration, and that pool is not growing fast enough to match the order books.

The workforce is also aging out. About one-third of aerospace and defense manufacturing and engineering roles are held by workers 55 or older, the AIAA’s Aerospace America reported, citing Deloitte and McKinsey analyses, and the sector’s retirement and attrition rate runs nearly 10 percent above the national industry average. One McKinsey estimate put the cost of that talent drain at up to $330 million for a single mid-sized company.

So the experienced people are leaving faster than they can be replaced, the work is harder to learn than almost any other engineering discipline, and the orders keep climbing. The arithmetic does not close.

A shrinking pipeline

The squeeze sits inside a broader contraction of the technical labor supply. The federal workforce shrank by roughly 220,000 people through November 2025, about a 10 percent cut, according to data analyzed by The New York Times from the Office of Personnel Management — the steepest reduction in decades. Many of those losses landed at civilian agencies that historically fed engineers into defense and aerospace through internships, fellowships, and research partnerships.

Money has been thrown at the gap. Congress added nearly $34 billion above the president’s fiscal 2026 defense request for more than 1,000 research and procurement programs, Roll Call reported, drawing on a database from Taxpayers for Common Sense. The watchdog group has counted more than $134 billion in such program increases since fiscal 2022.

But an appropriation does not produce a qualified engineer, and it does not shorten a test cycle. That is the wall the industry keeps hitting, and it is why a Denver company is standing up a building in Long Beach to let software do the work that hiring cannot fill.

What agentic AI actually does in the engineering office

Agentic AI is not the rule-based automation aerospace plants have used for forty years. Traditional automation handles one narrow, repeating task: a robotic arm welding a seam, a machine running a tolerance check. The agentic version is built to work across the whole production cycle — design iteration, compliance paperwork, supply-chain coordination, production planning — treating them as one connected job rather than a chain of handoffs.

On the floor, that changes who the engineer is. A systems engineer who once shepherded a single program can now oversee several, with the agent drafting the documentation, running the early trade studies, and grinding through the routine compliance work that used to eat hours a day. The engineer becomes a reviewer and a decision-maker instead of a producer of paperwork.

The people selling it are careful to say the humans do not disappear. Magaña has framed the goal as accelerating the cycle time, not removing the engineer from it. The agent is the junior staff that cannot be hired.

The space hardware itself is what makes this hard. A board bound for orbit has to survive launch loads, thermal swings of hundreds of degrees, and a radiation environment that corrupts ordinary electronics. Qualifying that hardware still routinely takes years — a timeline that turns into a problem when commercial operators want a satellite constellation fielded in months and defense customers want resilient systems in place before an adversary closes a gap.

This is where the agent is pointed. It can run thousands of simulation variations in parallel, assemble the qualification documentation, and flag design choices that historically surfaced only after an expensive physical test had already failed. The compression is not in the welding. It is in the thinking that used to happen one engineer at a time.

The accountability problem nobody has solved

The story the plant tells is coherent, and it is also unfinished. When a human engineer signs off on a missile-guidance design, there is a chain of accountability running back through years of training, licensure, and named responsibility. When an agent drafts the compliance package or proposes a design change, that chain gets harder to trace.

The qualification regimes that govern space and defense hardware were built around human reviewers checking human work. Adapting them to artifacts an AI generated — without losing the rigor that keeps an interceptor intercepting and a satellite operating — is a problem the sector has not solved. It is regulatory rather than technical, and it sits in the space between agentic AI accelerating a cycle and quietly defining it.

For now, the shortage is making the decision. The contracts are signed, the deadlines are fixed, and the engineers cannot be hired at the rate the order books demand, so the experiment is running whether or not the verification questions have answers.

Back in Long Beach, the boards keep coming off the line in weeks. The building is new, the talent it was meant to draw on is thinner than it has been in a generation, and the agent in the engineering office is doing the trade studies that a younger engineer, in another decade, would have done by hand. Whether those boards hold up the way years of human review once guaranteed will not be settled in a conference hall. It will be settled in orbit, and on the ranges, on the first programs fast enough to get there.

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For five years, the leading story about Kamoʻoalewa, a small asteroid that travels alongside Earth, was that it might be a stray piece of the Moon. A new peer-reviewed study argues it is probably something far more ordinary: a fragment of a distant asteroid family, weathered until its surface only looks lunar.

The timing is sharp. On or around June 7, after a 13-month cruise, China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft slipped into orbit around Kamoʻoalewa, a maneuver tracked by independent radio astronomers even before China’s space agency formally confirmed it. Sample collection is expected within weeks. The asteroid that may decide a long-running debate about its own origin is now being circled by the machine built to bring a piece of it home.

Why the Moon theory took hold

Kamoʻoalewa was found in 2016 by the Pan-STARRS survey in Hawaiʻi, and it is one of a small set of asteroids called quasi-satellites: rocks that orbit the Sun but stay close enough to Earth to seem like loose companions. This one is the most stable of the bunch, expected to linger near us for a few hundred years. It is small, somewhere between roughly 40 and 100 metres across, and it spins fast, turning about once every 28 minutes.

Quasi-satellites are faint and awkward to observe, which is part of why this one drew such outsized attention once a clue to its makeup appeared. It sits close, it stays put for centuries, and it is bright enough to study with large telescopes during its annual passes. For an object that might preserve a record of the early Solar System, that combination is rare.

In 2021, astronomers reported that its reflected light was a closer match to lunar-like silicates than to any common asteroid type, with an unusual extra redness. That resemblance was the spark for the lunar-fragment idea. A 2024 study went further, proposing a specific birthplace: the young Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon’s far side, from which an impact could have flung debris into an Earth-like orbit.

It was a tidy and romantic picture. A souvenir of the Moon, looping around its parent planet, waiting to be collected.

What the new study actually did

Writing in Nature Communications, a large international team led from the Chinese Academy of Sciences reopened the case from three directions. First, they reanalyzed the asteroid’s spectrum and pinned down a key absorption feature at a wavelength of 1.001 micrometres, a value they report as consistent not with lunar material but with LL chondrites, a common type of stony meteorite.

Then they tested whether ordinary meteorite could be made to look like Kamoʻoalewa. In the lab, the team blasted LL chondrite samples with laser pulses to mimic space weathering, the slow darkening and reddening that solar wind and tiny impacts inflict on any airless surface over millions of years. Heavily weathered chondrite powder, they found, reproduced the asteroid’s spectrum. Solid chips of the same meteorite did not.

Finally, they traced where such an object could have come from. Their modeling points to the ν6 secular resonance, a gravitational escape route in the inner asteroid belt, and more specifically to the Flora family, a cluster of asteroids born from an ancient collision. Kamoʻoalewa’s makeup, they write, resembles the well-studied asteroid Itokawa and seven Flora-family members, only more weathered.

The resonance matters because it offers a plausible delivery route. Rocks that drift into it can have their orbits stretched until they cross Earth’s path, which is one way an inner-belt fragment could end up as a quasi-satellite rather than a lunar one. The argument, in short, is that you do not need the Moon to explain Kamoʻoalewa. An ordinary asteroid nudged out of the Flora family and aged in sunlight can account for the same colour, the same orbit, and the same odd companionship with Earth.

Why a powder, not a slab, is the key detail

That powder-versus-chip result is the quiet heart of the paper. A fresh asteroid surface and a deeply weathered one can be the same rock and still reflect light differently, and grain size matters as much as chemistry. The team’s reading is that Kamoʻoalewa is coated in fine, long-exposed dust, which is exactly what would redden an ordinary asteroid until its colour drifts toward the lunar range.

If that holds, the redness that first suggested the Moon is not a fingerprint of lunar rock at all. It is what time does to a small, slow-tumbling asteroid that has been left out in the solar wind for ages. The comparison with Itokawa carries weight here, because Japan’s Hayabusa mission already returned grains from Itokawa and confirmed it as an ordinary chondrite body. The new study places Kamoʻoalewa in that same broad company.

What this does and does not prove

This is a competing explanation, not a verdict. The authors are careful to say Kamoʻoalewa probably came from the Flora family, and the hedge is doing real work. Reflectance spectra are notoriously slippery; weathering, grain size, viewing angle and composition can all nudge an asteroid’s colour in similar directions, which is why two capable teams can look at the same faint object and reach different conclusions.

The lunar-origin case has not been withdrawn, and the dynamical argument for a recent lunar escape still has its defenders. It is also worth noting that the new paper is an early-access version of an accepted manuscript, released ahead of final editing, so small details may still change. What the study does is weaken the single strongest pillar of the Moon theory, the matching red spectrum, by showing that a plain meteorite can be pushed to look the same.

In other words, the resemblance to the Moon is real. The new work simply argues it is a coincidence of weathering rather than a sign of shared birth.

The sample that will end the argument

What makes this debate unusual is that it has an expiration date. Most arguments about an asteroid’s origin are settled, if at all, by ever-finer remote measurements. This one will be settled by holding the rock.

The stakes are not trivial. If the grains turn out to be lunar, Kamoʻoalewa becomes a free sample of the Moon’s far side, delivered to Earth’s neighbourhood without a crewed landing. If they are ordinary chondrite, the asteroid becomes a well-preserved relic of the early Solar System and a test case for how badly space weathering can disguise a familiar rock. Those are two very different prizes, and the same capsule settles which one we get.

Tianwen-2 is expected to collect material from Kamoʻoalewa within weeks and send a capsule back toward Earth in 2027, after which the spacecraft heads onward to a comet. A returned sample can be measured for the isotopes and minerals that distinguish lunar rock from a chondrite asteroid, the kind of test no telescope can perform from afar. For once, a question about where a space rock came from will be answered by the rock itself, and the answer is already on its way.

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Students who believed in finding their one true passion gave up faster when things got hard. That is the finding, stripped to its bone, of a 2018 paper that has quietly rewired how psychologists talk about career advice.

The researchers — Paul O’Keefe at Yale-NUS College, with Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton at Stanford — proved it with a black hole article. They handed undergraduates an essay that started accessible and turned dense with equations halfway through. The students who treated interests as something you discover — fixed, waiting, predestined — lost interest the moment the physics got hard. The ones who treated interests as something you develop kept reading.

That single experimental setup, published in Psychological Science under the title “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?”, became the empirical spine of a now-common critique: the advice to follow your passion may quietly teach people to quit.

The black hole article that broke the theory

The setup was deliberately simple. Students first identified whether their strongest interests were in the arts and humanities or in math and science. Then they were assigned to read an engaging article outside their stated domain — a STEM student got an essay on Pierre Bourdieu, a humanities student got a piece on black holes.

Almost everyone enjoyed it. The hook worked.

Then came the second article: a dense, technical academic paper on the same topic. This is where the two groups split. Students primed with a fixed theory of interest — the belief that passions are found, not built — reported a sharp drop in fascination. Students primed with a growth theory stayed curious through the hard parts.

The researchers ran the experiment five different ways. The pattern held. People who believed passion was a thing you have treated friction as a signal they had picked the wrong thing.

Why the belief itself is the problem

The mechanism O’Keefe’s team identified is almost philosophical. If you believe your real passion is out there, fully formed, waiting to be recognized, then the first moment something gets boring or painful becomes evidence. Evidence that this wasn’t it. Evidence to move on.

Genuine interest, in that framework, should feel effortless. So effort itself becomes suspicious.

The Yale-NUS and Stanford team called this the cost of a fixed theory of interest. The article on the open-access version of the study is summarized in coverage on the cultural fallout of the follow-your-passion narrative, which sits awkwardly alongside graduation speeches that have been recycling the phrase since the 1980s.

What people quit, and how fast

In one of the O’Keefe experiments, students with a fixed-passion belief predicted, before the study began, that finding their true interest would mean motivation would carry them through anything. They believed friction would be absent because interest would be infinite.

It is hard to imagine a belief better designed to produce disappointment.

When the hard text arrived, their reported interest collapsed by a wide margin compared to the growth-mindset group. They also became less open to interests outside their original identified domain — the fixed view narrows people, the researchers wrote, rather than widens them.

The Forbes coverage of related work points out that passion is typically the reward of sustained effort, not the entry ticket. The order in which people expect to feel passion seems to determine whether they ever feel it.

The ghost of Steve Jobs

The modern version of the advice has a clear origin. Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement, June 2005, told graduates the only way to do great work was to love what they did, and if they hadn’t found it yet, to keep looking. The speech has been widely viewed online.

Cal Newport, the Georgetown computer scientist who wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, was among the first to point out that Jobs himself didn’t follow his own advice. Jobs was interested in Zen Buddhism and calligraphy. He built a personal computer company because a friend asked him to help sell circuit boards.

The passion came later. After the work.

Leadership coach Amina AlTai, in a December 2025 interview, told CNBC the advice “positions us to fizzle out fast” because it sets up an expectation of permanent emotional fuel. Real work doesn’t come with permanent emotional fuel. It comes with mortgages and Tuesday afternoons.

What the study did not say

O’Keefe’s team was careful not to argue against having interests, or against pursuing them. The finding was narrower and more specific: the theory people hold about where interests come from changes how they behave when interests stop being fun.

A person who believes interests develop will sit through a confusing equation. A person who believes interests are discovered will close the tab.

The students reading about black holes were not less smart, less curious, or less ambitious than each other. They had been handed different stories about how curiosity is supposed to feel. That alone changed how long they kept reading.

The slow version of passion

The implication that has stuck, almost a decade after the paper, is that passion is more like a long marriage than a first date. It deepens because you stay. It survives the boring stretches because you treat the boring stretches as part of it, not as evidence against it.

The reverse is also true. People who expect first-date energy at year seven leave at year seven.

This is why the 2018 finding keeps getting cited in career-advice columns, leadership books, and the slow drip of essays pushing back on the Jobs commencement speech. The study didn’t just measure quitting. It identified the sentence in someone’s head — this must not be my real passion — that turns a hard Tuesday into a resignation letter.

The article in the textbook

If you go back to the original 2018 paper, the most quietly devastating detail is in the methods section. The hard article the students were asked to read — the one that made the fixed-passion believers lose interest — wasn’t unusually difficult. It was a standard piece of upper-level academic writing. The kind of thing every person who has ever developed a real expertise has had to push through hundreds of times.

The students who believed passion was something you find treated it as a stop sign. The students who believed passion was something you build treated it as a hill.

Same article. Same equations. Different story about what the difficulty meant.

The post The Stanford study that tracked ‘follow your passion’ believers found they gave up faster on hard goals — researchers in 2018 showed passion treated as fixed makes setbacks feel like proof you chose wrong appeared first on Space Daily.

The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Rome, not Athens, not Damascus, not Cairo. It is a Palestinian town of approximately 25,000 people in the Jordan Valley, sitting 250 metres below sea level in the dry rift between the West Bank highlands and the eastern desert, watered for the last several thousand millennia by a single freshwater spring that emerges from the rocks at the base of the cliffs. The modern town is built around that spring. So was the previous town. So was the one before that, and the one before that. The archaeological mound at Tell es-Sultan, just north of the modern city centre, contains the layered remains of more than 20 successive settlements built one on top of another over the course of approximately 11,000 years of continuous human habitation — making Jericho, by most reasonable accounts, the oldest city on Earth in which people have lived without significant interruption since the end of the last Ice Age.

According to the World History Encyclopedia’s reference on early Jericho, drawing on the archaeological record established by Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations, the site began as a seasonal camping ground for Natufian hunter-gatherers around 10,000 BCE, during the closing centuries of the Younger Dryas — the final cold snap of the Pleistocene Ice Age, a period of approximately 1,200 years during which the world’s climate temporarily reverted to glacial conditions and permanent settlement anywhere in the Levant was essentially impossible. The Natufians camped at Jericho specifically because of the Ein as-Sultan spring, which provided reliable water in an otherwise arid environment. When the Younger Dryas ended around 9600 BCE and the climate warmed into what geologists call the Holocene — the current interglacial period in which human civilisation has subsequently developed — the Natufians at Jericho stopped leaving. By approximately 9400 BCE, the seasonal camp had grown into a permanent settlement of more than 70 circular mud-and-straw dwellings. The town has, in some form, been there ever since.

What Tell es-Sultan actually contains

The mound at Tell es-Sultan is approximately 40,000 square metres at its base and rises about 21 metres above the surrounding plain — the accumulated debris of thousands of years of mud-brick houses being built, falling down, and being rebuilt on top of their predecessors. Modern excavation has revealed a continuous sequence of habitation layers stretching from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period (10,000-8,800 BCE) through the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (8,800-7,000 BCE), the Pottery Neolithic (7,000-5,200 BCE), the Chalcolithic (5,200-3,300 BCE), the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Persian and Hellenistic periods, the Roman and Byzantine eras, the Islamic conquest, the Crusader period, the Ottoman centuries, and into the modern era. The same spring has watered every one of these settlements. The mound is, in stratigraphic terms, an unusually rich record of long-term human occupation — there was a brief settlement hiatus of several centuries between the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B periods around 7000 BCE, but the site has otherwise been continuously inhabited across the full 11,000-year span.

Among the most striking architectural features Kenyon’s team uncovered during the 1952-1958 excavations is the Tower of Jericho, a stone structure approximately 8.5 metres tall containing an internal staircase of 22 steps, built around 8,000 BCE. The tower is one of the oldest known monumental structures in the world. It predates the construction of the Egyptian pyramids by more than 5,000 years. It predates Stonehenge by approximately 5,000 years. It was built by a population of perhaps a few hundred people, using only stone tools, with no metal implements available — copper smelting in the Levant would not begin for another 3,000 years. Adjacent to the tower, Kenyon found a stone wall 3.6 metres high and 1.8 metres thick at the base, surrounding the entire Neolithic settlement. Whether the wall was defensive, ceremonial, or designed to protect the settlement from flash floods from the surrounding hills remains contested. What is not contested is that it represents some of the earliest large-scale collaborative construction work in human history.

The contested status of “oldest”

The claim that Jericho is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world is widely repeated but not universally accepted. Several other ancient settlements have plausible competing claims, depending on how “continuously” and “city” are defined. Damascus, Syria, has been continuously inhabited since approximately 9,000 BCE according to some archaeological estimates, though the dating is less secure than Jericho’s. Byblos, Lebanon, has continuous habitation evidence going back roughly 8,800 BCE. Aleppo, Plovdiv in Bulgaria, Argos in Greece, and several Anatolian sites have all been proposed at various times. The technical difficulty is that the strict definition of “continuously inhabited” requires essentially unbroken settlement, and most of these sites have either documented periods of partial abandonment, gaps in their archaeological records, or contested dating of their earliest layers. Jericho’s claim is the strongest because the Tell es-Sultan mound contains a particularly well-documented occupation sequence — successive settlements built directly on top of each other, with only the brief PPNA-to-PPNB hiatus interrupting the continuity. Per the Jerusalem Post’s coverage of Jericho’s archaeological record, the site has yielded approximately 70 prehistoric houses and more than 20 successive settlements, providing what is generally considered the best-documented long-term occupation sequence of any site in the world.

In September 2023, UNESCO formally recognised the archaeological complex at Tell es-Sultan as a World Heritage Site under the designation “Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan,” with Palestine as the State Party of nomination. As reported by NBC News’s coverage of the designation, the recognition was controversial — Israel objected to the listing on political grounds related to the West Bank’s status under international law — but the underlying archaeological case for Tell es-Sultan as one of the most important early Neolithic sites in the world was uncontested. The UNESCO listing acknowledges Jericho as one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on Earth and as the location of some of the earliest fortified settlements ever constructed by human beings.

What Jericho’s existence predates

The most striking way to grasp the antiquity of Jericho is by reference to the things that did not yet exist when its first permanent residents built their first stone houses. Writing would not be invented for approximately 5,700 more years — cuneiform script would emerge in Sumer around 3,200 BCE. The wheel would not be invented for another 5,500 years, also in Mesopotamia, around 3,500 BCE. Metallurgy would not develop in the Levant for another 4,500 years; copper smelting reached Jericho only around 5,000-4,500 BCE. The Egyptian pyramids would not be built for another 6,400 years. The Athenian Acropolis would not exist for approximately 7,500 years. The Roman Empire would not be founded for approximately 8,200 years.

Agriculture itself was just beginning at the time of Jericho’s founding. The Natufian culture that established Tell es-Sultan was among the first human groups anywhere in the world to harvest wild grains, develop sickle technology, and begin the long transition from hunting and gathering to settled farming. The full domestication of wheat and barley would come over the following thousand years, and Jericho was one of the central sites where this transition was worked out. The city’s founders were not farmers in the modern sense — they were hunter-gatherers in the process of becoming farmers, who chose a permanent location next to a reliable spring and stayed there long enough to invent agriculture as they went. They did not know that what they were doing would matter to anyone afterward. They were trying to feed themselves and stay warm at the end of the last Ice Age, and they happened to choose a spot of ground that has continued to feed people, in essentially uninterrupted succession, for the next 11,000 years.

The post The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Athens, Rome, or Cairo — it is Jericho, in the West Bank, where archaeologists have found evidence of settlement going back roughly 11,000 years, meaning people have been living in the same place since the end of the last Ice Age, before writing, before metalworking, and at the dawn of agriculture itself appeared first on Space Daily.

For one or two days each spring, the wind pattern at the top of Mount Everest shifts just enough to allow human beings, for a brief and dangerous window, to reach the summit. They climb in convoy, in oxygen masks, along ropes anchored years ago by previous expeditions. They pass landmarks that have become unofficially named over the decades — the Hillary Step, the South Summit, Rainbow Valley, Green Boots Cave. Some of these landmarks are geological features. Others are dead human beings. “Green Boots” is the name climbers have given to a body believed to be that of the Indian climber Tsewang Paljor, who died in the 1996 Everest disaster and whose corpse — still wearing the green plastic mountaineering boots that gave him the nickname — lies in a small limestone alcove near the standard route to the summit. For nearly thirty years, climbers passing by Green Boots have used him as a navigation marker. He is one of approximately 200 corpses still on the mountain. Some of them have been there for decades. Until recently, most of them were buried in ice. They are not, in 2026, buried as deeply as they used to be.

According to CBS News’s coverage of the 2024 Nepali army clean-up operation, climate change has been thinning the snow and ice on Everest’s upper slopes at a rate that is now beginning to reveal bodies and equipment that had been entombed for years or decades. Aditya Karki, the major in Nepal’s army who led the 2024 clean-up team, described the phenomenon directly: “Because of the effects of global warming, (the bodies and trash) are becoming more visible as the snow cover thins.” His team of 12 military personnel and 18 supporting climbers spent 45 days at altitudes above Everest base camp, working their way through the higher camps and into the death zone itself, chipping at the ice with axes and occasionally using boiling water to free objects from the grip of decades of accumulated freeze. They recovered five bodies — four full corpses and one skeleton — and brought back approximately 11 tonnes of refuse, in what was the largest single clean-up operation in the history of high-altitude mountaineering.

What the death zone actually does to a body

The reason there are still 200 corpses on Mount Everest, and the reason it took a 45-day operation by Nepali army professionals to recover only five of them, is the brutal physics of the altitudes at which the bodies sit. The death zone — the formal mountaineering term for the region above 8,000 metres (approximately 26,247 feet) — was named in 1953 by the Swiss physician Édouard Wyss-Dunant, who recognised that this altitude band represented the upper limit beyond which the human body could no longer acclimatise to the available oxygen. At 8,000 metres and above, the atmospheric pressure drops to approximately one-third of sea level. Each breath delivers approximately one-third the oxygen molecules that the same breath would deliver at the coast. The body’s cells begin dying of hypoxia within minutes of unsupplemented exposure. Even with bottled oxygen, climbers in the death zone can survive only 16 to 20 hours before their bodies begin to fail systemically.

Most climbers who die on Everest die in the death zone, either on the way up or, more frequently, on the descent — when they have used up their oxygen reserves, their physical resources, and their cognitive capacity, and the remaining strength to make it back to lower altitudes simply runs out. The bodies left behind freeze almost immediately. The death zone’s temperatures hover well below freezing year-round, the air is dry enough that decomposition is essentially suspended, and the bodies are typically partially or fully covered with windblown snow within hours of death. They do not decay. They preserve. A climber who died on Everest in 1996, like Tsewang Paljor, can look in 2026 essentially the way they looked the day after they died, complete with clothing, equipment, and even facial features. The mountain has become, accidentally, an enormous cryogenic preservation facility for human remains.

The 2024 operation

As reported in CNN Travel’s coverage of the Mountain Cleanup Campaign, the Nepali army’s 2024 operation was the latest iteration of a programme that began in 2019 in partnership with the consumer-products company Unilever. Between 2019 and 2023, the campaign had collected approximately 110 tonnes of waste from Everest and the surrounding peaks. The 2024 effort added another 11 tonnes to that running total, alongside the recovery of the five bodies. The total budget for the 2024 campaign exceeded $600,000, employed 171 Nepali guides and porters in addition to the army personnel and climbers, and ran from mid-April through late May, timed to coincide with the brief annual climbing window when high-altitude work on Everest is feasible at all.

The work was, by any measure, extraordinarily dangerous. The team operated for extended periods in the same death zone where the bodies they were recovering had died. Each member of the army team had to climb above 8,000 metres carrying equipment to extract frozen corpses from ice that had encased them for years or decades. The bodies, once freed, had to be carried back down the mountain on the same rope-and-ladder system used by ordinary climbers — except that an ordinary climber descending Everest is making themselves lighter by burning oxygen and water, while the army team was descending with the additional weight of a frozen adult human body. Per the AFP report carried by Phys.org’s coverage of the operation, the recovered bodies were transported to Kathmandu, where they were examined for identification. Those that could not be identified — and most could not, because their documents had long since deteriorated — were eventually cremated according to Nepali tradition.

The garbage problem

The 11 tonnes of rubbish removed by the Nepali army in 2024 was only part of a larger waste-collection effort that season. As reported by The Himalayan Times’s coverage of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee’s 2024 base camp operations, the SPCC — the local body responsible for waste management in the Everest region — collected an additional 77,191 kilograms (approximately 85 tonnes) of waste from Everest Base Camp during the same spring 2024 season. Of that total, approximately 27,533 kilograms — nearly 28 tonnes — was human waste, with the remainder consisting of burnable rubbish (27,990 kg), kitchen waste (14,150 kg), and recyclable materials (7,518 kg). The human and kitchen waste was transported to a disposal site near Gorakshep. The burnable and recyclable waste was carried down to Namche for further processing, with the recyclables eventually transported to Kathmandu for recycling. The combined SPCC and Nepali army operations in spring 2024 removed approximately 96 tonnes of accumulated waste from the Everest region — a single-season total greater than the cumulative output of every previous year of large-scale clean-up efforts combined.

The decomposition problem at high altitude is what makes the figures so striking. Per Smithsonian Magazine’s coverage of the broader Everest pollution issue, the sub-zero temperatures of the upper camps essentially halt biological breakdown. Faeces left at Camp IV in 1953 by the original Hillary expedition would still be present in essentially preserved form today if it had not been disturbed by subsequent climbers. The same applies to the food packaging, the oxygen bottles, the discarded climbing equipment, and the colourful synthetic-fibre tents that have accumulated over seven decades of mountaineering. The mountain does not recycle. It accumulates.

What the operation revealed

The 2024 Mountain Cleanup Campaign was significant not only for the 11 tonnes and five bodies it brought back, but for what it documented about the broader trajectory of the Everest ecosystem. The melting that exposed the bodies was visible. The discoloured ice that now contained microplastics from generations of climbers was measurable. The exposed equipment from expeditions decades old — gas canisters from the 1960s, oxygen apparatus from the 1970s, climbing ropes from the 1980s — provided a stratigraphic record of how long the world’s tallest mountain had been accumulating human refuse, and at what depth that refuse had been preserved before climate change began bringing it back to the surface.

The 2024 campaign also raised a question that has no clear answer: who is responsible for cleaning up the historic mess. The Nepali government has implemented progressively stricter rules requiring 2026-era climbers to bring their own waste back down with them, and these rules appear to be reducing the rate at which new waste accumulates. But the existing 30 to 50 tonnes of legacy trash, and the approximately 195 corpses still on the mountain, were left behind by climbers who in many cases are now themselves dead, by expeditions that were dissolved decades ago, by governments that have changed hands several times since. Major Karki, the leader of the 2024 operation, framed the dilemma directly: “This year’s trash might be brought back by the mountaineers. But who will bring the old ones?” The answer, for the moment, appears to be Nepali army personnel and Sherpa climbers, working at altitudes that kill people who underestimate them, removing — at a rate of approximately 11 tonnes per year — the cumulative residue of seventy years of human ambition. The melt that is making the work newly possible is also making it newly necessary. The mountain that buried these things is no longer cold enough, on its upper slopes, to keep burying them.

The post Above 26,000 feet on Mount Everest — in the death zone where the air contains roughly one-third the oxygen of sea level — climate change is melting the ice that has buried more than 200 frozen climbers, and Nepali army teams recovering them in 2024 also removed approximately 11 tonnes of trash, in a quiet revelation that the highest place humans have ever reached is also a slowly emerging landfill appeared first on Space Daily.

For about twenty years now, biologists have known that a small number of specific proteins can take a fully-developed adult cell — a skin cell, a kidney cell, a fully-specialized worker bee of a cell that has spent its working life doing one specific job — and send it backward in developmental time, all the way back to the embryonic state from which it originally came. The phenomenon is real, repeatable, and won Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery. The four proteins involved — known thereafter as the Yamanaka factors — function in the lab as a kind of factory-reset button for any vertebrate cell, capable of stripping away decades of acquired identity and aging signatures and returning the cell to a younger, more flexible state. The procedure works on cells in petri dishes. It works on mice. It works on non-human primates. What no one had yet attempted, until January 2026, was to apply it to a living human being.

According to MIT Technology Review’s coverage of the announcement, the FDA in January 2026 granted Investigational New Drug clearance to Life Biosciences, a Boston-based biotech founded on the research of Harvard Medical School professor David Sinclair, to begin a Phase 1 clinical trial of an experimental therapy called ER-100. The trial will enrol patients with two age-related forms of optic nerve damage — glaucoma and non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) — and will deliver, via injection into the eye, a modified adeno-associated virus carrying the genes for three of the four Yamanaka factors. The genes will remain inactive in the patient’s cells until the patient takes an oral dose of doxycycline, which switches them on. Once activated, the proteins are expected to partially reset the epigenetic markers of the patient’s optic nerve cells, restoring them to a younger configuration without erasing the underlying identity that makes them optic nerve cells in the first place. If it works, the patients should regain at least some of the vision they have lost. If it works well, it will demonstrate something more substantial: that cellular aging in living humans is, in principle, reversible.

What partial reprogramming actually is

The original Yamanaka procedure used four transcription factors — OCT-4, SOX-2, KLF-4, and c-Myc — to convert adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which behave essentially like embryonic stem cells and can develop into any tissue type. The conversion is complete: an adult skin cell, after exposure to all four factors, loses its identity as a skin cell and becomes a generic precursor cell that could, in principle, develop into any other cell type in the body. This is what stem-cell biologists call “full reprogramming.” It is extraordinarily useful in the laboratory, where iPSCs can be grown into any tissue of interest for research or transplantation. It is also extraordinarily dangerous in a living body. When all four Yamanaka factors are activated in adult mice, the animals develop teratomas — chaotic tumours containing hair, bone, muscle, and other tissue types — within weeks. The cells lose their identity. The body cannot tolerate it.

The advance that made human trials conceivable was the development of what is called “partial” or “transient” reprogramming. Per Scientific American’s coverage of the underlying science, partial reprogramming limits the exposure to the Yamanaka factors — either by using only a subset of them, or by switching them on for short periods rather than continuously, or both. The goal is to reset the cell’s epigenetic age markers — the chemical tags on its DNA that accumulate with age and govern which genes are switched on or off — without erasing the cell’s underlying identity as a specific type of cell. As reported in BBC Science Focus’s coverage of the broader field, Life Biosciences CEO Jerry McLaughlin describes the company’s approach as operating “in a space called partial epigenetic reprogramming,” in which the chemical tags that control which genes are active and which are silent are selectively rewritten without resetting the cell’s whole identity. A 2020 paper in Nature by Yuancheng Lu, then a graduate student in David Sinclair’s lab, demonstrated this principle in mice by using just three of the four factors (OCT-4, SOX-2, and KLF-4 — excluding c-Myc, which is the one most strongly associated with cancer). The treated mice, whose optic nerves had been deliberately damaged, recovered substantial visual function. Their optic nerve cells had been partially reset to a younger state without losing their identity as optic nerve cells.

Why the eye

The choice of optic nerve disease for the first human trial was deliberate and reflects a careful series of safety calculations. The eye is one of the few organs in the human body that can be treated with a localised injection without the therapy spreading to other tissues. The interior of the eye is partially walled off from the general bloodstream by the blood-retinal barrier, which means that the modified virus carrying the three Yamanaka factor genes stays largely confined to the area where it is injected. If something goes wrong — if cells start dividing inappropriately or losing their identity — the consequences are limited to the eye rather than spreading through the body. Vision loss, while serious for the affected patient, is not life-threatening in the way that systemic effects elsewhere in the body could be.

The eye also provides a clear, measurable endpoint. Vision can be quantified objectively — visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, visual field, optic nerve thickness — in ways that “biological aging” more broadly cannot. If ER-100 restores vision in the trial patients, the result will be unambiguous. If it does not, the result will also be unambiguous. The Phase 1 study is primarily focused on safety and tolerability, which is standard for first-in-human trials of novel gene therapies, but the visual outcomes will provide an early signal of whether the underlying biological premise — that partial epigenetic reprogramming can restore function to aged tissue — translates from mice and monkeys to human beings.

The control mechanism

One of the technical features distinguishing ER-100 from earlier attempts at cellular reprogramming is the use of a doxycycline-inducible switch. The genes carried by the viral vector are placed under the control of a regulatory sequence that responds to doxycycline, a common oral antibiotic. In the absence of doxycycline, the genes remain inactive. When the patient takes a dose of doxycycline, the genes switch on for a limited window of time. When the doxycycline clears the patient’s system, the genes switch off again. The mechanism provides a level of control that earlier cellular reprogramming approaches lacked — if the treatment produces concerning effects, the patient simply stops taking doxycycline, and the activated cellular reprogramming should cease.

The combination of three safety features — local delivery to the eye, exclusion of the most dangerous Yamanaka factor (c-Myc), and the doxycycline-inducible on/off switch — is what convinced the FDA that ER-100 was safe enough to test in humans. As reported in Nature Biotechnology’s coverage of the FDA approval, Life Biosciences’ preclinical work in non-human primates showed that the therapy was well tolerated with no systemic toxicities. Whether the same will be true in human patients, with their longer lifespans and more complex disease backgrounds, is a question the Phase 1 trial is designed to answer.

What this is and what it is not

What ER-100 is not: a proven anti-aging therapy. The Phase 1 trial will involve approximately a dozen patients, will run for one to two years, and is primarily designed to detect safety problems rather than to demonstrate effectiveness. Even if the trial succeeds completely, it will only establish that partial epigenetic reprogramming is safe enough to test in larger Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials, which would themselves take additional years to complete. The pathway from “first human trial” to “approved therapy for general use” typically runs 8 to 12 years for novel drug classes. The trial does not establish that humans can live longer. It does not establish that cellular aging can be reversed in tissues outside the eye. It does not establish that ER-100 will become a routine medical treatment for anything.

What ER-100 is: the first formal attempt, in any human being, to test whether the molecular machinery of cellular reprogramming can be safely applied to living people. The trial follows two decades of laboratory work — Yamanaka’s original 2006 discovery, the subsequent demonstrations in mice and non-human primates, the development of partial reprogramming techniques, the engineering of the doxycycline-inducible viral vector — and it represents the moment at which the underlying science crosses from animal models into human medicine. Several other companies are working on similar approaches; Altos Labs, backed by Jeff Bezos, and Retro Biosciences, backed by Sam Altman, are among the better-known competitors. The Life Biosciences trial is simply the first one to clear the FDA. The next several years will determine whether cellular reprogramming becomes a new category of medicine or remains a laboratory curiosity. The answer will not come immediately, but the experiment is now finally underway in the species the experiment was always ultimately about.

The post The first human trial of a therapy designed to partially reset the biological age of human cells was approved in January 2026 — using molecular switches that scientists have already shown can reverse the aging of cells in the laboratory — meaning humanity has, for the first time, formally entered the era of testing whether cellular aging can be reversed in living people. appeared first on Space Daily.

Most people who are quietly miserable do not know it. That, in essence, is what a Danish philosopher named Søren Kierkegaard tried to tell the readers of nineteenth-century Copenhagen in 1849, and what the empirical psychology of regret has been confirming, in laboratory studies and museum surveys, for the past three decades. When most people use the word “despair,” they mean acute unhappiness — the kind of low mood that follows a loss, a failure, or a difficult life event. Despair in this ordinary sense is something a person is aware of. They can name it, describe it, and (with luck) move through it. Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, used the word in a substantially different way. The despair he described was not an emotion. It was a structural condition of the self, present in the great majority of human beings, generally unnoticed by the people who carried it, and most acute precisely in those who did not know they had it. Kierkegaard’s book on the subject, The Sickness Unto Death, is one of the founding texts of existentialist philosophy.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Kierkegaard, the framework rests on a specific definition of what the self is. For Kierkegaard, the self is not a thing or a substance. It is “a relation that relates itself to itself” — a dynamic process by which a human being takes up the various contradictory features of being human (finite and infinite, possible and necessary, free and determined) and synthesises them into a coherent personality. The self is not given at birth; it is something a person has to become. And despair, in Kierkegaard’s account, is the misrelation that occurs when this becoming fails — when the synthesis goes wrong, when the person fails to take on the self they were capable of being.

The three forms of despair

Kierkegaard identified three primary configurations the failure can take. The first and most common is the despair of ignorance — being in despair without knowing it. A person in this state has not yet noticed any gap between the life they are living and the life they were capable of living. Their attention is consumed by the routine surfaces of daily existence: work, possessions, social position, the consumption of entertainment. The deeper question of what kind of person they are, in any meaningful sense, has never been seriously posed. Kierkegaard considered this unconscious form to be the dominant pattern in modern society — most people, in his view, were in despair without realising it, because the structures of their lives had insulated them from ever asking the question.

The second form is the despair of weakness — knowing what self one is meant to be and not being willing to be it. The person in this state has had some glimpse of their own possibilities and has, for whatever combination of fear, comfort, social pressure, or fatigue, declined to pursue them. The third form is the despair of defiance — willing to be a self other than the one one is, refusing the actual configuration of one’s life in favour of an imaginary or constructed alternative. The defiant form, Kierkegaard thought, was the most acute but also the rarest. As one frequently-cited line from the book puts it: “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss — an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. — is sure to be noticed.”

What modern psychology has found

Kierkegaard was writing in 1849, in a theological framework, with no empirical methodology beyond his own observation of the people around him in nineteenth-century Copenhagen. His specific claims about despair as a sickness of the spirit cannot be tested in the same way an empirical hypothesis can be tested. What can be tested is whether the basic phenomenon he described — that the failures most haunting to people across a life are the failures to become the self one was capable of being — shows up in modern psychological data on regret. The answer is that it does. Per a 2023 replication in Royal Society Open Science of the foundational research by Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec at Cornell University, the empirical psychology of regret converges on a striking temporal pattern: in the short term, people’s most acute regrets tend to be about things they did and wish they had not done. In the long term, the pattern reverses. The regrets that haunt people across years and decades, and that dominate when people look back on their lives as a whole, are overwhelmingly about things they did not do — chances not taken, paths not pursued, selves not allowed to emerge.

Gilovich and Medvec’s original 1994 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found this pattern across multiple population groups, including a sample of nursing-home residents reflecting on their entire lives. The 2023 replication, conducted at a Chicago museum of psychological science with a large public sample, reproduced the temporal interaction even though the specific magnitudes differed. The pattern is now considered one of the more robust findings in the empirical literature on regret. Its philosophical implication aligns closely with Kierkegaard’s framework, even though the researchers involved generally do not cite him.

Why the despair is so quiet

The most disconcerting feature of Kierkegaard’s account is his insistence that this despair is, in its most common form, undetectable to the person carrying it. Unlike acute sadness, which announces itself, the unconscious form of despair tends to be hidden by the very busyness of life that produces it. A person fully occupied with work, family obligations, consumption of news and entertainment, social media, the small daily tasks of contemporary existence, is unlikely to encounter the question of whether they are actually becoming the self they were meant to be. The question requires solitude, reflection, and a degree of confrontation with one’s own choices that ordinary life does not generally provide. As reported in D. Anthony Storm’s commentary on The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard described despair as a “misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself” — a sickness that, unlike most diseases, the patient is largely responsible for and from which the patient cannot escape simply by avoiding awareness of it. The avoidance, in Kierkegaard’s framework, is itself part of the despair.

What the framework does not promise

Intellectual honesty requires noting what Kierkegaard’s account does not establish. It is not a recipe for happiness. It does not specify what self any given person was meant to become, or how to identify that self, or how to pursue it once identified. Kierkegaard’s own answer to the question of how despair is overcome was specifically Christian — through a particular relation to God that he called faith — and many modern readers find that the theological framing limits the framework’s applicability. The diagnostic side of his work, however, has had broad influence well beyond the specifically Christian context, including on the existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century, on the founders of existential psychotherapy, on Erik Erikson’s developmental concept of “integrity versus despair” in late life, and on the broader twentieth-century literature on authenticity and self-realisation. What the framework provides is a vocabulary for naming a condition that often goes unnamed — the slow recognition, late in a life, that the person one has been is not quite the person one started out hoping to be. Kierkegaard called this the breaking through of despair into consciousness, and he thought it was, paradoxically, a kind of progress. The unconscious form, in his account, was worse than the conscious form, because it left no opening for change.

The post Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the deepest form of despair is not unhappiness but the failure to become the self you were quietly meant to be — a despair so subtle that most people who carry it never notice they are carrying it — and the difficulty of late-life regret is the slow recognition that the person you have been is not quite the person you started out hoping to be appeared first on Space Daily.

Imagine drilling through ice for 23 years to reach a lake nobody had ever seen, in the coldest place on Earth, in a research station that holds the world record for the lowest temperature ever recorded — and then, on the day you finally break through, having the lake itself shoot up the borehole to meet you. On the afternoon of 5 February 2012, at Russia’s Vostok Station on the East Antarctic ice sheet, that is approximately what happened. The drill bit, after 23 years of intermittent operation in the most punishing field conditions on the planet, finally penetrated the last few centimetres of ice and entered the surface of Lake Vostok at a depth of 3,769 metres — about 12,366 feet, or roughly 2.4 miles. The lake water beneath, compressed by the weight of nearly four kilometres of overlying ice, was under enormous hydrostatic pressure. The moment the drill broke through, the lake water surged upward into the borehole. It rose approximately 30 to 40 metres before encountering ice cold enough to freeze it solid. The plug of frozen lake water then sealed the borehole from below, in a kind of self-cleaning closure that the Russian team had specifically anticipated and designed the drill operation to produce.

As per Science magazine’s coverage of the breakthrough, citing Valery Lukin, leader of the Russian expedition, the team had been working toward this specific moment since 1989, when the Soviet (and later Russian) Antarctic programme first began deep ice-core drilling at the Vostok site. The original purpose of the drilling was paleoclimate research — recovering ice cores that contained trapped air bubbles from earlier periods of Earth’s history, which could be analysed to reconstruct atmospheric composition going back hundreds of thousands of years. The existence of Lake Vostok beneath the Vostok Station was not known when drilling began. The lake’s existence was inferred indirectly in the 1960s from aerial photography showing an unusually flat patch of ice surface, and was confirmed in 1993 through satellite radar surveys that could penetrate the ice and detect the liquid water beneath. By that point, the deep drilling at Vostok was already well underway, and the project’s scientific purpose shifted to include the eventual penetration of the lake itself.

The lake beneath

Lake Vostok is approximately 250 kilometres long and 50 kilometres wide — about 150 miles by 30 miles — which makes it slightly smaller than Lake Ontario but comparable in scale, and the largest of approximately 400 subglacial lakes that have now been mapped beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. The water in the lake is liquid, despite the surrounding air temperatures at the surface of the ice sheet routinely dropping below minus 80 degrees Celsius. Several factors keep it from freezing. The weight of the overlying ice raises the lake’s pressure to approximately 350 atmospheres, which lowers the freezing point of water by several degrees. Geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior keeps the lake bottom warmer than the ice above. And the ice itself functions as an insulator, isolating the lake’s interior from the extreme cold of the polar atmosphere.

The duration of the lake’s isolation is one of the more remarkable features of the discovery. According to TIME magazine’s coverage of the breakthrough, Lake Vostok has been sealed beneath continuous Antarctic ice for somewhere between 15 and 34 million years, with most estimates clustering toward the upper end of that range. Whatever microbial communities, dissolved organic chemistry, and physical conditions are present in the lake today have evolved or accumulated essentially independently of the surface biosphere across that entire period. The lake’s interior is one of the few isolated environments on Earth that has been disconnected from the surface for geological rather than merely historical timescales. The biological implications are substantial: if there is life in Lake Vostok, it is life that has been evolving along its own trajectory for tens of millions of years, in conditions of total darkness, high pressure, near-freezing temperatures, and limited nutrient input.

Why the breakthrough mattered

The scientific interest in Lake Vostok extends well beyond its identity as a curiosity of Antarctic geology. The lake is widely considered to be the best available terrestrial analogue for the kind of subsurface liquid water environments that may exist on other worlds in the solar system. Jupiter’s moon Europa is believed to contain a global ocean of liquid water beneath an outer ice crust, kept liquid by tidal heating from Jupiter’s gravitational pull. Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a similar configuration, with confirmed plumes of liquid water erupting through its icy surface. According to NBC News’s coverage of the Russian breakthrough, including comment from NASA’s then-chief-scientist Waleed Abdalati, the techniques developed to access and analyse Lake Vostok have direct relevance to the eventual missions that will attempt to sample the subsurface oceans of these other worlds. The technical, biological, and contamination-management challenges of drilling into a 15-million-year-isolated lake on Earth are, in important ways, simpler versions of the challenges that will face any spacecraft attempting to sample Europa or Enceladus.

The contamination management was, in fact, the most delicate aspect of the 2012 breakthrough. The Russian team had to use approximately 60 tonnes of kerosene and Freon in the borehole during the drilling, both as anti-freeze and as a means of equalising pressure with the surrounding ice. The drilling chemicals are not the kind of substances anyone wants introduced into a pristine 15-million-year-isolated lake. The pressure-driven upward surge of lake water at the moment of breakthrough was specifically engineered into the drill design to address this problem: when the lake water rose and froze in the borehole, it formed a plug that prevented the drilling chemicals from flowing downward into the lake. The team then withdrew from Vostok Station shortly after the breakthrough, leaving the plug of frozen lake water in place until the following Antarctic summer.

The samples and what they showed

According to Columbia Climate School’s coverage of the 2012 breakthrough and its scientific aftermath, the Russian team returned to Vostok in December 2012 to retrieve the frozen plug of lake water that had filled the borehole. The plug was extracted, transported to Russia, and analysed in laboratories in St. Petersburg over the following months. Initial analyses reported DNA traces from more than 3,500 distinct organisms — primarily bacteria and fungi, including some unfamiliar species — but the interpretation of these findings was contested in subsequent papers, partly because of the inherent difficulty of distinguishing genuine Lake Vostok organisms from contamination introduced by the drilling chemicals, the borehole environment, and the sample handling. The methodological challenges of confirming an isolated ancient ecosystem from a single contaminated sample are substantial, and the field is still working to resolve them.

Subsequent drilling campaigns at Vostok and at other Antarctic subglacial lakes have continued to refine the techniques. A 2013 American expedition to Lake Whillans, a smaller subglacial lake under a different part of the Antarctic ice sheet, used a “hot-water” drilling technique that introduced less chemical contamination and recovered cleaner samples; the Lake Whillans samples confirmed the presence of active microbial communities in subglacial environments, providing independent support for the basic biological finding from Vostok. A British expedition to Lake Ellsworth in late 2012 was forced to abandon its drilling effort after technical problems, but planning for future Antarctic subglacial lake missions continues. The 400 known subglacial lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet now represent one of the more active frontiers in terrestrial exploration — a sealed-off network of liquid water environments, accessible only through engineering feats comparable in difficulty to the early space missions, sitting beneath the most physically remote landmass on Earth. Lake Vostok was the first to be reached, in February 2012, by a Russian drill that had been working its way downward through the ice for 23 years before the lake came up the borehole to meet it.

The post Nearly four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, Russian scientists in 2012 drilled into a hidden lake the size of Lake Ontario that had been sealed away for at least 15 million years — and when the drill broke through, the pressure was so great that the ancient lake water shot up the borehole and froze in place, freezing itself before anyone could touch it. appeared first on Space Daily.

Every photograph of Earth ever taken from space, from Apollo 8’s Earthrise to Apollo 17’s Blue Marble to Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot, descends from a strip of 35-millimetre film pulled from the wreckage of a captured German V-2 rocket in the New Mexico desert in October 1946.

The camera that exposed it was a DeVry motion-picture camera modified by Clyde Holliday at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. It was not launched on a spacecraft, because no spacecraft existed. It was bolted into a weapon.

On October 24, 1946, V-2 No. 13 rose from White Sands Proving Ground carrying Holliday’s camera above the line now commonly treated as the edge of space. At about 105 kilometres up, it photographed Earth as a curved surface against black sky, one frame every second and a half.

The rocket did not land gently. It came back down on the desert range and was destroyed on impact, but the film cassette survived. When the frames were recovered and developed, the result was the first successful photograph of Earth taken from space.

The date matters because it is often blurred with the better-known V-2 camera flights that followed in 1947 and 1948. The first successful sequence came on October 24, 1946, more than a decade before Sputnik, and long before any human being had seen Earth from orbit.

A weapon repurposed as a camera platform

The V-2 was designed to kill. Wernher von Braun’s team at Peenemünde built it as a long-range ballistic missile, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum describes the weapon as having a range of about 320 kilometres and a one-ton warhead.

More than 3,000 V-2s were fired at Allied targets during the war. The program also consumed forced labour on a horrific scale, with the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum noting that at least 10,000 people died in the Mittelwerk production system, more than were killed by the weapon’s deployment.

After Germany’s defeat, American forces shipped captured V-2 parts to New Mexico. White Sands became one of the places where the United States learned how high-altitude rockets behaved, how instruments survived launch, and how useful the upper atmosphere could be as a laboratory.

The U.S. Army’s own history of White Sands places the range at the centre of early American rocket testing, beginning with captured German V-2 technology in 1946. That same test culture opened the nose cones to scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the University of Michigan and other institutions.

Most instruments were there to measure radiation, cosmic rays, solar ultraviolet light or the upper atmosphere. Holliday’s camera did something simpler and stranger. It turned the rocket around, in effect, and made Earth itself the subject.

The camera rode above the Kármán line

The October 24 flight carried a 35-millimetre DeVry cine camera, set to expose one frame every 1.5 seconds. Contemporary accounts identify the launch as V-2 No. 13, fired from White Sands and reaching about 104.6 to 105 kilometres above the desert.

That altitude put the camera just above the 100-kilometre Kármán line, the conventional boundary often used to mark the start of space. Balloons had photographed curvature from high altitude before. Holliday’s camera crossed into a different category.

The flight itself was rough. After engine cutoff, the rocket tumbled, and its spent body eventually struck the range downrange from the launch site. One detailed reconstruction places the impact speed at about 150 metres per second, far below the 500 to 800 metres per second sometimes repeated in loose retellings.

The camera was not simply vaporised. Accounts of the recovery describe Holliday’s camera as found in usable condition except for damage such as the missing lens, while the film cassette preserved the exposed frames. The rocket was gone; the pictures remained.

What the first frames showed

The images were grainy and severe. They showed a bright, curved horizon, black sky above it, and the American Southwest flattened into pale geometry below.

Nothing in the frame looks like the blue planet photographs that later became famous. There are no oceans shining blue, no cloud swirls at global scale, no Moon in the foreground. The power of the image is that it is barely an image at all, just enough evidence to prove that Earth could be photographed from outside itself.

Smithsonian’s account of the flight notes that Holliday stitched the movie frames together into broader views, and that the V-2 photographs revealed the planet against the darkness of space. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory also credits its researchers in 1946 with bolting a 35-millimetre motion-picture camera onto a captured German V-2 and taking the first pictures of Earth’s curvature from space.

Holliday understood the shift almost immediately. In a 1950 National Geographic article, he wrote that the V-2 photographs showed “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship.”

The view before Sputnik

That sentence was written seven years before Sputnik, twelve years before John Glenn orbited Earth, and eighteen years before Apollo 8 carried human eyes around the Moon. The idea of Earth as a planet among planets was already present in a strip of film recovered from military wreckage.

The camera program did not stop with one rocket. Holliday and other teams refined the mounts, lenses and recovery systems, and later V-2 flights produced clearer panoramic images from still higher altitudes, including views that covered enormous stretches of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.

Those flights helped teach engineers how to design instruments for violent ascent, cold upper air, vibration, spin and impact. The information flowed into the wider American sounding-rocket program, including Aerobee, a smaller and cheaper research rocket that APL developed when V-2s became scarce.

The line from V-2 photography to later space images is not only emotional. It is technical. The recovery procedures, camera housings, telemetry habits and high-altitude test culture belonged to the same early chain that eventually led from sounding rockets to satellites, crewed capsules and planetary probes.

The photographs that followed

A little more than two decades later, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders photographed Earthrise from lunar orbit. In 1972, the Apollo 17 crew took The Blue Marble while travelling toward the Moon.

In 1990, Voyager 1 turned back toward home and made Pale Blue Dot, photographing Earth from about 6 billion kilometres away. Space Daily has covered that image separately in its account of Carl Sagan’s long push for Voyager’s final look back.

Every one of those later images is more beautiful than Holliday’s first frames. They are richer, cleaner, more legible and more famous. But none of them came first.

The first view was black and white, scratched by motion, recovered after impact, and born from a rocket designed for war. Somewhere in that damaged sequence, the desert falls away and Earth curves into darkness for the first time a camera ever proved it could.

The post In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert appeared first on Space Daily.

Hold a single-use plastic spoon in your hand — the kind that comes with takeout food and gets thrown away after one meal. It weighs about seven grams. According to a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Medicine on 3 February 2025, that approximate mass of plastic is roughly what the average adult human brain now contains, distributed throughout the frontal cortex in the form of microscopic shards, fragments, and nanoparticles of polyethylene and a handful of other common consumer polymers. The researchers who produced the finding were so surprised by their own data that, in the words of one of the study’s senior authors, Andrew West of Duke University, they “didn’t believe it” until multiple complementary measurement techniques on multiple samples kept producing the same result. The result was that human brains, in 2024, contained approximately 50 percent more microplastic by mass than human brains preserved from autopsies in 2016 — and that the absolute concentrations in brain tissue were roughly seven to thirty times higher than in liver or kidney samples from the same bodies.

According to the original paper by Alexander J. Nihart and colleagues at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, published in Nature Medicine, the research team analysed 52 human brain samples from frontal-cortex tissue collected at autopsy in two periods: early 2016 and early 2024. They also examined liver and kidney specimens from the same donors. The detection methods combined three complementary techniques: pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to identify and quantify polymer types, attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to confirm the chemical structure of detected particles, and electron microscopy with energy-dispersive spectroscopy to visually verify the morphology of the particles in tissue. The combination of three independent measurement approaches was specifically designed to address the central methodological challenge of the field: the difficulty of distinguishing genuine plastic particles in biological tissue from procedural contamination introduced during sample handling.

What the numbers actually were

The mass concentrations the team measured were higher than anyone in the field had expected. The 2016 brain samples averaged approximately 3,345 micrograms of plastic per gram of brain tissue. The 2024 samples averaged approximately 4,917 micrograms per gram. Multiplied by the average mass of an adult human brain (approximately 1,400 grams), the 2024 figure corresponds to a total brain plastic burden of approximately 7 grams — roughly the mass of a plastic spoon, in the comparison that has become the study’s most-cited shorthand. According to National Geographic’s coverage of the study, the 50 percent increase between 2016 and 2024 mirrors the steep increase in global plastic production over the same period, which Matthew Campen, the UNM toxicologist who led the project, described as “frighteningly correlated” with the rate of plastic accumulation in the broader environment.

The composition of the brain plastic was unexpected as well. The dominant polymer detected was polyethylene — the material used in single-use plastic bags, food packaging, water bottle caps, and a wide range of consumer products. Polyethylene accounted for a substantially higher proportion of the brain microplastics than it did of the microplastics in liver or kidney samples from the same donors. Other detected polymers included polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, and styrene-butadiene rubber, with the overall mix consistent with the kinds of plastics most commonly fragmented into the environmental microplastic pool. Electron microscopy of the brain particles showed that they were predominantly nanoscale shard-like fragments, generally less than 200 nanometres long and less than 40 nanometres wide — small enough to cross biological barriers that were never evolutionarily designed to stop them.

How the plastic gets in

The blood-brain barrier is one of the more remarkable evolutionary structures in vertebrate biology. It consists of a tightly-sealed layer of endothelial cells lining the blood vessels of the brain, supplemented by specialised glial cells called astrocytes, that together prevent most molecules circulating in the bloodstream from reaching the brain’s neural tissue. The barrier has been evolving in its current form for approximately 500 million years, since early vertebrates, and its primary function is to protect the brain’s delicate neural environment from toxins, pathogens, ion fluctuations, and other potentially harmful substances that the rest of the body’s tissues regularly encounter. The barrier is impermeable to most molecules larger than about 500 daltons (a small organic molecule), and it is reinforced by active transport systems that pump out unwanted substances that do manage to cross.

According to the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center’s institutional summary of the research, the Nihart team had expected to find some microplastic accumulation in brain tissue, on the basis of earlier animal studies and the 2024 finding of microplastics in human olfactory bulb tissue. What they had not expected was the magnitude: brain concentrations 7 to 30 times higher than concentrations in liver and kidney from the same individuals. The most plausible explanation involves the size of the particles. The detected fragments were predominantly nanoscale rather than microscale, and the smallest nanoparticles — below about 100 nanometres — appear capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier through several mechanisms, including transcytosis through endothelial cells, uptake by circulating immune cells that then migrate into the brain, and direct entry through the olfactory pathway via the nasal cavity. The barrier evolved to handle organic molecules, ions, and biological pathogens. It did not evolve to handle nanoscale fragments of synthetic polymers that did not exist on Earth before Leo Baekeland synthesised the first true plastic, Bakelite, in 1907.

The methodological challenge

The findings have not been accepted without scrutiny. According to a methodological critique published in Nature Medicine in November 2025 in response to the original Nihart paper, several independent research groups have raised concerns about the reliability of the reported concentrations. The principal objections involve the difficulty of preventing procedural contamination during sample preparation — laboratory air, plastic containers, glassware, and reagents are themselves potential sources of the very polymers being measured — and questions about whether the pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry method, while sensitive, fully distinguishes between plastic-derived organic molecules and structurally similar organic compounds produced by tissue itself.

The Nihart team has responded to these concerns by emphasising the convergence of their three independent detection methods, the use of contamination controls, and the consistency of the findings across multiple samples and analytical approaches. The broader field is in the process of working out methodological standards for measuring microplastics in human tissue — the techniques are new, the targets are tiny, and the contamination challenges are real. What is not in dispute is that microplastics have been detected, by multiple independent research groups using multiple methods, in human blood, placenta, lungs, kidneys, livers, and now brains. The exact concentrations remain a matter of active scientific debate. The presence of the particles, in some quantity, in essentially every human tissue that has been examined for them, is now established.

What we do not yet know

The 2025 paper documented the presence of microplastics in human brains. It did not establish what those particles do once they are there. The health effects of microplastic accumulation in brain tissue, if any, are presently unknown. The Nihart team did observe that brains from individuals who had been diagnosed with dementia contained 3 to 5 times more plastic than brains from non-demented donors of similar age — a striking correlation, but one that cannot, on the current evidence, distinguish between several competing causal interpretations. The plastic could be contributing to dementia pathology. The dementia pathology could be allowing more plastic to accumulate (because of blood-brain barrier breakdown that occurs in some forms of dementia). Or some third factor — diet, environmental exposure, lifestyle — could be driving both. The cross-sectional design of the study cannot resolve which of these explanations is correct.

What the study has established, with reasonable confidence and pending replication by independent groups, is that human exposure to environmental microplastics has reached a level at which measurable quantities of those plastics are now present in the most metabolically protected tissue in the human body. The barrier that evolution spent half a billion years constructing to keep foreign matter out of the brain is, in the year 2026, demonstrably permeable to nanoparticles of a class of materials that have existed on the planet for fewer than 120 years. Whether this is medically significant, environmentally tractable, or biologically reversible are questions that the next decade of research will be working to answer. The exposure itself is no longer in doubt.

The post The average human brain now contains roughly a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastic particles — about 50 percent more than brains collected in 2016 — according to a February 2025 study in Nature Medicine, meaning the blood-brain barrier, which evolution spent half a billion years building to keep foreign substances out, has quietly turned out to be transparent to a material humans first manufactured in 1907 appeared first on Space Daily.

The cheapest piece of equipment that has been shown to substantially reduce a person’s lifetime risk of developing dementia is not a medication, a meditation practice, or an exercise routine. It is a small plastic device, typically beige or transparent, that fits behind the ear and amplifies sound. According to a study published in JAMA Neurology on 18 August 2025, adults with hearing loss who began using hearing aids before the age of 70 went on to develop dementia at approximately 61 percent the rate of comparable adults with untreated hearing loss. The effect held up across more than two decades of follow-up. It survived statistical adjustment for age, sex, vascular risk factors, and educational background. It is one of the largest single-intervention effects on dementia risk that has been documented in any peer-reviewed study to date — and it sits, in 2026, almost entirely unused by the population it would most benefit.

The study, led by Lily Francis of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio with senior author Sudha Seshadri, drew on data from the Framingham Heart Study — the longest-running cardiovascular and public-health cohort in American medical research, originally launched in 1948 in the Massachusetts town of Framingham. According to Hearing Tracker’s coverage of the study, citing the Francis et al. paper directly, the research team analysed records from 2,953 participants in the Framingham original and offspring cohorts who were aged 60 or older at baseline and free of dementia at the start of observation. The participants had received pure-tone audiometric hearing assessments between 1977-1979 (original cohort) and 1995-1998 (offspring cohort), and had been tracked for up to 20 years afterward for incident dementia. By the end of follow-up, 583 of the participants — approximately 20 percent — had developed dementia.

What the data showed

The headline finding was specific to a particular age group. According to Medscape’s detailed report on the statistical findings, participants who were younger than 70 at the time of their hearing assessment and who had hearing loss showed a sharp split based on whether they used hearing aids. Those with untreated hearing loss developed dementia at the highest rate. Those who used hearing aids had a 61 percent lower risk of dementia (hazard ratio 0.39, 95% confidence interval 0.17 to 0.89, P=0.03). Participants under 70 with no hearing loss at all sat in between, with a 29 percent lower risk than the untreated-hearing-loss group. The under-70 finding was robust across multiple statistical models including adjustments for cardiovascular risk and education.

For participants 70 or older at the time of their hearing assessment, the protective association disappeared. Hearing aid use in this older subgroup was not significantly associated with reduced dementia risk in any of the models the team examined. Seshadri, the senior author, offered a clinical interpretation of the age dependence: “The impact of correcting risk factors is, for most risk factors, greatest in midlife between ages 50-75.” Older adults whose hearing has been untreated for many years may have already accumulated brain changes — atrophy, reduced cognitive reserve, persistent social disengagement — that hearing aids alone cannot reverse. The implication is that hearing aids work as a dementia-prevention tool, but their effect appears to depend substantially on timing.

Why hearing might matter for the brain

The mechanistic explanations for why treated hearing loss reduces dementia risk are not yet fully established, but the broader literature converges on several plausible pathways. The first is cognitive load. When the auditory system delivers degraded signals to the brain, the brain has to expend more processing resources to extract meaning — leaving less cognitive capacity available for memory formation, attention, and other higher-order functions. Over years and decades, this chronic cognitive overhead may contribute to faster cognitive aging. Hearing aids reduce the load by restoring clearer auditory input, freeing up cognitive resources.

The second pathway is social. Hearing loss makes conversation effortful and often embarrassing, and many people with untreated hearing loss progressively withdraw from social activities — phone calls, group meals, religious services, family gatherings, professional meetings — to avoid the difficulty. The resulting social isolation is itself an established dementia risk factor, identified by the 2024 Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention as one of 14 modifiable risk factors. Hearing aids that restore conversational ability tend to restore social engagement as well. The third pathway is structural: untreated hearing loss has been associated in imaging studies with faster atrophy of brain regions involved in auditory and language processing, and the structural changes may have downstream effects on broader cognitive function.

What stands in the way

Given the size of the documented effect and the modest cost of the intervention, the central public-health puzzle is why so few of the people who could benefit from hearing aids actually use them. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders’ official statistics on hearing health, approximately 28.8 million US adults could benefit from using hearing aids, but among adults aged 70 and older with hearing loss who could benefit, fewer than 30 percent have ever used them. Among younger adults with hearing loss — exactly the group the 2025 Framingham analysis identifies as gaining the most from hearing aids — the adoption rate is substantially lower still. Across the entire population of Americans with hearing loss of any severity, between 60 and 90 percent never use hearing aids at all.

The reasons for this gap are well-documented in the public-health literature. According to a 2025 PMC review of insurance status and hearing aid utilization in older US adults, the leading barrier is cost. Prescription hearing aids in the United States typically cost between $2,000 and $5,000 per pair. Original Medicare does not cover hearing aids or fitting examinations at all. Some Medicare Advantage plans offer partial hearing benefits, but coverage varies enormously by plan. Medicaid hearing aid coverage varies state by state and is often limited. The 2022 FDA regulation permitting over-the-counter hearing aids for mild-to-moderate hearing loss has reduced costs substantially for some users — OTC aids run $200 to $1,500 per pair — but uptake of OTC devices has been slower than initially projected. Other barriers include the perceived stigma of using a visible aging-related device, the gradualness of hearing loss (which often goes unrecognised for years), and the typical delay of 7 to 10 years between when a person first becomes aware of hearing difficulty and when they finally pursue treatment.

What the study does not prove

The Francis et al. 2025 paper is an observational study rather than a randomised trial, and the authors acknowledged several limitations. Hearing aid use was self-reported and measured as a binary variable, with no information on how consistently or how many hours per day each participant actually wore their device. The study could not distinguish whether the protective effect was driven specifically by the age of intervention or by the underlying severity of hearing loss. People who chose to buy and wear hearing aids may have differed from non-users in unmeasured ways — better access to healthcare, higher health literacy, more proactive engagement with their own well-being — that could partly explain the dementia difference.

The 2025 finding does not, on its own, prove that hearing aids cause reduced dementia risk. What it adds to the existing literature, including the 2023 ACHIEVE randomised controlled trial which showed slowed cognitive decline in high-risk adults using hearing aids, is the specific temporal claim that the protective effect is concentrated in adults who begin treatment before age 70. The combined weight of the available evidence is now substantial enough that the 2024 Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention identified hearing loss as the single most prevalent modifiable risk factor for dementia globally, accounting for approximately 8 percent of all dementia cases. The most effective response to this risk factor — early-life hearing aid use — is one of the cheapest, lowest-risk, and most widely available interventions in the modern medical toolkit. The reason it remains so widely unused is not that the evidence is unclear. The evidence is increasingly clear. The reason is that the device itself sits at the intersection of cost, insurance coverage, social stigma, and the slow human pace at which gradual hearing loss becomes a noticed problem. The Framingham 2025 finding makes the case for closing that gap as urgently as any single piece of public-health data published in the past decade.

The post People who began using hearing aids before age 70 reduced their long-term risk of developing dementia by approximately 61 percent — according to a 2025 Framingham Heart Study — yet roughly 60 to 90 percent of adults with hearing loss never wear them, meaning one of the most powerful documented dementia-prevention tools is sitting unused in millions of medicine cabinets. appeared first on Space Daily.

Apollo 17 was the last time human beings walked on the Moon, but the mission did not behave like an ending. It behaved like a field season. In December 1972, Gene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley, drove a battery-powered rover across black lunar dust, and packed 741 rock and soil samples into boxes for the trip home.

The total came to 110.5 kilograms, the largest lunar sample return of the Apollo program.

One of the most arresting pieces of that haul was not a boulder or a glittering crystal. It was orange soil, found near Shorty Crater, made of tiny volcanic glass beads from an eruption roughly 3.64 billion years old.

The mission had gone to Taurus-Littrow partly because planners wanted old highland material and possible signs of younger volcanism on the valley floor. What Cernan and Schmitt found was stranger. The orange glass really was volcanic, but the crater beside it was not the vent that made it.

The last Apollo landing was built for science

Apollo 17 launched from Kennedy Space Center at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time on December 7, 1972. It was the only night launch of the Apollo lunar program, a Saturn V rising in white flame while the last Moon crew rode toward a landing site chosen for rocks, not symbolism.

The crew had three men. Eugene Cernan commanded the mission. Ronald Evans remained in lunar orbit aboard the command module America. Harrison Schmitt, the lunar module pilot, was a professional geologist and became the only scientist to walk on the Moon.

That mattered before the crew ever reached the surface. Earlier Apollo landings had proved that humans could land, work, and return. Apollo 17 was meant to stretch what a lunar expedition could do when the field crew included someone trained to read rocks as a landscape.

NASA’s mission plan sent Cernan and Schmitt to Taurus-Littrow, a valley on the southeastern edge of Mare Serenitatis. The site offered two temptations at once: old material from the lunar highlands and possible evidence of volcanic activity on the valley floor.

They landed the lunar module Challenger on December 11, 1972. Cernan reported that Challenger had landed, then the crew and Mission Control checked the spacecraft carefully in case an emergency liftoff was needed. Only after that did the valley become a workplace.

Taurus-Littrow was a valley full of targets

To the astronauts, Taurus-Littrow was not just scenery. It was a map of objectives. The South Massif, North Massif, Sculptured Hills, nearby craters, rolling boulders, and dark valley floor each held a different possible piece of lunar history.

The mission was one of Apollo’s J-type flights, which meant longer surface stays, expanded science equipment, and a Lunar Roving Vehicle. The rover let Cernan and Schmitt reach stations no walking crew could have covered efficiently in bulky suits.

Across three moonwalks, they spent more than 22 hours outside the lunar module. They drove about 35.7 kilometres in the rover, stopping at geology stations, sampling boulders, scraping trenches, shooting photographs, reading checklists, and loading sample bags.

The rover also made the Moon messier. During the first excursion, Cernan accidentally knocked off the rover’s right rear fender with a hammer handle sticking out from his suit pocket. Without the fender, abrasive dust sprayed over the astronauts, the vehicle, and their equipment.

Mission Control and the crew improvised a repair using onboard maps, clamps, and tape. It was not elegant, but it worked well enough to keep the dust under control during later drives.

The orange soil was real, but the first explanation was wrong

The most famous discovery came during the second moonwalk near Shorty Crater. Schmitt saw orange material in the soil and called attention to it immediately. On a grey world, colour was not a small detail.

Cernan and Schmitt sampled the orange material and nearby black soil. The discovery seemed, at first glance, to fit one of the mission’s big hopes: finding evidence of relatively young volcanic activity in the Taurus-Littrow region.

The truth was more complicated. Later study showed that the orange and black material consisted of volcanic glass beads, formed in a fire-fountain eruption about 3.64 billion years ago. The melt came from deep inside the Moon, roughly 400 kilometres below the surface.

Shorty Crater, however, was not the volcanic vent. It was an ordinary impact crater that happened to expose older volcanic glass. The bright colour was real. The easy story was not.

That is why Apollo 17 still matters to lunar science. The mission did not just collect souvenirs from the last human visit. It returned samples that forced geologists to separate what the Moon looked like from what had actually happened there.

The samples kept speaking after the astronauts left

The Apollo 17 collection included basalts, breccias, highland crustal rocks, rare deep-crust materials, rake samples, core samples, and soil from multiple stations. The 741 individual samples gave laboratories on Earth a physical archive of Taurus-Littrow.

Some rocks helped scientists study ancient basin-forming impacts. Others recorded mare volcanism, when lava once filled low areas of the Moon. The orange glass preserved a more explosive story, with droplets frozen from molten material thrown out billions of years ago.

The crew also drilled a deep core reaching material from about three metres below the lunar surface. That core let researchers examine layers that had been shielded from the most recent surface exposure.

Half a century later, Apollo samples are still being reanalysed with instruments the original mission teams did not have. The rocks Cernan and Schmitt packed into boxes in 1972 remain active scientific material, not relics.

That is why new work on Apollo material keeps appearing. A sample can sit quietly in storage for decades, then meet a better microscope, a more precise mass spectrometer, or a new question about the Moon’s interior.

Scientists are still pulling new chemistry out of Apollo 17 material today, including from samples returned in 1972 and preserved for later generations of instruments. Recent analysis of Apollo samples has continued to reveal hidden details about the Moon’s mantle.

The suits made fieldwork feel mechanical

For all the grandeur of the photographs, Apollo 17 geology was hard physical labour. Cernan and Schmitt worked in pressurized suits, sealed helmets, stiff gloves, and portable life-support backpacks. Every sample bag, rake stroke, core tube, and camera frame had to pass through machinery wrapped around the body.

Cernan’s flown A7-LB suit is now preserved by the Smithsonian. It was the last spacesuit worn on the lunar surface, with the red commander stripes visible in the images that still define Apollo 17.

Inside that suit, a geologic field stop became a sequence of constrained movements. Bend carefully. Grip through gloves. Balance in one-sixth gravity. Keep track of the sample number. Keep dust out of the wrong places. Describe the rock clearly enough for scientists on Earth to follow the work.

Schmitt’s presence changed the texture of the mission. He could look at a rock, a slope, or a patch of soil and narrate what made it geologically interesting. Cernan handled the rover, equipment, drilling, navigation, and command decisions while Schmitt kept reading the valley.

That partnership is the centre of Apollo 17. One astronaut brought the instincts of a Navy pilot and mission commander. The other brought the eye of a field geologist. Taurus-Littrow needed both.

There is a thoughtful video by Justin Brown that examines why difficult, quiet work can feel so different from work that brings constant feedback, which gives the Apollo 17 surface record a useful modern echo without changing what the mission actually was.

The final footprints were not the final experiment

Before leaving the surface, Cernan and Schmitt parked the rover so its television camera could watch Challenger lift off from the Moon. The rover stayed behind, along with the descent stage, tools, experiment hardware, footprints, wheel tracks, and the disturbed grey dust around the work sites.

Cernan was the last person to climb the ladder from the lunar surface. That fact gives Apollo 17 its emotional weight, but it can also flatten the mission into a farewell scene. The better way to understand it is as a scientific expedition that happened to be the last one.

The final Apollo astronauts also left objects that still connect the Moon to Earth. Earlier Apollo crews and Apollo 17 left retroreflectors that scientists have used to bounce laser pulses off the lunar surface, a continuing measurement of the Earth-Moon distance and the Moon’s slow movement away from us.

Those retroreflectors are still part of a live experiment. So are the rocks, in a different way. Every time a sealed Apollo 17 sample is opened for a new generation of instruments, the mission extends beyond December 1972.

Cernan also left a private mark for his daughter Tracy in the lunar dust, a small human gesture beside the official science and hardware. The initials he traced into the regolith are likely still there, not because they were protected, but because the Moon has no wind or rain to erase them.

The rover is still in Taurus-Littrow. The orange glass is on Earth. The footprints and wheel tracks remain in dust that has not felt weather since the astronauts lifted away. Apollo 17 ended as a flight, but as a field record it is still open, waiting in rock boxes, transcripts, photographs, and a valley no human has crossed since.

The post In 1972, Apollo 17 carried the only scientist to walk on the Moon into Taurus-Littrow, where a broken rover fender, 741 samples, and orange volcanic glass from 3.64 billion years ago turned the final lunar landing into a geology field trip appeared first on Space Daily.

The deepest place on Earth, it turns out, is littered. The dive began at the surface of the western Pacific Ocean, approximately 200 miles southwest of Guam, on the morning of 28 April 2019. Victor Vescovo, a 53-year-old retired Navy officer and Dallas-based private-equity investor, climbed into a two-person titanium pressure sphere mounted inside a 12-tonne submersible called Limiting Factor. He sealed himself in alone. The support crew on the surface ship released the submersible into the water. Vescovo began a vertical descent through the ocean — past the sunlit surface waters, past the dim twilight zone at 200 metres, past the cold blackness below 1,000 metres where natural light no longer reaches, and on downward through the deep ocean basins toward the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The descent took approximately four hours. By the time Vescovo’s submersible came to rest on the seabed, he was approximately 10,928 metres below the surface — almost seven miles down — in the deepest known point on the entire planet.

According to CNN Travel’s coverage of the dive, Vescovo’s depth of 10,928 metres exceeded the previous deepest manned descent — Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard’s 1960 trip in the bathyscaphe Trieste — by approximately 16 metres, or 52 feet. The film director James Cameron’s 2012 solo dive in the Deepsea Challenger had reached approximately 35,787 feet, slightly less deep than the 1960 record. Vescovo therefore became, at the moment his submersible touched bottom on 28 April 2019, the deepest-diving human in history, and the fourth person ever to have visited Challenger Deep, after Walsh and Piccard in 1960 and Cameron in 2012. He would, over the following two weeks, return to the bottom three more times, making him the most experienced visitor to the deepest place on Earth by a considerable margin.

What it takes to go there

The technical challenge of reaching Challenger Deep is substantial, and the engineering required to keep a human being alive at that depth is unlike any other application in modern engineering. The pressure at 10,928 metres is approximately 1,086 bar, or 16,000 pounds per square inch — roughly 1,071 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. Several common metaphors are used to convey the magnitude of this pressure in human terms. One is the weight of approximately 50 fully loaded Boeing 747 jumbo jets stacked on top of one another. Another is the weight of the Empire State Building bearing down on an area the size of a single human foot. A third is simply that any ordinary unprotected object lowered to Challenger Deep will be crushed essentially instantaneously into a small dense pellet of whatever material it was made from.

The Limiting Factor was designed specifically to survive these conditions. The submersible’s pressure hull is a titanium sphere with walls 90 millimetres thick, manufactured by Triton Submarines in Florida and certified by classification societies for unlimited depth — meaning the design is engineered to tolerate the maximum pressure that exists anywhere on the Earth’s seafloor. The interior of the sphere is approximately 1.5 metres in diameter, just large enough for two people to sit upright in cramped positions. The submersible’s life support, viewports, communications, propulsion, and ballast systems all had to be designed to operate at the extreme conditions of the trench bottom. The total cost of the Limiting Factor and its supporting expedition, called the Five Deeps Expedition, was approximately $48 million — Vescovo’s own money, derived from his career in private equity.

What he found

The bottom of the Mariana Trench is not, despite popular imagination, a featureless plain. According to NBC News Mach’s coverage of the dive, Vescovo described the seafloor at Challenger Deep as “a flat, beige basin covered with a thick layer of silt,” but with occasional rocky outcrops, varied geological features, and a surprisingly active biological community. He observed shrimp-like amphipods with long legs and antennae moving across the silt, translucent “sea pigs” (a type of sea cucumber adapted to extreme depths), spoon worms, snailfish, and other deep-sea organisms. Four of the species the expedition collected during the multiple Challenger Deep dives turned out to be previously unknown to science. The biological collection alone, taxonomically speaking, justified the entire expedition.

The submersible’s external lights illuminated patches of the seafloor as Vescovo manoeuvred the Limiting Factor across the basin. He criss-crossed back and forth for approximately four hours, the longest single time any human being has ever spent at Challenger Deep, looking for unique geological features, biological specimens, and any evidence that some location nearby might be even deeper than the 1960 Trieste position. He also looked, as a secondary mission objective, for any signs of human contamination. In the popular imagination, the deepest point on Earth would presumably be the one place least likely to contain evidence of human activity. The 1960 Trieste dive, which had been brief and visually limited, had not reported any obvious human debris. Cameron’s 2012 dive had likewise focused on biological and geological observations and had not specifically catalogued plastic pollution.

The plastic on the seabed

Vescovo’s longer dive time and more powerful illumination produced different results. According to TIME magazine’s coverage of the discovery, Vescovo observed a plastic bag and several candy wrappers resting on the seafloor at the bottom of Challenger Deep. The objects were photographed by the submersible’s external cameras and later confirmed by his expedition team. The plastic objects had presumably arrived at the deepest point on Earth through some combination of overboard dumping from ships, river runoff carried by ocean currents, and the gradual sinking of plastic debris through the water column from the floating Pacific garbage patches that have accumulated over the past several decades. Vescovo’s reaction, conveyed in interviews shortly after the dive, was direct: “It was very disappointing to see obvious human contamination of the deepest point in the ocean. It’s not a big garbage collection pool, even though it’s treated as such.”

According to CBS News’s coverage of the Five Deeps Expedition findings, Vescovo also observed “angular metal or plastic objects, one with writing on it” on the seafloor — suggesting that the visible debris at the bottom of the trench includes more than just the bag and wrappers, and that the cumulative presence of human-made objects at Challenger Deep is more substantial than any single piece would suggest. The expedition team collected biological samples and confirmed in subsequent analysis that the amphipods Vescovo had observed during the dive contained microplastics in their digestive systems — meaning that the visible plastic on the seafloor was the structurally largest component of a far more pervasive contamination that extended into the bodies of the animals living there.

What the dive established

The Five Deeps Expedition continued through the rest of 2019, with Vescovo completing dives to the deepest point in each of the world’s five oceans. The Mariana Trench dive remains the deepest of the five. The mission’s biological collection contributed several dozen new species to the scientific literature. The detailed sonar maps the expedition produced of the deepest points in the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, Southern, and Arctic Oceans substantially improved the global bathymetric record of the planet’s deepest features. The Limiting Factor submersible has since been used for further deep-ocean research expeditions, including the first manned dives to the bottoms of several other ocean trenches that had not previously been visited by people.

What the dive established, beyond its various scientific contributions, was something simpler and harder to absorb. The deepest place on Earth, the most physically remote point on the planet’s surface, the location that took 59 years from the first manned descent in 1960 to be visited for a fourth time by the spring of 2019 — that place contains plastic. The 50 jumbo jets of pressure overhead, the seven miles of seawater above, the total darkness, the four-degree water, the thousand-fold isolation from the activities of the human surface world have not been enough to keep the bag and the candy wrappers from arriving on the seafloor. Vescovo’s 2019 dive was the first time anyone had stayed at the bottom long enough, and looked carefully enough, to confirm what was already true: that the planet’s deepest point, like every other point on the planet, now contains visible evidence of the species that has spent the past century industrially manufacturing single-use plastic and disposing of it in ways that allow it, eventually, to settle to the bottom of every body of water on Earth. The deepest place on the planet, as of April 2019, is no longer pristine. Whether it ever was is a more philosophical question. It is certainly not pristine now.

The post Seven miles beneath the Pacific Ocean, in the deepest place on Earth, American explorer Victor Vescovo descended in 2019 to a depth where the pressure equals 50 jumbo jets stacked overhead — and at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where no light has ever reached, he found a plastic bag and several candy wrappers waiting on the seabed. appeared first on Space Daily.