Enlarge (credit: Getty | RJ Sangosti)

After an MDMA therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder dramatically failed to impress Food and Drug Administration advisers earlier this month, researchers are moving forward with another psychedelic—a slow-release oral dose of the hallucinogenic drug ketamine—as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression.

In a mid-stage, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial, researchers tested slow-release ketamine pills, taken twice weekly. The trial, sponsored by New Zealand-based Douglas Pharmaceuticals, found ketamine to be safe compared with placebo. At the trial's highest dose, the treatment showed some efficacy against depression in patients who had previously tried an average of nearly five antidepressants without success, according to the results published Monday in Nature Medicine.

But the Phase II trial, which started with 231 participants, indicated that the pool of patients who may benefit from the treatment could be quite limited. The researchers behind the trial chose an unusual "enrichment" design to test the depression treatment. This was intended to thwart the high failure rates generally seen in trials for depression treatments, even in patients without treatment-resistant cases. But even after selecting patients who initially responded to ketamine, 59.5 percent of the enriched participants still dropped out of the trial before its completion, largely due to a lack of efficacy.

Enlarge / Painting of a gryphon, or griffin, a lion-raptor chimera from ancient folklore. (credit: Mark Witton)

The gryphon, or griffin, is a legendary creature dating back to classical antiquity, sporting the body, legs, and tail of a lion and the wings, head, and front talons of an eagle. Since the 1980s, a popular "geomyth" has spread that the griffin's unique appearance was inspired by the fossilized skeleton of a horned dinosaur known as Protoceratops. It's a fascinating and colorful story, but according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, there is no hard evidence to support such a connection.

"Everything about griffin origins is consistent with their traditional interpretation as imaginary beasts, just as their appearance is entirely explained by them being [mythological] chimeras of big cats and raptorial birds," said co-author Mark Witton, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth. "Invoking a role for dinosaurs in griffin lore, especially species from distant lands like Protoceratops, not only introduces unnecessary complexity and inconsistencies to their origins, but also relies on interpretations and proposals that don’t withstand scrutiny.”

There are representations of griffin-like creatures in ancient Egyptian art dated to before 3000 BCE, while in ancient Greek and Roman texts the creatures were associated with gold deposits in Central Asia. By the Middle Ages, griffins were common figures in medieval iconography and in heraldry. The hippogriff named Buckbeak in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a related mythical creature, the product of a griffin and a mare.

Enlarge / NASA astronaut Christina Koch (right) poses for a portrait with fellow Expedition 61 Flight Engineer Jessica Meir, who is inside a US spacesuit for a fit check. (credit: NASA)

Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program.

Now, that plan appears to be in trouble, with one of the spacesuit providers—Collins Aerospace—expected to back out, Ars has learned. It's a blow for NASA, because the space agency really needs modern spacesuits.

NASA's Apollo-era suits have long been retired. The current suits used for spacewalks in low-Earth orbit are four decades old. "These new capabilities will allow us to continue on the ISS and allows us to do the Artemis program and continue on to Mars," said the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a celebratory news conference in Houston two years ago.

Enlarge / Some of the waste material that ends up part of these bricks. (credit: Seamus Daniel, RMIT University)

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have developed special “energy-smart bricks” that can be made by mixing clay with glass waste and coal ash. These bricks can help mitigate the negative effects of traditional brick manufacturing, an energy-intensive process that requires large-scale clay mining, contributes heavily to CO₂ emissions, and generates a lot of air pollution.

According to the RMIT researchers, “Brick kilns worldwide consume 375 million tonnes (~340 million metric tons) of coal in combustion annually, which is equivalent to 675 million tonnes of CO₂ emission (~612 million metric tons).” This exceeds the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of 130 million passenger vehicles in the US.

The energy-smart bricks rely on a material called RCF waste. It mostly contains fine pieces of glass (92 percent) left over from the recycling process, along with ceramic materials, plastic, paper, and ash. Most of this waste material generally ends up in landfills, where it can cause soil and water degradation. However, the study authors note, “The utilization of RCF waste in fired-clay bricks offers a potential solution to the increasing global waste crisis and reduces the burden on landfills."

Enlarge / Ligeia Mare, the second-largest body of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell)

During its T85 Titan flyby on July 24, 2012, the Cassini spacecraft registered an unexpectedly bright reflection on the surface of the lake Kivu Lacus. Its Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) data was interpreted as a roughness on the methane-ethane lake, which could have been a sign of mudflats, surfacing bubbles, or waves.

“Our landscape evolution models show that the shorelines on Titan are most consistent with Earth lakes that have been eroded by waves,” says Rose Palermo, a coastal geomorphologist at St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center, who led the study investigating signatures of wave erosion on Titan. The evidence of waves is still inconclusive, but future crewed missions to Titan should probably pack some surfboards just in case.

Troubled seas

While waves have been considered the most plausible explanation for reflections visible in Cassini’s VIMS imagery for quite some time, other studies aimed to confirm their presence found no wave activity at all. “Other observations show that the liquid surfaces have been very still in the past, very flat,” Palermo says. “A possible explanation for this is at the time we were observing Titan, the winds were pretty low, so there weren’t many waves at that time. To confirm waves, we would need to have better resolution data,” she adds.

Enlarge / This photo taken on June 25, 2024, shows the retrieval site of the return capsule of the Chang'e-6 probe in Siziwang Banner, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. (credit: Xinhua/Lian Zhen)

A small spacecraft landed in Inner Mongolia on Tuesday, bringing samples from the far side of the Moon back to Earth.

This was not China's first robotic mission to return a few pounds of dust and pebbles from the lunar surface—that came with the Chang'e 5 mission in December 2020. However, this was the first time any space program in the world returned material from the Moon's far side.

The successful conclusion of this mission, which launched from Earth nearly two months ago, marked another significant achievement for China's space program as the country sets its sights on landing humans on the Moon by the year 2030.

Enlarge / Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck speaks during the opening of the new Rocket Lab factory on October 12, 2018, in Auckland, New Zealand. (credit: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Peter Beck has been having a pretty great June. Earlier this month, he was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Then, Sir Peter Beck presided as Rocket Lab launched its 50th Electron rocket, becoming the fastest company to launch its 50th privately developed booster.

Finally, last week, Rocket Lab revealed that it had signed its largest launch contract ever: 10 flights for the Japanese Earth-observation company Synspective. Ars caught up with Beck while he was in Tokyo for the announcement. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, which touches on a variety of launch-related issues.

Ars Technica: Hi Pete. We've talked about competition in small launch for years. But when I tally up the record of some of your US competitors—Firefly, Astra, Relativity Space, Virgin Orbit, and ABL—they're 7-for-21 on launch attempts. And if you remove the now-retired rockets, it's 1-for-6. Some of these competitors have, or did, exist for a decade. What does this say about the launch business?

Enlarge / Enhanced Juno image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in 2018. It is likely not the same one observed by Cassini in the 1600s. (credit: Gerald Eichstadt and Sean Doran/CC BY-NC-SA)

The planet Jupiter is particularly known for its so-called Great Red Spot, a swirling vortex in the gas giant's atmosphere that has been around since at least 1831. But how it formed and how old it is remain matters of debate. Astronomers in the 1600s, including Giovanni Cassini, also reported a similar spot in their observations of Jupiter that they dubbed the "Permanent Spot." This prompted scientists to question whether the spot Cassini observed is the same one we see today. We now have an answer to that question: The spots are not the same, according to a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“From the measurements of sizes and movements, we deduced that it is highly unlikely that the current Great Red Spot was the ‘Permanent Spot’ observed by Cassini,” said co-author Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. “The ‘Permanent Spot’ probably disappeared sometime between the mid-18th and 19th centuries, in which case we can now say that the longevity of the Red Spot exceeds 190 years.”

The planet Jupiter was known to Babylonian astronomers in the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, as well as to ancient Chinese astronomers; the latter's observations would eventually give birth to the Chinese zodiac in the 4th century BCE, with its 12-year cycle based on the gas giant's orbit around the Sun. In 1610, aided by the emergence of telescopes, Galileo Galilei famously observed Jupiter's four largest moons, thereby bolstering the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system.

Enlarge (credit: Azaliya via Getty)

For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier.

It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog recently said, “nobody believes me.” A prominent professor at a major public university once described him as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer.”

As a teenager in New Jersey in the 1960s, Herzog kept dogs and cats, as well as an iguana, a duck, and a boa constrictor named Boa. Now a professor emeritus at Western Carolina University, he insists he’s not out to smear anyone’s furry friends. In a blog post questioning the so-called pet effect, in 2012, Herzog included a photo of his cat, Tilly. “She makes my life better,” he wrote. “Please Don’t Blame The Messenger!”

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off aboard United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

In an update released late Friday evening, NASA said it was "adjusting" the date of the Starliner spacecraft's return to Earth from June 26 to an unspecified time in July.

The announcement followed two days of long meetings to review the readiness of the spacecraft, developed by Boeing, to fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth. According to sources, these meetings included high-level participation from senior leaders at the agency, including Associate Administrator Jim Free.

This "Crew Flight Test," which launched on June 5 atop an Atlas V rocket, was originally due to undock and return to Earth on June 14. However, as engineers from NASA and Boeing studied data from the vehicle's problematic flight to the International Space Station, they have waved off several return opportunities.

Enlarge / Dr. Peter Marks, Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research within the Food and Drug Administration on March 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Susan Walsh)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday announced expanded approval for a gene therapy to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD)—despite the fact that it failed a Phase III clinical trial last year and that the approval came over the objections of three of FDA's own expert review teams and two of its directors.

In fact, the decision to expand the approval of the therapy—called Elevidys (delandistrogene moxeparvovec-rokl)—appears to have been decided almost entirely by Peter Marks, Director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Elevidys initially gained an FDA approval last year, also over objections from staff. The therapy intravenously delivers a transgene that codes for select portions of a protein called dystrophin in healthy muscle cells; the protein is mutated in patients with DMD. Last year's initial approval occurred under an accelerated approval process and was only for use in DMD patients ages 4 and 5 who are able to walk. In the actions Thursday, the FDA granted a traditional approval for the therapy and opened access to DMD patients of all ages, regardless of ambulatory status.

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Earlier this week, the US Senate passed what's being called the ADVANCE Act, for Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy. Among a number of other changes, the bill would attempt to streamline permitting for newer reactor technology and offer cash incentives for the first companies that build new plants that rely on one of a handful of different technologies. It enjoyed broad bipartisan support both in the House and Senate and now heads to President Biden for his signature.

Given Biden's penchant for promoting his bipartisan credentials, it's likely to be signed into law. But the biggest hurdles nuclear power faces are all economic, rather than regulatory, and the bill provides very little in the way of direct funding that could help overcome those barriers.

Incentives

For reasons that will be clear only to congressional staffers, the Senate version of the bill was attached to an amendment to the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act. Nevertheless, it passed by a margin of 88-2, indicating widespread (and potentially veto-proof) support. Having passed the House already, there's nothing left but the president's signature.

Enlarge / New research lends further credence to the "population crash" theory about Easter Island being just a myth. (credit: Arian Zwegers/CC BY 2.0)

For centuries, Western scholars have touted the fate of the native population on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as a case study in the devastating cost of environmentally unsustainable living. The story goes that the people on the remote island chopped down all the trees to build massive stone statues, triggering a population collapse. Their numbers were further depleted when Europeans discovered the island and brought foreign diseases, among other factors. But an alternative narrative began to emerge in the 21st century that the earliest inhabitants actually lived quite sustainably until that point. A new paper published in the journal Science Advances offers another key piece of evidence in support of that alternative hypothesis.

As previously reported, Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering their cultural significance, as well as how a Stone Age culture managed to carve and transport statues weighing as much as 92 tons. The first Europeans arrived in the 17th century and found only a few thousand inhabitants on a tiny island (just 14 by 7 miles across) thousands of miles away from any other land. Since then, in order to explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people.

But perhaps they didn't need tens of thousands of people to accomplish that feat. Back in 2012, Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion. [UPDATE: An eagle-eyed reader alerted us to the 1980s work of Czech experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, who conducted similar practical experiments on Easter Island after being inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. Pavel concluded that just 16 men and one leader were sufficient to transport the statues.]

The piece of debris that fell through Alejandro Otero's roof (right) came from a support bracket jettisoned from the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

The owner of a home in southwestern Florida has formally submitted a claim to NASA for damages caused by a chunk of space debris that fell through his roof in March.

The legal case is unprecedented—no one has evidently made such a claim against NASA before. How the space agency responds will set a precedent, and that may be important in a world where there is ever more activity in orbit, with space debris and vehicles increasingly making uncontrolled reentries through Earth's atmosphere.

Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, was not home when part of a battery pack from the International Space Station crashed through his home on March 8. His son Daniel, 19, was home but escaped injury. NASA has confirmed the 1.6-pound object, made of the metal alloy Inconel, was part of a battery pack jettisoned from the space station in 2021.

Enlarge / Pharma interest and investment in radiotherapy drugs is heating up. (credit: Knowable Magazine)

On a Wednesday morning in late January 1896 at a small light bulb factory in Chicago, a middle-aged woman named Rose Lee found herself at the heart of a groundbreaking medical endeavor. With an X-ray tube positioned above the tumor in her left breast, Lee was treated with a torrent of high-energy particles that penetrated into the malignant mass.

“And so,” as her treating clinician later wrote, “without the blaring of trumpets or the beating of drums, X-ray therapy was born.”

Radiation therapy has come a long way since those early beginnings. The discovery of radium and other radioactive metals opened the doors to administering higher doses of radiation to target cancers located deeper within the body. The introduction of proton therapy later made it possible to precisely guide radiation beams to tumors, thus reducing damage to surrounding healthy tissues—a degree of accuracy that was further refined through improvements in medical physics, computer technologies and state-of-the-art imaging techniques.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

It's one of the world's worst-kept secrets that large language models give blatantly false answers to queries and do so with a confidence that's indistinguishable from when they get things right. There are a number of reasons for this. The AI could have been trained on misinformation; the answer could require some extrapolation from facts that the LLM isn't capable of; or some aspect of the LLM's training might have incentivized a falsehood.

But perhaps the simplest explanation is that an LLM doesn't recognize what constitutes a correct answer but is compelled to provide one. So it simply makes something up, a habit that has been termed confabulation.

Figuring out when an LLM is making something up would obviously have tremendous value, given how quickly people have started relying on them for everything from college essays to job applications. Now, researchers from the University of Oxford say they've found a relatively simple way to determine when LLMs appear to be confabulating that works with all popular models and across a broad range of subjects. And, in doing so, they develop evidence that most of the alternative facts LLMs provide are a product of confabulation.

Enlarge (credit: Diamond Shruumz)

Cases of illnesses linked to microdosing candies have more than doubled, with reports of seizures and the need for intubation, mechanical ventilation, and intensive care stays. But, there remains no recall of the products—microdosing chocolates, gummies, and candy cones by Diamond Shruumz—linked to the severe and life-threatening illnesses. In the latest update from the Food and Drug Administration late Tuesday, the agency said that it "has been in contact with the firm about a possible voluntary recall, but these discussions are still ongoing."

In the update, the FDA reported 26 cases across 16 states, up from 12 cases in eight states last week. Of the 26 reported cases, 25 sought medical care and 16 were hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a health alert about the candies. The agency noted that as of June 11, the people sickened after eating Diamond Shruumz candies presented to health care providers with a host of severe symptoms. Those include: central nervous system depression with sedation, seizures, muscle rigidity, clonus (abnormal reflex responses), tremor, abnormal heart rate (bradycardia or tachycardia), abnormal blood pressure (hypotension or hypertension), gastrointestinal effects (nausea, vomiting, or abdominal pain), skin flushing, diaphoresis (excessive sweating), and metabolic acidosis with increased anion gap (an acid-based disorder linked to poisonings).

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In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people can’t eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the world’s poorest, raising a cow or two—or a few sheep or goats—can be a key source of wealth.

But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livestock account for about 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s cars and trucks combined. And about 40 percent of livestock’s global warming potential comes in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas formed as they digest their fibrous diet.

That dilemma is driving an intense research effort to reduce methane emissions from grazers. Existing approaches, including improved animal husbandry practices and recently developed feed additives, can help, but not at the scale needed to make a significant global impact. So scientists are investigating other potential solutions, such as breeding low-methane livestock and tinkering with the microbes that produce the methane in grazing animals’ stomachs. While much more research is needed before those approaches come to fruition, they could be relatively easy to implement widely and could eventually have a considerable impact.

Enlarge / A Sixgill Hagfish (Eptatretus hexatrema) in False Bay, South Africa. (credit: Peter Southwood/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The humble hagfish is an ugly, gray, eel-like creature best known for its ability to unleash a cloud of sticky slime onto unsuspecting predators, clogging the gills and suffocating said predators. That's why it's affectionately known as a "snot snake." Hagfish also love to burrow into the deep-sea sediment, but scientists have been unable to observe precisely how they do so because the murky sediment obscures the view. Researchers at Chapman University built a special tank with transparent gelatin to overcome this challenge and get a complete picture of the burrowing behavior, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

“For a long time we’ve known that hagfish can burrow into soft sediments, but we had no idea how they do it," said co-author Douglas Fudge, a marine biologist who heads a lab at Chapman devoted to the study of hagfish. "By figuring out how to get hagfish to voluntarily burrow into transparent gelatin, we were able to get the first ever look at this process.”

As previously reported, scientists have been studying hagfish slime for years because it's such an unusual material. It's not like mucus, which dries out and hardens over time. Hagfish slime stays slimy, giving it the consistency of half-solidified gelatin. That's due to long, thread-like fibers in the slime, in addition to the proteins and sugars that make up mucin, the other major component. Those fibers coil up into "skeins" that resemble balls of yarn. When the hagfish lets loose with a shot of slime, the skeins uncoil and combine with the salt water, blowing up more than 10,000 times its original size.

Enlarge / Michigan's State Maritime Archaeologist Wayne R. Lusardi takes notes underwater at the Lake Huron WWII wreckage of 2nd Lt. Frank Moody's P-39 Airacobra. Moody, one of the famed Tuskagee Airmen, fatally crashed in 1944. (credit: National Geographic)

In April 1944, a pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, Second Lieutenant Frank Moody, was on a routine training mission when his plane malfunctioned. Moody lost control of the aircraft and plunged to his death in the chilly waters of Lake Huron. His body was recovered two months later, but the airplane was left at the bottom of the lake—until now. Over the last few years, a team of divers working with the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum in Detroit has been diligently recovering the various parts of Moody's plane to determine what caused the pilot's fatal crash.

That painstaking process is the centerpiece of The Real Red Tails, a new documentary from National Geographic narrated by Sheryl Lee Ralph (Abbot Elementary). The documentary features interviews with the underwater archaeologists working to recover the plane, as well as firsthand accounts from Moody's fellow airmen and stunning underwater footage from the wreck itself.

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black military pilots in the US Armed Forces and helped pave the way for the desegregation of the military. The men painted the tails of their P-47 planes red, earning them the nickname the Red Tails. (They initially flew Bell P-39 Airacobras like Moody's downed plane, and later flew P-51 Mustangs.) It was then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who helped tip popular opinion in favor of the fledgling unit when she flew with the Airmen's chief instructor, C. Alfred Anderson, in March 1941. The Airmen earned praise for their skill and bravery in combat during World War II, with members being awarded three Distinguished Unit Citations, 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 14 Bronze Stars, 60 Purple Hearts, and at least one Silver Star.

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A key aspect of humans' evolutionary success is the fact that we don't have to learn how to do things from scratch. Our societies have developed various ways—from formal education to YouTube videos—to convey what others have learned. This makes learning how to do things far easier than learning by doing, and it gives us more space to experiment; we can learn to build new things or handle tasks more efficiently, then pass information on how to do so on to others.

Some of our closer relatives, like chimps and bonobos, learn from their fellow species-members. They don't seem to engage in this iterative process of improvement—they don't, in technical terms, have a cumulative culture where new technologies are built on past knowledge. So, when did humans develop this ability?

Based on a new analysis of stone toolmaking, two researchers are arguing that the ability is relatively recent, dating to just 600,000 years ago. That's roughly the same time our ancestors and the Neanderthals went their separate ways.

Last week, during our inaugural Ars Live event, Quilty Space director of research Caleb Henry joined Ars space editor Eric Berger for a discussion of SpaceX's Starlink and other satellite internet systems. We discussed Starlink's rapid road to profitability—it took just five years from the first launch of operational satellites—and the future of the technology.

One of the keys to Starlink's success is its vertical integration as a core business at SpaceX, which operates the world's only reusable rocket, the Falcon 9. This has allowed the company not just to launch a constellation of 6,000 satellites—but to do so at relatively low cost.

"At one point, SpaceX had publicly said that it was $28 million," Henry said of the company's target for a Falcon 9 launch cost. "We believe today that they are below $20 million per launch and actually lower than that... I would put it in the mid teens for how much it costs them internally. And that's going down as they increase the reuse of the vehicle. Recently, they've launched their 20th, maybe 21st, use of a first-stage rocket. And as they can amortize the cost of the booster over a greater number of missions, that only helps them with their business case."