Eicher takes new role as Astronomy Editor Emeritus, with Senior Editor Mark Zastrow appointed the magazine’s next Editor-in-Chief.
David J. Eicher joined Astronomy magazine in September 1982 and is one of the most widely recognized astronomy enthusiasts in the world. Credit: William Zuback
After 43 years with Astronomy, including 23 years as Editor-in-Chief, David J. Eicher is transitioning to a new role as the magazine’s Editor Emeritus.
Eicher is one of the most widely recognized astronomy enthusiasts in the world, and his contributions to the field are immeasurable. His passion for astronomy and science communication has been one of the driving forces behind Astronomy’s growth into the world’s most popular astronomy magazine.
Eicher will remain actively involved with Astronomy in his emeritus role, contributing stories to the magazine and producing his popular “This Week in Astronomy” video series, presented by Celestron. He will also remain involved with Astronomy special events. His final editorial letter as Editor-in-Chief will appear in the magazine’s November issue.
Says Eicher: “I look forward to this new era of Astronomy magazine and working with the talented team who will carry on with the important work of continuing the brand as the largest and most successful covering astronomy and space in the world.”
The entire team at Astronomy thanks Eicher for his extraordinary dedication — and looks forward to his continued contributions.
Credit: William Zuback
Stepping into the role of Astronomy’s next Editor-in-Chief is Mark Zastrow. Zastrow has been with Astronomy as a Senior Editor since 2020. He will lead the magazine’s talented team of editors, writers, and designers in continuing to deliver trusted coverage of new research, observing guidance, and space exploration in the print edition and at Astronomy.com.
Zastrow is a trained astronomer and experienced science journalist. He holds a master’s degree in astronomy from Boston University, where he researched topics including exoplanets, the variability of M dwarfs, and the icy water plume of Enceladus. Driven by a passion for communicating science to broader audiences, he also obtained a master’s in science journalism from BU. Before joining Astronomy, he worked as a freelance science journalist based in Seoul and has written for publications including Nature and Sky & Telescope.
“I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with Dave, and I’ve learned so much from him and the rest of our team,” said Zastrow. “I know what the magazine means to readers — many of whom, like me, grew up reading Astronomy, looking through an eyepiece, and dreaming about the cosmos. I’m looking forward to building on that legacy while finding new ways to serve our community of observers, astrophotographers, and anyone fascinated by the universe and our place in it.”
Validation of AV coverage in Lake Taihu using the Sentinel-based model.
GA, UNITED STATES, September 3, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ — A new study presents satellite pixel-scale estimation models for aquatic vegetation coverage in lakes, addressing long-standing challenges in ecological monitoring. By integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Sentinel-2, and Landsat-8 imagery, the researchers developed a scalable, accurate method to quantify aquatic vegetation coverage and area. These models offer a powerful tool for long-term analysis of lake ecosystem dynamics and carbon sink assessments, with applications ranging from regional water management to global climate models.
Aquatic vegetation plays a vital role in sustaining lake ecosystems, contributing to carbon storage, water purification, and biodiversity. While excessive vegetation can harm biodiversity by reducing light penetration, moderate coverage supports ecological balance. Accurate monitoring of aquatic vegetation area and density is therefore crucial for managing water resources and understanding lake ecosystem health. Traditional satellite-based methods have relied on binary classifications that merely detect presence or absence within a pixel, making it difficult to assess fractional coverage precisely. Based on these challenges, there is a pressing need to develop models that can accurately quantify aquatic vegetation coverage at the pixel level using satellite remote sensing data.
Researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a study (DOI: 10.34133/remotesensing.0616) on April 30, 2025, in Journal of Remote Sensing that introduces a stepwise upscaling method for quantifying aquatic vegetation (AV) coverage in lakes. By leveraging Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Sentinel-2 Multispectral Instrument (MSI), and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery, they constructed the first satellite pixel-scale models capable of estimating both aquatic vegetation area and fractional coverage. This development addresses critical challenges in monitoring ecological changes across large lake systems, offering new capabilities for long-term vegetation tracking and environmental assessment.
The team developed two novel models—one based on Sentinel-2 and the other on Landsat-8—achieving high accuracy in estimating aquatic vegetation coverage at the satellite pixel scale. The models were developed using a stepwise upscaling method. UAV images captured at 3-cm resolution provided fine-scale vegetation classification via the visible difference vegetation index (VDVI). These data were aligned with Sentinel-2 Multispectral Instrument (MSI) imagery to create a training set, followed by an intermediate Sentinel-based model. Using that model, resampled pixel-level vegetation maps were aligned with Landsat-8 imagery to train a second model. Both models used XGBoost for regression and were evaluated using R², Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) to ensure performance and robustness. The Sentinel-based model, validated with UAV-derived data, achieved an R² of 0.95, while the Landsat-based model, built upon Sentinel data, reached an R² of 0.97.
These models were used to map the vegetation dynamics of 42 large lakes in China’s Yangtze and Huai River basins over three decades. In 2022 alone, the total aquatic vegetation area reached 4,896.4 km², with notable differences in trends: increasing in the Yangtze region and decreasing in the Huai River basin. This pixel-level approach improves precision in ecosystem carbon stock assessment and offers a scalable monitoring framework for global lakes.
“Our work bridges the gap between ground-based small-scale sampling and satellite large-scale observations, offering a scalable, high-accuracy solution for ecosystem monitoring,” said lead researcher Dr. Juhua Luo. “By capturing fractional vegetation coverage at the pixel level, we can support better carbon stock estimates and long-term aquatic ecological studies. This opens new avenues for maintaining aquatic ecosystem stability and health in the face of climate.”
This research lays the groundwork for global-scale, pixel-level mapping of aquatic vegetation using freely available satellite data. The methodology supports integration into carbon budgeting models and lake ecosystem management frameworks. In the future, these models may be extended to estimate aquatic vegetation biomass and lake CO₂ fluxes, helping to track lake carbon sequestration capacity. Continued development could include anti-saturation aquatic vegetation indices and refined models for low and high vegetation density zones. With rising ecological threats, such tools are essential for timely, science-based intervention and restoration planning.
DOI 10.34133/remotesensing.0616
Original Source URL https://doi.org/10.34133/remotesensing.0616
Funding information This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42271377, 42271114) and by Science and Technology Planning Project of NIGLAS (NIGLAS2022GS09).
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Think of a dinosaur. It’s likely that the first animals popping into your head were Tyrannosaurus, Diplodocus or Velociraptor, which all hark from the fossil-rich fields of North America and Asia, and are frequent Hollywood stars says Professor Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum.
However, although spectacular dinosaur remains have been found all over the world, from Antarctica to Alaska, the UK dinosaur record is often overlooked. This is despite the UK dinosaur record being the most historically important and one that many scientists are still working to unravel.
What dinosaurs roamed Britain?
The first three dinosaurs to receive scientific descriptions, Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus, were all found in the soft sandstones and mudstones of southern England, opening the eyes of scientists and an incredulous public to the existence of past worlds that were populated by animals radically different from anything alive today.
These three were later selected to form the core of a newly recognised group, Dinosauria, which was named in 1842 by prominent anatomist Sir Richard Owen (founder of the Natural History Museum, London). Since then, rocks of Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous age from across the UK, with a record spanning from around 220–100 million years ago, have continued to yielded new and important dinosaur fossils, from many corners of the British Isles.
Getty Images
This is the least well-known of the three animals which were used to found Dinosauria, but undeservedly so. Known primarily from a single partial skeleton and a handful of other bones, Hylaeosaurus was a relatively small (3–4 m long) dinosaur and a member of the tank-like armoured group Ankylosauria. In addition to the numerous stud-like bones embedded throughout its skin, its armour also included a series of impressive, curved shoulder spines, all of which would have deterred attacks from most would-be predators.
The remains of Hylaeosaurus were first described in 1833 by Gideon Mantell, a Sussex country doctor who made many of the first dinosaur discoveries. It has the distinction of being the first armoured dinosaur to have been discovered anywhere in the world.
The known specimens all come from Early Cretaceous rocks (around 140 million years old) around Cuckfield and Hastings in Sussex, but we have yet to find a complete skeleton. Like other ankylosaurs, Hylaeosaurus was a herbivore that would have browsed on ferns and other low-growing plants and it walked on all fours.
A reconstruction of Hylaeosaurus can be found among the famous statues at Crystal Palace Park in southeast London, although modern reconstructions have updated this image.
A mounted skeleton of the dinosaur Hypsilophodon. Credit: Trustees of the Natural History Museum
Until recently dinosaurs were depicted as lumbering brutes, but vast amounts of new work have overturned this view and revealed them as dynamic, active animals. Nevertheless, a consistent exception to this earlier rule was Hypsilophodon, a bipedal, lightly-built species that has always been regarded as a speedster and the dinosaur equivalent of a gazelle.
Its slender hind legs and long counterbalancing tail anchored powerful muscles, which allowed this small, defenceless animal to outrun and out-manoeuvre most predators. Many skeletons of this dinosaur athlete have been found, providing us with one of the most complete pictures of how small plant-eating dinosaurs looked and behaved.
Hypsilophodon has also been an important animal for understanding the origin and evolution of its later relatives, like Iguanodon and the duck-billed dinosaurs.
Strangely, however, all of the skeletons we have are of youngsters: no adults have been found. All known Hypsilophodon remains come from a single thin layer of sandstone on the Isle of Wight, which dates from the Early Cretaceous period (~125 million years ago). Its currently thought that of these animals belonged to a single herd, which was wiped out in a single tragic event, such as a flash flood or miring in quicksand.
By Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com) – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19459514.
Pantydraco is one of the oldest dinosaurs known from the UK, with fossils dating back to the Late Triassic around 210 million years ago. Its fossils come from what is now southern Wales and Bristol, but during the Triassic the area looked quite different with several large islands set in a tropical sea. Pantydraco is a sauropodomorph dinosaur – a member of the same group that went on to include giants like Brachiosaurusand Diplodocus.
Unlike its later relatives, Pantydraco was small (no more than 1.5 m in length), ran on its hind legs and might have eaten both plants and animals. It had a small skull, a long neck and hands that were adapted for grasping, each with a large thumb claw that might have been for defence or to help in gathering food. It is named after the Welsh quarry where the fossils were first found, meaning ‘dragon from Pant-y-ffynnon’.
IJReid, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Most of our knowledge of dinosaur biology is built on bones, using their shapes, sizes and arrangements to reconstruct the animal’s overall appearance, as well as providing many of the clues used to infer important behaviours such as feeding and walking.
However, bones are just one of the many lines of evidence that palaeontologists can use, and other types of dinosaur fossils offer unique and important insights into dinosaur lifestyles, such as footprints or preserved gut contents. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to get the remains of dinosaur skin, which might be either scaly or feathered.
The first dinosaur skin impression found anywhere in the world was discovered in the UK, from the Early Cretaceous rocks of Sussex. It was described in 1852 (again, by Gideon Mantell) and was found together with two large arm bones. Although known from relatively meagre material, these bones are distinctive enough that they can be recognised as a distinct species: Haestasaurus becklesii.
Haestasaurus was a sauropod dinosaur and probably a close relative of animals like Camarasaurus from the USA. The skin impression shows that the body would have been covered with thousands of closely-packed polygonal scales, in an arrangement similar to those of many living reptiles.
An artistic illustration of Baryonyx. Trustees of the Natural History Museum
In 1983, Bill Walker, an amateur palaeontologist, made a stunning discovery in a Surrey clay pit – the enormous claw of a theropod (meat-eating) dinosaur. The claw was unlike that of any other theropod and further excavation at the site uncovered one of the most complete theropod skeletons ever found in Europe. More surprising was that the new animal belonged to a theropod group that was very poorly known.
Analysis of the fossil showed that it shared many similarities with a famous, but poorly understood, dinosaur from north Africa: Spinosaurus. The new species was named Baryonyx walkeri in honour of its discoverer and the enormous hand claw, which measures 30 cm in length (Baryonyx means ‘heavy claw’).
Like Spinosaurus, Baryonyx has a long, almost crocodile-like snout, which was lined with over 200 conical teeth. These skulls are not adapted for ripping through flesh, as in most other meat-eating dinosaurs, but for impaling more slippery prey, namely fish. The huge claw would have been used to whisk fish from rivers and lakes as Baryonyx prowled through the shallows. We are sure that Baryonyx was a fish-eater for another good reason: in the region where its stomach would have been palaeontologists found a preserved set of partly digested fish scales.
Discover more fascinating dinosaur facts
Professor Paul Barrett is a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, centring on the evolutionary palaeobiology of dinosaurs and other amniotes.
Main image: An artistic representation of Hypsilophodon. Trustees of the Natural History Museum
One day, Mars might become a home to humans. But first, there’s the cinematic, sci-fi challenge of making the Red Planet suitable for life. There’s a problem, though: The typical person can’t get to space safely. That throws a wrench into the whole “let’s move to Mars” plan in the face of extreme climate change and other existential risks on Earth.
Today, the path to becoming an astronaut is “littered with the hopes and dreams of medically disqualified candidates,” said Shawna Pandya, a research astronaut with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS) and the director of its Space Medicine Group. “Once upon a time, kids being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in the doctor’s office would be told, ‘Well, you could still be anything, except an astronaut.’”
Here are some of the common reasons why you might be medically disqualified from becoming an astronaut:
Tobacco use
Autoimmune disorders
Temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders
Sleep apnea
Asthma
Hypertension
Migraines
Anxiety and depression
Astronauts inherently aren’t representative of the broader population — they’re selected for being in very good health. The stress of existing in essentially weightless microgravity conditions, like those on the International Space Station (ISS), can be incredibly tough on the human body. Astronauts face heightened risks of early-onset osteoporosis, insulin resistance, and significant muscle mass loss. Naturally, government space agencies want people whose bodies are more resilient to such pressures, and who can perform necessary duties without a ton of medical intervention.
According to Haig Aintablian, director of the UCLA Space Medicine Program, “just as pregnancy causes the body to undergo complex and unique changes, spaceflight also produces distinct and significant physiological changes.” It also requires its own medical specialty to manage (aptly called space medicine).
There’s a lot scientists don’t know, from the physical to the psychological. That’s a problem — for the future of science, space travel, and maybe even human existence at large.
NASA wants to go to Mars for research, and aims to send humans there as early as the 2030s. As the most similar planet to Earth in our solar system, Mars may have once harbored life, or may even currently. And in the future, we may even need it to support us.
Decades ago, seriously engaging with the idea of moving to Mars was extremely fringe for a multitude of reasons, ranging from a lack of technical feasibility to the desire to put scientific resources toward solving problems on Earth. Elon Musk — founder of the spaceflight company SpaceX — became a famed advocate for colonizing Mars in the early 2000s. He still is. Musk, who is currently worth around $410 billion, claims that he is only accumulating assets for the purpose of Martian space settlement. Last year, he said that he wants 1 million human settlers on the Red Planet in a self-sustaining city by 2050.
Now Musk isn’t alone. NASA experts, biologists, academics, futurists, disaster resilience researchers, and physicians are seriously considering the possibility of making humanity an interplanetary species.
“The biggest problem for humanity to solve is the guaranteed survival of our species — which the logical answer is to become multiplanetary,” Aintablian said. “I don’t think there’s a better solution than Mars.”
While we know some of the health effects of being on the ISS, we can’t really replicate the effects of Martian radiation exposure. Kelly Weinersmith — a biologist and co-author of A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? — thinks that settling Mars on Musk’s timescale will be catastrophic. She argues that we shouldn’t rush to set up shop before understanding — and mitigating — the risks, even if this takes centuries rather than decades.
But many advocates for settling Mars are much more impatient. The only way to get there safely would be to unlock significant advances in space medicine, a nascent field that has just barely scratched the surface in its approximately 75-year history.
“Nothing that humanity has done that has been worthwhile has been easy,” Aintablian told me. “So much in our development as a civilization has been difficult, and the reason why we’re able to live such comfortable lives now is because of the extremely difficult challenges that humans have had to solve in the past.”
What we know — and don’t — about human health on Mars
Since extremely few people end up in space right now, the researchers trying to understand how to improve human health there have a limited sample size to work with. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961, and more than 600 astronauts have followed him. Only about a sixth of them are women.
NASA researchers have identified some key ways that time in space can impact human health — radiation exposures, isolation, distance from Earth, altered gravity, and environmental consequences like an altered immune system. But we’re still lacking many specific examples of how these different dynamics play out in real life.
Former astronaut Scott Kelly, right, who commanded a one-year mission aboard the International Space Station, along with his twin brother, former astronaut Mark Kelly.NASA/AFP via Getty Images
One of the best studies we have is NASA’s famous 2019 twins study. Twin studies allow researchers to separate the effects of genetic predispositions from environmental influences on health outcomes. NASA compared the health of identical twin brothers Scott and Mark Kelly over the course of a year. Scott went into orbit on the ISS while Mark remained on Earth. Both underwent the same battery of physiological tests, and the results indicated some surprising new differences between the two men.
Scott’s telomeres — the bits of DNA at the end of our chromosomes — lengthened while he was in space and (mostly) reverted to normal once he returned to Earth, possibly indicating radiation-induced DNA damage and potential increased cancer risk. Scott also lost body mass, developed signs of cardiovascular damage that were not present in Mark, and experienced some short-term cognitive changes after returning to Earth.
While survivable with the right training, equipment, and precautions, the twin study demonstrated how space’s unique environment can have significant consequences for gene expression and overall health while in orbit.
If the best of the best struggle, what about the rest of us? We’re getting some insights here now, too.
Since space tourism has literally taken off, astronauts aren’t the only ones going to space now: Wealthy non-astronauts, like Jeff Bezos, Gayle King, and Katy Perry, have recently taken short, recreational jaunts into outer space through Bezos’s space tech company, Blue Origin.
“Teenage Dream” singer Katy Perry kisses the ground after returning to Earth from her short spaceflight earlier this year.
Aintablian is very excited about the prospect of civilian access to space increasing, which will inherently mean people with medical issues are also flying. This represents a huge opportunity for scientists to study the medical management of a much wider range of conditions.
That said, 10 or 15 minutes in space is hardly comparable to the conditions on the ISS. And Mars poses even worse consequences in terms of hostile environments and time spent away from Earth. Mars has toxic dust, lacks plant life and a breathable atmosphere, and only has about 40 percent of Earth’s gravity. Earth’s global magnetic field protects our planet from harmful radiation, and the Martian counterparts are localized, not planet-wide.
The longest time someone has been in space consecutively is 438 days aboard a space station. But crewed missions to Mars would probably take at least nine months just to get there, let alone stay or travel back (which could take up to three years). Mars is usually around 140 million miles from Earth based on its orbital path around the sun, with up to a 20-minute communication delay one way. If they experienced a medical emergency, astronauts likely wouldn’t be able to access telemedicine instructions in time, and they couldn’t turn back around for treatment.
A crewed mission to Mars would have to take all of their supplies with them before they left our planet. And when the first people heading to Mars set foot on the planet, they won’t have access to the intense support astronauts receive when landing back on Earth.
Getting to Mars is only part of the challenge. We’ve been to space, but so far, humans have only ever sent robots to the Red Planet. We are making educated guesses at what Mars is like for living things. Earth analogues aren’t able to truly replicate the closed, hostile conditions of the space environment, which can wreak havoc on astronauts’ mental health. Desert research stations have an atmosphere, while the moon barely has one — and setting up that modest base was a huge mission in its own right. Weinersmith told me that scientists at polar research stations are isolated in remote, inhospitable environments, but they can “still open the door, take a deep breath, and not die.”
Medicine’s new frontier
We’re still pretty far from being able to breathe in Mars’ atmosphere — but it would be nice to get there one day and simply not die.
Programs dedicated to figuring out how to get humans safely into space for long periods of time are popping up, and non-physician health care providers are getting in on the action too. UCLA is planning to launch a space nursing program and possibly space paramedic training. SpaceMed is a European master’s program focused on human health in spaceflight and other extreme conditions.
Today, astronauts receive most of their care from Earth-based aerospace medicine physicians called flight surgeons through telemedicine. Aintablian envisions a future where health care providers directly accompany astronauts on their expedition-class missions, like to the moon or Mars. Artificial intelligence can act as a resource for the on-board flight surgeon, he predicted, and aid in the development of other technologies that will bring us closer to Mars.
Such technology is already in the works. Google recently collaborated with NASA to develop an AI system that could guide astronauts in diagnosing and treating medical conditions that arise in-flight when they lack access to telemedicine.
But the devil is in the details, Pandya told me. AI can help with just-in-time training for medical emergencies and diagnostics, but the data requirements would be massive. Since extremely few people end up in space — and the ones who do are overwhelmingly male — models might be trained on an unrepresentative dataset that could lead to inaccurate predictions of physiological changes in space. These kinks need to be worked out first.
Right now, there’s a gendered gap in the research — so much so that Weinersmith told me there’s never a line to the women’s restroom at space settlement conferences. Human reproduction and development in space, as a result, is wildly understudied.
As far as we know, no human being has ever been to space while pregnant, and we don’t know of any humans who have been conceived in space. We’re going to learn a lot about reproduction on Earth from the first human space pregnancy and space birth, a prerequisite for a self-sustaining settlement on Mars. (Plus, space tourism companies are talking about hotels in space, and we know what people do in hotels.) Ideally, you want to have an idea of what will happen to someone giving birth in space before they actually go through it.
“What we’re arguing is that we should do the research to understand those risks before we go out there because if there are massive risks, there usually are technological solutions for some of these,” Weinersmith said.
NASA will begin its second Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog this October, a year-long “mission” to Mars in a 3D-printed habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it will collect behavioral health data on the effects of isolation and confinement. Scientists are conducting bed rest studies, which simulate the physiological effects of altered gravity and weightlessness. And as funding cuts transform the future of scientific research on Earth and beyond, space medicine researchers are among those advocating for continued investment in space and biomedical science.
Maedeh Mozneb, a biomedical engineer and project scientist in the Sharma Lab at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told me that the ultimate goal is to send “avatars” of astronauts to space by taking their stem cells and creating 3D tissue cultures called organoids that represent different parts of their body — yes, miniature hearts, kidneys, and even brains made from Earth-dwelling humans. From there, scientists can determine personalized countermeasures such as workout plans or supplements tailored to each astronaut’s needs, before they actually end up in space.
The hope, for those space medicine physicians like Pandya, is that in a spacefaring future, all medical disciplines — from neurology to radiology — will be represented in space medicine.
Space medicine research and practice isn’t cheap. “I often get asked,” said Pandya, “‘Why are you spending money on space health when we have all of these problems on Earth?’” But that’s the wrong way to think about it, she said.
Research conducted in space has already improved health on this planet. Advances in digital imaging for moon photography during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission later played a crucial role in CT scans and MRIs. Remote health monitoring tools designed for astronauts in space are now widely used in hospitals.
Space medicine research will also allow more people to go to space. In 2023, Pandya’s team demonstrated the safety and functionality of a continuous glucose monitor in the spaceflight environment. This could eventually allow diabetics to check their blood sugar in space. It has implications for current astronauts, who can develop insulin resistance and pre-diabetes symptoms in longer-duration spaceflights. The child diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes who wants to be an astronaut may actually have the chance to live out their dream now, and studying how the body metabolizes glucose in space helps us better understand health on Earth.
Then there are the diseases that take decades to unfold. Muscle loss in space can help scientists better understand how to treat conditions like Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. On Earth, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s often aren’t apparent until a person is in their late 60s.
In microgravity, said Shelby Giza, the director of business development at Space Tango, a company that facilitates automated research and development in microgravity conditions, “you can see that kind of disease output in a matter of weeks.” Research on these conditions can be conducted much faster — and hopefully accelerate the pace of medical breakthroughs.
The same can be said for cancer. Not all radiation exposures are made equal, and susceptibility to the harmful effects of radiation varies between individuals. Since the ISS is within the protection of Earth’s magnetosphere, it’s not the best comparison to the elevated radiation levels astronauts would face on Mars.
According to former NASA astronaut and biologist Kate Rubins, most astronauts are healthy people in their 30s and 40s, an age when cancer typically doesn’t develop. Scientists must track astronauts for decades after their last spaceflight to see if cancer or other adverse health conditions occur. NASA’s Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health program, which is voluntary for former astronauts and not specific to cancer alone, monitors the health status of people like Kelly and Rubins for the rest of their lives.
Exposure to space radiation is linked to developing cancer and degenerative diseases. To mitigate the risk of developing fatal cancers, NASA currently limits astronauts’ spaceflight radiation exposure to 600 millisieverts (mSv) — roughly the equivalent of 60 CT scans of the torso and pelvis — over the course of their entire career. A 2023 NASA white paper estimates that a healthy astronaut will have a 33 percent increased risk of dying from cancer in their lifetime after a 1,000-day mission to Mars.
One of the next big things in space medicine “is probably going to be the development of radiation protection mechanisms,” Aintablian told me. “I do believe that with the amount of emphasis being placed on radiation protection, we’re going to figure out ways to actually protect against significant amounts of radiation for the general public for multiple uses.”
While it’s still relatively early days for the space pharma industry, life science companies are taking note, seeing microgravity as a platform for better drug discovery.
Like fiber optic cables used for telecommunications, some pharmaceuticals are better synthesized in microgravity conditions. Scientists can produce more uniform protein crystals in microgravity, which can improve drug injectability and reduce the need for refrigeration.
Raphael Roettgen, an entrepreneur and the co-founder of space biotech startup Prometheus Life Technologies, told me that organoids — those 3D cell models replicating human organs — grow more cleanly in space without Earth’s gravity weighing them down. Derived from non-embryonic stem cells, these miniature organ models have tremendous potential for personalized medicine.
Roettgen hopes that human space organoids could reduce the need for animal testing in the near term. Eventually, he hopes that new organs could be regenerated for patients needing transplants. Since the new tissue would be derived from the patient’s own stem cells, there would not be a risk of immune rejection, saving transplant patients astronomical costs and immense suffering. He estimates that liver regeneration and transplants from these organoids could become a reality in patients within the next 20 years.
Microgravity is an “expensive tool,” but an important one nonetheless, said Mozneb, who studies the effects of low earth orbit on stem cell differentiation. She hopes increasing commercialization and new technologies will significantly decrease the cost of launching experiments into orbit over the next 10 years.
What we already know about space medicine is a drop in the ocean of what we will discover as more people — astronauts and otherwise — venture into space.
“It’s like if you were studying genetics back in the ’90s,” Mozneb said. “Everything is a discovery.”
The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing for a unique opportunity to study the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas from what could be the best vantage point in the solar system.
Astronomers made the rare and extraordinary discovery of an interstellar object in our own solar system on July 1, 2025, sparking a scramble to study the mysterious visitor. The object has since been named comet 3I/ATLAS, where 3I stands for “third interstellar,” and designated C/2025 N1 (ATLAS).
As it turns out, it may be observations from Mars, not Earth, that give us our closest look at the comet. 3I/ATLAS will come as close as around 18.6 million miles (30 million kilometers) to Mars, while it will only come within 168 million miles (270 million km) of Earth. That means spacecraft orbiting Mars are in play.
Colin Frank Wilson, Project Scientist for ESA’s Mars orbiters, confirmed that the agency is preparing to attempt observations of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS during its passage through the solar system.
“We can confirm that we are planning to observe 3I/Atlas around the time of its closest approach to Mars,” Wilson said. “This is predicted to occur on 3 October 2025. On this date, the object will still be approximately 30 million kilometres from Mars.”
ESA will employ both Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft to make observations.
“We will attempt to obtain images of the object using the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard Mars Express, and also with the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) onboard TGO,” Wilson explained.
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An illustration of the Mars Express spacecraft. (Image credit: ESA, C. Carreau)
The comet will be too distant for a real close-up look. However, if 3I/ATLAS is bright enough, HRSC may be able to hint at whether it’s elongated, spherical or irregularly shaped. The first discovered interstellar interloper, 1I/’Oumuamua, was unusually elongated and more asteroidal, while 2I/Borisov was more like a typical comet. CaSSIS, meanwhile, could provide insights into 3I/ATLAS’ volatile activity and its composition.
“We will also attempt to measure the spectrum of the object, using the TGO’s NOMAD and MEx’s OMEGA and SPICAM spectrometers,” Wilson said.
These payloads could tease out evidence of molecular signatures such as water vapor or organics in 3I/ATLAS’ coma if it becomes active. “However, we do not have great hopes that the signal will be bright enough for spectral characterization,” Wilson said.
There are other spacecraft around Mars that could be repurposed to take advantage of the 3I/ATLAS close approach as well. These include NASA’s aging Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). China also has its Tianwen-1 orbiter, which carries a high-resolution camera comparable to that of MRO.
Spacecraft studying worlds beyond Mars may be able to get a glimpse of 3I/ATLAS as well. For example, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which launched in April 2023 and is scheduled to arrive in the Jovian system in July 2031, will give it a go.
“The JUICE spacecraft is also planning observations,” Joern Helbert, head of ESA’s Solar System Section, told Space.com. “Due to thermal constraints on the spacecraft, they are limited to a period in November of this year, and four instruments are planned to be used.”
And a submitted paper by T. Marshall Eubanks et al. notes that spacecraft including Europa Clipper, Hera and even the more distant Lucy probe may pass through 3I’s cometary tail in the period after its closest approach to the sun, or perihelion.
ESA considered utilizing the Hera probe — which launched in October last year to visit the asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos, to study the aftermath of NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission — to look out for 3I/ATLAS. However, the comet was considered to be too faint and poorly illuminated from Hera’s location.
Closer to Earth, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently trained its scopes on 3I/ATLAS for the first time, yielding unexpected results.
In a recent scientific development at the University of Gottingen in Germany, it was revealed that precious metals like gold and ruthenium are coming out from deep inside the Earth to its surface through volcanic activity. Chemical signatures depicting traces of core material in the eruptions have been detected by the scientists after studying lava from Hawaiian volcanoes such as Kīlauea and Lo‘ihi.
The study suggests that only tiny amounts make it to the surface, but it is speculated that the core of the Earth contains up to 30 billion tons of gold, worth roughly €2.77 trillion. That means small leaks through the eruption provide a glimpse into the richest and most inaccessible layers of the planet, according to a report by TOI.
The research also includes a vast quantity of gold that the core of the Earth includes. The trace amounts that reach the surface in lava flows offer scientists a rare view into the deepest layers of the planet. “We’re talking about traces, not nuggets,” says Matthias Willbold, a co-author of the study.
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Current technology is inefficient for mining: scientists
These findings indicated to the researchers that current technology is not efficient enough to mine the core of the Earth, but it helps in understanding the planet’s composition and the processes shaping its interior over billions of years.
In order to discover these deep-Earth materials, scientists focused on ocean island basalts, volcanic rocks formed by hot mantle plumes rising from near the core of the Earth. Another metal, Ruthenium, a metal densely found in the core, acts as a chemical fingerprint.
Elevated levels of the 100Ru isotope in lava signify that a fraction of less than 0.3 per cent of core material can reach the surface. This provides strong and clear evidence that the core is not completely isolated from the rest of the planet, as was earlier believed.
While they may have faced extinction 66 million years ago, our collective fascination with dinosaurs has meant that iconic species, such as T.rex, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus, are just as, if not even more recognisable than animals living today, says Will Newton.
However, these weren’t the only dinosaurs that once called Earth ‘home’. There were hundreds more that, when compared to our childhood favourites, stand out – not because they were bigger, toothier, or fiercer, but because they were incredibly strange, even by dinosaur standards.
If at any point while reading this article you think, ‘this dinosaur looks too strange, it can’t possibly be real’, just remember that platypuses, pangolins, and blobfish are real-life animals and not the works of a child armed with a set of crayons and a vivid imagination. Mother Nature works in mysterious ways and has been creating weird (and wonderful) animals ever since life first emerged.
From shaggy, sail-backed giants with rakes for hands to bird-like pipsqueaks with wings made of skin rather than feathers, here are 10 of the strangest dinosaurs that ever lived…
Weirdest dinosaurs in the world
Deinocheirus
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Looking like a cross between a duck, a camel, and an extinct ground sloth, Deinocheirus is a particularly peculiar dinosaur whose size and bizarre mix of features belies its somewhat mundane lifestyle.
Instead of pursuing giant herbivorous dinosaurs across great plains like its meat-eating theropod cousins did, Deinocheirus spent most of its life wading in stagnant ponds. It’s thought it used its large, rake-like claws to dig and gather plants and its duck-like bill to filter any other small foodstuffs from water, including fish.
At 11m in length and nearly six-and-a-half tons in weight, Deinocheirus is the largest ornithomimosaur (ostrich-like dinosaur) currently known to science. It was discovered in 1965 in rocks belonging to the Nemegt Formation in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. This rock formation is roughly 70 million years old and has yielded remains of many other types of dinosaurs, including ankylosaurs, sauropods, hadrosaurs, and tyrannosaurs.
Deinocheirus, like other ornithomimosaurs, was probably covered in shaggy, hair-like feathers and based on the structure of its caudal vertebrae it may have even sported an extravagant tail fan of bird-like feathers.
However, unlike other ornithomimosaurs Deinocheirus wasn’t particularly renowned for its speed. Its legs were relatively short and its back-end was very robust, suggesting it moved rather slowly.
This may have made it a target for large contemporary predators like Tarbosaurus – there’s evidence of bite marks on several Deinocheirus bones that have been attributed to such an attacker. That said, Deinocheirus had size on its side and fully grown would have had very few natural predators.
Ubirajara
This small, 1m-long dinosaur is not only strange in terms of its appearance, but also in terms of its discovery.
Initially described in a 2020 study, Ubirajara was later declared invalid after it became apparent that the fossils it was described from had been illegally exported from its country of origin, Brazil, back in 1995.
Ubirajara has since been repatriated and is now on display at the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Paleontology Museum in northeastern Brazil, but the study describing it and where it falls in the wider dinosaur family tree has not yet been re-published, shrouding it further in mystery.
Nevertheless, from photographs of the holotype specimen we know that Ubirajara was feathered and possessed never-before-seen spear-like feathers emerging from its shoulders. It’s this unique feature that prompted authors of the now withdrawn 2020 study to name it Ubirajara, which in the local Tupi language means ‘Lord of the Spear’.
Based on its appearance, Ubirajara has been informally placed in the Compsognathidae family – a group of small, carnivorous dinosaurs that were remarkably quick and agile and are thought to have hunted equally speedy lizards. It lived roughly 115 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous, a short time after its proposed sister species Sinosauropteryx from Mongolia lived.
Oryctodromeus
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As a group, dinosaurs aren’t really known for burrowing. This is a behaviour most often associated with mammals and one of the often suggested reasons why they survived the asteroid-induced mass extinction 66 million years ago, while the non-avian dinosaurs didn’t.
However, there is a dinosaur that scientists are confident built and maintained burrows – Oryctodromeus. This labrador-sized animal lived in the Western United States during the Late Cretaceous (~100 million years ago) and belongs to a family of herbivorous, fast-running dinosaurs known as thescelosaurs.
Oryctodromeus was discovered in 2007 after paleontologists unearthed a fossilised burrow in southwestern Montana that contained the remains of three partial skeletons from an adult and two juveniles.
The burrow these dinosaurs were found entombed in closely matched the proportions of the adult specimen, suggesting it had dug out its own home rather than squatted in a burrow made by another animal. A closer examination of the burrow also revealed a pronounced s-bend, a feature some think Oryctodromeus may have deliberately crafted in order to make it harder for predators to enter its home.
Oryctodromeus is the first and so far only non-avian dinosaur that shows convincing evidence of burrowing behaviour. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that there may have been more burrowing dinosaurs, and that some may have even weathered the initial fallout from the asteroid that wiped out the rest of their kin inside their burrows, only to ultimately face extinction years later.
Heterodontosaurus
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No, this isn’t concept art of a genetically modified dinosaur from an upcoming Jurassic Park film, it’s a real-life dinosaur that lived in South Africa during the Early Jurassic, 200 to 190 million years ago.
Heterodontosaurus’ name means ‘different toothed lizard’ and it’s unique amongst other dinosaurs in that it possessed differently shaped gnashers.
In total, Heterodontosaurus had three types of teeth. In its upper jaws it had small, incisor-like teeth followed by long, canine-like fangs that protruded from both its upper and lower jaws. Behind these were a series of chisel-shaped cheek teeth that are thought to have done the majority of the work when it came to eating.
In fact, it’s thought Heterodontosaurus’ sharp front teeth played little role in feeding and were instead used for fighting others of its kind.
There has been a lot of debate surrounding Heterodontosaurus’ diet as a result of its unique dentition. Most palaeontologists agree that it was predominantly herbivorous and used its pointed beak and robust cheek teeth to pick at and grind up tough plant material. However, some have suggested it may have been omnivorous and used its fangs to subdue and kill small prey during high-speed hunts.
It’s believed Heterodontosaurus may have also been covered by hundreds of filamentous, feather-like structures, just like its close cousin Tianyulong. If so, it would have looked a lot like a crazed, two-legged hedgehog in life.
Spinosaurus
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Few dinosaurs are quite as enigmatic as Spinosaurus – the poster child of ‘strange dinosaurs’. This giant, sail-backed theropod was originally discovered in 1912 and later described in 1915 based on the lower part of a jaw, a handful of vertebrae, and several, extraordinarily long neural spines, all found in western Egypt.
Spinosaurus’ peculiarity amongst other large, meat-eating theropods from the Late Cretaceous (~100-94 million years ago) was immediately apparent, but before more work was able to be done on reconstructing this strange dinosaur, the type material was destroyed during a British bombing raid of Munich in World War II.
Some more remains have since been discovered, though whether or not these belong to the originally described type species, Spinosaurus aegypticus, or another is unclear. This ambiguity in terms of fossils, not to mention its affinities with other dinosaurs, has meant that depictions of Spinosaurus have dramatically changed over time.
Once a terrestrial, upright-walking superpredator that may have rivalled T.rex in terms of ferocity, Spinosaurus is now widely thought to have been a specialist, semiaquatic predator that hunted fish. Its long, slender snout, huge dorsal sail, and paddle-shaped tail are all signs that it was built for a life in water, or at least around water. That said, exactly how much time it spent in water and whether it was actually capable of swimming and pursuing fish is heavily debated.
The discovery of more Spinosaurus material will no doubt shed some much needed light on this enigmatic dinosaur, but it will forever be one of, if not the strangest dinosaur of all time.
Parasaurolophus
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As dinosaurs go, duck-billed hadrosaurs are amongst the most familiar and ‘normal-looking’. Some even refer to them as the ‘cows of the Cretaceous’ based on the fact that they were incredibly numerous, gathered in large herds, and – at least morphologically speaking – were rather unremarkable.
Not all hadrosaurs were drab, plant-eating dullards though; the 9m-long, five-ton Parasaurolophus from the Late Cretaceous (~75 million years ago) of western North America stands out from the rest of the hadrosaur crowd thanks to the large, snorkel-shaped crest that adorns its head.
This hollow structure connected to Parasaurolophus’ nasal cavity and is full of winding passages that, when air was blasted through them, created a unique sound.
In the 1980s, palaeontologist David Weishampel made a model of Parasaurolophus’ skull and blew into it. The noise reportedly sounded like that made by a crumhorn – a Renaissance-aged wind instrument that sounds a little bit like how you’d imagine a goose attempting to play a vuvuzela would sound…
Aside from its bulk, Parasaurolophus didn’t have much else going for it in terms of protection, so scientists think it may have weaponised its unique honk and used it to deter predators.
A lone Parasaurolophus honking may have been enough to make a hungry tyrannosaur think twice before approaching. A herd of honking Parasaurolophus, on the other hand, may have produced a honk loud enough to drive said predator away from its hunting grounds entirely.
Miragaia
Connor Ashbridge, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Stegosaurs aren’t exactly known for their long necks, so when scientists discovered remains of an unusual, long-necked species in 150-million-year-old rocks from Portugal back in 1999 they were left scratching their heads.
In total, Miragaia has 17 neck vertebrae, which is more than most sauropods do – a group of dinosaurs renowned for their incredibly long necks. This discovery went against the long-held view that stegosaurs were solely low browsing herbivores with short necks, suggesting that some – Miragaia at least – were capable of reaching leaves from the tops of tall shrubs and trees.
Miragaia, like its cousin Stegosaurus, is also covered in plates and spikes. While it may be half the size of its more recognisable relative, it’s arguably ‘spikier’ and has even longer tail spines.
Last year, scientists analysed Miragaia’s tail and concluded that it was capable of generating enough speed and pressure to inflict serious injuries on potential predators. However, its tail spines, while longer than Stegosaurus’, were found to be less robust, meaning Miragaia’s primary weapon was somewhat of a glass cannon that may have broken if it was swung too haphazardly.
There were several bloodthirsty predators that roamed Portugal at the same time as Miragaia, including Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and Torvosaurus, but just how often they hassled this spiky stegosaur is unknown.
Brachytrachelopan
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From a long-necked species of a typically short-necked dinosaur to a short-necked species of a typically long-necked dinosaur, this is Brachytrachelopan – a diminutive sauropod that could have comfortably worn a turtleneck sweater.
Standing just over 3m tall, measuring 11m in length, and weighing in at five tons, Brachytrachelopan was indeed small by sauropod standards, but it’s its incredibly short neck that makes it stand out from other sauropods
From the base of its skull to its shoulders, Brachytrachelopan’s neck measures only 2m, making it the shortest of any known sauropod. Its neck is also 40% shorter than those of other dicraeosaurids – a family of sauropods that went against group norms and, over time, evolved shorter and shorter necks.
Not only was Brachytrachelopan’s neck short, it was inflexible too. This has led scientists to suggest that it primarily ate plants that grew low to the ground and maxed out at heights of 1-2m.
Brachytrachelopan lived in Argentina during the Late Jurassic (from 160 to 150 million years ago). Interestingly, this is the same place where, roughly 50 million years later, the largest known sauropod (and the largest known terrestrial animal of all time) also lived – Argentinosaurus.
While it may be the largest sauropod in terms of height, standing more than 20m tall, Argentinosaurus doesn’t hold the title of the ‘longest-necked sauropod’; that title goes to Mamenchisaurus from China, which has an abnormally long neck measuring up to 15m.
Liaoningosaurus
PaleoEquii, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ankylosaurs are already quite strange; most are heavily-built, slow-moving herbivorous tanks that resemble giant armadillos. Now imagine an ankylosaur that was roughly half the size of an armadillo (~30cm-long), dined on fish, and spent a lot of its time swimming.
This bizarre ankylosaur is known as Liaoningosaurus. It lived during the Early Cretaceous (from 125 to 119 million years ago) and was discovered in the early 2000s in northeastern China.
Since its discovery, partial skeletons of 20 Liaoningosaurus have been found, one of which was found with preserved gut contents that suggest it may have eaten fish. A closer look at Liaoningosaurus’ teeth also reveal fork-like ridges on the crowns of its cheek teeth – a clear sign that it was carnivorous, say researchers.
Further studies of its skeleton have put forward evidence to suggest that it may have been partially aquatic, such as a bony belly plate. This may have served a similar function to a turtle’s plastron and protected Liaoningosaurus from underwater attackers, as well as rough substrates.
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation of Liaoningosaurus’ lifestyle, and some even argue that it’s not a valid species; rather a juvenile form of another known species of ankylosaur – Chuanqilong.
Yi Qi
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This tiny, winged dinosaur from the Late Jurassic (around 160 million years ago) is so strange that the word ‘strange’ literally makes up half of its name – qi meaning ‘strange’ in Mandarin and yi meaning ‘wing’.
The first and so far only Yi Qi specimen was discovered in a quarry near Mutoudeng, North China, by a local farmer, and later sold to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in 2007.
After careful preparation of the fossil, museum staff uncovered remains of fluffy feathers, adding Yi Qi to the growing list of feathered dinosaurs. They also found small patches of wrinkled skin between Yi Qi’s fingers and the bones in its arms. This suggests its wings were made up by a membrane of skin, like the wings of pterosaurs and bats.
Yi Qi isn’t the only winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, Microraptor, and Anchiornis are all similarly small, winged dinosaurs, but it is the only one we currently know of that had membranous wings.
It’s unclear exactly how competent a flyer Yi Qi was, but the lack of large pectoral muscles suggest it probably wasn’t capable of flapping flight. Instead, it’s thought Yi Qi was a specialised glider that soared from tree to tree as it hunted small, flying insects.
1. Transportation Department Joins the War on Wind
Add the Department of Transportation to the list of federal agencies waging what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind.” The Transportation Department said Friday it was eliminating or withdrawing $679 million in federal funding for 12 projects across the country designed to buttress development of offshore turbines. The funding included $427 million awarded last year for upgrading a marine terminal in Humboldt County, California, meant to be used for building and launching floating wind turbines. The list also included a $48 million offshore wind port on Staten Island, $39 million for a port near Norfolk, Virginia, and $20 million for a staging terminal in Paulsboro, New Jersey. “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a statement. “Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg bent over backwards to use transportation dollars for their Green New Scam agenda while ignoring the dire needs of our shipbuilding industry.”
It’s just the Trump administration’s latest attack on wind. The Department of the Interior has led the charge, launching a witch hunt against any policies perceived to favor wind power, de-designating millions of acres of federal waters for offshore wind development, and kicking off an investigation into bird deaths near turbines. Last month, the Department of Commerce joined the effort, teeing up future tariffs with its own probe into whether imported turbines pose a national security threat to the U.S. In response, the Democratic governors of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey on Monday issued a statement calling on the administration “to uphold all offshore wind permits already granted and allow these projects to be constructed.”
2. California and Exxon Mobil battle over plastics
Only a tiny percentage of plastic waste is recycled.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
In what the New York Times called a “sharp escalation” of its legal strategy to fend off liability for pollution, Exxon Mobil has countersued California, accusing the state’s landmark litigation over plastic waste of defaming the oil giant. At a court hearing last month, Exxon attorney Michael P. Cash described the lawsuit California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a cadre of environmental groups first filed last year as “an attack” aimed at the oil company’s home state of Texas and said the issue should be litigated there. As Times reporter Karen Zraick noted, Cash illustrated his point by displaying “a graphic showing a missile aimed at Texas from California” and by comparing Bonta and his nonprofit allies to “The Sopranos.”
Backed by a parallel lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, and the Surfrider Foundation, Bonta sued Exxon in state court on the grounds that the company had deceived Californians by “promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis,” alleging that the pollution had created a public nuisance and sought damages worth “multiple billions of dollars.” The lawsuit mirrors past litigation over planet-heating emissions, but targets the petrochemical division that has been one of the fastest-growing for Exxon and other oil giants. The courtroom drama came right as international negotiations in Geneva over a global treaty to curb plastic pollution failed after the United States joined Russia and other petrostates to block measures supported by more than 100 other nations that would have curbed production.
3. The U.S. is facing potential uranium shortfalls
In North America, nuclear fuel may soon become harder to come by. Canadian uranium giant Cameco has warned that delays in ramping up production at its McArthur River mine in Saskatchewan could shrink its forecast output for the year. The move came just a week after one of the world’s other major suppliers of uranium, Kazakhstan’s state-owned miner Kazatomprom, announced plans to slash its production by 10% next year.
The pullback is happening right as the U.S. nuclear industry’s dealmaking boom is taking off. Now that Trump’s tax law assured that support for atomic energy would continue, Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that more reactor plans are coming. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told Katie. That includes Europe. Despite similarly lethargic construction of reactors over the last three decades, France and Germany have finally united around the need for more atomic energy to power the continent’s energy transition. A pact signed at last week’s Franco-German summit “appears to herald rapprochement on reactors,” the trade publication NucNet surmised.
4. Cadillac’s rebirth as a luxury EV maker faces a test
Once a stodgy gas-guzzling automaker, Cadillac refashioned itself as a luxury electric vehicle maker in recent years, rising alongside Chevrolet to put General Motors in the No. 2 slot behind Tesla. Roughly 70% of buyers who purchased the electric versions of the Cadillac Optiq or Lyriq switched from other luxury brands, including 10% who previously owned Tesla. That number could rise with Tesla’s brand loyalty nosediving, as this newsletter previously reported. “We’re in a position of great momentum,” John Roth, the global vice president of Cadillac, told The New York Times. “We offer more electric S.U.V.s than any luxury manufacturer, all with more than 300 miles of driving range.” But as Times reporter Lawrence Ulrich wrote, “that moment will soon be tested” as the electric car industry reels from the repeal of tax credits in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
The challenges ahead are best illustrated through the Escalade, Cadillac’s iconic luxury SUV. The company sold just 3,800 electric Escalade IQs in the first six months of the year. While that’s a strong showing for a three-row SUV starting around $130,000, the V-8 engine gas-powered Escalade starts at about $87,000, and sold about 24,000 vehicles – roughly six times as many as the electric version.
5. Legal fight over Border Patrol’s arrest of firefighter heats up
Lawyers in Oregon are demanding the release of a firefighter arrested last week by Border Patrol while fighting a wildfire in Washington state. The man, whose name hasn’t been released, was among two firefighters cuffed in the Olympic National Forest as they fought to contain the Bear Gulch Fire that had burned about 14 square miles as of Friday and forced evacuations. The arrests sparked a political firestorm over what critics saw as a jarring example of the warped priorities of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That’s particularly so in the case of this firefighter, who attorneys said had received his U-Visa certification from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon in 2017 and had submitted his U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services application the following year.
When the AP asked the Bureau of Land Management why its contracts with two firefighting companies were terminated and 42 firefighters were escorted away from Washington’s largest wildfire, the agency declined to comment. The decisions came as the American West is essentially a tinderbox. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, Washington and Oregon are both at high risk of a megafire igniting this fall.
THE KICKER
Turns out mammoths weren’t just in the icy tundra. Scientists in Mexico discovered mammoth bones, shedding light on a once-obscure population of extinct tropical elephantids that ranged as far south as Costa Rica. In a paper published this week in Science, National Autonomous University of Mexico paleogenomicist Federico Sánchez Quinto documented the previously unknown lineage of the Santa Lucía mammoths, which he said split from northern Columbian mammoths hundreds of thousands of years ago. “If you had told me 5 years ago that I would be collecting these samples, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” he said. “This paper really is an exciting beginning of something.”
Facetotectans (aka y-larvae) have been a mystery since their discovery in the 1800s. Scientists are unsure of what they grow up to become, but we now know where these crustaceans fit in the tree of life. This image shows a cypris larvae, or y-cyprid. Credit: Niklas Dreyer
Y-larvae, mysterious crustaceans related to barnacles, may be parasitic and are key to understanding barnacle evolution.
When most people think of barnacles, they imagine shell-like organisms clinging to boats, docks, or even whales. Yet some barnacles go far beyond passive attachment — they can actually invade and take over their hosts.
“Instead of gluing themselves to a rock or something, they glue themselves to a host, often a crab, and they inject themselves into that host, and live their entire life as a root network growing through their host. It’s almost like a fungal network or plant root system. They have no real body in the way that we think of animal bodies,” explains James Bernot, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UConn.
Bernot and an international team of collaborators — including lead author Niklas Dreyer from the Natural History Museum of Denmark and Biodiversity Research Center Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Jørgen Olesen from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Gregory Kolbasov from Moscow University, Jens Høeg from the University of Copenhagen, and Ryuji Machida and Benny Chan from the Biodiversity Research Center Academia Sinica — recently published a study in Current Biology on a puzzling group of crustaceans that may help resolve one of marine biology’s enduring mysteries.
The mystery of y-larvae
Barnacles are crustaceans, like crabs and shrimp, and have evolved unusual survival strategies. After a free-swimming larval phase, they spend the rest of their lives permanently attached to a chosen surface.
One especially mysterious group, known as “y-larvae” or Facetotecta, looks like juvenile barnacles. They have been documented in plankton samples since the 1800s, but no one has ever identified their adult stage. Bernot notes that this unresolved question remains central, though the team’s new research brings science closer to an answer.
To investigate where y-larvae belong on the crustacean family tree, the researchers gathered more than 3,000 specimens and examined their genes by sequencing the transcriptome — the set of expressed RNA molecules that reflects which genes are active.
Genetic analysis and hidden lives
“We were finally able to confirm, in the realm of big data science, that they are, in fact, related to barnacles, but they aren’t closely related to any of the other parasitic barnacles. This was interesting to test by building a giant tree of life for all the crustaceans, then adding this little branch of y-larvae, this very unknown group, to that bigger tree, and we saw that they are related to barnacles, but more as distant cousins,” says Bernot.
Though not closely related to parasitic barnacles, these crustaceans are also likely parasitic because they have some structures in common with their parasitic cousins, says Bernot, including antennae with claws that may be used to hook onto their host.
This image shows the lifecycle of y-larvae from y-nauplius, to y-cyprid, to ypsigon (the last known stage), which is a worm-like stage that emerges from the previous larval stage if the y-cyprid is exposed to crustacean molting hormones. The researchers believet his worm-like stage is probably parasitic and would borrow into a host. Each is about 100 micrometers long (1/10 of a millimeter). Credit: Niklas Dreyer
“One of the best pieces of evidence we have that y-larvae become parasitic is that if we expose them to crustacean growth hormone, they will hatch out of their little swimming larval shape into a small slug-like body, which is similar to what parasitic barnacles do when they enter a host,” says Bernot. “The fact that if we give them hormones, they also molt into a slug-like thing, suggests they go on to be parasitic somewhere, but we still don’t know what host they end up in. Being hidden inside another animal’s body could explain why we haven’t found the adult stage of y-larvae yet.”
Although these crustaceans are unusual and largely unknown with only 17 species described so far, Bernot says some of his co-authors found more than 100 new and different species from a single harbor in Japan. There is more to learn about these enigmatic animals.
Evolutionary strategies and ecosystem roles
“We were finally able to confirm, in the realm of big data science, that they are, in fact, related to barnacles, but they aren’t closely related to any of the other parasitic barnacles. This was interesting to test by building a giant tree of life for all the crustaceans, then adding this little branch of y-larvae, this very unknown group, to that bigger tree, and we saw that they are related to barnacles, but more as distant cousins,” says Bernot.
Although they are only distantly related to parasitic barnacles, the evidence suggests y-larvae are also parasitic. They share certain traits with parasitic barnacles, including clawed antennae that may help them latch onto a host.
“One of the best pieces of evidence we have that y-larvae become parasitic is that if we expose them to crustacean growth hormone, they will hatch out of their little swimming larval shape into a small slug-like body, which is similar to what parasitic barnacles do when they enter a host,” says Bernot. “The fact that if we give them hormones, they also molt into a slug-like thing, suggests they go on to be parasitic somewhere, but we still don’t know what host they end up in. Being hidden inside another animal’s body could explain why we haven’t found the adult stage of y-larvae yet.”
Despite being poorly understood, with only 17 described species, y-larvae may be far more diverse than previously thought. Bernot points out that some of his colleagues identified more than 100 distinct species from just a single harbor in Japan, suggesting much remains to be discovered about these unusual animals.
Ingenious barnacle adaptations
Different species of barnacles use different strategies when they become sessile adults. Besides living on inanimate objects, those that live on animals like whales are not considered parasitic because they are essentially hitching a ride and do not feed on their host. Others attach to the host and have structures that they use to feed on the host. Understanding the evolution of these different strategies is important, and Bernot says that a project they are currently working on involves building the evolutionary tree of all barnacles to observe and understand some of the evolutionary patterns.
“A big question is, what is it about barnacles that has given them so much variability over evolutionary time to take on so many different shapes and forms and lifestyles? They have come up with incredibly ingenious strategies for making their ways of life, and often their ways of life seem very bizarre to us, but they have clearly been very successful,” says Bernot. “These animals have been around for hundreds of millions of years and there are several thousand species of them, so they have come up with some really amazing solutions to complex problems.”
Some of those solutions could also help humans. For example, Bernot says, there is a lot of interest in trying to better understand barnacle glues.
“They glue themselves to docks, they glue themselves to boats, and that is a problem. The Navy spends millions of dollars on additional fuel because barnacles on their ships cause additional drag. Also having more powerful glues that can dry underwater would be very useful for mechanical reasons, but maybe also for dentistry and things like that,” says Bernot. “There could be a lot of applications if we can better understand some of these amazing solutions that barnacles have evolved.”
Reference: “Phylogenomics of enigmatic crustacean y-larvae reveals multiple origins of parasitism in barnacles” by Niklas Dreyer, James P. Bernot, Jørgen Olesen, Gregory A. Kolbasov, Jens Thorvald Høeg, Ryuji J. Machida and Benny K.K. Chan, 21 July 2025, Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.06.007
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