Apples developer site has shared news of a new API coming for apps that will offer expanded options for managing In-App Purchases. Its called the Advanced Commerce API, and heres what we know so far.Advanced Commerce API gives more flexibility to App Store developersHeres the official announcement:The AppStore facilitates billions of transactions annually to help developers grow their businesses and provide a world-class customer experience. To further support developers evolving business models such as exceptionally large content catalogs, creator experiences, and subscriptions with optional add-ons were introducing the AdvancedCommerceAPI.Developers can apply to use the AdvancedCommerceAPI to support eligible AppStore business models and more flexibly manage their In-App Purchases within their app. These purchases leverage the power of the trusted AppStore commerce system, including end-to-end payment processing, tax support, customer service, and more, so developers can focus on providing great app experiences.Apples announcement also includes a link where developers can learn more about eligibility requirements and the application process.As of the time Im publishing, however, that link is redirecting to Apples standard In-App Purchase page for developers. Initially, the link was broken altogether.Hopefully Apple will get the page up that contains more details soon. But for now, it sounds like Apple is expanding the ways that developers can manage In-App Purchases for their apps.Whatever the full details turn out to be, more options and greater flexibility seem like great changes no matter what.Are you a developer interested in using this new App Store API? Let us know in the comments.Best iPhone accessoriesAdd 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Three weeks into 2025, Apple has now updated its CarPlay website with one small, but noteworthy change: CarPlay 2 is no longer promised to arrive in 2024, thus confirming the delay.Apple, however, says its work on next generation CarPlay continuesUpdated CarPlay site removes promised launch date, but Apple confirms ongoing developmentApples plans to ship CarPlay 2 (next generation of CarPlay) have hit an official delay.Apples website has been updated to remove any reference to a 2024 deadline (first seen by MacRumors).In a statement to 9to5Mac, however, Apple said that it is still working with several automakers to implement the next generation CarPlay experience:The next generation of CarPlay builds on years of success and insights gained from CarPlay, delivering the best of Apple and the automaker in a deeply integrated and customizable experience. We continue to work closely with several automakers, enabling them to showcase their unique brand and visual design philosophies in the next generation of CarPlay.Each car brand will share more details as they near the announcements of their models that will support the next generation of CarPlay.All throughout 2024, Apples CarPlay site claimed that the first models with CarPlay 2 would arrive in 2024.Even in December, the language remained unchanged, leading some (myself included) to believe a launch announcement would arrive just before the deadline passed.The same thing had played out the prior year, for example, when Apple promised the first CarPlay 2-supporting automakers would be announced. They kept that promise, just barely, with a December news drop.But in 2024, Apples new CarPlay deadline came and went with no change.Whats next after CarPlay 2s delay?Plenty of signs exist that Apples still working on its new CarPlay system, beyond the statement shared abovebut its just not ready yet.Personally, Id love to see Apple take CarPlay in a new direction by building CarPlay 2 tools into the existing system. That way, millions of existing CarPlay users can benefit from the upgrades.For now though, all we know is that Apple and its automaker partners are continuing to develop the next generation of CarPlayand all we can do is wait.Are you interested in getting CarPlay 2, or would you prefer that the first CarPlay just got better? Let us know in the comments.Best CarPlay accessoriesAdd 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Yikes.Dirty MoneyPresident Donald Trump's $500 billion AI infrastructure project, dubbed Stargate, is receiving a ton of fundingfrom an Abu Dhabi-based investment company called MGX which is led by the United Arab Emirates' president's brother, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan.According to The Information, the firm is contributing roughly $7 billion to the project, which is hoping to raise $100 billion to build out AI infrastructure in the United Statesbefore expanding that figure to a half trillion in several years' time.Tahnoun is in charge of a $1.5 trillion empire, reflecting of the UAE's vast crude oil wealth. He also has a strong interest AI, quickly emerging as one of the biggest investorsin the industry.On the flip side, the national security advisor is also a member of the country's royal family, which has an abysmal track record when it comes to human rights abuses, from detaining prisoners of conscience to the torturing of immigrant workers. The family's members also have a well-documented reputation for dodging taxes and laundering money abroad using offshore companies, earning the UAE a spot on the European Union's "black list" of countries that are failing to keep illicit money flows at bay.In short, Trump's massive AI infrastructure project is receiving a ton of dubiously-sourced cash an ethical miasma that will haunt the program from its earliest days.Green New DatacenterBy relying on oil money, Stargate also highlights a greater turn away from investments in renewable sources of energy, with progressing AI becoming a far more commonly and easily agreed-upon goal uniting the ultra-wealthy.None of that seems to have put off multi-hyphenate billionaire and former environmental champion Elon Musk, who met with Tahnounin September to discuss the "latest developments in advanced technology and AI."Tahnoun also met with AI chipmaker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Alphabet president Ruth Porat since then, as Bloomberg reports. In October, MGX was also one of the biggest investors in OpenAI's round of funding.But whether the multibillion gambit will pay off in the long run remains to be seen. While Trump made a big deal out of his announcement of the Starget project earlier this week, he remained noticeably vague on details.Besides, as several publications have since pointed out, the numbers aren't quite adding up. While $500 billion in a matter of years seems like a massive stretch, even conjuring up $100 billion might prove extremely difficult.Musk voiced those concerns in a tweet just hours after the project was announced, arguing that OpenAI doesn't "actually have the money" and that SoftBank has "well under $10B secured."The accusations drew the ire of Altman, though, who accused Musk of being "wrong, as you surely know."More on Stargate: Sam Altman Blasts Elon Musk for Defying Donald Trump's AI DealShare This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsExThera, a US-based medical startup, claimed that its cutting edge blood-filtering device could cure cancer.Intrigued, an American billionaire named Alan Quasha capitalized on its promisebybuying the devices and taking overa medical clinic on the Caribbean island of Antigua outside the purview of US regulators, offering desperate, terminally ill cancer patients a chance of being healthy again at the price of $45,000 for each round of treatment.But as The New York Times reports, of the roughly two dozen patients treated at the Antigua clinic using the ExThera device, at least six died, likely as a result of their stay. Family members and medical professionals who visited the clinic reported horrifying conditions, including patients being treated without sufficient anesthesia, and a lack of basic hygienic practices.Most of all, it appears that the cancer-curing claims about the device were vastly overblown and in some cases, were spun into outright lies."I feel so duped by all these people," Kim Hudlow, whose husband, David, underwent treatment at the Antigua clinic, told the NYT. "The way this was spun up and the way it was explained, they got me."The ExThera device isn't total quackery, in the NYT's analysis. It was approved by the Food and Drug and Administration for treating emergency COVID-19 cases, and for that purpose, it seems effective. After the pandemic and seeking another stream of income, however, ExThera thought its device might be effective at filtering circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, which are responsible for cancer metastasizing.The startup's chief regulatory officer Sanja Ilic organized a study in Croatia to test the filter's efficacy on cancer patients. It yielded promising preliminary results, with at least one patient showing a shrunken tumor. But the Croatian study was tiny, with only 12 patients in total, and it wasn't led by an oncologist.It was enough to woo the billionaire investor Quasha, however, who invested several million dollars in ExThera through his firm Quadrant Management, and began operating a clinic in Antigua via a subsidiary called Quadrant Clinical Care,where the experimental treatment wouldn't need approval from from US regulators.When ExThera's director of medical affairs Jonathan Chow arrived at the clinic, according to the NYT's reporting, he was appalled by what he saw. Patients were bleeding profusely, and at least one was screaming in pain. He learned that the patients were instructed to abstain from chemotherapy, the most reliable treatment for halting the spread of cancer. There was also, Chow discovered, not a single oncologist on site.Other witnesses said that the clinic's lead doctor, Joey John, made incisions without any imaging or sufficient anesthesia. Chow warned ExThera's leadership about what he saw, and when they didn't listen, he resigned.Hudlow, a trained nurse, was on several occasions taken aback by the clinic's questionable practices and her husband's condition, which was not improving. In fact, after finishing the first round and returning home to Florida, it got worse and his cancer showed signs of growing more aggressively.But at every step of the way, a doctor was there telling her to continue her husband's treatment. On a phone call, Ilic, ExThera's chief regulatory officer, told her that her husband's pain was actually a good sign. It meant that David "had a strong immune activation," he said, per the NYT.Ilic also reportedly made multiple claims that weren't supported by the Croatian study, such as promising that one patient had recovered so thoroughly, with a 60 percent reduction in tumors, that he was now training for a marathon.The Hudlows returned for another bout of treatment. Shortly after, David's condition became so horrendous that he had to be scrambled back to a US hospital, where doctors found that his cancer had spread beyond saving. Two days later, he died.The NYT found that another patient, Ashley Sullivan, asked Ilic why she developed new tumors after her treatment. Ilic insisted she had it all wrong. "Have NO idea who told you is not working for you," Ilic texted Sullivan. "We got your CTCs down to zero."According to the newspaper, she died three months later.Share This Article

MIT Technology Reviews Whats Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. Jan Liphardt teaches bioengineering at Stanford, but to many strangers in Los Altos, California, he is a peculiar man they see walking a four-legged robotic dog down the street. Liphardt has been experimenting with building and modifying robots for years, and when he brings his dog out in public, he generally gets one of three reactions. Young children want to have one, their parents are creeped out, and baby boomers try to ignore it. "Theyll quickly walk by, he says, like, What kind of dumb new stuff is going on here? In the many conversations Ive had about robots, Ive also found that most people tend to fall into these three camps, though I dont see such a neat age division. Some are upbeat and vocally hopeful that a future is just around the corner in which machines can expertly handle much of what is currently done by humans, from cooking to surgery. Others are scared: of job losses, injuries, and whatever problems may come up as we try to live side by side. The final camp, which I think is the largest, is just unimpressed. Weve been sold lots of promises that robots will transform society ever since the first robotic arm was installed on an assembly line at a General Motors plant in New Jersey in 1961. Few of those promises have panned out so far. But this year, theres reason to think that even those staunchly in the bored camp will be intrigued by whats happening in the robot races. Heres a glimpse at what to keep an eye on. Humanoids are put to the test The race to build humanoid robots is motivated by the idea that the world is set up for the human form, and that automating that form could mean a seismic shift for robotics. It is led by some particularly outspoken and optimistic entrepreneurs, including Brett Adcock, the founder of Figure AI, a company making such robots thats valued at more than $2.6 billion (its begun testing its robots with BMW). Adcock recently told Time, Eventually, physical labor will be optional. Elon Musk, whose company Tesla is building a version called Optimus, has said humanoid robots will create a future where there is no poverty. A robotics company called Eliza Wakes Up is taking preorders for a $420,000 humanoid called, yes, Eliza. In June 2024, Agility Robotics sent a fleet of its Digit humanoid robots to GXO Logistics, which moves products for companies ranging from Nike to Nestl. The humanoids can handle most tasks that involve picking things up and moving them somewhere else, like unloading pallets or putting boxes on a conveyor. There have been hiccups: Highly polished concrete floors can cause robots to slip at first, and buildings need good Wi-Fi coverage for the robots to keep functioning. But charging is a bigger issue. Agilitys current version of Digit, with a 39-pound battery, can run for two to four hours before it needs to charge for one hour, so swapping out the robots for fresh ones is a common task on each shift. If there are a small number of charging docks installed, the robots can theoretically charge by shuffling among the docks themselves overnight when some facilities arent running, but moving around on their own can set off a buildings security system. Its a problem, says CTO Melonee Wise. Wise is cautious about whether humanoids will be widely adopted in workplaces. Ive always been a pessimist, she says. Thats because getting robots to work well in a lab is one thing, but integrating them into a bustling warehouse full of people and forklifts moving goods on tight deadlines is another task entirely. If 2024 was the year of unsettling humanoid product launch videos, this year we will see those humanoids put to the test, and well find out whether theyll be as productive for paying customers as promised. Now that Agilitys robots have been deployed in fast-paced customer facilities, its clear that small problems can really add up. Then there are issues with how robots and humans share spaces. In the GXO facility the two work in completely separate areas, Wise says, but there are cases where, for example, a human worker might accidentally leave something obstructing a charging station. That means Agilitys robots cant return to the dock to charge, so they need to alert a human employee to move the obstruction out of the way, slowing operations down. Its often said that robots dont call out sick or need health care. But this year, as fleets of humanoids arrive on the job, well begin to find out the limitations they do have. Learning from imagination The way we teach robots how to do things is changing rapidly. It used to be necessary to break their tasks down into steps with specifically coded instructions, but now, thanks to AI, those instructions can be gleaned from observation. Just as ChatGPT was taught to write through exposure to trillions of sentences rather than by explicitly learning the rules of grammar, robots are learning through videos and demonstrations. That poses a big question: Where do you get all these videos and demonstrations for robots to learn from? Nvidia, the worlds most valuable company, has long aimed to meet that need with simulated worlds, drawing on its roots in the video-game industry. It creates worlds in which roboticists can expose digital replicas of their robots to new environments to learn. A self-driving car can drive millions of virtual miles, or a factory robot can learn how to navigate in different lighting conditions. In December, the company went a step further, releasing what its calling a world foundation model. Called Cosmos, the model has learned from 20 million hours of videothe equivalent of watching YouTube nonstop since Rome was at war with Carthagethat can be used to generate synthetic training data. Heres an example of how this model could help in practice. Imagine you run a robotics company that wants to build a humanoid that cleans up hospitals. You can start building this robots brain with a model from Nvidia, which will give it a basic understanding of physics and how the world works, but then you need to help it figure out the specifics of how hospitals work. You could go out and take videos and images of the insides of hospitals, or pay people to wear sensors and cameras while they go about their work there. But those are expensive to create and time consuming, so you can only do a limited number of them, says Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation technologies at Nvidia. Cosmos can instead take a handful of those examples and create a three-dimensional simulation of a hospital. It will then start making changesdifferent floor colors, different sizes of hospital bedsand create slightly different environments. Youll multiply that data that you captured in the real world millions of times, Lebaredian says. In the process, the model will be fine-tuned to work well in that specific hospital setting. Its sort of like learning both from your experiences in the real world and from your own imagination (stipulating that your imagination is still bound by the rules of physics). Teaching robots through AI and simulations isnt new, but its going to become much cheaper and more powerful in the years to come. A smarter brain gets a smarter body Plenty of progress in robotics has to do with improving the way a robot senses and plans what to doits brain, in other words. Those advancements can often happen faster than those that improve a robots body, which determine how well a robot can move through the physical world, especially in environments that are more chaotic and unpredictable than controlled assembly lines. The military has always been keen on changing that and expanding the boundaries of whats physically possible. The US Navy has been testing machines from a company called Gecko Robotics that can navigate up vertical walls (using magnets) to do things like infrastructure inspections, checking for cracks, flaws, and bad welding on aircraft carriers. There are also investments being made for the battlefield. While nimble and affordable drones have reshaped rural battlefields in Ukraine, new efforts are underway to bring those drone capabilities indoors. The defense manufacturer Xtend received an $8.8 million contract from the Pentagon in December 2024 for its drones, which can navigate in confined indoor spaces and urban environments. These so-called loitering munitions are one-way attack drones carrying explosives that detonate on impact. These systems are designed to overcome challenges like confined spaces, unpredictable layouts, and GPS-denied zones, says Rubi Liani, cofounder and CTO at Xtend. Deliveries to the Pentagon should begin in the first few months of this year. Another initiativesparked in part by the Replicator project, the Pentagons plan to spend more than $1 billion on small unmanned vehiclesaims to develop more autonomously controlled submarines and surface vehicles. This is particularly of interest as the Department of Defense focuses increasingly on the possibility of a future conflict in the Pacific between China and Taiwan. In such a conflict, the drones that have dominated the war in Ukraine would serve little use because battles would be waged almost entirely at sea, where small aerial drones would be limited by their range. Instead, undersea drones would play a larger role. All these changes, taken together, point toward a future where robots are more flexible in how they learn, where they work, and how they move. Jan Liphardt from Stanford thinks the next frontier of this transformation will hinge on the ability to instruct robots through speech. Large language models ability to understand and generate text has already made them a sort of translator between Liphardt and his robot. We can take one of our quadrupeds and we can tell it, Hey, youre a dog, and the thing wants to sniff you and tries to bark, he says. Then we do one word changeYoure a cat. Then the thing meows and, you know, runs away from dogs. And we havent changed a single line of code. Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the robotics company Eliza Wakes Up has ties to a16z.

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Looking for the most recent Strands answer?Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.Todays NYTStrandspuzzle isn't too tough. The clue lets you know the theme pretty quickly, and the answers are common words and simple to find. But if you need hints and answers, read on.Also, I go into depth about therules for Strands in this story.If you're looking for today's Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Mini Crossword answers, you can visitCNET's NYT puzzle hints page.Read more:NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So FarHint for today's Strands puzzleToday's Strands theme is:Get smartIf that doesn't help you, here's a clue: Brainiac!Clue words to unlock in-game hintsYour goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle's theme. If you're stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:LEET, TEEN, HALL, QUIT, BRAN, GILL, RIGHT, GILT, RAIN, HAINT, HILL, STENT, TENTAnswers for today's Strands puzzleThese are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you've got all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:QUICK, BRIGHT, CLEVER, BRILLIANT, INTELLIGENTToday's Strands spangramToday's Strands spangram isTHATSGENIUS.To find it, start with the T that's five letters in from the left on the top row, and wind down. The completed NYT Strands puzzle for Jan. 24, 2025. NYT/Screenshot by CNET

January 23, 202524 min readMargarethe Hilferding, Sigmund Freud and the Conspiracy of SilenceMargarethe Hilferding was the first woman admitted to Sigmund Freuds Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but her radical work on maternal instinct was dismissed and ignored Lily Whear (composite); Karl Hilferding (CC BY-SA 3.0) (image)In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day next week, Lost Women of Science is telling the story of Margarethe Hilferding, a pioneering psychoanalyst and physician from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. She was the first woman to earn a medical degree at the University of Vienna and the first woman to join Sigmund Freuds Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In her paper On the Basis of Mother Love,LISTEN TO THE PODCASTOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.TRANSCRIPTMarcy Thompson: The year was 1945. World War II had just ended in Europe, and a soldier named Peter Milford headed back to his home in Vienna.Eveline List: He fought in the army to free Austria.Marcy Thompson: He came back to find out what remained of his beloved city and the mother he had left behind.Eveline List: Everything had been destroyed. In the rubble, he was looking for the surviving friends.Marcy Thompson: When he left Vienna before the war, his name wasn't Peter Milford. It was Peter Hilferding. He'd changed his name in New Zealand, where he'd escaped as a refugee.Eveline List: an hour to an hour walk to a house that was the publishing center of the Social Democratic Publishers.Marcy Thompson: Before the war, in this very building, Peter's mother published articles about hunger, housing, and the rights of the working class on behalf of the Social Democratic Party.A trained physician, the first woman to graduate from the University of Vienna Medical School, she worked tirelessly on behalf of women's health and reproductive rights. She was the first woman to be accepted into Sigmund Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic SocietyEveline List: at the door, late at night and told who he was, and they took him in and gave him a bed for a night.Marcy Thompson: His mother's name was Margarethe Hilferding or Margaret in the English pronunciation, and her contribution to the field of psychoanalysis was so prescient, so forward thinking, that it remains radical to this day. She would challenge the deeply ingrained notion that a mother's love for her child is innate.Eveline List: Then he walked to the outskirts of Vienna to the place of his aunt. And his cousin, her father, gave him a suitcase that Margarethe Hilferding had left for him.Marcy Thompson: What Peter had left Vienna to escape was the same crushing reality that his mother could not. The Hilferdings were Jewish, which in wartime Vienna was a death sentence.Eveline List: could have in the awful place where she had been gathered with other Jews, and some old clothes and that was all. And they gave him her letter of goodbye.Marcy Thompson: I'm Marcy Thompson. Today on Lost Women of Science, we examine the fragments of the remarkable life of Margaret Hilferding. As is so often the case with brilliant women, her story might have gone unnoticed. At best, a footnote on the pages of someone else's story. At worst, another tragic victim of the Holocaust.But as we'll see, Hilferding left behind much more than that. Starting with that suitcase and what was uncovered by the indomitable curiosity of a few women, a handful of historians and psychoanalysts who examined the origins of Sigmund Freud's groundbreaking work, and discovered to their surprise the female medical doctor who was there at the beginning.Eveline List: My name is Eveline List. I studied first history and psychology. And after my doctorate, I decided to start psychoanalytic training to understand something about people. I wanted to understand how, how things and people were connected.Marcy Thompson: It sounds a little bit like Hilferding herself went in to study the same thing.Eveline List: I mean, yeah.Marcy Thompson: What drew you to her? Where did you discover her?Eveline List: Well, I spoke to a friend who was the head of the documentary archives of the resistance movements in Vienna. And then he said, well, uh, aren't you interested in some materials? And I said, well, yeah, what you got? And so he suggested Margarethe Hilferding.I have always been very much into the history of psychoanalysis. So I knew she had been the first one. Of course, I was very interested. They had very little about her. But what, what he gave me was the starting point.Marcy Thompson: Eveline List would soon connect with Hilferding's son, Peter Milford, the same person who had returned to Vienna so many years earlier.Turns out they lived fairly close to each other. When Eveline met Peter, he was well into his 90s.Eveline List: He was intellectually very bright and open, and he also had a very dry humor, but at the same time he was very humble.Marcy Thompson: Peter Milford provided Eveline with a first hand account of his mother's astonishing accomplishments.He traced her story back before the turn of the 20th century, when enormous cultural change was taking place.In the late 19th century, Margarethe Hilferding was part of an unusual historical phenomenon. She was among a growing group of highly educated, liberal Jewish women who studied medicine in Europe. A subset of these women were drawn to the nascent field of psychoanalysis. Outside of academia, these women are unknown. And even within academia, these pioneers have received little attention.Klara Naszkowska: We of course know that that's the tendency to cut out from official history, to cut out the minorities, and that includes women.Marcy Thompson: That's Klara Naszkowska. Cultural historian, professor of women's studies at Montclair State University, and editor of the book, Early Women Psychoanalysts.Naszkowska's research focuses on a somewhat better known Russian physician, who was also a pioneer in the field, Sabina Spielrein.Klara Naszkowska: As I was researching Spielrein, I was discovering more and more names. I mean, I wasn't definitely the first one to discover this, but I discovered for myself that there were so many of those women.Almost all of those women were also Jewish, which was also another factor, ah leading to their disappearance from history. And that while each of them had an individual story, there were so many also common threads in those stories when it comes to gender, Jewishness, anti-SemitismMarcy Thompson: By the late 1800s, a cultural shift was taking place among progressive Jewish families in Europe and Russia, especially those who subscribed to Marxist ideologies. They began educating their daughters.Klara Naszkowska: We have a very typical family there. And that's a Jewish family where parents are either observant or maybe observe some of the holidays. Those parents typically, especially fathers, support their daughters in pursuing university level education, in becoming doctors, in becoming psychoanalysts, and, generally speaking, financially independent professionals, and not marrying.Marcy Thompson: While this describes the characteristics of Margarethe Hilferding's family to a T, it doesn't necessarily explain why Hilferding herself would eventually be drawn to this new field, or what made her into the formidable figure she would become. For that, we need to understand the depth and breadth of her intellect and her overriding desire to work on behalf of women.Candice Dumas: She contributed so significantly to several fields, the field of medicine, the field of psychoanalysis, she really advocated for rights to contraception and abortion. This is the early 1900s.Marcy Thompson: Candice Dumas is a clinical psychologist with a practice in Cape Town, South Africa. She was also interested in tracing the first generation of women in psychoanalysis.But while Dumas was aware of pioneers like Sabina Spielrein, she knew nothing of Margarethe Hilferding, even though she was part of the headwaters of psychoanalysis itself.Candice Dumas: And I think she paved the way for other women to join the fold and be accepted as well at the end of the day.Marcy Thompson: As is the case with so many lost women scientists, Hilferding was undeniably brilliant, excelling well beyond what was expected of her or even her male contemporaries at the time.Candice Dumas: She knew from the very beginning she wanted to study medicine, and she was willing to jump through all the right hoops to get there.Marcy Thompson: To put these hoops in perspective, in 1897, Margarethe was one of three female students who were enrolled to study for an academic degree at the university. That's out of 15 million women who lived in Austria, Hungary at the time.She enrolled to study physics and math, but could only do so if professors allowed women in their classes. Here's Eveline List.Eveline List: They were made fun of and professors were, some of the professors were really neglecting simply that they existed or, you know, didn't let them to their lectures. The argument of the majority who was against that women studying were so far-fetched and ridiculous.You know, like, there are so many bald men and that's a sign of how their brain is functioning. And when women, uh, would start studying, they'd lose their hair and their fertility.Marcy Thompson: Despite these ridiculous attitudes, Margarethe continued to pursue her goal. Heres Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: She started taking medical courses on the side as kind of an underground student, until finally that women were allowed to study, officially study medicine.Eveline List: And actually the opening of the medical university happened not because they suddenly got all so enlightened, but that they desperately needed female doctors because in Bosnia, which Austria had occupied, the women refused to go to male doctors. And so they needed female doctors.Marcy Thompson: And in 1903, at age 32, Margarethe Hilferding became the first Austrian woman to receive her medical degree from the University of Vienna after completing her entire formal education there.Things were beginning to change, and although anti-Semitism and misogyny were still alive and well in Austria, the era of progressive Viennese modernism was underway.It was a time of radical social change.Eveline List: There were several emancipatory movements at that time.Marcy Thompson: Austria had been ruled for centuries by the conservative Habsburg dynasty and was solidly Catholic, but more progressive thinking was taking hold.Eveline List: The largest, of course, was the labor movement. There was the women's movement. There were all kinds of health movements.Marcy Thompson: And in the coffeehouse culture that the era is famous for, Margarethe found her way to a group of radical intellectuals who reflected her own desire for progress, the Socialist Students League.Eveline List: They met in one cafe regularly, starting to read the Neue Zeit, which was the social democratic periodical from Germany. They were reading Karl Marx and discussed among each other.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was the group's first female member, and it was there that she met her husband, Rudolf Hilferding, who was seven years her junior. He was also a medical doctor, and, like Margarethe, he was interested in a multitude of subjects. Candice Dumas explains the union.Candice Dumas: It was really an intellectual marriage and a marriage of equals. They were both raised Jewish. And they decided on a civil marriage instead of a religious ceremony.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe worked at the Vienna General Hospital, fighting to be called Frau Doktor, not simply Fraulein. And Rudolf's interest expanded into the field of economics and the need for political reform.Both of them felt frustrated that their medical training didn't prepare them to understand the psychic and social conditions that impacted their patients' lives.Candice Dumas: Rudolf moved away from medicine and veered fully into politics.Marcy Thompson: The couple moved to Berlin, where Rudolf was invited to lecture for the German Social Democratic Party.They had two children, Karl and Peter, and Rudolf threw himself into writing what would become a groundbreaking and career making Marxist treatise called Finance Capital. His career seemed boundless, but Margarethe found herself alone, raising two children and unable to practice as a doctor in Germany.Without a degree from a state controlled university, it was impossible for her to put her vast education and drive to work. So much for all that Marxist talk of emancipation. Here's Eveline List.Eveline List: Here they were talking about all those enlightened ideas, a revolutionary perspective, and then he actually expected her to do all the work by herself, but he followed his interest. All that she had worked for was suddenly impossible.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was faced with a choice.Candice Dumas: He wanted to stay and she needed to go back to where she was free. She packed up two very young children and moved back and looked after them on her own. She loved raising her children, but she also loved her work.Marcy Thompson: Rudolph stayed in Germany. He eventually became the Minister of Finance for two Social Democratic led governments. But their marriage was over. Margarethe returned to Vienna with her children, and set up a medical practice treating women in a working class district.Margarethe's patients had most likely never been to a female doctor. As their physician, she functioned as a gynecologist, but also as a counselor. She saw the impact of their social conditions. She witnessed their suffering. She listened. Here's Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: She went into the depths of their psyches and could explore with them. She saw how overburdened women were and how it impacted them economically. It impacted them physically.Marcy Thompson: Her medical training, however, wouldn't have included any way of understanding how these factors contributed to her patient's health. And she wouldn't have had an empirical approach to alleviating their mental suffering.Universities were still years away from offering any kind of psychological training. It just didn't exist. But the new field of psychoanalysis, which had started in Vienna a few years before and was just taking root, offered both a framework for understanding internal psychological struggle, and also a way of placing patients in a broader social context.Both were part of Margarethe's personal mission. Klara Naszkowska explains that psychoanalysis would have offered Margarethe some insight, especially in light of the political turmoil of the time.Klara Naszkowska: In Europe, it was a very broad cultural project. It was a socio-political project. It was a way of looking at people, so included a lot of different factors and therapy was one of them.Marcy Thompson: The pioneering work of Sigmund Freud framed this internal unrest in a new way. Here's Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: Freud was, was looking for connections as what, what's going on underneath, what is driving people's behaviors and emotions and, um, difficulties that they get stuck with.So this is also the realm is that it's not only about getting patients to talk and focusing on what is spoken, but in looking at what is underneath that and what is potentially unspoken.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe would certainly have been familiar with Freud's lectures in Vienna, as well as his written work. His theories were a topic of discussion, especially among the followers of progressive movements.Eveline List believes there was a clear reason that Margarethe was drawn to Freud.Eveline List: There was the idea of being able to understand her patients better.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe Hilferding and Sigmund Freud had many acquaintances in common, and soon enough she made her way to Freud himself.Candice Dumas: It's almost as though it was, it was meant to be that they were going to cross paths.Marcy Thompson: The all male Vienna Psychoanalytic Society originally met at Freud's apartment on Wednesday evenings. But in that cozy enclave where the subconscious lives of men and women would be plumbed, there was some doubt that a woman doctor would have anything of value to contribute. Klara Naszkowska.Klara Naszkowska: So we know there was a huge debate about whether women actually have that cognitive capacity to become doctors and psychoanalysts, and it's not pretty, let's say.Rosemary Balsam: There were really outrageous things that were said.Marcy Thompson: That's Rosemary Balsam.Rosemary Balsam: Particularly by one of my nemesis, Fritz Wittels, and he said that, well, as medical students, they're harmless, women, because any normal kind of essentially red blooded man in medical school would treat them as prostitutes. But once they graduate, they're a real threat. Nobody should give power to a woman because they'll abuse their power.Marcy Thompson: Rosemary Balsam is a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists of London and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale Medical School.Rosemary Balsam: So this was kind of, you know, an attitude that was shared by a lot of them. Freud himself sort of viewed Vittles as, you know, boys will be boys, and so on.Marcy Thompson: Even though Freud had stated that, quote, women cannot measure up to men in their capacity of sublimation of sexuality, unquote, he was well aware of the progressive thinking in the cultural circles surrounding the group, and he called for the intellectual openness to accept women as members.In 1910, 38 year old Margarethe, a physician with the highest education it was possible for anyone to achieve, a deep political commitment, and mother to two young boys, was taken into consideration as the group's first female member.Klara Naszkowska: They vote, and the vote is in favor of accepting her. But this is kind of like the beginning.Marcy Thompson: It was a historical moment. Although there had been one example of a woman attending a meeting, it was an altogether different accomplishment to be accepted as a member. Margarethe had taken down that barrier as another first. Eveline List.Eveline List: I think she impressed them enormously.Marcy Thompson: Within a year, she presented her own research. It was a paper called On the Basis of Mother Love. It was a thesis that grew directly out of Margarethe's practice as a physician. It would determine her relationship to the field of psychoanalysis, and it would cause some very big waves among Freud and his esteemed male colleagues. More after the break.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe had been a member of Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for less than a year when she presented her revolutionary paper to the group. It was called On the Basis of Mother Love. It should be noted that the actual paper no longer exists. The minutes of the meeting, which were recorded by Otto Rank, on January 11th, 1911, are essentially a summary of Hilferding's presentation.But Rosemary Balsam believes Otto Rank most likely represented the paper accurately.Rosemary Balsam: One of the things that I had appreciated very much about Rank's minutes, it's more open than any kind of notes I'm sure we would write these daysmuch more open and much more descriptiveand so it really does convey her thinking.Marcy Thompson: And Hilferding's thinking proved to be extraordinary. Clara Nashkowska explains.Klara Naszkowska: So this paper and this presentation she gave, Motherly Love, was incredibly ahead of her time in just a mind blowing way.Marcy Thompson: The central thesis of Margarethe's paper was hard for the men in the room to comprehend.Rosemary Balsam: She said there is no maternal instinct.Marcy Thompson: No maternal instinct. Even today, that is a bold assertion. Margarethe put forth the idea that there is no innate maternal love, as she called it.Klara Naszkowska: I mean, it's still, still incredibly progressive. Because she talked about things that we're still dealing with, such as this idea of maternal instinct. This idea that if you don't have it, then you're a bad parent, you're a bad mother.Marcy Thompson: The research that Margarethe conducted for this paper was rooted in the lives of real women. It came directly from her experiences as a physician and as a mother herself. As an extremely rare example of a female physician who treated women, she had unparalleled insight into her patients' lives.Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: She could explore with her patients, I think, in a way that male doctors at the time couldn't, whether these women actually wanted to be mothers or not. And that was radical thinking for both women and men at that time.Marcy Thompson: This idea went against the grain of how women had been perceived historically, culturally, and biologically. It goes against that same grain today. We are meant to think of ourselves as natural caretakers who immediately bond with our children as a matter of species survival. That's how we are taught that women are wired. And that was precisely the thinking of the men in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.Rosemary Balsam: And I think that it was the kind of Darwinian biological kind of sense that derived from what they all knew from animal life and they were all very taken with how, uh, female animals would protect their young and so on.And it was felt that that was really part of instinctual life and that it applied to us.Marcy Thompson: But Hilferding rejected that idea. She said that while maternal affection isn't automatically instinctual, it could be brought about by physical contact between the mother and baby. Taking Freud's drive theory into consideration, which is based on the idea that organisms have instinctual needs that power certain behaviors, Hilferding put forward a new idea about instinct.Eveline List explains.Eveline List: If it's not sort of something inborn, then obviously it needs a relationship. And it's the relationship to whom? And of course, it's the mother. So the life saving and drive inducing comes from the relationship between mother and child. And then of course, that capacity of the woman is nothing innate either.It has to develop. And so the whole drive dynamics is something psychosocial alongside of course a biological basis because I mean psychoanalysis is not some esoteric belief, but but of course without the body there's nothing.Rosemary Balsam: Hilferding brought the body right into the room and talked about birthing.Marcy Thompson: Let's pause for a second and remind ourselves of the year. It was 1911. In front of a group of well educated but relatively unenlightened men, men who knew little about internal female struggles, there was Margarethe Hilferding talking about the sometimes brutal, physical, and emotional aspects of motherhood.And she was putting it in psychoanalytic terms.Rosemary Balsam: So she tied, which I have long felt, but that that the quality of the birth experience probably influences the relationship to that child. So Hilferding was quite observant about that and talked about the psychological surround of the mother, but also the physicality of, um, the act of birthing.Marcy Thompson: It was shocking to her audience. Klara Naszkowska.Klara Naszkowska: And when she gave that presentation at that time this all male group did not like it. They did not like it. And we still do it, but they definitely did it. We still idealize this motherly love, as she, as she called it. And they, they were not having it. They completely rejected her presentation.Marcy Thompson: Motherly love to this group would seem to have a particular definition, one that was inborn and could not be challenged, even using a psychoanalytic framework as Margarethe did. Eveline List, again.Eveline List: Psychoanalysis is interested in the body as something that has meaning. It's just the symbolized body that really counts in psychoanalysis.Rosemary Balsam: So the interaction between the mother and child is central in Hilferding, and she said, this is, I find, uh, absolutely brilliant. She said, if we assume an Oedipal complex in the child, it finds its origin in sexual excitation by way of the mother, the prerequisite for which is an equally erotic feeling on the mother's part.It follows then that at certain times the child does represent for the mother a natural sex object, and so on.Marcy Thompson: This notion would have been startling to the men in attendance because it pushed Freud's idea of the Oedipal Complex in a new direction. A direction that involved the mother and child relationship as primary.Rosemary Balsam: Another thing that she said was that there exists between a mother and child certain sexual relationships which must be capable of further development.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was not only charting new territory, she was laying down the path for further exploration. She brought long overlooked desires and fears of motherhood into the conversation.According to Klara Naszkowska.Klara Naszkowska: She talked about how the relationship between a mother and her fetus or baby or child is complicated, complex, nuanced, and ambivalent.Marcy Thompson: Ultimately, she took on a subject that is still taboo, the existence of women as sexual beings before, during, and after motherhood. Candice Dumas points out why that was problematic.Candice Dumas: That was radical thinking for both women and men at that time. The different reactions women have to motherhood, which back then was also not spoken about. Today, it's still difficult to speak about. I see patients in my practice that if they are not in love with their babies from day one, they feel immense guilt that they are doing something wrong as a woman and as a mother.Klara Naszkowska: I teach my students about this and I ask them about maternal instinct and a lot of them think, no, no, no, that's a natural thing. They don't see it as a social construct, which it actually is.Marcy Thompson: As hard as it is for us to grapple with these conflicting feelings today, it was practically crippling for the esteemed members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who had a very particular idea of who and what women should be, even in this extremely progressive bubble.They were living in a country where the cult of the Virgin Mary had been the norm for centuries. Women's maternal love was not only ingrained, it was a cultural necessity.Candice Dumas: I think personally they experienced this as a threat.Marcy Thompson: They held tight to the idea that maternal love was inborn, and anything suggesting otherwise was due to the fact that a mother was, in the words of one member, degenerate. To this, all Margarethe said was, It just won't do.Rosemary Balsam: I think that she definitely was disappointed. However, Hilferding was pretty tough minded.Marcy Thompson: But her presentation was essentially rejected. Even worse, it was erased. Possibly by Freud himself. Which wouldn't have been unusual.Rosemary Balsam: People who broke from Freud, almost every one of them had more to say about females than Freud. And that seemed to be a kind of unconscious threat. And when she said this won't do, I think that, uh, that's, that would be the beginning of a lot of discord.Marcy Thompson: Within months, the group experienced some seismic shifts, ultimately resulting in a splinter group who followed Alfred Adler. As for Freud, his true feelings about Margarethe may have been expressed in the letter he wrote to Carl Jung.When she left the group, along with others, Freud was not unhappy to be losing their only female member. He referred to her as their only doktor weib, which, according to Eveline List, he meant derogatorily. She goes so far as to say that he was calling Margarethe a bitch of a doctor. Never one to depend on a man for approval, Margarethe moved on.But On the Basis of Mother Love would be Margarethe's only contribution to the field. Its impact, if it had one, was brief.Candice Dumas: This paper essentially disappeared. For a hundred years, nobody read any of of her work.Klara Naszkowska: And these themes basically disappear from psychoanalysis.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe Hilding did not need the validation of a group or dependence on its leader to do what she believed in most: caring for her patients, and fighting to uphold the values of social democratic politics. For her, there was still plenty of work to do.Klara Naszkowska: She is a counselor because part of her service, mostly for the working class, for the poor, is counseling on sexuality and birth control and sexual relationships and so on.Marcy Thompson: And so, that is what she returned to, serving her patients, fighting for their rights, to birth control, to abortion, to a living wage. In just a few years, the First World War began. Margarethe continued to raise her two sons. And when the war was over, the Social Democratic Party saw some success on behalf of working people.Eveline List: She was a regular activist in the party and gave speeches in many fields. And she was organizing the Social Democratic Doctors and she founded that society. And she was, of course, a women's rights activist.Marcy Thompson: This period of time was known as Red Vienna. It lasted through the mid 1930s, and saw the rise of socialist organizing and workers power.Eveline List: She was very involved in political life, one could say.Marcy Thompson: But as she went up against the Catholic Church to fight for these rights, Margarethe experienced considerable heartbreak when her son Karl converted to Catholicism at age 19.Candice Dumas: His baptism and confirmation coincided with a presentation she gave where she was criticizing the role of the Catholic Church in relation to abortion laws. It was a big disappointment for her.Marcy Thompson: Despite this, Margarethe believed deeply that education itself was a source of political power as it had been for her.Candice Dumas: She really honestly believed that with enough education that thatanti-Semitism could be eradicated, that people could enlighten themselves beyond that, that wouldn't become as important anymore.Marcy Thompson: The gains of Red Vienna were short lived. In 1934, the Austro-fascists banned the Social Democratic Party, and practically overnight, the entire country was ruled under the ultra conservative, anti-Semitic Austro-fascists. Margarethe was temporarily imprisoned, and lost her public positions, her home, her practice, her source of income, and her rights.But, as the years wore on, and conditions for Jews continued to decline, she remained dedicated to helping people whose situation was worse than hers.Eveline List: Hilferding, she loved being a doctor, doing the work of a doctor and the Rothschild, you say, we say Rothschild, was the only Jewish hospital that still existed. And she was allowed to walk there. She was not allowed to use public transport. She was also not allowed to sit on a public bench. She worked there a few hours every day and then walked back.Marcy Thompson: In 1938, Austria was annexed by Germany. Nazis entered Vienna, the streets lined with people waving flags. Hitler rode through the city standing in an open car, appearing to be adored by all. Everything that Margarethe and the Social Democratic Party worked for was over. Margarethe, who was 66 at the time, was forced to live in a Jewish old person's home in Vienna.This is what it was called, but it was actually a filthy, overcrowded prison for older Jews who had been forcibly moved from their homes, and whose rights were taken away. Here's Candice Dumas again.Candice Dumas: It seems as though in these old age ghettos, she was really able to, without a lot of resources, she was still able to try and provide care, medical and psychological care, to, to the other people imprisoned there as well.Marcy Thompson: Her son, Peter, managed to escape to New Zealand. And even though Margaret had a narrow window of opportunity to leave for France, she didnt take advantage of it.Candice Dumas: She was dedicated to her work. She would leave when she was ready. And unfortunately, when she was ready, it was too late.Marcy Thompson: In 1941, systemic mass deportations of Jews began. In the end, Hilferding was a woman who lived according to her ideas and convictions. But her foray into psychoanalysis, as brilliant as it was, was cut short. In total, the notes on her one psychoanalytic paper take up just 14 pages of the four volumes of the Minutes of the Psychoanalytic Society.But that doesn't mean we can't learn from that paper now.Rosemary Balsam: She really was a pioneer here and she really had prescient ideas.Marcy Thompson: So the question is, how is it that a paper written more than a hundred years ago is still ahead of its time? The forces working against Margarethe Hilferding were the same forces that have been working against women throughout time, and that work against us today.In Rosemary Balsam's words, it's due to a conspiracy of silence.Rosemary Balsam: I mean, the silence has been there, uh, for centuries upon centuries upon centuries, and I think that it's very much to the advantage of male power that people are in a conspiracy of silence.Marcy Thompson: The silencing that Margarethe Hilferding experienced came long before the Holocaust. But eventually, that would silence her, too. Which brings us back to the suitcase, and the letter that was found inside it when her son Peter returned after the war.Margarethe letter (German): Meine lieben buben, lieber Karl und lieber Peter.Margarethe letter (English): My dear boys, dear Karl, dear Peter.Marcy Thompson: She wrote this letter in June 1942. It was her 71st birthday. The next day, she would be transported to Theresienstadt, which served as a temporary holding place for Jews being moved to camps farther east.Margarethe letter (English): Now, it seems that my departure is getting serious after all, but not closer to you and not under favorable conditions.Marcy Thompson: She put this letter in that suitcase, which she managed to get to her sister's house on the outskirts of Vienna.Margarethe letter (English): I expected that we would probably never see each other again, that we would never hear from each other again, that we wouldn't even know where we are. I had to expect that, but it was still a long way off.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was taken from Vienna to Theresienstadt by train. There, Margarethe might have seen her brother, Otto Honigsberg, who died in Theresienstadt shortly after.Margarethe letter (English): It is now over a year since I received a Red Cross reply to my letter from Peter, and two months since I've heard from Karl.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe did not know that her son Karl had been murdered in Auschwitz, or that her ex-husband Rudolf had been tortured to death in Paris by the Gestapo.Margarethe letter (English): I have not been so bad on the whole, and have always kept my head up until now. Will that be possible any longer? I certainly intend to, but it will be very difficult.Marcy Thompson: Not long after being transported to Theresienstadt, Margarethe was sent to Treblinka, a concentration camp.Margarethe letter (English): And now it's my 71st birthday. I don't want to be sentimental, but it's actually a sad day for me.Marcy Thompson: Upon arriving in Treblinka, Margarethe was murdered almost immediately.Margarethe letter (English): One shouldn't complain if one has to leave life soon. It's about time.Marcy Thompson: Although she would disappear, her work was not for nothing. Eventually her son Peter would read this letter and understand the depth of his mother's love and her remarkable story. A story where she was not lost, after all.Margarethe letter (English): The only happiness is that you are on the outside.Mother.Marcy Thompson: On January 27th, we observe Holocaust Memorial Day. And this year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - Birkenau. We dedicate this episode of Lost Women of Science to all those, like Margarethe Hilferding, who did not survive.I'm Marcy Thompson, and I produced this episode. Deborah Unger was Senior Managing Producer.Echo Finch designed and engineered our sound. Our music was composed by Lizzie Younan. We had fact checking help from Lexi Atiyah. Lily Whear created the art. Thank you to our co-executive producers, Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner, and to Eowyn Burtner, our program manager. Thanks also to Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American.Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ann Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. For a transcript of this episode and for more information about Margarethe Hilferding, please visit our website, lostwomenofscience.org, and sign up so you'll never miss an episode.Further ReadingEarly Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance. Edited by Klara Naszkowska. Routledge, 2024Scientific Meeting on January 11, 1911, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: Volume III: 1910-1911. Edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn. International Universities Press, 1962Women of the Wednesday Society: The Presentations of Drs. Hilferding, Spielrein, and Hug-Hellmuth, by Rosemary Marshall Balsam, in American Imago, Vol. 60, No. 3; Fall 2003Lisa Appignanesi on Women & Freud, an extract from Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists Exhibition Catalogue. Edited by Lisa Appignanesi. Freud Museum London, October 2024

January 23, 20252 min readGlowing Mystery Mollusk Finally IdentifiedThis strange sea creature stumped scientists for 20 years. Heres what it really is.By Jude Coleman edited by Sarah Lewin FrasierA mystery mollusk observed by MBARIs remotely operated vehicle Tiburon in the outer Monterey Canyon at a depth of approximately 1,900 meters 2021 MBARIAbsolute darkness. Crushing pressure. Icy cold. The Pacific Oceans midnight zonebetween 3,300 and 13,100 feet deepis not a welcoming place. But that hasnt deterred one delicate, baffling mystery mollusk from setting up shop in this inhospitable water column.For more than 20 years scientists at Californias Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have occasionally encountered this five-inch translucent creature with a bizarre medley of traits. Its face is surrounded by an oversized hood that it uses to enfold prey and jet-propel itself like a jellyfish. Its tail is fringed with tentacles, and when provoked, it can detach one. When touched, its hood and tail glow with a constellation of blue-green dots like an underwater planetarium.Now scientists have determined that this deep-sea enigma is a nudibranch, or sea slugbut one so odd that it merits the creation of an entirely new nudibranch family, the researchers report in Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers. Dubbed Bathydevius caudactylus, its the first nudibranch known to live in the deep-sea water column rather than lurking on the seafloor or floating near the surface, for example.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The mystery mollusk Bathydevius caudactylus observed at a depth of approximately 1,550 meters. It has a wide, paddle-like tail with several finger-like projections called dactyls that may help with defense. 2021 MBARIThe animal features a unique grab bag of traits of other nudibranchs, says study co-author and MBARI marine biologist Steven Haddock. Haddock was present when scientists first spotted the mollusk, during exploration using a remotely operated vehicle in 2000. We were all spitballing what we thought it was, he recalls.In the two decades since then, the researchers have observed more than 100 B. caudactylus and studied some in their laboratories. Genetic analysis revealed the creature probably belongs to a family that split from the other nudibranchs long agoso even though it shares some features with other species, it evolved its eclectic range of traits independently. Similar features can evolve multiple times, but to see it happen in such a unique kind of organism under such different circumstances than what we see in other nudibranchs is pretty cool, says Jessica Goodheart, a mollusk researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Maybe [such features] can evolve much more easily than we anticipated.

Doom: The Dark Ages gets release date confirmed, will make you feel like an "iron tank" rather than the "fighter jet" acrobatics of Doom EternalBeefier melee and revamped Glory Kills, too.Image credit: Bethesda News by Katharine Castle Managing Editor Published on Jan. 23, 2025 Bethesda and id Software revealed an extensive new gameplay deep dive for Doom: The Dark Ages as part of the Xbox Developer Direct tonight, confirming the game's leaked release date of May 15th 2025 in the process.Set in a sci-fi fantasy medieval war against the demons of hell and acting as a prequel to Doom (2016), the Doom Slayer now has a hefty Shield Saw at his disposal alongside a multitude of new guns and weapons to play with, and tonight we got a glimpse of just how dramatically that shield will affect the game's overall combat flow.DOOM: The Dark Ages | Developer_Direct 2025 (4K) | Coming May 15, 2025. Watch on YouTube"In Doom Eternal you felt like a fighter jet," game director Hugo Martin said. "In Doom: The Dark Ages, you'll be an iron tank. Heavy, strong, but still fast." The more grounded combat system will strike a finer balance between enemy projectiles and player movement than previous games, Martin continued, and classic Doom fans will be pleased to hear that all adds up to make "strafing to aim viable again".In a Q&A for press ahead of tonight's showcase, Martin told Eurogamer "the shield is your multi-tool, you know, it's your Swiss army knife," and its lock-on mechanic is a big part of this. In addition to strafing, it will also let you rocket you across the arena to shield bash enemies - or traverse large chasms as we saw in the showcase trailer."You just feel like a pinball, like you're this wrecking machine" he added, and at one point even likened it to web-slinging from Spider-Man. That's where the speed element comes from, it seems, but as we saw in the trailer, the shield can also block and deflect incoming fire, be thrown like Kratos' axe, and even be used to parry demon melee attacks - all from a single, contextual button press.Don't worry if the word 'parry' makes you break out in a sweat, though, as the showcase revealed there will be extensive difficulty modifiers that players can adjust on the fly to tweak settings such as parry windows, game speed, daze duration and more. Image credit: id SoftwareThe Doom Slayer will have new melee options of his own to follow up those defensive manoeuvres, including an iron flail, an electrified gauntlet, and a spiked mace. Again, these will all be available on one input, and have their own combos and upgrade paths.In the press Q&A, Martin revealed this streamlining of the controls was an important goal for Doom: The Dark Ages. This was partly to make it feel intuitive, as "you shouldn't be fighting the controls, you should be fighting the bad guys", he said, but also so players can "master the control scheme faster, then we can ask more of you sooner."Martin also told Eurogamer that many of The Dark Ages' new weapons were designed to be "more brutalistic" to fit the medieval setting, and that he wanted players to think of them "like torture devices". There's no flamethrower this time, either, so the path to clawing back ammo will be done entirely through the new melee weapons."It's a loop that's made up of three core abilities that the player has, which is guns, shield and melee, and you're basically going to be using one or all of those three non-stop throughout the game. And each of those will give you the resources you need to stay in the fight". Image credit: id SoftwareGlory Kills have also been revamped for The Dark Ages. They're now un-synced and can be executed from any angle without locking you into a short, close-up death sequence. "For 10 years now, we've been trying to solve the problem of what happens when there are multiple demons staggered at the same time," Martin said during the Q&A."By the time you've played one synced glory kill, you turn to the other one and he's already out of his stagger state. The answer [was] it never worked to just leave them in the stagger state longer, that just feels weird." Martin also cited that moving between multiple staggered enemies felt "jarring", which didn't gel with their overarching goal of making The Dark Ages feel "fluid and constantly in control".As a result, the studio lent more on the "physics part" of the engine, so players "could move through [enemies] like Leonidas in the Hot Gates in that scene in 300," which Martin says was "a big source of inspiration" for the new Glory Kill system. Making them un-synced also solved "the problem of repetition" and recycled animation sequences, as seen in Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, he said. Now, "you basically perform combos," Martin explained, "and you feel like you're in total control".On top of the new crop of weapons, The Dark Ages will also let players pilot a "30 storey" Atlan mech to punch giant titans, and fly around on a cybernetic dragon, which breathes fire and has its own mounted gatling gun. Image credit: id Software"They're these pace breakers that happen throughout the game and are woven into the story," executive producer Marty Stratton told Eurogamer. They have their own missions, suite of abilities and mini-bosses to fight. With the dragon, in particular, you'll also using it to explore certain levels, as well as getting on and off it at specific points, with Stratton giving an example of using it to land on a hell galleon, say, then fighting your way through it from the inside before needing to escape again.Levels won't all be linear romps to the finish line, either. In one mission, for example, Martin likens it to a "Doom sandbox", calling it the "largest play space ever in a Doom game" as you bomb around a medieval battlefield pursuing objectives at your own pace. Whether that's representative of a more general open world-style approach remains to be seen, of course. Martin did reveal in the Q&A that "exploration is a huge part of the game", but it's more of "an expanded linear experience" than true open world.Still, together with the mech and dragon sequences, it looks like id Software is pulling out all the stops here when it comes to scale and spectacle, and we'll no doubt find out more when Doom: The Dark Ages releases on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass on 15th May.