here comes the boom! Falcon 9 sonic booms can feel more like seismic waves Trajectories, wind shear, temperature gradients, topography, and weather can affect how a sonic boom spreads. Jennifer Ouellette – May 27, 2025 12:36 pm | 1 A Falcon 9 rocket lifted SPHEREx into orbit in March. Credit: NASA/Jim Ross A Falcon 9 rocket lifted SPHEREx into orbit in March. Credit: NASA/Jim Ross Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more The Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California, serves military space launch missions as well as launches for NASA and commercial entities like SpaceX. But how do all those launches affect residents living along the Central Coast? People might marvel at the spectacular visual display, but as launch activity at the base has ramped up, so have the noise complaints, particularly about the sonic booms produced by Falcon 9 launches, which can reach as far south as Ventura County. The booms rattle windows, frighten pets, and have raised concerns about threats to the structural integrity of private homes. There have been rockets launching from Vandenberg for decades, so why are the Falcon 9 launches of such concern? "Because of the Starlink satellites, the orbital mechanics for where they're trying to place these in orbit is bringing [the trajectories] closer to the coast," said Brigham Young University's Kent Gee, who described his research into sonic boom effects on neighboring communities in a press briefing at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans. And the launches are occurring much more frequently, from two to three launches per year in the 1980s to between five and seven launches each month today. There were 46 Falcon 9 launches out of the Vandenberg base in 2024 alone, per Gee. Gee joined a project called ECOBOOM (Environmental and Community Observation of Sonic Booms) to study the factors that can impact just how jarring those sonic booms might be, conducted jointly by BYU and California State University, Bakersfield, with cooperation from the Space Force. "Space Force is interested in this because they feel a sense of stewardship," said Gee. "These rockets from SpaceX and other providers are launched from the base for a variety of missions and they want to understand the effects both on and off base, trying to understand how they can complete the mission while minimizing [negative] impacts." Gee and his cohorts monitored 132 separate sonic booms last summer, relying on data gathered via a network of 25 or so acoustic monitoring stations located along 500 square miles, including the beaches of Isla Vista and further inland to the hills of Ojai. "The measurements were made in parks, people's backyards, parking lots, wastewater plants, and all sorts of different locations," said Gee. More bang than boom A view of a Falcon 9 rocket launch from a park in Ventura County. Credit: Kent Gee There has been a great deal of research on supersonic aircraft, but the sonic booms produced by rockets like the Falcon 9 are acoustically distinct, according to Gee. For instance, most sonic booms have two shock waves, but the Falcon 9 booster produces a boom with three shocks as it descends through the atmosphere after launch. Gee co-authored a paper earlier this year analyzing the acoustic signatures of three Falcon 9 flyback sonic booms. While the first and third shocks were what one might typically expect, the second central shock "is formed by a combination of the grid fins and the lower portions of the booster, including the folded landing legs," Gee and BYU colleague Mark C. Anderson wrote. "These lower portions of the booster produce a rarefaction wave that tends to migrate toward the back of the shock system while the grid fins produce a shock wave that tends to migrate toward the front of the shock system." Those shock waves merge, and their relative strengths determine where this second shock appears in the full sonic boom acoustic signature. Sonic booms from rockets are also lower frequency, with peaks of less than 1 Hz—below the range of human hearing. The result is less of a "boom" and more of a "bang," according to Gee, that can last a few seconds, compared to milliseconds for a typical acoustic wave. It's more akin to a seismic wave, particularly if one is indoors when it hits. "Sometimes you get a very low amplitude rumble, but it comes on suddenly, and it's there for a few seconds and disappears," he said. It's also one reason why the sonic booms can travel so far afield of the Vandenberg base. Could the similarities confuse California residents who might mistake a sonic boom for an earthquake? Perhaps, at least until residents learn otherwise. "Since we're often setting up in people's backyard, they text us the results of what they heard," said Gee. "It's fantastic citizen science. They'll tell us the difference is that the walls shake but the floors don't. They're starting to be able to tell the difference between an earthquake or a sonic boom from a launch." Launch trajectories of Falcon 9 rockets along the California coast. Credit: Kent Gee A rocket's trajectory also plays an important role. "Everyone sees the same thing, but what you hear depends on where you're at and the rocket's path or trajectory," said Gee, adding that even the same flight path can nonetheless produce markedly different noise levels. "There's a focal region in Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo where the booms are more impactful," he said. "Where that focus occurs changes from launch to launch, even for the same trajectory." That points to meteorology also being a factor: Certain times of year could potentially have more impact than others as weather conditions shift, with wind shears, temperature gradients, and topography, for instance, potentially affecting the propagation of sonic booms. In short, "If you can change your trajectory even a little under the right meteorological conditions, you can have a big impact on the sonic booms in this region of the country," said Gee. And it's only the beginning of the project; the team is still gathering data. "No two launches look the same right now," said Gee. "It's like trying to catch lightning." As our understanding improves, he sees the conversation shifting to more subjective social questions, possibly leading to the development of science-based local regulations, such as noise ordinances, to address any negative launch impacts. The next step is to model sonic booms under different weather conditions, which will be challenging due to coastal California's microclimates. "If you've ever driven along the California coast, the weather changes dramatically," said Gee. "You go from complete fog at Vandenberg to complete sun in Ventura County just 60 miles from the base." Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 1 Comments

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $1.2 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.

The Days of Play celebration comes to PlayStation Store, featuring numerous games all available at discount for a limited time*, starting May 28! You can get a preview of just some of the titles** that’ll be included ahead of the promotion’s go-live time right here. The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle (45% off), WWE 2K25 Standard Edition (30% off), Astro Bot (15% off), The Last of Us Part II Remastered (20% off) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (75% off).  The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle (45% off), WWE 2K25 Standard Edition (30% off), Astro Bot (17% off) and The Last of Us Part II Remastered (20% off).  The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle (45% off), WWE 2K25 Standard Edition (30% off), Astro Bot (17% off) and The Last of Us Part II Remastered (20% off).  And there are many more games beyond the titles listed below. When the dedicated promotion page goes live on PlayStation Store on May 28, head there to see the full list and find out your regional discount pricing.  And there’s plenty more Days of Play related-celebrations to enjoy! 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Artificial intelligence has sent demand for electricity skyrocketing in the U.S. after years of virtually zero growth. That has sent Big Tech companies scrambling to secure generating capacity for their data centers. For many, that has meant turning to nuclear fission. The power source has been experiencing a resurgence in the last few years following decades of plant closures. (Fission, used in all current nuclear plants, is distinct from fusion, the still-experimental approach to getting power from atoms that, while attracting investors, has yet to produce more electricity than it consumes.) For tech companies, part of the appeal of fission is a stable, predictable source of power that flows 24/7, giving their data centers the potential to run computing loads whenever they require it.  But another part of the appeal lies in new reactor designs that promise to overcome the shortcomings of existing nuclear power plants. Where old power plants were built around massive reactors that could generate over 1 gigawatt of electricity, new small modular reactor (SMR) designs see multiple modules deployed alongside each other to meet a range of needs.  SMRs rely on mass manufacturing to bring costs down, but to date, no one has built one in the U.S. Still, that hasn’t kept Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft away from the table. They’ve either signed agreements to buy power from nuclear startups or invested in them directly — or both. Here are the nuclear fission startups backed by Big Tech. Kairos Power Kairos Power received a vote of confidence from Google when the search giant promised to buy around 500 megawatts of electricity by 2035, with the first reactor targeted to come online by 2030. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW The company’s small modular reactors rely on molten fluoride salt for cooling and to transport heat to a steam turbine. The salt’s high boiling point means that the coolant doesn’t need to be kept at high pressure, which should improve operating safety. The reactors contain fuel pebbles coated in carbon and ceramic shells, which should be strong enough to withstand a meltdown. The Alameda-based startup has received a $629 million award from the U.S. government, including $303 million from the Department of Energy. In November 2024, Kairos received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to commence construction on two reactors in Tennessee. At 35 megawatts, the test units will be smaller than Kairos’ eventual commercial reactors, which are expected to generate 75 megawatts each. Oklo Oklo is another SMR company targeting the data center world — no surprise given that it was backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who also took the nuclear startup public via a reverse merger with his special purpose acquisition vehicle, AltC, in July 2023. Altman served as chairman of Oklo until April, when he stepped down as OpenAI began negotiating with Oklo for an energy supply agreement. DCVC, Draper Associates, and Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management are among the startup’s previous investors. Cooled by liquid metal, Oklo’s reactor is based on an existing U.S. Department of Energy design that’s intended to reduce the amount of nuclear waste that results from regular operations. Still, Oklo’s path hasn’t been a smooth one. The company’s first license application was denied in January 2022. Oklo has said it will resubmit the application sometime in 2025. But that hasn’t stopped the company from landing a deal to supply data center operator Switch with 12 gigawatts by 2044. Saltfoss Like Kairos, Saltfoss, formerly known as Seaborg, also wants to build SMRs cooled by molten salt. But unlike Kairos and others, it envisions placing two to eight of them on a ship to create what it calls a Power Barge. The startup has raised nearly $60 million, including a $6 million seed round that included investments from Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and Unity co-founder David Helgason, according to PitchBook. Satlfoss has an agreement with Samsung Heavy Industries to build the ships and the Satlfoss-designed reactors. TerraPower Founded by Bill Gates, TerraPower is building a larger reactor, called Natrium, which is cooled by liquid sodium and features molten salt energy storage. The company broke ground on the first power plant in June 2024 in Wyoming. The Natrium design calls for the reactor to generate 345 megawatts of electricity. That’s smaller than other new nuclear plants today but larger than most SMR designs.  But Natrium has a trick up its sleeve with its molten salt heat storage system. Since nuclear reactors operate best at a steady state, the Natrium reactor can continue breaking atoms when demand is low, and the extra energy is stored as heat in a vat of molten salt, which can be drawn upon later to generate electricity. Investors include Gates’ Cascade Investment fund, Khosla Ventures, CRV, and ArcelorMittal. X-Energy X-Energy landed a hefty $700 million Series C-1 last year led by Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. At the same time, the SMR startup announced two development agreements that would see the deployment of 300 megawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the Pacific Northwest and Virginia. The company’s high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors buck recent trends in the U.S. and Europe, where the design has been shunned in favor of other approaches. The company’s Xe-100 reactor is expected to generate 80 megawatts of electricity. Helium gas flows through the reactor’s 200,000 billiard ball-sized fuel “pebbles,” absorbing heat to spin a steam turbine. 

drop it like it's hot The key to a successful egg drop experiment? Drop it on its side Eggs are less likely to crack when dropped horizontally vs. vertically, contradicting conventional wisdom. Jennifer Ouellette – May 26, 2025 11:05 am | 7 A physics teacher drops a package designed to protect three eggs from a fall of ten meters Credit: Ben Wildeboer/CC BY-SA 3.0 A physics teacher drops a package designed to protect three eggs from a fall of ten meters Credit: Ben Wildeboer/CC BY-SA 3.0 Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Egg drop competitions are a staple of high school and college physics classes. The goal is for students to build a device using bubble wrap, straws, or various other materials designed to hold an egg and keep it intact after being dropped from a substantial height—say, ten meters (nearly 33 feet). There's even a "naked egg" version in which a raw egg is dropped into a container below.  The competition is intended to teach students about structural mechanics and impact physics, and it is not an easy feat; most of the dropped eggs break. MIT engineering professor Tal Cohen decided to investigate why the failure rate was so high and reported her team's findings in a paper published in the journal Communications Physics. "The universal convention is that the egg should be in a vertical orientation when it hits the ground," Cohen told Physics Magazine. But their results from controlled trials simulating the egg drop challenge in the lab calls this conventional wisdom into question. It is not an unreasonable assumption to make. Another popular physics party trick is to walk on several cartons of eggs without breaking them. Typically it only takes about five and a half pounds of force to crack a single eggshell, much less than the average adult human. As I wrote for Slate back in 2012, "The key is to align the eggs so that the narrow pole is pointing upward, and step in such a way to distribute your weight over the entire surface area, to avoid overloading any one eggshell." (Being barefoot also helps.) In fact, I noted at the time a surprisingly long history of scientific studies of eggshells and how cracks propagate, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when they served as useful models for failure analysis when building airplanes. The toughness comes from the egg shell's structure; it is made up mostly of calcium carbonate (calcite) crystals, similar to tooth enamel or sea shells,  embedded within a protein matrix. The egg shell is strengthened further by a thin inner collagen layer. This tends to keep damage localized as cracks spread little by little rather than one clean break. Chef instructor demonstrates the one-handed technique for cracking an egg in 1954's Sabrina. Paramount Pictures Chef instructor demonstrates the one-handed technique for cracking an egg in 1954's Sabrina. Paramount Pictures Sabrina needs a new egg. Paramount Pictures Sabrina needs a new egg. Paramount Pictures Chef instructor demonstrates the one-handed technique for cracking an egg in 1954's Sabrina. Paramount Pictures Sabrina needs a new egg. Paramount Pictures Cohen et al. give a shoutout in their introduction to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, specifically the longstanding quarrel between the people of Lilliput and Blefuscu on the best orientation for cracking an egg. Of course, there is the classic chef's one-handed egg-cracking technique—immortalized in the 1954 romantic comedy, Sabrina—which involves holding the egg between the fingers and thumb and rapping the edge sharply against the rim of the bowl to achieve a clean break. Alas, this usually ends in a crushed eggy mess when attempted by amateurs. (Practicing with a golf ball can improve one's skill.) MIT scientists have previously studied precisely how much force to apply to the center of an egg. Specifically, the scientists devised a mathematical formula linking the ovoid geometry of the eggshell and its rigidity—a property that, along with strength (a related but distinct concept), accounts for how much force a given object can withstand before breaking. It's the narrow tip that is the most crack-resistant part of the egg, since the shell becomes more rigid the more the egg curves. That's why pressing down on both the bottom and top of an egg with your fingers won't work. But turn the egg horizontally and press right at the center, and the shell cracks easily. Stiffness vs. toughness So what's going on with these latest MIT findings? To find out, Cohen et al. bought 180 chicken eggs—Costco's Kirkland Signature brand— and conducted their own egg drop experiments in the lab. They dropped 60 eggs each from three different heights (8, 9, and 10 millimeters) onto a hard surface in three different orientations: horizontal, vertical on the sharp end, and vertical on the blunt end. They also subjected an additional 60 eggs to compression tests to determine the force required to break the eggs in both the vertical and horizontal orientations. Experimental snapshots for vertical (top) and horizontal (bottom) egg drops. Credit: A. Sutanto et al., 2025 The results: over half of the eggs broke when dropped vertically from an 8-millimeter (31-inch) height, regardless of which end of the egg was pointing downwards. Yet less than ten percent of the horiztonally-dropped eggs broke. The eggs broke when the force exceeded 45 Newtons, an impressive per-egg load bearing capacity that is independent of its orientation. There was a key difference, however, between how vertically and horizontally  squeezed eggs deformed in the compression experiments—namely, the former deformed less than the latter. The shell's greater rigidity along its long axis was an advantage because the heavy load was distributed over the surface. (It's why the one-handed egg-cracking technique targets the center of a horizontally held egg.) But the authors found that this advantage when under static compression proved to be a disadvantage when dropping eggs from a height, with the horizontal position emerging as the optimal orientation.  It comes down to the difference between stiffness—how much force is needed to deform the egg—and toughness, i.e., how much energy the egg can absorb before it cracks. Cohen et al.'s experiments showed that eggs are tougher when loaded horizontally along their equator, and stiffer when compressed vertically, suggesting that "an egg dropped on its equator can likely sustain greater drop heights without cracking," they wrote. "Even if eggs could sustain a higher force when loaded in the vertical direction, it does not necessarily imply that they are less likely to break when dropped in that orientation. In contrast to static loading, to remain intact following a dynamic impact, a body must be able to absorb all of its kinetic energy by transferring it into reversible deformation." "Eggs need to be tough, not stiff, in order to survive a fall," Cohen et al. concluded, pointing to our intuitive understanding that we should bend our knees rather than lock them into a straightened position when landing after a jump, for example. "Our results and analysis serve as a cautionary tale about how language can affect our understanding of a system, and improper framing of a problem can lead to misunderstanding and miseducation." DOI: Communications Physics, 2025. 10.1038/s42005-025-02087-0  (About DOIs). Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 7 Comments

A team of astronomers observed a confused exoplanet orbiting its two parent stars in a highly unusual way.As New Scientist reports, the planet, which was first discovered in 2004, is located in a system called Nu Octantis 72 light-years away, and is twice the size of Jupiter. After it was spotted, some physicists thought its mere existence was impossible due to its extremely close proximity to its twin stars.But according to a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers is proposing a wild new theory to explain how the planet could exist while also having such an extremely tight orbit.They propose that one of the stars and the planet orbit the second star in two opposite directions. In other words, the planet is retrograde, or orbiting the star in reverse."The existence of this planet has been controversial, because there were no observational precedents and we expect planets to form in prograde orbit if they form at the same time as the stars," coauthor and University of Hong Kong professor Man Hoi Lee told IFLScience.To make matters even more unusual, the researchers propose that the planet's orbit is sandwiched between the two stars, forcing it to thread the needle during each orbit.It's an erratic dance that highlights how much there's still to learn about the complex orbital mechanics of multi-star systems."It invites scientists to consider a wider range of star and planet scenarios regarding both formation and evolution," University of Texas at Arlington professor Manfred Cuntz, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist.One of the system's stars is a white dwarf, indicating it's nearing the end of its life cycle and making Nu Octantis an even more exotic outlier. The scientists estimate that the system was formed 2.9 billion years ago.However, the planet came to be much later. The researchers propose that it either used to orbit both stars, and changed to its unusual trajectory after one of the stars turned into a white dwarf, or it accreted its considerable mass from said white dwarf.But more research is needed before they can develop a more accurate picture of how the planet evolved."Observations of other planets in tight binary systems with late-stage or post-main- sequence stellar components will provide additional clues for us to better understand the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems," the team wrote in its paper.The researchers are already excited to get a closer glimpse of a similar binary star system, such as HD 59686, which also hosts an enormous gas giant with six times the mass of Jupiter.More on binary star systems: Alpha Centauri Sending Stream of Objects Into Our Solar System, Scientists ProposeShare This Article

We may earn a commission from links on this page.If your kitchen counter is currently housing a Vitamix blender, you know that you can whip up some serious soups, sauces, and nut butters in that thing. In fact, my Vitamix's hot soup function is one of my favorite ways to use it. But it is almost summer, and I am no longer in the mood for soup. Now I crave chilled treats. Can my favorite blender, the Vitamix Ascent X5 go from hot soup to sorbet? Yes, and surprisingly well. Here’s how to make yourself a frozen dessert in this amazing blender.The Vitamix is not an ice cream machineIt’s important to note that the Vitamix is a blender, and not an ice cream machine. Most ice cream machines have some sort of cooling mechanism (whether coolant, a compressor, or a frozen bowl) to chill the mixture while a dasher or auger incorporates air—the smaller the air bubbles, the creamier the texture. The Vitamix doesn’t have a cooling system. The blades create heat, so instead it uses them, and speed, to its advantage. This means you need to work in reverse—add already frozen food to the blender and it will whip air into the mixture as it chops up the ingredients. Then all you have to do is freeze the resulting soft-serve texture into a more solid state. As much as I enjoy a specialty appliance like the Ninja Slushi (it’s pretty badass), the multipurpose Vitamix Ascent X5 blender truly caters to my tiny kitchen's space limitations. I need to do a lot of different things with a select few appliances, and the Vitamix's frozen dessert capabilities add a whole new category to my home menus. (While the Ascent X5 makes things easier, you can use any Vitamix—I'll add those instructions at the end of this article.) Vitamix Ascent X5 Blender $749.95 at Amazon Shop Now Shop Now $749.95 at Amazon How to use the frozen dessert function on the Vitamix Ascent X5 1. Consider the ingredientsThe most important thing to consider is the ratio of your frozen to liquid ingredients. Since this blender doesn’t have a cooling system to make frozen desserts, you need to add the coldest stuff you can, while still providing enough liquid to move the frozen stuff around so the blades can catch it.  Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann The Vitamix website gives the guideline of 1 cup frozen to ¼ cup liquid. This amount of liquid, along with some vigorous tamping with the plastic tamper bat, will result in a thick, soft serve-like consistency that you can enjoy immediately, or freeze to a more solid, ice cream-like state. To experiment, I used two cups of frozen banana slices, and a half-cup of a sweetened vegan cream. (Forgive me, but I have a lactose intolerant Italian-American partner who would be furious if I used regular heavy cream.) Add everything to the blender container and secure the lid. 2. Pick your presetTurn the power on. Press the three line “burger” button and you’ll see an array of food icons appear on the digital display. Use the rotating dial to select the one that looks like a tall stemmed glass with a pompadour and a little spoon handle.  Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Have your plastic tamper ready—this part only takes 50 seconds.3. Blend and tampPress the start button. Take out the lid’s central plug and start tamping the ingredients with the tamper. The machine will start at a slower speed and ramp up pretty quickly. Your only job is to force frozen objects down into the blender blades. Once they all finally disappear into the mixture you can end your tamping session.4. Look for the “quadrants”Remember when I mentioned making hot soup in this thing? Well, the reason the soup gets hot is because of the heat that builds from the friction of blades running at high speeds. You want that heat to happen as little as possible for your frozen dessert. This setting only runs for 50 seconds but if you see four humps, or quadrants, forming in the mix, then that’s the tell-tale sign that your dessert is completely smooth and finished blending. It should look like this: Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Once you see the quadrants, stop the preset, even if there’s time left. My mixture was finished after 40 seconds, so I stopped the machine and worked quickly to decant it into a metal loaf pan that I had chilled in the freezer earlier. I sprinkled some chopped chocolate on top and popped it into the freezer for a couple hours to set.  Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Not only does this frozen dessert scoop like a dream, but the texture and flavor are incredible. While it's technically not true ice cream, it eats like ice cream. I was afraid after freezing it solid that it would be rock solid, but no—the mixture is nicely aerated and the consistency is creamy and smooth.How to use a Vitamix without a cold treat presetIf you don’t have the Ascent X 5 model, you can still use any Vitamix blender the same way, you just have to control the speed with the dial yourself. Start on a low speed so the blades can catch the ingredients and then ramp up to the top speed within the next 10 to 15 seconds. Look for the same quadrants to form, and then turn off the blender. Get ready to spend the summer exploring any frozen dessert flavor combination you can dream up.

What if there were a battery that could release energy while trapping carbon dioxide? This isn’t science fiction; it’s the promise of lithium-carbon dioxide (Li-CO₂) batteries, which are currently a hot research topic. Li-CO₂ batteries could be a two-in-one solution to the current problems of storing renewable energy and taking carbon emissions out of the air. They absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into a white powder called lithium carbonate while discharging energy. These batteries could have profound implications for cutting emissions from vehicles and industry—and might even enable long-duration missions on Mars, where the atmosphere is 95% CO₂. To make these batteries commercially viable, researchers have mainly been wrestling with problems related to recharging them. Now, our team at the University of Surrey has come up with a promising way forward. So how close are these “CO₂-breathing” batteries to becoming a practical reality? Like many great scientific breakthroughs, Li-CO₂ batteries were a happy accident. Slightly over a decade ago, a U.S.-French team of researchers were trying to address problems with lithium air batteries, another frontier energy-storage technology. Whereas today’s lithium-ion batteries generate power by moving and storing lithium ions within electrodes, lithium air batteries work by creating a chemical reaction between lithium and oxygen. The problem has been the “air” part, since even the tiny (0.04%) volume of CO₂ that’s found in air is enough to disrupt this careful chemistry, producing unwanted lithium carbonate (Li₂CO₃). As many battery scientists will tell you, the presence of Li₂CO₃ can also be a real pain in regular lithium-ion batteries, causing unhelpful side reactions and electrical resistance. Nonetheless the scientists noticed something interesting about this CO₂ contamination: It improved the battery’s amount of charge. From this point on, work began on intentionally adding CO₂ gas to batteries to take advantage of this, and the lithium-CO₂ battery was born. How it works Their great potential relates to the chemical reaction at the positive side of the battery, where small holes are cut in the casing to allow CO₂ gas in. There it dissolves in the liquid electrolyte (which allows the charge to move between the two electrodes) and reacts with lithium that has already been dissolved there. During this reaction, it’s believed that four electrons are exchanged between lithium ions and carbon dioxide. This electron transfer determines the theoretical charge that can be stored in the battery. In a normal lithium-ion battery, the positive electrode exchanges just one electron per reaction. (In lithium air batteries, it’s two to four electrons.) The greater exchange of electrons in the lithium-carbon dioxide battery, combined with the high voltage of the reaction, explains their potential to greatly outperform today’s lithium-ion batteries. However, the technology has a few issues. The batteries don’t last very long. Commercial lithium-ion packs routinely survive 1,000 to 10,000 charging cycles; most LiCO₂ prototypes fade after fewer than 100. They’re also difficult to recharge. This requires breaking down the lithium carbonate to release lithium and CO₂, which can be energy intensive. This energy requirement is a little like a hill that must be cycled up before the reaction can coast, and is known as overpotential. You can reduce this requirement by printing the right catalyst material on the porous positive electrode. Yet these catalysts are typically expensive and rare noble metals, such as ruthenium and platinum, making for a significant barrier to commercial viability. Our team has found an alternative catalyst, caesium phosphomolybdate, which is far cheaper and easy to manufacture at room temperature. This material made the batteries stable for 107 cycles, while also storing 2.5 times as much charge as a lithium ion. And we significantly reduced the energy cost involved in breaking down lithium carbonate, for an overpotential of 0.67 volts, which is only about double what would be necessary in a commercial product. Our research team is now working to further reduce the cost of this technology by developing a catalyst that replaces caesium, since it’s the phosphomolybdate that is key. This could make the system more economically viable and scalable for widespread deployment. We also plan to study how the battery charges and discharges in real time. This will provide a clearer understanding of the internal mechanisms at work, helping to optimize performance and durability. A major focus of upcoming tests will be to evaluate how the battery performs under different CO₂ pressures. So far, the system has only been tested under idealized conditions (1 bar). If it can work at 0.1 bar of pressure, it will be feasible for car exhausts and gas boiler flues, meaning you could capture CO₂ while you drive or heat your home. Demonstrating that this works will be an important confirmation of commercial viability, albeit we would expect the battery’s charge capacity to reduce at this pressure. By our rough calculations, 1kg of catalyst could absorb around 18.5kg of CO₂. Since a car driving 100 miles emits around 18kg to 20kg of CO₂, that means such a battery could potentially offset a day’s drive. If the batteries work at 0.006 bar, the pressure on the Martian atmosphere, they could power anything from an exploration rover to a colony. At 0.0004 bar, Earth’s ambient air pressure, they could capture CO₂ from our atmosphere and store power anywhere. In all cases, the key question will be how it affects the battery’s charge capacity. Meanwhile, to improve the battery’s number of recharge cycles, we need to address the fact that the electrolyte dries out. We’re currently investigating solutions, which probably involve developing casings that only CO₂ can move into. As for reducing the energy required for the catalyst to work, it’s likely to require optimizing the battery’s geometry to maximize the reaction rate—and to introduce a flow of CO₂, comparable to how fuel cells work (typically by feeding in hydrogen and oxygen). If this continued work can push the battery’s cycle life above 1,000 cycles, cut overpotential below 0.3 V, and replace scarce elements entirely, commercial Li-CO₂ packs could become reality. Our experiments will determine just how versatile and far-reaching the battery’s applications might be, from carbon capture on Earth to powering missions on Mars. Daniel Commandeur is a Surrey Future Fellow at the School of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering at the University of Surrey. Mahsa Masoudi is a PhD researcher of chemical engineering at the University of Surrey. Siddharth Gadkari is a lecturer in chemical process engineering at the University of Surrey. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mark Whaling and a crew raced up and down a hill in a tanker truck as they battled a wildfire in Los Angeles County, scrambling to get water from a street hydrant in time to stay ahead of flames moving up a ridge. A helicopter flew in to drop water, but it had to fly a long distance to refill—and a fire that might have been stopped went on to destroy homes. As they fought that early 2000s blaze, Whaling says, he spotted a sealed, million-gallon water tank nearby that firefighters had no way of accessing. He thought that was ridiculous. “We don’t tell fire engines, ‘Protect the city and go find your own water.’ We put fire hydrants every 600 feet all around cities,” said Whaling, who has since retired from the county fire department. “But when it comes to the helicopters, we weren’t supporting them as robustly as we should.” His frustration sparked an idea: the Heli-Hydrant, a relatively small, open tank that can be rapidly filled with water, enabling helicopters to fill up faster for urban fires rather than flying to sometimes distant lakes or ponds. As wildfires become more frequent, Whaling’s invention is getting the attention of officials eager to boost preparedness. First used for the 2020 Blue Ridge Fire in Yorba Linda, 10 Heli-Hydrants have been built across Southern California and 16 more are in progress, according to Whaling. Helicopters are essential for firefighting. They can drop 1,000 gallons (about 3,785 liters) of water at once—some much more. That is far more than hoses can get on a fire all at once, and can be the best way to attack fires that are difficult for ground crews to reach. But pilots sometimes have to fly a long way to scoop up water. And in drought-prone areas, natural sources can sometimes dry up or diminish, so they’re hard to draw from. In Southern California’s Riverside County, helicopters have had to fly up to 10 miles (about 16 kilometers) to find water, eating critical time from battling fires. An innovative solution On a remote plot in the Southern California town of Cabazon, contractor Glenn Chavez stood on a ladder and peered into an empty Heli-Hydrant. A radio in hand, he clicked a button to activate the system and watched as water roared into the tank. In about six minutes, it filled with 8,500 gallons (32,176 liters). Chavez, a general contractor, was testing the Cabazon Water District’s latest investment—a second Heli-Hydrant that local officials are counting on to help protect the town. At $300,000, it cost slightly less than the average price of a single home in Cabazon. “Living in a beautiful desert community, you’re going to have risks of fire,” said Michael Pollack, the district’s general manager. “And to have these Heli-Hydrants is a major advantage. People will have a little bit of comfort knowing that they have another tool for fighting fires in their community.” Pilots can remotely activate the tanks from half a mile away, with the tank typically filling quickly from a city’s water system. Helicopters can fill up in less than a minute. Once it’s activated, solar panels and backup batteries ensure the system can still be used during power outages. And at night, lights from the tank and a tower nearby guide pilots toward it. In November, fire responders in San Diego put the product to the test when the 48-acre Garden Fire in Fallbrook, a community known for its avocado groves, prompted evacuation orders and warnings. Helicopters tapped the tank nearly 40 times. Pilot Ben Brown said its proximity to the fire saved not just time but fuel. “They’re great for when you don’t have other water sources,” he said. “The more dip sites, especially in some of the more arid environments in the county, the better.” But they don’t always help Heli-Hydrants have raised some concerns about their placement in urban areas where houses, buildings, and power lines can be obstacles to flight and they might have to squeeze into tighter spaces. In those cases, firefighters may choose to fly farther to a natural source that gives the helicopter more room, said Warren Voth, a deputy pilot with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. A pilot’s goal is to always to face the wind while entering and exiting an area, for safety, and they need room to accomplish that. In some cases, the municipal systems needed to fill Heli-Hydrants could go empty during major fires. As the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles burned, three 1-million gallon tanks that helped pressurize city hydrants in the Pacific Palisades ran dry as demand soared and burning pipes leaked water. Other times, helicopters just can’t access them. When winds are fierce, flying is nearly impossible; hurricane-force winds that supercharged the Los Angeles infernos initially grounded firefighting aircraft. When multiple helicopters respond to large blazes, they can’t all use the Heli-Hydrant. And smoke can make it hard to see it. Portable water tanks can accomplish some of the things that Heli-Hydrants do, but can require time, people, and equipment to set up. A Heli-Hydrant gives one community hope Areas where wildland vegetation intersects with human development have always been vulnerable to fires, but more people are living in them today, and climate change is creating conditions that can make these regions drier and more flammable. Jake Wiley has seen intensifying wildfires devastate his community. Two blazes—in 2007 and 2017—collectively scorched more than 400 structures in San Diego. The last one forced Wiley, now general manager for the Rainbow Municipal Water District, to evacuate. That fire also prompted local agencies to install a Heli-Hydrant—and when the Garden Fire erupted in November, it played a big role helping firefighters protect homes. “It seems like when you’ve seen the worst, you haven’t yet,” Wiley said. “Anything we can do helps.” The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment. —By Dorany Pineda and Brittany Peterson, Associated Press

Got a project that’s too wild for this world? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards, June 6th marks the end of the Main Entry period — click here to submit your work. What does the future of architecture hold? How will tomorrow’s buildings look, feel, and interact with the existing human-made environment? Which innovations are primed to help us reduce the footprint of construction, improve liveability, and redefine our idea of and relationship to space? These are the questions Architizer’s Vision Awards look to answer (or, at least offer some suggestions in lieu of concrete answers). Dedicated to the planned and unbuilt, which may or may not ever be, nominations represent one of our most unique human traits — the ability to imagine possibilities and impossibilities, to dream big and think well into unchartered territory. Unbuilt architecture, whether it is planned for construction or destined to remain on “paper,” should be more present in a newscycle of press releases for recently constructed or newly opened buildings. Indeed, many of the ideas presented in such projects directly respond to emerging crises exacerbated by our continued reliance on 20th-century practice’s approaches and materiality. Meanwhile, the evolution of architectural visualization allows architects to develop their wildest ideas and to communicate their boldest visions with more clarity and urgency than ever before. Kyathos I Mass Timber Arena by KAAF I Kitriniaris Associates Architecture Firm, Βεΐκου, Galatsi, Greece Many studios are looking to re-write the script with high tech innovations that simply would not have been possible in the recent past, or emphasize the urgent need to get back to traditional building styles that utilize natural resources and passive principles in a bid to bring down carbon emissions and other outputs with negative environmental impact. The Kyathos Mass Timber Basketball Arena proposal does both. It’s fitting that we should look at this concept in spring 2025. The Osaka Expo recently opened in Japan and features the largest free-standing wooden structure ever built. The Grand Ring encases the event site and a section of its coastal waters with a circumference of 61,035 square meters (656,975 square feet). To us, it reflects what is possible when modern engineering meets one of the world’s most sustainable materials. Likewise, realizing a size previously unthinkable with wood, Alexander Kitriniaris’ KAAF I Kitriniaris Associates Architecture Firm‘s plans for this Greek sports stadium offer a new vision for the athletic facility typology.  Kyathos I Mass Timber Arena by KAAF I Kitriniaris Associates Architecture Firm, Βεΐκου, Galatsi, Greece Employing a composite timber load bearing system, the project — commissioned by Galatsi Municipality — comprises a main court, spectator stands, internal mezzanine and gallery running the perimeter, changing rooms for athletes and referees, toilets, offices, and auxiliary spaces. Its total surface area is 4,000 square meters (43, 055 square feet), all of which complement the location. Designed for the site of an older, smaller wooden gymnasium, which fails to meet modern standards and is scheduled for demolition, the aesthetics reflect the surrounding Mediterranean flora grove. The name Kyathos refers to a type of painted pottery cup popularized in ancient Greece. The design of this was based on the petals of a milkweed belonging to the Euphorbia genus of plants. The countryside in this region is home to around forty such species, making the entire building an ode to indigenous nature and culture that has been here for millennia. When realized, it will stand in sharp contrast to the stereotype of arenas and stadiums most fans across the world have grown accustomed to, which often seem to have landed in situ, from another district if not planet. Kyathos I Mass Timber Arena by KAAF I Kitriniaris Associates Architecture Firm, Βεΐκου, Galatsi, Greece Above the main court level, the building’s structure is composed entirely of engineered wood, including glue-laminated timber, cross-laminated timber, and plywood. A timber support frame wraps the indoor gymnasium in a precise 45-by-30-meter (148-by-98 foot) rectangular grid. The roof is formed by ten identical isostatic frames. Symmetrical in design, these triple-arched assemblies combine beams and posts, reinforced where necessary by discreet metal connectors and stiffeners. Overhead, a lightweight polymer roof — waterproof, UV-resistant, recyclable, and printable — ensures durable protection while minimizing weight. In the renderings, an elegant lattice-like pattern, calls attention to these delicate considerations. At the heart of the design, the firm’s plans and visualizations emphasize, lies a bioclimatic structural shell (pictured below), conceived to provide constant shade while optimizing natural ventilation, daylighting, and passive cooling. Meanwhile, rainwater collected from the roof and shaped surfaces is reused for on-site irrigation, supporting the lush Mediterranean flora of the existing grove. Kyathos I Mass Timber Arena by KAAF I Kitriniaris Associates Architecture Firm, Βεΐκου, Galatsi, Greece This year, Saudi Arabia has begun working towards the World Cup 2034. Set to be held in November that year due to the incompatibility of regional climate and international football — or football at any level — the environmental price tag for this edition of the planet’s biggest soccer tournament is likely to be huge. While recent years have seen major strides taken to improve the impact of competitive sports, with last year’s Paris Olympics achieving more than 50% carbon reduction compared with the previous two Games, there are clear differences in what’s needed to host matches in cities like Jeddah and Riyadh. Not to mention the ultra-futurist urban experiment, NEOM — a metropolis that doesn’t exist yet.   Even during winter months, average temperatures across the desert state sit at a very hot 29°C. Humidity is high in coastal areas, while frost and snow are not uncommon overnight on higher ground. While it’s too early to tell the footprint of the vast mega-stadiums we’ve been promised for the competition, heating and cooling requirements are almost certainly going to be immense. We are, after all, experiencing a surge in global temperatures year-on-year and an increase in weather extremes of all kinds, and this will have significantly worsened in another ten years. More so, whether we’re powered with renewables or dinosaur fossils, high energy consumption of all types is not sustainable in the real sense.  Kyathos I Mass Timber Arena by KAAF I Kitriniaris Associates Architecture Firm, Βεΐκου, Galatsi, Greece Analyzing the legitimacy, authenticity and suitability of Saudi Arabia as a World Cup host nation is a conversation for another time. Perhaps another publication. But the fundamental point is we urgently need to rethink and reprioritize non-essential undertakings for the sake of the climate and our planet. When seen through this lens, the plans for Kyathos in Greece act as a symbol of progress and sets benchmarks for a future in which we acknowledge the need for our passions to be in balance with the Earth, rather imposing upon it. The fact this is achieved through an homage to a history in which we were more aligned to nature, and associated materials, but also utilizes modern engineering techniques and manufacturing methods of those materials, only accentuates the masterful vision behind this design.  Given the number of projects that will be designed between now and the stadium’s project 2028 construction date, and the ever-increasing concentration of carbon in our atmosphere, its urgent that we begin celebrating such plans now — while they’re still plans — rather than waiting for the design to become a physical building. After all, architecture starts before you put two bricks together (or, in this case, two pieces of timber). Learn More About Vision Awards Got a project that’s too wild for this world? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards, June 6th marks the end of the Main Entry period — click here to submit your work. The post Hoop Dreams: Greece Tips Off a New Vision for Arena Architecture appeared first on Journal.