May 21, 202522 min readMildred Weeks Wells’s Work on Airborne Transmission Could Have Saved Many Lives—If the Scientific Establishment ListenedMildred Weeks Wells and her husband figured out that disease-causing pathogens can spread through the air like smoke Dutton; Lily WhearAir-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, charts the history of the field of aerobiology: the science of airborne microorganisms. In this episode, we discover the story of two lost pioneers of the 1930s: physician and self-taught epidemiologist Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, sanitary engineer William Firth Wells. Together, they proved that infectious pathogens could spread through the air over long distances. But the two had a reputation as outsiders, and they failed to convince the scientific establishment, who ignored their findings for decades. What the pair figured out could have saved many lives from tuberculosis, SARS, COVID and other airborne diseases. The contributions of Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband were all but erased from history—until now.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.TRANSCRIPTCarl Zimmer: Mildred is hired in the late 1920s to put together everything that was known about polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads.At the time, the idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just an obsolete superstition. Public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, and this goes totally against the consensus at the time.Carol Sutton Lewis: Hello, I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. Welcome to the latest episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, where we talk with authors and artists who've discovered and celebrated female scientists in books, poetry, film, and the visual arts.Today I'm joined by Carl Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist and the author of 15 books about science. His latest book, Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, focuses on the last great biological frontier: the air. It presents the history of aerobiology, which is the science dealing with the occurrence, transportation, and effects of airborne microorganisms.The book chronicles the exploits of committed aerobiologists from the early pioneers through to the present day. Among these pioneers were Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, William Firth Wells.Airborne tells the story of how Mildred and William tried to sound the alarm about airborne infections, but for many reasons, their warnings went unheard.Welcome, Carl Zimmer. It's such a pleasure to have you with us to tell us all about this fascinating woman and her contributions to science.Can you please tell us about Mildred Weeks Wells—where and how she grew up and what led her to the field of aerobiology?Carl Zimmer: She was born in 1891, and she came from a very prominent Texas family—the Denton family. Her great-grandfather is actually whom the city of Denton, Texas is named after. Her grandfather was a surgeon for the Confederate Army in the Civil War, and he becomes the director of what was called then the State Lunatic Asylum.And he and the bookkeeper there, William Weeks, are both charged with embezzlement. It's a big scandal. The bookkeeper then marries Mildred's mother. Then, shortly after Mildred's born, her father disappears. Her mother basically abandons her with her grandmother. And she grows up with her sister and grandmother in Austin, Texas. A comfortable life, but obviously there's a lot of scandal hanging over them.She is clearly incredibly strong-willed. She goes to medical school at the University of Texas and graduates in 1915, one of three women in a class of 34. That is really something for a woman at that point—there were hardly any women with medical degrees in the United States, let alone someone in Texas.But she books out of there. She does not stick around. She heads in 1915 to Washington, D.C., and works at the Public Health Service in a lab called the Hygienic Laboratory. Basically, what they're doing is studying bacteria. You have to remember, this is the golden age of the germ theory of disease. People have been figuring out that particular bacteria or viruses cause particular diseases, and that knowledge is helping them fight those diseases.It's there in Washington at this time that she meets a man who will become her husband, William Firth Wells.Carol Sutton Lewis: Just a quick aside—because we at Lost Women of Science are always interested in how you discover the material in addition to what you've discovered. How were you able to piece together her story? What sources were you able to find? It seems like there wasn't a lot of information available.Carl Zimmer: Yeah, it was a tough process. There is little information that's really easy to get your hands on. I mean, there is no biography of Mildred Wells or her husband, William Firth Wells.At the Rockefeller archives, they had maybe 30 document boxes full of stuff that was just miraculously conserved there. There are also letters that she wrote to people that have been saved in various collections.But especially with her early years, it's really tough. You know, in all my work trying to dig down for every single scrap of information I could find of her, I have only found one photograph of her—and it's the photograph in her yearbook. That’s it.Carol Sutton Lewis: You talked about that photograph in the book, and I was struck by your description of it. You say that she's smiling, but the longer you look at her smile, the sadder it becomes. What do you think at that young age was the source of the sadness?Carl Zimmer: I think that Mildred grew up with a lot of trauma. She was not the sort of person to keep long journals or write long letters about these sorts of things. But when you've come across those clues in these brief little newspaper accounts, you can kind of read between the lines.There are reports in newspapers saying that Mildred's mother had come to Austin to pay a visit to Mildred because she had scarlet fever when she was 10, and then she goes away again. And when I look at her face in her yearbook, it doesn't surprise me that there is this cast of melancholy to it because you just think about what she had gone through just as a kid.Carol Sutton Lewis: Oh. Absolutely. And fast forward, she meets William and they marry. They have a son, and they start collaborating. How did that begin?Carl Zimmer: The collaboration takes a while. So William Wells is also working at the Public Health Service at the time. He is a few years older than Mildred and he has been trained at MIT as what was called then a sanitarian. In other words, he was going to take the germ theory of disease and was going to save people's lives.He was very clever. He could invent tests that a sanitarian could use, dip a little tube into a river and see whether the water was safe or not, things like that. He was particularly focused on keeping water clean of bacteria that could cause diseases like typhoid or cholera and he also, gets assigned by the government to study oysters because oysters, they sit in this water and they're filtering all day long. And you know, if there's bacteria in there, they're going to filter it and trap it in their tissues. And oysters are incredibly popular in the early nineteen hundreds and a shocking number of people are keeling over dying of typhoid because they're eating them raw. So William is very busy, figuring out ways to save the oyster industry. How do we purify oysters and things like that? They meet, they get married in 1917.In 1918 they have a child, William Jr. nicknamed Bud. But William is not around for the birth, because he is drafted into the army, and he goes off to serve. in World War I.Carol Sutton Lewis: So Mildred is at home with Bud and William's off at the war. But ultimately, Mildred returns to science. A few years later, where she is hired as a polio detective. Can you tell me a little bit about what the state of polio knowledge was at the time and what precisely a polio detective did?Carl Zimmer: It doesn't seem like polio really was a thing in the United States until the late 1800s. And then suddenly there's this mysterious disease that can strike children with no warning. These kids can't. walk, or suddenly these kids are dying. Not only are the symptoms completely terrifying to parents, but how it spreads is a complete mystery. And so Mildred, seems to have been hired at some point in the late 1920s To basically put together everything that was known about polio to help doctors to deal with their patients and to, you know, encourage future science to try to figure out what is this disease.You know, Mildred wasn't trained in epidemiology. So it's kind of remarkable that she taught herself. And she would turn out to be a really great epidemiologist. But, in any case, She gets hired by the International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis, that was the name then for polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads. Case studies where, in a town, like this child got polio, then this child did, and did they have contact and what sort of contact, what season was it? What was the weather like? All these different factors.And one thing that's really important to bear in mind is that, at this time, the prevailing view was that diseases spread by water, by food, by sex, by close contact. Maybe like someone just coughs and sprays droplets on you, but otherwise it's these other routes.The idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just obsolete superstition. for thousands of years, people talked about miasmas, somehow the air mysteriously became corrupted and that made people sick with different diseases. That was all thrown out in the late 1800s, early 1900s when germ theory really takes hold. And so public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless.Carol Sutton Lewis: But Mildred doesn't agree, does she?Carl Zimmer: Well, Mildred Wells is looking at all of this, data and she is starting to get an idea that maybe these public health experts have been too quick to dismiss the air. So when people are talking about droplet infections in the 1920s, they're basically just talking about, big droplets that someone might just sneeze in your face. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, are spreading long distances through the air.So Mildred is starting to make a distinction in her mind about what she calls airborne and droplet infections. So, and this is really the time that the Wellses collectively are thinking about airborne infection and it's Mildred is doing it. And William actually gives her credit for this later on.Carol Sutton Lewis: Right. and her results are published in a book about polio written entirely by female authors, which is quite unusual for the time.Carl Zimmer: Mm hmm. Right. The book is published in 1932, and the reception just tells you so much about what it was like to be a woman in science. The New England Journal of Medicine reviews the book, which is great. But, here's a line that they give, they say, it is interesting to note that this book is entirely the product of women in medicine and is the first book.So far as a reviewer knows. by a number of authors, all of whom are of the female sex. So it's this: Oh, look at this oddity. And basically, the virtue of that is that women are really thorough, I, guess. so it's a very detailed book. And the reviewer writes, no one is better fitted than a woman to collect data such as this book contains. So there's no okay, this is very useful.Carol Sutton Lewis: PatronizeCarl Zimmer: Yeah. Thank you very much. Reviewers were just skating over the conclusions that they were drawing, I guess because they were women. Yeah, pretty incredible.Carol Sutton Lewis: So she is the first to submit scientific proof about this potential for airborne transmission. And that was pretty much dismissed. It wasn't even actively dismissed.It was just, nah, these women, nothing's coming outta that, except William did pay attention. I believe he too had been thinking about airborne transmission for some time and then started seriously looking at Mildred's conclusion when he started teaching at Harvard.Carl Zimmer: Yeah. So, William gets a job as a low level instructor at Harvard. He's getting paid very little. Mildred has no income. He's teaching about hygiene and sanitation, but apparently he's a terrible teacher. But he is a clever, brilliant engineer and scientist; he very quickly develops an idea that probably originated in the work that Mildred had been doing on polio. that maybe diseases actually can spread long distances through the air. So there are large droplets that we might sneeze out and cough out and, and they go a short distance before gravity pulls them down. But physics dictates that below a certain size, droplets can resist gravity.This is something that's going totally against what all the, the really prominent public health figures are saying. William Wells doesn't care. He goes ahead and he starts to, invent a way to sample air for germs. Basically it's a centrifuge. You plug it in, the fan spins, it sucks in air, the air comes up inside a glass cylinder and then as it's spinning, if there are any droplets of particles or anything floating in the air, they get flung out to the sideS.And so afterwards you just pull out the glass which is coated with, food for microbes to grow on and you put it in a nice warm place. And If there's anything in the air, you'll be able to grow a colony and see it.Carol Sutton Lewis: Amazing.Carl Zimmer: It is amazing. This, this was a crucial inventionCarol Sutton Lewis: So we have William, who is with Mildred's help moving more towards the possibility of airborne infection, understanding that this is very much not where science is at the moment, and he conducts a really interesting experiment in one of his classrooms to try to move the theory forward. We'll talk more about that experiment when we come back after the break.MidrollCarol Sutton Lewis: Welcome back to Lost Women of Science Conversations. We left off as the Wellses were about to conduct an experiment to test their theories about airborne infections. Carl, can you tell us about that experiment?Carl Zimmer: Okay. it's 1934, It's a cold day. Students come in for a lecture from this terrible teacher, William Wells. The windows are closed. The doors are closed. It's a poorly ventilated room. About 20 minutes before the end of the class, he takes this weird device that's next to him, he plugs it into the wall, and then he just goes back and keeps lecturing.It's not clear whether he even told them what he was doing. But, he then takes this little pinch of sneezing powder. out of a jar and holds it in the sort of outflow from the fan inside the air centrifuge. So all of a sudden, poof, the sneezing powder just goes off into the air. You know, there are probably about a couple dozen students scattered around this lecture hall and after a while they start to sneeze. And in fact, people All the way in theback are sneezing too.So now Wells turns off his machine, puts in a new cylinder, turns it on, keeps talking. The thing is that they are actually sneezing out droplets into the air.And some of those droplets contain harmless bacteria from their mouths. And he harvests them from the air. He actually collects them in his centrifuge. And after a few days, he's got colonies of these bacteria, but only after he had released the sneezing powder, the one before that didn't have any.So, you have this demonstration that William Wells could catch germs in the air that had been released from his students at quite a distance away, And other people can inhale them, and not even realize what's happening. In other words, germs were spreading like smoke. And so this becomes an explanation for what Mildred had been seeing in her epidemiology..Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. That was pretty revolutionary. But how was it received?Carl Zimmer: Well, you know, At first it was received, With great fanfare, and he starts publishing papers in nineteen thirty he and Mildred are coauthors on these. And, Mildred is actually appointed as a research associate at Harvard, in nineteen thirty it's a nice title, but she doesn't get paid anything. And then William makes another discovery, which is also very important.He's thinking okay, if these things are floating in the air, is there a way that I can disinfect the air? And he tries all sorts of things and he discovers ultraviolet light works really well. In fact, you can just put an ultraviolet light in a room and the droplets will circulate around and as they pass through the ultraviolet rays, it kills the bacteria or viruses inside of them. So in 1936, when he's publishing these results, there are so many headlines in newspapers and magazines and stuff about this discovery.There's one headline that says, scientists fight flu germs with violet ray. And, there are these predictions that, we are going to be safe from these terrible diseases. Like for example, influenza, which had just, devastated the world not long beforehand, because you're going to put ultraviolet lights in trains and schools and trolleys and movie theaters.Carol Sutton Lewis: Did Mildred get any public recognition for her contributions to all of this?Carl Zimmer: Well not surprisingly, William gets the lion's share of the attention. I mean, there's a passing reference to Mildred in one article. The Associated Press says chief among his aides, Wells said, was his wife, Dr. Mildred Wells. So, William was perfectly comfortable, acknowledging her, but the reporters. Didn't care,Carol Sutton Lewis: And there were no pictures of herCarl Zimmer: Right. Mildred wasn't the engineer in that couple, but she was doing all the research on epidemiology. And you can tell from comments that people made about, and Mildred Wells is that. William would be nowhere as a scientist without Mildred. She was the one who kept him from jumping ahead to wild conclusions from the data he had so far. So they were, they're very much a team. She was doing the writing and they were collaborating, they were arguing with each other all the time about it And she was a much better writer than he was., but that wasn't suitable for a picture, so she was invisible.Carol Sutton Lewis: In the book, you write a lot about their difficult personalities and how that impacted their reputations within the wider scientific community. Can you say more about that?Carl Zimmer: Right. They really had a reputation as being really hard to deal with. People would politely call them peculiar. And when they weren't being quite so polite, they would talk about all these arguments that they would get in, shouting matches and so on. They really felt that they had discovered something incredibly important, but they were outsiders, you know, they didn't have PhDs, they didn't have really much formal training. And here they were saying that, you know, the consensus about infectious disease is profoundly wrong.Now, ironically, what happened is that once William Wells showed that ultraviolet light could kill germs, his superior at Harvard abruptly took an intense interest in all of this and said, Okay, you're going to share a patent on this with me. My name's going to be on the patent and all the research from now on is going to happen in my lab. I'm going to have complete control over what happens next. And Mildred took the lead saying no way we want total autonomy, get out of our face. She was much more aggressive in university politics, and sort of protecting their turf. And unfortunately they didn't have many allies at Harvard and pretty soon they were out, they were fired. And William Wells and his boss, Gordon Fair, were both named on a patent that was filed for using ultraviolet lamps to disinfect the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: So what happened when they left Harvard?Carl Zimmer: Well, it's really interesting watching them scrambling to find work, because their reputation had preceded them. They were hoping they could go back to Washington DC to the public health service. But, the story about the Wells was that Mildred, was carrying out a lot of the research, and so they thought, we can't hire William if it's his wife, who's quietly doing a lot of the work, like they, for some reason they didn't think, oh, we could hire them both.Carol Sutton Lewis: Or just her.Carl Zimmer: None of that, they were like, do we hire William Wells? His wife apparently hauls a lot of the weight. So no, we won't hire them. It's literally like written down. It’s, I'm not making it up. And fortunately they had a few defenders, a few champions down in Philadelphia.There was a doctor in Philadelphia who was using ultraviolet light to protect children in hospitals. And he was, really, inspired by the Wellses and he knew they were trouble. He wrote yes, I get it. They're difficult, but let's try to get them here.And so they brought them down to Philadelphia and Mildred. And William, opened up the laboratories for airborne infection at the University of Pennsylvania. And now actually Mildred got paid, for the first time, for this work. So they're both getting paid, things are starting to look betterCarol Sutton Lewis: So they start to do amazing work at the University of Pennsylvania.Carl Zimmer: That's right. That's right. William, takes the next step in proving their theory. He figures out how to actually give animals diseases through the air. He builds a machine that gets to be known as the infection machine. a big bell jar, and you can put mice in there, or a rabbit in there, and there's a tube connected to it.And through that tube, William can create a very fine mist that might have influenza viruses in it, or the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. And the animals just sit there and breathe, and lo and behold, They get tuberculosis, they get influenza, they get all these diseases,Now, meanwhile, Mildred is actually spending a lot of her time at a school nearby the Germantown Friends School, where they have installed ultraviolet lamps in some of the classrooms. And they're convinced that they can protect kids from airborne diseases. The biggest demonstration of what these lamps can do comes in 1940, because there's a huge epidemic of measles. In 1940, there's, no vaccine for measles. Every kid basically gets it.And lo and behold, the kids in the classrooms with the ultraviolet lamps are 10 times less likely to get measles than the kids just down the hall in the regular classrooms. And so this is one of the best experiments ever done on the nature of airborne infection and how you can protect people by disinfecting the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: Were they then finally accepted into the scientific community?Carl Zimmer: I know you keep waiting for that, that victory lap, but no. It's just like time and again, that glory gets snatched away from them. Again, this was not anything that was done in secret. Newspapers around Philadelphia were. Celebrating this wow, look at this, look at how we can protect our children from disease. This is fantastic. But other experts, public health authorities just were not budging. they had all taken in this dogma that the air can't be dangerous.And so again and again, they were hitting a brick wall. This is right on the eve of World War II.And so all sorts of scientists in World War II are asking themselves, what can we do? Mildred and William put themselves forward and say we don't want soldiers to get sick with the flu the way they did in World War I. They're both haunted by this and they're thinking, so we could put our ultraviolet lamps in the barracks, we could protect them. Soldiers from the flu, if the flu is airborne, like we think, not only that, but this could help to really convince all those skepticsCarol Sutton Lewis: mm.Carl Zimmer: But they failed. The army put all their money into other experiments, they were blackballed, they were shut out, and again, I think it was just because they were continuing to be just incredibly difficult. Even patrons and their friends would just sigh to each other, like, Oh my God, I've just had to deal with these, with them arguing with us and yelling at us. And by the end of World War II, things are bad, they have some sort of split up, they never get divorced, but it's just too much. Mildred, like she is not only trying to do this pioneering work in these schools, trying to keep William's labs organized, there's the matter of their son. Now looking at some documents, I would hazard a guess that he had schizophrenia because he was examined by a doctor who came to that conclusion.And so, she's under incredible pressure and eventually she cracks and in 1944 she resigns from the lab. She stops working in the schools, she stops collaborating with her husband, but she keeps doing her own science. And that's really amazing to me. What kinds of things did she do after this breakup? What kind of work did she conduct? And how was that received?Mildred goes on on her own to carry out a gigantic experiment, in hindsight, a really visionary piece of work. It's based on her experience in Philadelphia. Because she could see that the ultraviolet lamps worked very well at protecting children during a really intense measles epidemic. And so she thought to herself, if you want to really make ultraviolet light, and the theory of airborne infection live up to its true potential to protect people. You need to protect the air in a lot more places.So she gets introduced to the health commissioner in Westchester County, this is a county just north of New York City. And she pitches him this idea. She says, I want to go into one of your towns and I want to put ultraviolet lights everywhere. And this guy, William Holla, he is a very bold, flamboyant guy. He's the right guy to ask. He's like, yeah, let's do this. And he leaves it up to her to design the experiment.And so this town Pleasantville in New York gets fitted out with ultraviolet lamps in the train station, in the fountain shops, in the movie theater, in churches, all over the place. And she publishes a paper with Holla in 1950 on the results.The results are mixed though. You look carefully at them, you can see that actually, yeah, the lamps worked in certain respects. So certain diseases, the rates were lower in certain places, but sadly, this incredibly ambitious study really didn't move the needle. And yeah, it was a big disappointment and that was the last science that Mildred did.Carol Sutton Lewis: Even when they were working together, Mildred and William never really succeeded in convincing the scientific community to take airborne infection seriously, although their work obviously did move the science forward. So what did sway scientific opinion and when?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, Mildred dies in 1957. William dies in 1963. After the Wellses are dead, their work is dismissed and they themselves are quite forgotten. It really isn't until the early 2000s that a few people rediscover them.The SARS epidemic kicks up in 2003, for example, and I talked to a scientist in Hong Kong named Yuguo Li, and he was trying to understand how was this new disease spreading around? He's looking around and he finds references to papers by William Wells and Mildred Wells. He has no idea who they are and he sees that William Wells had published a book in 1955 and he's like, well, okay, maybe I need to go read the book.Nobody has the book. And the only place that he could find it was in one university in the United States. They photocopied it and shipped it to him in Hong Kong and he finally starts reading it. And it's really hard to read because again William was a terrible writer, unlike Mildred. But after a while it clicks and he's like, oh. That's it. I got it. But again, all the guidelines for controlling pandemics and diseases do not really give much serious attention to airborne infection except for just a couple diseases. And it's not until the COVID pandemic that things finally change.Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. If we had listened to Mildred and William earlier, what might have been different?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, I do try to imagine a world in which Mildred and William had been taken seriously by more people. If airborne infection was just a seriously recognized thing at the start of the COVID pandemic, we would have been controlling the disease differently from the start. We wouldn't have been wiping down our shopping bags obsessively. People would have been encouraged to open the windows, people would have been encouraged to get air purifiers, ultraviolet lamps might have been installed in places with poor ventilation, masks might not have been so controversial.And instead these intellectual grandchildren of William and Mildred Wells had to reinvent the wheel. They had to do new studies to persuade people finally that a disease could be airborne. And it took a long time. It took months to finally move the needle.Carol Sutton Lewis: Carl, what do you hope people will take away from Mildred's story, which you have so wonderfully detailed in your book, rendering her no longer a lost woman of science? And what do you hope people will take away from the book more broadly?Carl Zimmer: I think sometimes that we imagine that science just marches on smoothly and effortlessly. But science is a human endeavor in all the good ways and in all the not-so-good ways. Science does have a fair amount of tragedy throughout it, as any human endeavor does. I'm sad about what happened to the Wells by the end of their lives, both of them. But in some ways, things are better now.When I'm writing about aerobiology in the early, mid, even late—except for Mildred, it's pretty much all men. But who were the people during the COVID pandemic who led the fight to get recognized as airborne? People like Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, Kim Prather at University of California, San Diego, Lidia Morawska, an Australian researcher. Now, all women in science still have to contend with all sorts of sexism and sort of baked-in inequalities. But it is striking to me that when you get to the end of the book, the women show up.Carol Sutton Lewis: Well,Carl Zimmer: And they show up in force.Carol Sutton Lewis: And on that very positive note to end on, Carl, thank you so much, first and foremost, for writing this really fascinating book and within it, highlighting a now no longer lost woman of science, Mildred Weeks Wells. Your book is Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, and it's been a pleasure to speak with—Carl Zimmer: Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed talking about Mildred.Carol Sutton Lewis: This has been Lost Women of Science Conversations. Carl Zimmer's book Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe is out now. This episode was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis. Our producer was Luca Evans, and Hansdale Hsu was our sound engineer. Special thanks to our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger, our program manager, Eowyn Burtner, and our co-executive producers, Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf.Thanks also to Jeff DelViscio and our publishing partner, Scientific American. The episode art was created by Lily Whear and Lizzie Younan composes our music. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX.If you've enjoyed this conversation, go to our website lostwomenofscience.org and subscribe so you'll never miss an episode—that's lostwomenofscience.org. And please share it and give us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, and please don't forget to click on the donate button—that helps us bring you even more stories of important female scientists.I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. See you next time.HostCarol Sutton LewisProducerLuca EvansGuest Carl ZimmerCarl Zimmer writes the Origins column for the New York Times and has frequently contributed to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. His journalism has earned numerous awards, including ones from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering. He is the author of fourteen books about science, including Life's Edge.Further Reading:Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Carl Zimmer. Dutton, 2025Poliomyelitis. International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis. Williams & Wilkins Company, 1932 “Air-borne Infection,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 21; November 21, 1936“Air-borne Infection: Sanitary Control,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 22; November 28, 1936“Ventilation in the Spread of Chickenpox and Measles within School Rooms,” by Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 129, No. 3; September 15, 1945“The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill,” by Megan Molteni, in Wired. Published online May 13, 2021WATCH THIS NEXTScience journalist Carl Zimmer joins host Rachel Feltman to look back at the history of the field, from ancient Greek “miasmas” to Louis Pasteur’s unorthodox experiments to biological warfare. #public #health #researcher #her #engineer

Embracer has announced that it is spinning off Coffee Stain Group – formerly known as Coffee Stain & Friends – into a standalone group of developers and publishers. As a result of this, what remains of Embracer Group, a division formerly known as Middle-Earth & Friends, will be renamed to Fellowship Entertainment. As part of this move, shares in Coffee Stain Group will be distributed to shareholders of Embracer and will go on to be listed on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market in Stockholm. Fellowship’s stocks will continue to be listed on Nasdaq Stockholm. As a result of this move, Coffee Stain Group will take with it 250 employees among its development and publishing divisions. The overall group will include Coffee Stain, Tuxedo Labs, and Ghost Ship, along with some Scandinavia-based studios from Amplifier Game Investment. Some of the IPs under Coffee Stain Group will be Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, Teardown, Valheim, and Welcome to Bloxburg. Fellowship Entertainment, on the other hand, will focus on transforming its business into a group that can handle game development and publishing, as well as the development of new IPs that can be spin-off into transmedia properties, including comics, merchandise, and film. Companies under Fellowship Entertainment include 4A Games, Aspyr Media, CrazyLabs, Crystal Dynamics, Dambuster Studios, Dark Horse, Deca Games, Eidos-Montréal, Flying Wild Hog, Gunfire Games, Limited Run Games, Middle-earth Enterprises, Milestone, PLAION, Tarsier Studios, THQ Nordic, Tripwire Interactive, Vertigo Games, and Warhorse Studios. These are among the 40 different companies under Fellowship Entertianment. “We’re really proud of everything we’ve built as part of Embracer, and grateful for the support and trust we’ve received over the years,” wrote Coffee Stain founder and group CEO Anton Westbergh. “Now, as we take the step to become a separately listed company, it feels both exciting and, honestly, a little bit scary—but in a good way.” “The games industry is more competitive than ever, but also more rewarding if you do things right, and we believe this move gives us the clarity and control to navigate the landscape better on our own terms. We can now focus even more on what we do best—supporting our developers, staying close to our communities, and building an even brighter future for Coffee Stain.” Embracer co-founder and group CEO Lars Wingefors also had a statement where he praised the talent, IPs and communities under Coffee Stain Group. The decision to split the company off was seemingly made because of Westbergh’s strategies and leadership for the long-term health and success of the company. “Coffee Stain Group has incredible talent, IPs and communities. To date, it has been a true recipe for success,” said Wingefors. “I am confident in Anton’s strategy and leadership and see a clear long-term opportunity in attracting and enabling partnerships with like-minded independent game developers and talents.” While the move looks largely like it might end up being a good thing for all parties involved, only time will tell how they might end up affecting the developers at all of the studios, as well as the games that they’re making, that will be affected. #embracer #being #renamed #fellowship #entertainment

hemul75/Getty ImagesOkay. Deep breath. This is surreal. I just added an entire new feature to my software, including UI and functionality, just by typing four paragraphs of instructions. I have screenshots, and I'll try to make sense of it in this article. I can't tell if we're living in the future or we've just descended to a new plane of hell.Let's take a step back. Google's Jules is the latest in a flood of new coding agents released just this week. I wrote about OpenAI Codex and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot Coding Agent at the beginning of the week, and ZDNET's Webb Wright wrote about Google's Jules. Also: I test a lot of AI coding tools, and this stunning new OpenAI release just saved me days of workAll of these coding agents will perform coding operations on a GitHub repository. GitHub, for those who've been following along, is the giant Microsoft-owned software storage, management, and distribution hub for much of the world's most important software, especially open source code. The difference, at least as it pertains to this article, is that Google made Jules available to everyone, for free. That meant I could just hop in and take it for a spin. And now my head is spinning. Usage limits and my first two prompts The free access version of Jules allows only five requests per day. That might not seem like a lot, but in only two requests, I was able to add a new feature to my software. So, don't discount what you can get done if you think through your prompts before shooting off your silver bullets for the day. My first two prompts were tentative. It wasn't that I wasn't impressed; it was that I really wasn't giving Jules much to do. I'm still not comfortable with the idea of setting an AI loose on all my code at once, so I played it safe. My first prompt asked Jules to document the "hooks" that add-on developers could use to add features to my product. I didn't tell Jules much about what I wanted. It returned some markup that it recommended dropping into my code's readme file. It worked, but meh. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI did have the opportunity to publish that code to a new GitHub branch, but I skipped it. It was just a test, after all. My second prompt was to ask Jules to suggest five new hooks. I got back an answer that seemed reasonable. However, I realized that opening up those capabilities in a security product was just too risky for me to delegate to an AI. I skipped those changes, too. It was at this point that Jules wanted a coffee break. It stopped functioning for about 90 minutes. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETThat gave me time to think. What I really wanted to see was whether Jules could add some real functionality to my code and save me some time. Necessary background information My Private Site is a security plugin for WordPress. It's running on about 20,000 active sites. It puts a login dialog in front of the site's web pages. There are a bunch of options, but that's the key feature. I originally acquired the software a decade ago from a coder who called himself "jonradio," and have been maintaining and expanding it ever since. Also: Rust turns 10: How a broken elevator changed software foreverThe plugin provides access control to the front-end of a website, the pages that visitors see when they come to the site. Site owners control the plugin via a dashboard interface, with various admin functions available in the plugin's admin interface. I decided to try Jules out on a feature some users have requested, hiding the admin bar from logged-in users. The admin bar is the black bar WordPress puts on the top of a web page. In the case of the screenshot below, the black admin bar is visible. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI wanted Jules to add an option on the dashboard to hide the admin bar from logged-in users. The idea is that if a user logged in, the admin bar would be visible on the back end, but logged-in users browsing the front-end of the site wouldn't have to see the ugly bar. This is the original dashboard, before adding the new feature. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETSome years ago, I completely rewrote the admin interface from the way it was when I acquired the plugin. Adding options to the interface is straightforward, but it's still time-consuming. Every option requires not only the UI element to be added, but also preference saving and preference recalling when the dashboard is displayed. That's in addition to any program logic that the preference controls. In practice, I've found that it takes me about 2-3 hours to add a preference UI element, along with the assorted housekeeping involved. It's not hard, but there are a lot of little fiddly bits that all need to be tweaked. That takes time. That should bring you up to speed enough to understand my next test of Jules. Here's a bit of foreshadowing: the first test failed miserably. The second test succeeded astonishingly. Instructing Jules Adding a hide admin bar feature is not something that would have been easy for the run-of-the-mill coding help we've been asking ChatGPT and the other chatbots to perform. As I mentioned, adding the new option to the dashboard requires programming in a variety of locations throughout the code, and also requires an understanding of the overall codebase. Here's what I told Jules. 1. On the Site Privacy Tab of the admin interface, add a new checkbox. Label the section "Admin Bar" and label the checkbox itself "Hide Admin Bar".I instructed Jules where I wanted the AI to put the new option. On my first run through, I made a mistake and left out the details in square brackets. I didn't tell Jules exactly where I wanted it to place the new option. As it turns out, that omission caused a big fail. Once I added in the sentence in brackets above, the feature worked. 2. Be sure to save the selection of that checkbox to the plugin's preferences variable when the Privacy Status button is checked. This makes sure Jules knows that there is a preference data structure, and to be sure to update it when the user makes a change. It's important to note that if I didn't have an understanding of the underlying code, I wouldn't have instructed Jules about this, and the code would not work. You can't "vibe code" something like this without knowing the underlying code. 3. Show the appropriate checked or unchecked status when the Site Privacy tab is displayed. This tells the AI that I want the interface to be updated to match what the preference variable specifies. 4. Based on the preference variable created in, add code to hide or show the WordPress admin bar. If Hide Admin Bar is checked, the Admin Bar should not be visible to logged-in WordPress front-end users. If the Hide Admin Bar is not checked, the Admin Bar should be visible to logged-in front-end users. Logged-in back-end users in the admin interface should always be able to see the admin bar. This describes the business logic that the new preference should control. It requires the AI to know how to hide or show the admin bar, and it requires the AI to know where to put the code in my plugin to enable or disable this feature. And with that, Jules was trained on what I wanted. Jules dives into my code I fed my prompt set into Jules and got back a plan of action. Pay close attention to that Approve Plan? button. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI didn't even get a chance to read through the plan before Jules decided to approve the plan on its own. It did this after every plan it presented. An AI that doesn't wait for permission raises the hairs on the back of my neck. Just saying. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI desperately want to make a Skynet/Landru/Colossus/P1/Hal kind of joke, because I'm freaked out. I mean, it's good. But I'm freaked out. Here's some of the code Jules wrote. The shaded green is the new stuff. I'm not thrilled with the color scheme, but I'm sure that will be tweakable over time. Also: The best free AI courses and certificates in 2025More relevant is the fact that Jules picked up on my variable naming conventions and the architecture of my code and dived right in. This is the new option, rendered in code. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETBy the time it was done, Jules had written in all the code changes it planned for originally, plus some test code. I don't use standardized tests. I would have told Jules not to do it the way it planned, but it never gave me time to approve or modify its original plan. Even so, it worked out. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI pushed the Publish branch button, which caused GitHub to create a new branch, separate from my main repository. Jules then published its changes to that branch. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETThis is how contributors to big projects can work on those projects without causing chaos to the main code line. Up to this point, I could look at the code, but I wasn't able to run it. But by pushing the code to a branch, Jules and GitHub made it possible for me to replicate the changes safely down to my computer to test them out. If I didn't like the changes, I could have just switched back to the main branch and no harm, no foul. But I did like the changes, so I moved on to the next step. Around the code in 8 clicks Once I brought the branch down to my development machine, I could test it out. Here's the new dashboard with the Hide Admin Menu feature. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI tried turning the feature on and off and making sure the settings stuck. They did. I also tried other features in the plugin to make sure nothing else had broken. I was pretty sure nothing would, because I reviewed all the changes before approving the branch. But still. Testing is a good thing to do. I then logged into the test website. As you can see, there's no admin bar showing. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETAt this point, the process was out of the AI's hands. It was simply time to deploy the changes, both back to GitHub and to the master WordPress repository. First, I used GitHub Desktop to merge the branch code back into the main branch on my development machine. I changed "Hide Admin Menu" to "Hide admin menu" in my code's main branch, because I like it better. I pushed thatback to the GitHub cloud. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETThen, because I just don't like random branches hanging around once they've been incorporated into the distribution version, I deleted the new branch on my computer. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI also deleted the new branch from the GitHub cloud service. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETFinally, I packaged up the new code. I added a change to the readme to describe the new feature and to update the code's version number. Then, I pushed it using SVNup to the WordPress plugin repository. Journey to the center of the code Jules is very definitely beta right now. It hung in a few places. Some screens didn't update. It decided to check out for 90 minutes. I had to wait while it went to and came back from its digital happy place. It's evidencing all the sorts of things you'd expect from a newly-released piece of code. I have no concerns about that. Google will clean it up. The fact that Julescan handle an entire repository of code across a bunch of files is big. That's a much deeper level of understanding and integration than we saw, even six months ago. Also: How to move your codebase into GitHub for analysis by ChatGPT Deep Research - and why you shouldThe speed with which it can change an entire codebase is terrifying. The damage it can do is potentially extraordinary. It will gleefully go through and modify everything in your codebase, and if you specify something wrong and then push or merge, you will have an epic mess on your hands. There is a deep inequality between how quickly it can change code and how long it will take a human to review those changes. Working on this scale will require excellent unit tests. Even tools like mine, which don't lend themselves to full unit testing, will require some kind of automated validation to prevent robot-driven errors on a massive scale. Those who are afraid these tools will take jobs from programmers should be concerned, but not in the way most people think. It is absolutely, totally, one-hundo-percent necessary for experienced coders to review and guide these agents. When I left out one critical instruction, the agent gleefully bricked my site. Since I was the person who wrote the code initially, I knew what to fix. But it would have been brutally difficult for someone else to figure out what had been left out and how to fix it. That would have required coming up to speed on all the hidden nuances of the entire architecture of the code. Also: How to turn ChatGPT into your AI coding power tool - and double your outputThe jobs that are likely to be destroyed are those of junior developers. Jules is easily doing junior developer level work. With tools like Jules or Codex or Copilot, that cost of a few hundred bucks a month at most, it's going to be hard for management to be willing to pay medium-to-high six figures for midlevel and junior programmers. Even outsourcing and offshoring isn't as cheap as using an AI agent to do maintenance coding. And, as I wrote about earlier in the week, if there are no mid-level jobs available, how will we train the experienced people we're going to need in the future? I am also concerned about how access limits will shake out. Productivity gains will drop like a rock if you need to do one more prompt and you have to wait a day to be allowed to do so. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETAs for me, in less than 10 minutes, I turned out a new feature that had been requested by readers. While I was writing another article, I fed the prompt to Jules. I went back to work on the article, and checked on Jules when it was finished. I checked out the code, brought it down to my computer, and pushed a release. It took me longer to upload the thing to the WordPress repository than to add the entire new feature. For that class of feature, I got a half-a-day's work done in less than half an hour, from thinking about making it happen to published to my users. In the last two hours, 2,500 sites have downloaded and installed the new feature. That will surge to well over 10,000 by morning. Without Jules, those users probably would have been waiting months for this new feature, because I have a huge backlog of work, and it wasn't my top priority. But with Jules, it took barely any effort. Also: 7 productivity gadgets I can't live withoutThese tools are going to require programmers, managers, and investors to rethink the software development workflow. There will be glaring "you can't get there from here" gotchas. And there will be epic failures and coding errors. But I have no doubt that this is the next level of AI-based coding. Real, human intelligence is going to be necessary to figure out how to deal with it. Have you tried Google's Jules or any of the other new AI coding agents? Would you trust them to make direct changes to your codebase, or do you prefer to keep a tighter manual grip? What kinds of developer tasks do you think these tools should and shouldn't handle? Let us know in the comments below. Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.Featured #let #google039s #jules #agent #into

Chris Kerr, Senior Editor, NewsMay 22, 20252 Min ReadImage via Embracer GroupEmbracer Group has detailed how the next stage in its plan to split into three standalone, publicly-listed companies will unfold.Last year, the Swedish conglomerate ended a period of studio closures, divestments, and layoffs by announcing it would partition its business into three units: Asmodee, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-earth Enterprises & Friend.After carving out Asmodee and saddling it with debt, the company has confirmed it intends to spin off Coffee Stain Group and rename its remaining business Fellowship Entertainment."Embracer today announces its intention to spin-off Coffee Stain Groupinto a standalone group of community-driven game developers and publishers by the end of calendar year 2025," reads an investor update."The shares in Coffee Stain Group will be distributed to the shareholders of Embracer, and are intended to be listed on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market in Stockholm. At the same time, Embracer Group AB are planned to be renamed Fellowship Entertainment."Embracer pledges to create "unforgettable experiences" after cutting ties with thousands of workersCoffee Stain Group will consist of over 250 game developers and publishers such as Coffee Stain, Ghost Ship, and Tuxedo Labs. It will also house certain studios from Amplifier Game Invest.Related:Coffee Stain CEO and co-founder Anton Westbergh will lead the group and become the steward of popular franchises including Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, Valheim, Teardown, and Welcome to Bloxburg.Embracer's remaining business will be renamed Fellowship Entertainment and intends to unite top creators and intellectual properties to "build unforgettable experiences" for players.Fellowship will comprise 4A Games, Aspyr Media, CrazyLabs, Crystal Dynamics, Dambuster Studios, Dark Horse, Deca Games, Eidos-Montréal, Flying Wild Hog, Gunfire Games, Limited Run Games, Middle-earth Enterprises, Milestone, PLAION, Tarsier Studios, THQ Nordic, Tripwire Interactive, Vertigo Games, Warhorse Studios, and more than 40 other companies.In total, the rebranded business unit will employ roughly 6,000 people in over 30 countries. The group will control the commercial rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and game franchises like Kingdom Come Deliverance, Dead Island, Tomb Raider, and over 300 other IPs.Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors will continue to oversee all three business entities by establishing a privately held holding company called Embracer AB that will "act as an active and supportive long-term shareholder" of Asmodee Group, Coffee Stain Group, Fellowship Entertainment, and "potentially other companies."Related: about:Embracer GroupAbout the AuthorChris KerrSenior Editor, News, GameDeveloper.comGame Developer news editor Chris Kerr is an award-winning journalist and reporter with over a decade of experience in the game industry. His byline has appeared in notable print and digital publications including Edge, Stuff, Wireframe, International Business Times, and PocketGamer.biz. Throughout his career, Chris has covered major industry events including GDC, PAX Australia, Gamescom, Paris Games Week, and Develop Brighton. He has featured on the judging panel at The Develop Star Awards on multiple occasions and appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live to discuss breaking news.See more from Chris KerrDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like #embracer #spinning #off #coffee #stain

Succession star Kieran Culkin has secured the part of a young Caesar Flickerman in Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping movie adaptation, following months of rumors.Lionsgate confirmed the news on X/Twitter today, confirming that Culkin would indeed appear as The Hunger Games’ colorful and eccentric TV host in next year’s book-to-movie adaptation. The mystery of who would play Caesar Flickerman has had readers’ heads spinning since rumors began to swirl earlier this year. Now that the fancast has been officially confirmed, all eyes are on Lionsgate to bring its prequel to life.Sunrise on the Reaping is yet another prequel adaptation for eager Hunger Games readers. It takes place after 2023’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and long before the events of the Jennifer Lawrence-led Hunger Games movies that premiered throughout the 2010s. Stanley Tucci was prominently featured as Caesar Flickerman in the film series that finished its story in 2015, leaving Culkin with big shoes to fill as he preps to play a younger version of the character.“Kieran’s scene-stealing presence and undeniable charm are perfect for Caesar Flickerman, the sickeningly watchable host of Panem’s darkest spectacle,” Lionsgate Motion Picture Group Co-President Erin Westerman said in a statement. “Stanley Tucci made Caesar unforgettable—and now Kieran will make the role entirely his own.”Culkin has left a massive mark on TV and film in the last few years thanks to his roles as characters like Roman Roy in Succession and Benji Kaplan in last year’s A Real Pain. Movie fans may also recognize Culkin from his time as a child actor in films like 1991’s Father of the Bride as well as 1990’s Home Alone, where he appeared alongside his brother, Macaulay Culkin. Kieran’s recent time in the spotlight has seen him build a career off of his quick wit, making his casting as The Hunger Games’ dystopian TV host in Sunrise on the Reaping feel like a match made in heaven.The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping’s release date is currently set for November 20, 2026. When it brings Suzanne Collins’ novel of the same name to the big screen, viewers can expect to see Culkin star alongside Ralph Fiennesas President Coriolanus Snow, Elle Fanningas Effie Trinket, Jesse Plemonsas Plutarch Heavensbee, Joseph Zadaas Haymitch Abernathy, and more.Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Blueskyand Twitter. #kieran #culkin #confirmed #play #caesar

Dyson has announced what it’s claiming is the “world’s slimmest vacuum cleaner.” At first glance, its new PencilVac looks like a broom rather than a vacuum because the battery, motor, and electronics are all integrated into a thin handle that’s just 38mm in diameter — the same thickness as Dyson’s Supersonic r hair dryer. It weighs in at just under four pounds and is powered by the company’s smallest and fastest vacuum motor yet.The PencilVac is designed to be a replacement for the slim Dyson Omni-glide, which launched in 2021 with a cleaning head that used two spinning brushes so it could suck up dust and dirt in multiple directions. The new PencilVac is not only slimmer and lighter than the Omni-glide, it uses four spinning brush bars that Dyson calls Fluffycones.The PencilVac uses four conical brushes called Fluffycones that are designed to prevent long hair from getting tangled up around them. Image: DysonAs the name implies, the Fluffycones each feature a conical design that causes long hairs to slide down to the narrow end of each brush and fall off so they can be sucked up instead of getting tangled up around the brushes. The Fluffycones slightly protrude at the sides for better edge cleaning, and are paired with green LED lightsthat illuminate dust and debris so you can see when floors have been properly cleaned.The PencilVac is just 3.7-inches tall when laying flat, allowing it to slide and clean under furniture. Image: DysonOther innovations Dyson is introducing with the PencilVac include a motor that’s just 28mm in diameter but spins at 140,000RPM to generate 55AW of suction, and a new two-stage dust filtration system that prevents clogging and performance loss as the vac fills up. Given its size, the PencilVac has a smaller dust bin than Dyson’s other cleaners, but uses a new design that compresses dust as it’s removed from the airflow to help maximize how much dirt the bin can hold.A magnetic charging dock is included, which has storage for accessories and can charge an additional battery. Image: DysonThe PencilVac magnetically connects to a floor dock for charging and storage, and features a small LCD screen that shows the cleaning mode and an estimate of how long before the battery dies. It’s also Dyson’s first vacuum to connect to the MyDyson mobile app, which offers access to additional settings, alerts for when the filter needs to be cleaned, and step-by-step maintenance instructions.The vacuum’s slim design does come with some trade-offs when compared to the company’s larger models. Its cleaning head is designed for use on hard floors, not carpeting, and while it can be swapped with alternate attachments like a furniture and crevice tool, it doesn’t convert to a shorter handheld vac. Runtime is also limited to just 30 minutes of cleaning at its lowest power setting, but its battery is swappable and Dyson will sell additional ones to extend how long you can clean.Dyson hasn’t revealed pricing details yet, and while the PencilVac will launch in Japan later this year, it won’t be available in the US until 2026.See More: #dysons #new #superskinny #stick #vac

The portal into a whole world of gods and monsters has been opened at Epic Universe, Orlando, Florida’s newest theme park. The Universal Monsters reign supreme at the Dark Universe, where you explore the world of Darkmoor that just so happens to be the place where so many of Universal Studios’ classic horror films intersect. io9 was thrilled to be among the first to ride its main attraction: Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment. At the center of the action is the Frankenstein Manor, where Victoria Frankenstein resides and continues the mad work of her ancestor Victor. She’s built a new monster prototype and aims to capture the horrors of the icons of fright. Under her watch she’s got the Phantom of the Opera, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, and more with the help of her Frankenstein she aims to dominate Dracula. © io9 Gizmodo What transpires is an awesome and action-packed thrill ride into the monster mash of your dreams if you’re a horror fan. You see Victoria, a badass leather-donning scientist, and her monster attempt to harness Drac’s power—but it might be more than they can keep their grip on because: BAT! Dracula can burst into smaller creatures of the night and aims to escape domestication for some sort of Monsters Avengers team-up. Yes, really. The ride itself uses a similar mechanism to Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, where you are moved around practical and video scenes to witness the story. Along the way you bear witness to exciting monster squad squabble up moments with state of the art animatronics. To me, it’s my favorite ride and I love how passionate the lore crafted around it seemed to be. If the ride were to breakdown, I’d say “Well, I guess I live here now”—that’s how amazing the showrooms are. For thrill ride fans, Epic Universe also features Curse of the Werewolf, a spinning coaster inspired by the Wolf-Man that also features incredible animatronic work. © io9 Gizmodo While you might not be able to live there, Darkmoor feels the most lived-in, in the best way. The wandering interactions with Igor, the Invisible Man, the Monster, and the Bride of Frankenstein weave a new classic story you’re a part of. The Bride even calls this new Frank her friend as the body of her Frankenstein rests in the queue of Frankenstein Manor. They’re existing in a timeline where monsters are celebrated and feared by the villagers. They even have a Burning Blade Tavern, which homages the studio’s original horror film universe and incorporates the lore into the ambiance and even the menu items. I love myself a character-shaped pretzel and you’ll find a Frankenstein one here to suit your snacking needs. And one of the most killer facts? The score of the land is composed by none other than “Dead Man’s Party” legend Danny Elfman. There’s even a part-exclusive vinyl you can buy of his work, pressed for a limited special release only in the theme park land. © io9 Gizmodo The Dark Universe also offers the chance to not only walk among the creatures of the night but be one too, thanks to the Darkmoor Monster Makeup Experience. It’s the most important spooky, scary appointment you need to make if you go. Mad scientists, er, makeup artists transform you and help you look like you walk among the shadows beneath the scorching Florida sun. It’s worth it and there’s even cosplay lite fashion gear to feel like you belong. For the first time in my life, I finally found a theme park land where I felt the most at home and in my true form. Epic Universe opens this Friday at Universal Studios Orlando. Travel and accommodations as well as the monster make-up demo were provided for the purposes of this review. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #epic #universes #best #ride #might

The circle is so much a part of Chengdu, China, a city known for its fusion of modernity and traditional values. Found everywhere from the Golden Sun Bird, to Anshun Bridge, to the city’s circular layout, Wade and Leta pull on these themes found throughout the city to create their interactive Stop, Listen, Look exhibition. At 23 feet tall, some elements are powered by wind and some by motor. These simple yet delightful machines by the Brooklyn-based design duo move in fantastic ways through the air, spinning and bouncing along their predetermined tracks. As much as the exhibition is meant to work with natural elements, the true beauty is when people get involved and work together, creating a symphony of sight and sound. Bold stripes, eye-popping hues of magenta and orange, and whimsical green and blue balls dot the plaza, kinetic sculptures twisting happily through space. This sense of energy mirrors the busy Chengdu streets, just below the installation – seemingly far away from the expansive and relatively calm IFS Chengdu rooftop. Nestled in the heart of the city, the rooftop is home to a number of firsts for Wade and Leta, including a collaboration with renowned sound designer Eric Lau, who created a soundtrack based on the Chengdu’s energy, taken from tones heard about the city during everyday life. The installation also featured beautiful sounds by local artist Huang Jin, featuring 8 tones of the city interspersed throughout the installation. All visitors are welcome to alter the auditory ambiance, yet another element of play, with an embedded MIDI controller built into the structure. Movement and reflection combine in a whirlwind of sight and sound, tactile feedback creating a wonderfully satisfying experience. As the pair say, Wade and Leta make “music for the eyes.” Intentionally combining purposeful eclecticism and performative design, their work is in the exploration, within the process of play. They believe work and life are intimately intertwined, living and working with each other every single day. Blurring the lines between the disciplines, they remind us with Stop, Listen, Look that only together can we truly bring out the best within us. Wade and Leta To learn more about Stop, Listen, Look by Wade and Leta, please visit wadeandleta.com. Photography courtesy of Wade and Leta. #wade #leta #unveil #installation #that

An artist’s impression of Earth’s quasi-satellite Kamo`oalewa, the first destination of the Tianwen-2 missionAddy Graham/University of Arizona Final preparations are under way for China to launch an uncrewed craft to visit both an asteroid and a comet, in the hope of learning more about the space rocks in our solar system. The Tianwen-2 mission by the China National Space Administrationwill collect a 100-gram sample from the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa and return it to Earth. After dropping off the sample, the probe will use our planet’s gravity as a slingshot Advertisement The mission is due to launch from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province on 29 May. It won’t be the first to return samples of asteroids to Earth, as both NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa missions have already done that. But it will be China’s first mission to an asteroid involving the return of a rock sample, and it is likely to be the first mission to a unique type of body called a quasi-satellite. Quasi-satellites like Kamoʻoalewa don’t strictly orbit Earth, but travel in a similar orbit to us around the sun, swinging elliptically around our planet as they do so. This unusual situation has led scientists to suspect that this particular one is a chunk of the moon ejected millions of years ago by an asteroid impact. On the other hand, 311P/PanSTARRS has an asteroid-like orbit – spinning around our sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – but with an appearance more like a comet because it has tails. These are suspected of being bits of dust and rubble flung out from its spinning body. Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month. Sign up to newsletter The CNSA has previously said that 311P/PanSTARRS is a “living fossil”, making it useful for studying the early material composition, formation process and evolutionary history of the solar system. And Tianwen-2 will provide scientists with a better understanding of both Kamoʻoalewa and 311P/PanSTARRS. However, the results won’t come quickly: the craft is due to reach 311P/PanSTARRS in 2034, and even the Kamoʻoalewa sample is expected to return to Earth only in late 2027. Exactly how much the CNSA will share about the discoveries is also unclear. Leah-Nani Alconcel at the University of Birmingham, UK, says the mission’s outline is known, and one likely goal is to study the differences between the asteroid and the comet to gain a deeper understanding of the range of bodies in our solar system, but precise details haven’t been forthcoming. Alconcel’s previous experience working with the CNSA on the Double Star satellite leads her to suspect that the agency will hold on to the resulting scientific data tightly. “It was extremely difficult to negotiate,” says Alconcel.
”Once they kind of had some information from us, they were not very keen to reciprocate. There will not be a public repository of this data, I don’t think.” She says that the mission is daring, as Kamoʻoalewa is spinning, which will make landing harder. Navigation algorithms are likely to demand such powerful computers that images and sensor readings will be sent back to Earth for computation. “If we were to always pick lovely, cooperative objects, we wouldn’t learn a lot,” she says. “There’s a lot that could potentially go wrong.” The CNSA didn’t respond to New Scientist‘s request for interview. Topics: #china #readying #mission #two #rocky